What the appropriate role of a village is in relation to its individual members constantly changes throughout the memoir and is one of the major paradoxes that troubles Kingston. Because each female protagonist in The Woman Warrior interacts differently with her respective village, Kingston is unable to summarize categorically how a woman should be treated by her village, and what that individual's responsibilities are to her fellow villagers. In "No Name Woman," both Kingston's aunt's family and village ostracize her because she gets pregnant by a man who is not her husband. However, whereas we might then expect No Name Woman to reject her family and certainly her village, her separation from these two social communities is more than she can stand psychologically, and she wavers precipitously between consciousness — represented by comforting thoughts of her family — and unconsciousness — symbolized in her fear of open spaces. Kingston imagines of her aunt, "Flayed, unprotected against space, she felt pain return, focusing her body. . . . For hours she lay on the ground, alternately body and space." No Name Woman's desire to be contained — both physically and socially — within some structure finally drives her to seek refuge in a pigsty: "It was good to have a fence enclosing her, a tribal person alone."
Fa Mu Lan's relationship with her village is diametrically opposite of No Name Woman's with hers. Returning to her home after training for fifteen years with the old couple, Fa Mu Lan is greeted by her parents "as if they were welcoming home a son"; in other words, they are ecstatically happy. The villagers, represented by two cousins of Fa Mu Lan, question where she has been during her absence, but no one takes seriously the possibility that she "went to the city and became a prostitute," as one giggling cousin suggests. When Fa Mu Lan is finally ready to leave her village to fight the evil emperor and tyrannical barons, her departure is radically different from No Name Woman's: The villagers present the woman warrior with gifts — including "their real gifts . . . their sons" — that honor the self-sacrifice that she is making on their behalf. Ironically, the villagers note how beautiful Fa Mu Lan is only after she disguises herself as a man; however, they at least acknowledge that this warrior is a woman dressed "in man's fashion" when they continue referring to her by using the female pronoun "she": "'How beautiful you look,' the people said. 'How beautiful she looks.'"
