Kingston rewrites No Name Woman’s story based on her own understanding of the patriarchal nature of traditional Chinese society, in which women were conditioned to do as they were told, without question. Because of the close-knit community in which No Name Woman lived, Kingston contends that her aunt’s sexual partner “was not a stranger because the village housed no strangers.” Ironically, Kingston reasons, the same patriarchal society that subjugated women to subservient roles bears responsibility for No Name Woman’s adultery. Because No Name Woman was conditioned to do everything that she was ordered to do, she was unable to gather the personal strength necessary to repel the man’s sexual advances. This inability emphasizes what Kingston argues is the great disparity between how women and men were supposed to act: “Women in the old China did not choose. Some man had commanded her to lie with him and be his secret evil. . . . She obeyed him; she always did as she was told.” Even more damning of this double standard in “old China” is Kingston’s assertion that this man who basically raped No Name Woman was the same villager who organized the raid against No Name Woman’s family. Kingston’s version of Brave Orchid’s original talk-story emphasizes how a dutifully submissive woman is victimized by a man’s abusive manipulation of a gender-based social code.
Kingston also exposes the unfair discrimination against women in traditional Chinese society when she discusses how sons are celebrated more than daughters. She imagines that her aunt’s illegitimate child must have been a girl: “It was probably a girl; there is some hope of forgiveness for boys.” Only a mad person, as her grandfather is described to have been, would prefer a female child over a male. Sons were venerated because they could pass on the family name, thereby ensuring a family’s stability and longevity; in contrast, daughters, who were given away by their parents at marriage, primarily functioned only as bearers of sons for their husbands’ families. Such was the traditional code and operation of a patrilineal society that enforced its patriarchal ideology by imposing restrictions on women’s positions and conduct. Improper actions, such as No Name Woman’s, were considered a breach of this code and could lead to severe consequences, including death. Because Kingston’s aunt had an adulterous affair and, even worse, probably produced a female child from the sexual union, she threatened what Kingston terms the “roundness”—the harmony and the wholeness—of her family and the larger community. This prized circularity was so enmeshed in everyday life—symbolically, in “the round moon cakes and round doorways, the round tables of graduated sizes that fit one roundness inside another, round windows and rice bowls”—that the slightest ripple, the tiniest threat, to social stability was believed by the villagers to be an outright attack on an entire way of life and therefore must be completely annihilated.
No Name Woman is attacked because her action—adultery, confirmed by pregnancy—threatens socially accepted behavior tacitly enforced through centuries of tradition. “In the village structure,” Kingston notes, “spirits shimmered among the live creatures, balanced and held in equilibrium by time and land.” When No Name Woman’s family banishes her from the family, she runs out into the fields surrounding the house and falls to the ground, “her own land no more.” Her family no longer considers her among the “live creatures, balanced and held in equilibrium by time and land.” What these shimmering “spirits” are is not entirely clear, but their presence implies that both the living and the nonliving actively and forcefully protect the many traditions that stabilize the society. In No Name Woman’s case, her illegitimate child violates the immense value placed on a traditional family and is, for the family, another mouth to feed. Ironically, the aunt’s and her child’s fates are almost whimsically determined by the time in which this story takes place; Kingston surmises, “If my aunt had betrayed the family at a time of large grain yields and peace, when many boys were born, and wings were being built on many houses, perhaps she might have escaped such severe punishment. . . . Adultery, perhaps only a mistake during the good times, became a crime when the village needed food.” Remember, too, that we are told that the aunt had returned from her husband’s family to live with her own. Perhaps she was thrown out because she was another mouth to feed during her husband’s absence.
No Name Woman’s family is implicated in her “crime” and therefore must suffer the ransacking of their house. According to Chinese custom, because the family was responsible for the daughter’s wrongdoing, they should have prevented the adultery in the first place. Kingston’s aunt is doubly punished by witnessing her family’s being made to suffer. The family knows and must accept that it will be attacked for No Name Woman’s transgression of the community’s social code of how women should behave, which explains its reported passivity and resignation to the ransacking.
Kingston speculates further that her aunt may have taken some pride in her personal appearance and expressed her individuality. Any such display would have been a contravention to the established proper conduct in which young men and women learned to “efface their sexual color and present plain miens.” Perhaps the aunt was seeking some affection or even romance: “She dreamed of a lover for the fifteen days of New Year’s. . . . And sure enough she cursed the year, the family, the village, and herself.” Traditionally, the Chinese New Year is a fifteen-day celebration beginning either in late January or early February. Because people’s actions, activities, and practices during the celebration set the pattern for the entire new year, the new year must begin auspiciously.
Kingston wants to believe that her aunt had at least some positive control of her own destination rather than being merely a victim. In this less feasible scenario that Kingston feels it necessary to create, her aunt is more than just a victim who is married to a stranger, estranged immediately, raped, then ostracized by her family and community, and finally left with no choice but to commit suicide. Unfortunately, though, Kingston must acknowledge that the aunt killed both herself and her newborn baby, which leaves us very little room to doubt the horrific events contained in Brave Orchid’s telling of No Name Woman’s story. However, Kingston would like to think—perhaps she finds it emotionally necessary to believe—that Brave Orchid fabricated many of the story’s details according to the emphasis that she intended to impress on Kingston.
Although Kingston tries to make sense of what her mother tells her, she remains unsure about the reliability of the facts surrounding her aunt’s suicide, as are we. The confusion and ambivalence she feels as the author, who was once the listener, parallel ours. Her mother talked-story orally; she talks-story in print. Brave Orchid may have believed that the story would prevent her daughter from having sexual relations outside marriage and thereby bringing shame upon the family, but the daughter interprets the story according to values she can relate to, namely individualism and a strong, nurturing sense of womanhood.
One of the ways that this individualism and womanhood are defined is through language, or, at least for No Name Woman, the lack of it. Overall in the memoir, there is a movement from silence in the first line of the first chapter—“You must not tell anyone”—to language in the last line of the last chapter—“It translated well.” For Kingston, silence—the absence of language—equals voicelessness, which in turn means the loss of identity as a woman, a Chinese American, an adult, all of which are what she is trying to find. However, she is very aware of the emotional risks she is taking by asserting her independence from her own Chinese community. When her aunt violated her community’s standards of acceptable behavior, “the villagers punished her for acting as if she could have a private life, secret and apart from them.”
Silence both begins and ends “No Name Woman,” which balances Kingston’s mother’s opening sentence with Kingston’s own thoughts about how fearfully powerful silence can be: “The Chinese are always very frightened of the drowned one, whose weeping ghost, wet hair hanging and skin bloated, waits silently by the water to pull down a substitute.” Here, Kingston fears for herself: If she remains silent and fails to find her own personal voice, she risks becoming a “substitute” for her aunt, who remained silent her entire life. Unwittingly—perhaps—Kingston’s mother increases her daughter’s anxiety when she admonishes her never to repeat No Name Woman’s story: “Don’t tell anyone you had an aunt.”
But telling everyone that she had an aunt is exactly what Kingston does, and for a very complex reason. If Kingston’s purpose in writing The Woman Warrior is to solidify her identity as a female Chinese American, then for her to remain silent about her aunt is tantamount to her rejecting her own sense of self. She cannot deny a voice for her aunt—“my aunt, my forerunner”—without denying one for herself, which is why she reinterprets Brave Orchid’s talk-story by creating a more individualized life for her aunt, who, she imagines, used a “secret voice, a separate attentiveness,” much like she herself does throughout the memoir. “Unless I see her life branching into mine,” Kingston writes of No Name Woman, “she gives me no ancestral help.”
