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."
