Maxine Hong Kingston's "No Name Woman" from the book, The Woman Warrior (1975)
There are two points that stood out to me in this story, parallels and circles.
This story highlights how traditions in cultures affect families for generations to come. The narrator receives the warning from her mother, 'Don't humiliate us' (5). She instills fear into the narrator by relating the story of her aunt, who broke the rules, bringing shame to the family.
Throughout the story, the narrator contemplates actions and consequences for this unknown aunt while processing how the aunt's story applies to her own life: "Unless I see her life branching into mine, she gives me no ancestral help (10). What strikes me the most here is that the narrator has only been told a brief story about her unnamed aunt, but the narrator (also unnamed), has developed several different scenarios about how her aunt had become pregnant and defiled the family name. It is obvious that women had no value of their own, for even if she was raped, she would still have faced the same consequences.
The narrator tries to make sense of what happened to the aunt, or could happen to her, through a parallel of what her own life and actions could be, especially in light of her newer Chinese-American lifestyle. She tells the readers that her aunt "once found a freckle on her chin" and seared it with a needle to remove it, cleaning it with peroxide. There is no way that she could have this information since no one will talk about the aunt. I believe that she is talking about herself here, and overlapping her life with her aunt's.
The symbol of circles, of things that are "round" also stand out in the story. "The round moon cakes and round doorways, the round tables...one roundness inside another, round windows and rice bowls...this roundness had to be made coin-sized so that she would see its circumference"(13).
These circles are representative of the family circle, which, in Chinese culture, is also encompassed by the community circle. The circle keeps the family and community strong. It protects each of them and keeps intruders out, but it also keeps the narrator imprisoned by her own family culture and tormented by the possibility of her own failures.
Question: Do you think the narrator is defending the aunt or is she condemning her too?
I don't want to take the cheap route, but I think she's doing both but unaware of it. Simply put, I think she is just trying to make sense of the story of the aunt. If she was condemming her I don't believe she would have spent so much effort in filling in the gaps of the story. If she was trying to defend her she wouldn't be haunted by her as said in the end of the story "My aunt haunts me...I do not think she always means me well" (16). But I think in trying to make sense of her aunt, she is already doing a negative action because "she was a spite suicide" (16) so she may be inadvertently condemning her. The narrator wants to know who the aunt was as a person, and in trying to give the story a purpose to herself (inadvertently defend her), without the aunt's perspective she will always be the outcast (inadvertently condemning her). The narrator can make up all the different backgrounds, but one will never know the true story.
ReplyDeleteBy ignoring the all else and telling only what happened, the mother turns a family memeber into a cautionary tale to influence children to never do anything to shame their family or else something terrible will happen. To a Chinese community this would most likely succeed, but to other cultures this may come across difficulties. What kind of relationship do stories have in culture?