Aunt Maxine Hong Kingston example essay topic

There have been many conflicts that have been risen between cultures concerning the differences in values and morals within one another. In "No Name Woman", there is a conflict between Chinese and American culture, the role of women in traditional Chinese society; Growing up Chinese American and Silence and voice. The story combines Chinese history, myths, and beliefs that her mother tells her. The narrator Maxine Hong Kingston speaks about her mother and traditional Chinese culture through the stories she tells about her family and growing up. Through out the story Maxine Hong Kingston tries to find a common ground between Chinese culture and American culture.

The role of women in traditional Chinese society, men are obviously, intentionally absent from this story. The focuses on a woman that affects Maxine Hong Kingston's life, and in most cases depicts how that woman relates to the male dominated society around her. It is women who are pictured destroying the house; the implication of Maxine Hong Kingston's relationship with her mother and her mother's talk-stories in particular is both empowerment and dis empowerment. However, she also reinforces the view that girls are disappointments to their parents, despite what they may accomplish. Maxine Hong Kingston feels haunted by the images or ghosts of little Chinese girls whose parents left them to die because they wanted sons instead. In a particularly vivid section of the story, Maxine Hong Kingston imagines the time when her aunt's family casts her aunt out.

Alone, her aunt is lost in the wilderness, and when the baby comes, she resorts to giving birth in a pigsty. Maxine Hong Kingston believes that her aunt decides to kill herself and her baby together in order to spare the child a life without family or purpose: " A child with no descent line would not soften her life... begging her to give it purpose". (43) Maxine Hong Kingston also notes that the baby was probably a girl, and as such would already have been considered practically useless to society: "He had traded one of his sons, My grandmother made him trade back". (41) Shows how women are being devalued. It is clear that Growing up Chinese American, Maxine Hong Kingston is also reaching out to other Chinese Americans who share her feelings of displacement and frustration.

It is especially difficult to reconcile the heavy handed and often restrictive traditions of the emigrants with the relative freedom of life in America. Being Chinese American often means, that one is torn between both worlds without really being part of either. Another difficulty in being Chinese American is that one's cultural heritage is always second-hand, filtered through the lens of someone else. The "No Name Woman", is about an aunt Maxine Hong Kingston never knew she had.

"You must not tell anyone", my mother said, "what I am about to tell you. In China, your father had a sister who killed herself. She jumped into the family well. We say that your father has all brothers because it is as if she had never been born". (37) The theme of silence and voice begins, "You must not tell anyone".

It is both ironic and contradictory because Maxine Hong Kingston is in fact telling everyone. However, the Chinese emigrants are so guarded of their community that they keep silent about anything that could disrupt it. It is often their children, as Chinese-Americans, who bear the burden of the community's silence. For her part, Maxine Hong Kingston is naturally quiet and socially awkward to begin with. It is with some pride, however, that Maxine Hong Kingston eventually begins to tell talk-stories herself. In the end, the very act of writing her story becomes her way of finding a voice.

The narrator's struggle in "No Name Woman" is to write about that which is never said: her unnamed dead aunt, the slaughter in her mother's Chinese village, Kingston's struggle is also about finding a voice, as both a Chinese American and a woman, after she has been silenced all her life. Writing a story therefore becomes a rebellion of sorts, from the first sentence she is in fact telling everyone. In writing, Maxine Hong Kingston displays a willingness to break the silence and asserts power over those who have held her back. Part real and part fantastical, talk-stories are designed more to teach Maxine Hong Kingston Chinese traditions and customs than to accurately represent the "truth". As a result, Maxine Hong Kingston is both confused and frustrated in her attempts to make sense of the stories her mother tells her.

At the same time, possibly this uncertainty of the stories allows Maxine Hong Kingston the most freedom. In "No-Name Woman", for instance, Maxine Hong Kingston learns from her mother that she once had an aunt who killed herself and her newborn baby by jumping into the family well in China. The woman's husband had left the country years before, so the villagers knew that the child was illegitimate. The night that the baby was born, the villagers raided and destroyed the family house, and the woman gave birth in a pigsty. The next morning the mother found her sister-in-law and the baby plugging up the well. The woman had brought such disgrace upon her family that they decided to pretend that she had never been born.

Maxine Hong Kingston's mother tells her the story as a warning story, in the years Kingston begins to menstruate. Her mother warns her to be careful for fear that the same fate fall upon her: " Now that you have started to menstruate, what happened to her could happen to you... The villagers are watchful". (38) Her mother shows no sympathy for the dead. Because Maxine Hong Kingston cannot ask about her unnamed aunt who is referred to only as, "No Name Woman" she invents her own fantasies about why her aunt gave in to her forbidden passions. In one such scenario, her aunt is a timid woman ordered into submission by a rapist.

In another, her aunt harbors a slowly blossoming passion, attempting to attract a man's attention by carefully tending to her appearance. Maxine Hong Kingston's fantasies must have direct bearing on her own life: she rejects, for example, the idea the idea that her aunt was a wild woman of loose morals. Instead, her aunt's greatest crime one with which Maxine Hong Kingston identifies was acting on her private interests, stepping out of the role Chinese society and traditions had prohibited for her. How is Maxine Hong Kingston, in trying to make sense of her own life, able to tell from these talk-stories what is peculiar to her own family and what is true for all Chinese or, more importantly, what is Chinese and what is "the movies"? (39). Such traditions, Maxine Hong Kingston says, were thought of as necessary to ensure village stability, especially when the villagers were all related in some way.

Any sexual passion could lead to adultery or incest and therefore threatened the social order. Maxine Hong Kingston, to show this struggle, sets up conflicts: between private and public, playfulness and necessity, the individual's need for expression and society's need for control. As she imagines what old world China was like, she paints a picture of a repressive, strictly ordered society in which people were essentially unable to have private lives. Everything had to be done for the sake of the family or village's well being, what Maxine Hong Kingston calls "the Necessary". In such a world, Kingston's aunt represents the worst kind, one whose private lusts made public by her illegitimate child disrupted the social order and threatened the very existence of the village. In times of plenty, notes Maxine Hong Kingston, adultery might have been "only a mistake" (42); when the villagers needed everyone to work together to provide food, however, it became a crime.

At the end of the story, Maxine Hong Kingston imagines her aunt as a lonely, wandering ghost, begging for scraps from the gifts given other ghosts by their loving relatives. Ghosts refer to both American and Chinese, humans and animals, the living and the dead. Ghost represents Maxine Hong Kingston past, not being realized by her potential and always being held back by her mother. The story serves as a background for Maxine Hong Kingston's own experience growing up as a Chinese American, torn between the world of Chinese customs and traditions that surround her like "ghosts" and her new, permissive American environment.

However, to Americans or Chinese-Americans, often the Chinese are ghosts and other way around to the Chinese. In "No-Name Woman" The narrative jumps back forth between past and present, fact and fiction, Kingston's life and the society in which her aunt lived. A description of how it was very important in the village to eliminate sexual attraction. Maxine Hong Kingston's own peculiarities about making herself attractive to boys: "If I made myself American - pretty so that the five...

(42) The most vivid parts of the story are those in which Kingston lets her imagination about her aunt run free in her Chinese American point of view. She depicts in beautiful detail the careful manner in which her aunt in her imagination, of course plucked hairs from her forehead to attract a suitor. She also imagines her aunt's sufferings in heartbreaking detail, first as a mother giving birth and then as a ghost begging for scraps.