The Woman Warrior: 1. No Name Woman Summary & Analysis

Brave Orchid, Maxine Hong Kingston’s mother, tells her that her father had a sister who drowned herself in the family well. The family claims that Kingston’s father only had brothers. Denial around his sister’s pregnancy began when the family first noticed her distended belly—around the same time that the men in Kingston’s family began to leave for America, or Gold Mountain.

No Name Woman, which is the name that Kingston grants her shamed aunt, had the baby in the early summer, according to Brave Orchid. The villagers “had been counting” the months from the time No Name Woman’s husband left until she got pregnant. They raided the family’s home “on the night the baby was to be born.”

Brave Orchid recalls that the villagers first “threw mud and rocks at the house.” Then, they became more violent, slaughtering livestock and breaking into the house, particularly the aunt’s room. They destroyed her clothes and shoes “and broke her combs, grinding them underfoot.” That evening, No Name Woman gave birth in a pigsty. When Brave Orchid went out for water, she found her sister-in-law and the baby “plugging up the family well.”

Kingston notes that, whenever Brave Orchid wanted to teach her children something, she would relate a story like this one. The world that Brave Orchid knew was one of “brute survival.” The children of immigrants had to figure out how those customs fit into “solid America.”

One method of “brute survival” is the habit of being intentionally misleading. The Chinese not only confuse authorities by hiding their real names, Kingston says, but also seek to confuse the gods by “misleading them with crooked streets and false names.” This is further complicated by the penchant for telling stories. Thus, one wonders, “What is Chinese tradition and what is the movies?” Kingston wonders, what actually happened and how much is just invention?

Brave Orchid taught her children that whenever they did “useless” things, they used up energy. Kingston wonders if her aunt may have been one of few Chinese to be extravagant enough to commit adultery. She wonders if her aunt could have been “the lone romantic who gave up everything for sex.” It is also possible, she thinks, that No Name Woman was like many Chinese women and did not choose, but that a man may have forced her “to lie with him” and may also have “masked himself” to join in the raid on her family.

Kingston contemplates how her aunt may have met her lover or rapist. Maybe they met in the fields or in the mountains where she would have collected fuel. Kingston is sure that he would not have been a stranger, for there were no strangers in the village. She is also sure that they would have dealt with each other for non-sexual reasons. Perhaps he sold No Name Woman cloth. When he asked for sex, she probably did what she was told, for, “she always did as she was told.”

No Name Woman married a man from the next village. They had not yet met, so she stood beside “the best rooster, his proxy,” for the wedding ceremony. They met once on the night of their honeymoon, then “he left for America” and they never met again. Kingston imagines that her aunt’s lover was probably not much different from her husband. He, too, likely gave orders that she followed and may have ordered her not to tell her family about him, threatening to kill her.

As punishment for her crime against the family, No Name Woman sat alone at meals. There was, according to Kingston’s parents, an “outcast table.” Chinese people did not let their “wrongdoers” go out and start “separate new lives like the Japanese, who could become samurais and geishas.” Instead, they “hung on to the offenders and fed them leftovers.”

No Name Woman technically belonged to her husband’s parents. In Chinese tradition, daughters-in-law lived with their husbands’ parents. When Kingston’s aunt committed her offense, her in-laws sent her back to her own family, though they could have “sold her, mortgaged her, stoned her.” Kingston finds this mysterious and wonders if they granted her this privilege “to deflect the avengers.”

All of No Name Woman’s brothers, including Kingston’s father, “became western men.” When the family’s goods were divided, three brothers took the land and Kingston’s father chose an education. Kingston’s aunt, on the other hand, was expected “to keep the traditional ways.” Women were regarded as “heavy” and “deep-rooted,” capable of maintaining “the past against the flood, safe for returning.”

Kingston wonders what No Name Woman may have enjoyed about “her friend.” Maybe she liked the way his “hair was tucked behind his ears” or “the question-mark line of a long torso.” Perhaps he had “warm eyes or a soft voice.” For some small amount of charm, “she gave up the family.” Kingston also wonders if her aunt was “a wild woman,” but the image of her being “free with sex” does not seem right at all. These notions are attempts for Kingston to connect her life with that of her aunt so that her aunt can offer her “ancestral help.”

