Kingston’s story seeks meaning in the Chinese culture system in order to strengthen her individual identity. It also shows that certain aspects of the people and traditions of a cultural background can be disturbing at times. “To be a woman, to have a daughter in starvation time was enough… Women in the old China did not choose (Kingston 6”. The Chinese community that held the most meaning for Kingston’s cultural identity had been lost somewhere in the past. The only knowledge Kingston has of anything Chinese had come from her mother, but that was not enough for her. She has only vague memories and imaginations of such a community that serve as a backdrop for the goal she seeks in strengthening her identity in relation to her ancestral and cultural makeup.
For Kingston, she had become separated from part of her heritage. She struggled in attempting to understand the meaning of this heritage in a world that is different from the older generations. She illustrates this confusion and difficulty in attempting to understand her cultural roots when she says, “Chinese Americans, when you try to understand what things in you are Chinese, how do you separate what is peculiar to childhood, to poverty, insanities, one family, your mother who marked your growing with stories, from what is Chinese? What is Chinese and what is the movies? (Kingston 5)”. Kingston wants to tap into this old world her parents and ancestors belong to in order to better understand how she became who she is, but this world is so vague to her. As a result, she seeks a medium through which she can more closely relate to her cultural roots and therefore strengthen her own identity. Kingston accomplished this through knowledge of her female relatives lives’ in China so that she may better understand their role in the community and how they were affected by this role, more precisely, she examined the life of her aunt the outcast of her family.
Kingston uses differences and similarities in the three separate narratives to explore the mores of traditional Chinese culture, the differences between Chinese culture and American culture, and ultimately to condemn the traditional roles of women in a Chinese society. Clearly, the disparate narratives of her mother, aunt, and narrator all reveal a different viewpoint on Chinese culture. The mother is clearly supportive of the aunt’s finale fate and symbolizes the traditional view of women in society. The story her mother tells is extremely clear-cut and black and white. In contrast, the aunt’s story allows the reader to understand the effect of a traditional view at a personal, individual level. Kingston takes the mother’s version of the story and complicates the matter by creating a speculative version of events. The narrator’s struggle to make sense of the story through her Americanized perspective also helps to reveal a great deal about traditional Chinese culture, the aunt and mother’s traditional viewpoints allow us to better explore and understand the Americanized view of the daughter, and vice versa. The grim acceptance and disapproval of the mother’s customary views creates very little sympathy for the traditional view of women in Chinese culture.
Throughout the story, three distinct characters are used in the repetition of the aunt’s tale, all bearing different insights into her character and providing different perspectives on the social situation of the time. As mentioned earlier, the mother’s version is tinged with conservative disapproval and disdain, possible a result of her direct involvement with the events and their unpleasant consequences. Despite her traditional viewpoint, her version is interestingly the most objective one of the three: her own opinions only make themselves felt at the end of her otherwise purely narrative tale.
The aunt was never mentioned in the Kingston household because of her actions, which brought upon shame to the family, something that should be avoided at all costs in Chinese society. She had no name and did not exist in her family’s memory, at least not publicly. However, Maxine Hong Kingston didn’t want to join her family’s punishment toward her aunt. She pitied her aunt, whom she considered to have been a victim under Chinese tradition. The aunt was forced to wait for her husband to do a wife’s duty, a difficult responsibility especially for one who had only known her husband for a couple of days. The aunt was never allowed to have her ideal love and desires. In this conservative circumstance, her aunt’s adultery pushed her life into an endless hell. Maxine Hong Kingston sympathized with her and tried to be the voice of this nameless ghost.
The description of the aunt embodies conflict in itself. She lived in a time where all she did was not of the norm in China. She paid attention to her appearance. “All the married women blunt-cut their hair in flaps about their ears or pulled it back in tight buns… [The aunt] brushed her hair back from her forehead, tucking the flaps behind her ears (Kingston 9)”. She would even smooth out her eyebrows, drawing attention from not only the village’s men, but the women also. Yet, even though the aunt would indulge in these actions, she never strayed too far. She knew that if she were to do any more than pluck her eyebrows and wear her hair differently, it would cause too much controversy within the community. The aunt committed adultery, a very brazen act for a Chinese woman, but she was still reticent about her actions, influenced by her Chinese upbringing.
In the next portrayal of the aunt, the narrator then puts forth her own speculative version of events, describing her aunt in various situations in which she might’ve been forced to commit adultery. Whereas her mother spoke of the aunt in disdain, the narrator speaks of her aunt with sympathy. The conveying of a modern mindset upon her aunt may seem jarring in the context of such an oppressive society, but it is precisely this discordance that highlights this section of the story. The narrator figures the aunt must’ve been in some type of circumstance where she had to have sex with another man.
The conflicts between the mother and narrator’s versions of the story are representative of the clash between Chinese culture and the culture of being a Chinese-American. For the narrator, it was extremely difficult to relate to her Chinese heritage because of the way she grew up. Being raised in an American culture, Maxine Hong Kingston was faced with different expectations than those that her parents met. In America, it was not customary for women to be as submissive as is the norm in Asian culture. As a young child, Americans are taught to be independent and individualistic, while as in Chinese culture a child would be taught to be obedient to its elders. These conflicts bring emphasis to the main point of the story, which is the discord Hong-Kingston felt with her identity.
**** I feel like there should be a paragraph here that should tie all the things together, but I’m not sure how to state it.*******
Kingston seeks meaning in every aspect of the shaping of her identity. She yearns to discover about the life of her aunt who once lived in China in the hope that she will gain some meaning in her Chinese background, What she discovers is that the Chinese women of the old country had no real identity other than that in relation to their male counterpart. As a result, she is caught in a struggle between her drive to find meaning in her cultural roots as a Chinese woman and the unfavorable status that women hold in Chinese tradition. Since women of the old country had little freedom, Kingston can only imagine what her aunt’s life was actually like, thus the story of “No Name Woman” was written. Through this story, Kingston relies on the story of her aunt to help her understand who she truly is.
