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.