Kingston imagines her aunt working on her beauty in a mirror in an effort to sustain her love. Married Chinese women did not generally look after their appearance too much; one who did was regarded as eccentric. Married women tended to wear blunt haircuts or pulled their hair back into a bun. Her aunt, however, “combed individuality into her bob.” Using   a string, she pulled back her hairline and “the tops of her eyebrows” to make “a smooth brow.” Kingston recalls that her mother repeated the technique on her daughters. Knowing how much pain this caused, Kingston hopes that No Name Woman’s lover appreciated her smooth brow.

Paying such attention to her looks, Kingston imagines No Name Woman would have caused gossip. She may also have piqued the curiosity of other men, even male relatives. These men left because of poverty, but there may have been another reason— “the never-said.”

Kingston thinks, too, that her aunt may have been spoiled, “unusually beloved” as “the precious only daughter.” Her family welcomed the chance to take her back after her husband left. Kingston’s grandfather was supposedly different from other people as a result of being bayoneted in the head by a Japanese soldier. Once, he tried to trade one of his sons for a baby girl, which he had brought home “wrapped up inside his brown western-style greatcoat.” His grandmother made him trade the child back. When he finally got a daughter of his own, “he doted on her.”

To allow for the harmony of five generations living under one roof without creating sexual confusion, Kingston notes that they “[effaced] their sexual color” in favor of “plain miens.” As a result, they all adopted loud voices, which remained “unmodulated to American tones even after years away from the village.” Kingston tried to break away from this by walking with her toes “pointed forward” and not “pigeon-toed, which is Chinese-feminine.” She also spoke “in an inaudible voice,” which was American-feminine.

Silence was important, too. At the dinner table, no one spoke. No Name Woman never said “her inseminator’s name.” Kingston thinks that it could have been a man within her own household, though in their village, sleeping with a man outside of the family would have been just as bad. All men in the village were “kinsmen.” They were neutralized as possible lovers by being referred to as “brother,” “younger brother,” or “older brother.”

To make herself less fearful of boys, Kingston herself quietly added “brother” to boys’ names. She thinks this is why no one asked her to dance and why she had no dates. She did not know “how to make attraction selective.” She thought that if she made herself “American-pretty,” the few Chinese boys in her class would fall in love with her, but so would those who were not Chinese.

Kingston’s family allowed for some romance, but it was important to avoid a misalliance. These couples “snapped off the future,” due to their inability to have “true offspring.” The villagers got angry at No Name Woman for acting as though “she could have a private life” which did not concern them at all. Kingston thinks that if she had committed her infidelity at some other time, during a period in which there were large yields of grain, when there was peace and many boys were born, she may have escaped their punishment.

After the villagers attacked their home, No Name Woman’s family believed that she had cursed them. They were certain that death was coming. To avoid the worst, they treated her as though she were already dead and called her “Ghost.” In response, she ran away into the fields and endured the pain of childbirth alone.

Kingston thinks that the No Name Woman’s act of going to the pigsty to give birth may have been her last act of responsibility, her decision to “protect this child as she had protected its father.” She killed it and herself because a child with no descent line would haunt her. Kingston also thinks that carrying the baby to the well was an act of love, because she could have simply smothered it in the mud. A mother who loves her child takes it along. It is possible, too, that the baby was a girl. If it had been a boy, the family may have been more forgiving.

It had been twenty years since Kingston first heard the story about her aunt. She has not asked for details, not even her aunt’s name. Kingston recalls how Chairman Mao had encouraged the Chinese to give “paper replicas” of things from life, such as houses, meat, and dresses—even “spirit money”—to the “spirits of outstanding soldiers and workers, no matter whose ancestors they may be.” In a similar vein, Kingston devotes pages of paper to No Name Woman, despite her sense that her aunt’s spirit does not wish her well. Kingston, after all, insists on telling her shameful story, that of a “spite suicide” who drowned herself. The Chinese are particularly afraid of “the drowned one, whose weeping ghost…waits silently by the water to pull down a substitute.”