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.
