Amy Tan's No-Name Woman

The Death of Woman Wang, by Jonathan Spence is an educational historical novel of northeastern China during the seventeenth century. The author's focus was to enlighten a reader on the Chinese people, culture, and traditions. Spence's use of the provoking stories of the Chinese county T'an-ch'eng, in the province of Shantung, brings the reader directly into the course of Chinese history. The use of the sources available to Spence, such as the Local History of T'an-ch'eng, the scholar-official Huang Liu-hung's handbook and stories of the writer P'u Sung-Ling convey the reader directly into the lives of poor farmers, their workers and wives. The intriguing structure of The Death of Woman Wang consists on observing these people working on

Everyone has its own definition of success. For ones, it is to earn a lot of money, to other, it is just to be happy in life. Two stories, Girl by Jamaica Kincaid and Two Kinds by Amy Tan, present those ideas in a form of a struggle of mother teaching her daughter a life lessons to ensure daughter’s success in the future. Although the Girl and Two Kinds have a very similar topic – in both stories mother wants her daughter to be successful, the mother’s approach to the daughter and the general idea of what success is, is different.

The Death of Woman Wang, by Jonathan D. Spence, paints a vivid picture of provincial China in the seventeenth century. Manly the life in the northeastern country of T’an-ch’eng. T’an-ch’eng has been through a lot including: an endless cycle of floods, plagues, crop failures, banditry, and heavy taxation. Chinese society in Confucian terms was a patriarchal society with strict rules of conduct. The role at this time of women, however, has historically been one of repression. The traditional ideal woman was a dependent being whose behavior was governed by the "three obedience’s and four virtues". The three obedience’s were obedience to

Maxine Hong Kingston has many unanswered questions about her father’s sister. Kingston explores all the possibilities of her aunt’s life and personality through her essay, “No Name Woman.” Her aunt profoundly disgraced her family by becoming pregnant out of wedlock. Although the aunt is punished by the family’s refusing to remember her, this punishment is entirely unwarranted because not only was the aunt clearly raped, she was raped by her husband’s father.

After reading this part, it is easy to conclude that, the policies, especially the tax collecting policy, plays a key role on people’s destitution. The chapter “the Widow” addresses a topic on widows’ struggles on protecting their children and heritages. This builds a foundation for realizing woman’s status and people’s moral believes. The chapter “the feud” describes a crisis which breaks the harmony between different groups of people and poses a threat to the socirty. These three parts are bases of understanding and analyzing the story of the woman Wang, and Wang’s story involves the crises that are presented before. This arrangement gives reader a clear picture of T’an-Ch’eng; readers can get sufficient information to do their further investigation.

The woman in question has committed adultery after her husband left for the states and gets impregnated in the process. The village is furious and attacks the woman and declares her as an outcast in the society. The man who impregnated her does not face any repercussions. This societal reaction drives the woman to commit suicide together with her newborn. Her immediate family is also angered by her and they decide to delete her from history by never mentioning about her in any family conversation.

Kingston slips this into the chapter by guessing that her dead aunt’s child is female since “there is some hope of forgiveness for boys” (Kingston 15). The subject of gender inequality shows up throughout the novel, such as when Kingston’s great uncle takes only the boys out to town, fully aware that the girls want to come, but leaving them at home “hanging [their] coats back up” (47). This issue is a global one; even in modern times, women are seen as inferior to men. In this memoir, gender inequality is one of the issues that Kingston is attempting to point out to us. Although not all of the readers are Chinese-American, Kingston transcends the cultural barrier to speak to the reader about her experiences with gender inequality and conflict.

“But there is more to this silence: they want me to participate in her punishment. And I have”(Kingston 2520). In Maxine Kingston’s No Name Woman, there is a clear theme in her short story, and it is found in the minor details of the lines. Kingston is going against her family’s wish and is discussing her aunt. Her family wanted to keep her unnamed aunt a secret, and for a while, Maxine Kingston did.

