Why Tell Her Aunt's Story, Kingston?

Maxine Hong Kingston begins her quest for a unique identity by reading the stories of her aunts. She begins her tale by doing this. Rhetorically, the first thing she says is her mother's advice to keep what she was about to tell her to herself to herself. (383). She started by describing her aunt, the only sister in her father's household. They avoid talking about her aunt's death since it is the reason why she took her own life. In contrast, Kingston is an American-Chinese trapped between two civilizations. Concerned with finding her identity through exploring her Chinese cultural history to merge and harmonize the diversity created by the two cultures. This paper, therefore, seeks to understand the reason and motives for which Kingston tells her aunt’s story.

According to the revelations of the story, one major reason for which Kingston unveils her aunt’s story is the quest of balance that Kingston has a hard time finding between the Chinese culture and her American life. On the contrary, she tells the story which she was warned by her mother not to tell to anyone. However ironical her actions seem, she has to use the story to her advantage. One way of her beginning to understand the traditions of the Chinese is to tell the story. In the story No Name Woman, Kingston writes, “Those of them in the first American generations have had to figure out how the invisible world the emigrants built around our childhood fits into solid American” (385). China is “invisible”, an intangible place that Kingston only hears about. On the other hand, America is “solid,” because not only she lives there but also she socializes and interacts daily with other Americans as she adjusts to their society and their way of life. These two cultures become much harder for her to merge and explore with equal measures. She finds it hard to reconcile the conflict between these antagonistic cultures, which have become part of her as well as contributing to her character and personality.

Kingston tells her aunt’s story since it is through the narrative that her mother taught her the Chinese ways of life, cultural beliefs, and expected norms. For example, she is warned how wrong and unethical, condemned, and shunned giving birth out of wedlock was prohibited. Unlike in American society where ancestry and giving birth before marriage is common, in the Chinese culture such were never tolerated. Therefore, when she became of age, her mother warned her not to risk getting pregnant before marriage. Through the story, her mother warned her by saying, “Don’t let your father know that I told you. He denies her. Now that you have started to menstruate, what happened to her could happen to you. Don’t humiliate us. You shouldn’t like to be forgotten like you had never been born. The villagers are watchful.”(385). The idea of women not being allowed to give birth before marriage becomes important even after marriage. For instance, women are expected to be faithful, honor and protect the marriage vows. Her aunt did not protect her marriage, conceived and had a child while her husband was overseas. It was for this reason why the society shunned her and she finally gave birth in a pigsty prompting her to commit suicide by drowning into the family well to avoid suffering from the humiliation of being treated as an outcast and no longer as a family member.

Kinston in her quest to find her roots infers from her aunt’s story how her family might have come to America. Her family’s entry to America is, thus, explained in relation to her aunt’s story.

In 1924 just a few days after our village celebrated seventeen hurry-up wedding-to make sure that every young man who went ‘out on the road’ would responsibly come home-your father and his brothers and his brothers and your aunt’s new husband sailed to America, the Golden Mountain. It was your grandfather’s last trip. Those lucky enough to get contracts waved goodbye from the decks. They fed and guarded the storeways and helped them off in Cuba, New York, Bali, Hawaii. ‘We’ll meet in Californian next year’ they said (383).

Hence, Kingston is able to know exactly when her family came to America and how she came to be born in America knowing most ways of the Americans.

Conclusion

In the short story No Name Woman, there are several revelations of the Chinese culture, beliefs, and practices. Kingston, therefore, is able to realize that her aunt’s story had a lot of information that could reveal to her the culture and traditions of the Chinese which she is then able to device reconciliatory ways of integrating the two cultures which are part of her life and have been essential at modeling her personality and the person she has become.

Work Cited

Kingston, Maxine H. The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood among Ghosts. Harvard.edu. 2000. http://isites.harvard.edu/fs/docs/icb.topic1049594.files/No%20Name%20Woman%20Kingston.pdf. Accessed 4 February 2017.