Maxine Hong Kingston begins her search for a personal identity with the story of an aunt, to whom this first chapter’s title refers. Ironically, the first thing we read is Kingston’s mother’s warning Kingston, “You must not tell anyone . . . what I am about to tell you. In China your father had a sister who killed herself. She jumped into the family well. We say that your father has all brothers because it is as if she had never been born.” Of course, keeping silent is exactly what Kingston is not doing. Because she is most concerned with exploring how her Chinese cultural history can be reconciled with her emerging sense of herself as an American, Kingston must uncover just what this Chinese cultural history is, and one way of doing so is by listening to, and then altering, her mother’s stories about the family’s Chinese past.
Throughout The Woman Warrior, Kingston will refer to her mother’s historical tales as “talk-stories,” culturally based, primarily oral stories whose general purpose is didactic. For example, here in “No Name Woman,” Kingston says of her mother, who, we later learn, is named Brave Orchid, “Whenever she had to warn us about life, my mother told stories that ran like this one [about No Name Woman], a story to grow up on. She tested our strength to establish realities.” Similar to a folktale, a talk-story often involves the fantastic and fuses realistic events with magical qualities. Because of this realistic-magical aspect, a talk-story can be as confusing to its audience—Kingston and her readers—as it can be inspiring.
Brave Orchid’s story of No Name Woman provides one valuable inroad into Kingston’s discovering her cultural history. Brave Orchid relates how on the night when Kingston’s aunt gave birth to an illegitimate child, the people of the Chinese village in which the aunt and her family lived ransacked the family’s house, killed all of their livestock, and destroyed their crops. Shunned by her family, the aunt gave birth in a pigsty, alone. The next morning, Brave Orchid went to gather water from the family’s well, where she discovered that No Name Woman had committed suicide by throwing herself and her child down into the well.
Explaining that the aunt had become pregnant by a man whose identity the aunt never disclosed, Brave Orchid also relates that at the time—1924—the aunt’s husband was working in America. Due to failing crops and a poor domestic economy, many of the men from the ancestral village in China were forced to leave their farms to seek work, traveling as far as America, which the Chinese nicknamed “Gold Mountain” because the original Chinese immigrants initially perceived it as a bountiful land where a good living could be made working in the gold-mining industry.
Brave Orchid’s story about Kingston’s aunt is a cautionary tale meant to discourage the young Kingston from engaging in premarital sex; hopefully, the fear of humiliation, ostracism, and death will serve sufficiently as a deterrent for sexual promiscuity. Brave Orchid explains to her daughter about the aunt, “Now that you have started to menstruate, what happened to her could happen to you. Don’t humiliate us. . . . The villagers are watchful.” Here, Brave Orchid’s phrase “The villagers are watchful” transcends time and geography: No Name Woman severely crippled her family’s social standing in the Chinese village; similarly, Brave Orchid warns her daughter not to embarrass her family, which was among many others that emigrated from their village in China and settled in Stockton, California. Kingston notes of her mother, “Whenever she had to warn us about life, my mother told stories that ran like this one, a story to grow up on.” Brave Orchid uses the “talk-story” of No Name Woman to pass on codes of proper conduct and values to her daughter.
Kingston, however, does not fully understand the story’s importance when she first hears it. Because she is confused by its many details, she rewrites Brave Orchid’s original tale, creating the impetus for why No Name Woman acts as she does in Brave Orchid’s version. Kingston knows that her mother is concerned that she not have premarital sex because her mother directly states that that is the reason for telling the story. But what Kingston does not know, at least not until the memoir’s final chapter, is that her mother hopes to strengthen her daughter emotionally and psychologically by giving her a sense of who she is and where she came from. In “No Name Woman,” Kingston writes, “Those of us in the first American generations have had to figure out how the invisible world the emigrants built around our childhood fits into solid America.” China is “invisible,” an intangible place that Kingston only hears about; America is “solid,” not only because she physically lives in it, but because she interacts daily with other Americans and necessarily wants to fit in. How to reconcile this conflict between these two disparate cultures becomes her thesis, the problem she attempts—and ultimately succeeds—to solve.
The young Kingston has difficulty making sense of her mother’s story and fails to receive direct, unambiguous responses to her questions and concerns. Her struggle to understand how knowing the history of her aunt who committed suicide will help her conduct herself properly—according to her mother’s traditional Chinese code of beliefs—is reflected in the questions she asks directly to Chinese Americans: “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 tradition and what is the movies?” How, Kingston asks, can she decipher what is real and what is fiction in her mother’s stories when her mother herself will not tell her? The larger issue, then, becomes how Kingston will integrate such talk-stories into her own personal life as she grows from childhood to womanhood, and just how relevant these tales of life in China are to a first-generation Chinese American with Chinese-born parents. To her American sensibilities, the stories are confusing because they are based on a Chinese context.
Because her mother’s messages are difficult to adopt or apply to her immediate American reality, Kingston, after relating Brave Orchid’s telling of No Name Woman’s story, rewrites the tale from her own American perspective. She uses her own style of “talk-story” to guess the reasons for her aunt’s actions. Ironically, although at the time she probably would not have recognized it, nor perhaps have wanted to, Kingston’s rewriting her mother’s talk-story as her own indicates an important element in her reconciling her Chinese past and her American present: She learns to talk-story by having listened to her mother. In this way, a continuity is established between her mother, who represents the cultural traditions of China, and herself as a first-generation Chinese American. Kingston will finally acknowledge this succession of generations when, at the end of “Shaman,” she compares herself favorably to her mother and proudly recognizes their many similarities: “I am really a Dragon, as she is a Dragon, both of us born in dragon years. I am practically a first daughter of a first daughter.”