Such statements lead to a certain shame about the past because of the violation of what the female role was supposed to wait for her husband, in which pregnancy is not an excuse for not fulfilling such expectation. In Chinese culture, stories keep young girls and daughters fearful, silent, and vulnerable about how an ideal woman should act; accordingly, the Chinese are frightened of “the downed one, whose sleeping ghost, wet hair hanging and skin bloated, waits silently by the water to pull down a substitute” (Kingston 239). Such concepts in Chinese culture lead to the happenings in the story by giving the “no name woman”; the idea that she no longer belonged to the family and that the community would never accept the fact of her pregnancy while her husband was gone for years would cause Kingston’s aunt feel shame and bring her life to an end of all the suffering caused by the community and their social expectations. The social expectations toward the female gender in the Chinese culture can cause individuals that do not follow such expectations to feel helpless causing them to embrace an atmosphere of silence, shame, and prejudice. Pregnancy was not an option for her culture, as many shamed her and lead the “no name woman” and her child to their own

“No Name Woman”, by Maxine Hong Kingston, is a story about a woman named Maxine that comes from a Chinese-American background. As Maxine is slowly transitioning from a girl to a young woman, her mother decides to tell her a story about her father’s sister who had been impregnated by a man from her village. Her child was born out of wedlock one night. Once the villagers heard about this, they all raided her house. They slaughtered their livestock and destroyed their belongings. Her aunt had brought shame on the entire family by violating the village’s moral standards. The aunt and the child were found in the family well the next day after committing suicide. Since Maxine was told to never ask about her aunt, she began imaging what had happened

Each chapter focuses on the story of a different woman that affects her life, and how that woman relates to the largely male-dominated Chinese society that she lives in. Kingston begins by recalling a talk-story that her mother told her growing up about her aunt, the No Name Woman, who had given birth to an illegitimate child in China years after her husband had left for America. She was persecuted by her fellow villages for the disgraceful act and eventually threw both herself and her newborn child down a well in order to escape the shame of her actions. However, Kingston says, “The real punishment was not the raid swiftly inflicted by the villages, but the family's deliberately forgetting her” (Kingston 18). Despite the uncertainty surrounding Kingston's aunt's pregnancy, neither the villagers nor her family ever tried to find the man that impregnated her.

In this story from Iran, two sisters are treated by opposite extremes by their mother. Adji Khanom is tall and thin with large lips and considered unattractive, her young sister Mahrokh is fair and petite and known as a beauty. Since childhood, Abji was hit and humiliated in front of strangers by their mother, for the shame of being born an ugly duckling, undermining herself esteem. Her parents once arranged a marriage to the carpenters apprentice Kalb Hosayn, but he did not want to marry her. Convinced that her reward will be in the next life, she devotes her life to prayer. When Mahrokh is to be married, Abji does all she can to slander her, even saying she is two months pregnant. Her jealous reaches its zenith on Mahrokh and Abbas wedding

All throughout history women have been considered as the weaker sex. A woman without a man by her side commanding her was classified as a deviant since the beginning of time. Even though women have been perceived to be submissive and subjective in history, they have, in fact, been proven to be extremely rebellious, even though it has troubled them more. In Maxine Hong Kingston’s story “No Name Woman” the narrator’s aunt was punished by being erased and forgotten from history because she was accused of committing adultery as she became pregnant years after her husband went the United States. Her getting pregnant demonstrated that she was submissive to the point where she was not able to

Reflecting on our history to right our social wrongs of the future is just one way to look at it. We hear of racial discrimination in the news all the time and how we must repay in some way those who are descendents of slavery. I agree with your statement that we can in fact continue to grow as a country, but it is simply impossible to ensure everyone has those rights. I do not personally agree with many of Howard Zinn’s writings as I feel he deliberately left out historical facts to slant his view.

‘No Name Woman’ by Maxine Kingston Hong From the beginning of this story, it is clear that the narrator is generally fearful of the no-name woman. Her mother had told the story in a way that it would instill fear in her and show her how a person who abandoned culture was punished. Since the narrator was approaching puberty, her mother knew that she was at risk of getting pregnant. This story showed her that pregnancy would be betrayal to her family and it would elicit anger and punishment from the society.