"No Name Woman" by Maxine Hong Kingston

This excerpt taken from The Woman Warrior is an amazing story in itself.  The Chinese used to do things so differently than us.  I remember hearing stories that you could only have two children in China, and if the second one was a girl they would kill her.  When I first started reading this, I was thinking that the aunt had an affair willingly, and while it is looked down upon, she shouldn't have had her family's home destroyed.  But as I read on, I realized what the narrator was saying: Women had no choice.  She could of hated the father of her baby and still had to sleep with him.  Old times were bad times.  Old times were unforgiving.  It reminds me of the Old Testament, which I have not read regularly, but know enough to know that God was cruel and unforgiving in the old days.  In the New Testament, after Christ, He is a benevolent god.  The new God forgives.  Or maybe he doesn't.  Maybe the new times just mean we don't care that much anymore.

This story was very informative for me, culturally, because I don't know a lot about different cultures.  To  think that the man that impregnated the aunt could have been one of the people with the white masks.  The ending, when the narrator describes the birth and suicide was imagined so well in my mind that a shed a few tears.  How cruel to think it is love to kill your baby along with yourself.  But it also WOULD be cruel to abandon it.  Which is the worse of two evil?  I do not know.

I do know, however, that this narrator is full of emotion while writing this and is desperate to figure out if this means anything about her heritage.  The Chinese worship their ancestors, so they had to forget this one.  The aunt could not be remembered because she would have brought shame to the family, and with people so proud this would be the end of the world. 

I felt a lot of different emotions while reading this.  I felt the anger of the narrator as she became angry at her ancestors, at her mother.  I felt the shame of the father, never having returned to China because he was traded once for a girl.  I felt the pain of the aunt as she felt she had no way out.  This was a very powerful piece of literature that I could go on and on about, but for now I will save the rest for class discussion.

Until next time,

Keri Jo