Maxine Hong Kingston - a Girl without Fate - Term Paper Example

Kingston’s No Woman In 1940, the girl who would grow up to be Maxine Hong Kingston became the first American-born child to Tom Hong and Chew Ying Lan who were then living in Stockton, California (Feng, 2003). Given an American and a Chinese name, Maxine Ting Ting Hong was a true product of immigrant parents. The young girl grew up speaking nothing but her parent’s language until she went to school, when she discovered she was incapable of communicating effectively with anyone else. From that time forward, the young girl would develop an affinity for words that would eventually blossom into a strong writing voice. This voice comes forward in her short story “No Name Woman” to tell of a family legend that has helped to shape the woman she would become. In her speculations about what might have pushed the no name woman to a position of suicide and her subsequent disownment by the family, Kingston, as narrator, reveals a great deal about the social and cultural positions of her dual society. The story, told in first person, is presented as an autobiographical reflection upon a story told to Kingston by her mother when she first reached puberty. Essentially, the mother tells Kingston about an aunt she had that is no longer acknowledged or remembered (out loud) by the family. This aunt was married quickly to a young man who was leaving China for America to try to earn money. The weddings were arranged so as to provide these young men with the anchors necessary to ensure they would return home. Years after their departure, though, this aunt became pregnant, bringing disgrace upon the family. As the time for the baby’s birth draws close, the village rises up against the family that has brought so much shame and dishonor to their community, attacking the family home and destroying their property. The rice fields are trampled and drained, the doors are broken in, the kitchenware is smashed and the villagers act in ways calculated to instill terror in the hearts of those inside. After the villagers are gone and the family is left to salvage whatever shattered pieces of their lives that are left to them, the pregnant aunt ran out into the fields and, later that night, gave birth to her baby in a nearby pigsty. Kingston’s mother later finds the girl and her newborn child drowned in the family well. The remainder of the story is Kingston’s reflections upon this aunt as she attempts to understand why she would have risked so much simply for sex. There are several massive holes in the story of the no name aunt for Kingston. For example, it is pointed out that Kingston’s mother, the sister-in-law to this aunt, is a witness to the destruction. This indicates the level of shame brought on the family as the daughter of the household, in keeping with Chinese tradition, should have been lodged with the family of her husband instead of staying where Kingston’s mother was living. The many ways in which this aunt is punished by her Chinese society are enumerated throughout the story in just such a way as Kingston attempts to make a distinction between the Chinese culture and that of the American-Chinese culture in which she has grown up. “Chinese-Americans, when you try to understand what things in you are Chinese, how do you separate what is peculiar to childhood, to poverty, insanities, one family, your mother who marked your growing with stories, from what is Chinese? What is Chinese tradition and what is the movies?” (Kingston). As she attempts to puzzle out the answer to these questions, she examines the motivations and expectations of the family toward the aunt. “The No-Name Woman seems as much to be the narrator as the narrator’s aunt. You should notice that Kingston does not give the narrator a name anymore than she does the aunt. The narrator is expected to participate in the punishment of the dead aunt, and yet, as an American she questions that expectation” (Hendricks, 2001). As she explores what might have happened to her aunt, the narrator can be seen to identify with the woman and the expectations of her society. In an attempt to understand what might have happened to her aunt, and to resist the family expectations that she, too, will participate in the belief that this woman never existed, Kingston attempts to look at the situation rationally. “Kingston begins by saying that her aunt could not have wanted to give up everything for sex. She must have been forced into this adultery and forced to keep it a secret” (Yan, 2008). The various ways this enforced behavior might have been brought about are considered within the story itself. “Women in old China did not choose. Some man had commanded her to lie with him and be his secret evil. I wonder whether he masked himself when he joined the raid on her family … She obeyed him; she always did as she was told” (Kingston). This enforced behavior is even described as rape in several instances, but Kingston allows that there might have also been an element of mutual attraction brought on by loneliness and a long-missing husband who was husband for a day only before he left for America. Kingston illustrates the difficulty of her aunt in facing the idea that she was married not only by pointing out the very short time period in which she knew her husband, but also by examining the ways in which her aunt probably continued to focus on her looks as if she were a single woman. “She thinks she must have continued to keep her beautiful appearance, although most married women did not. Kingston wonders if her vanity was possibly encouraged by her family, being the only daughter and beloved by all” (Yan, 2008). This makes her final fate all the more dreadful in that her promising life for the future was completely destroyed, in life and in death, by the actions of others upon her and her own inability to understand the changes. Understanding how her beautiful young aunt, still dressing and grooming as if she were a single woman, might have attracted the attention of a man she was forced to come into contact with on a regular basis, whether reciprocated by the aunt or not, helps Kingston come to the conclusion that her Chinese culture has treated this woman unfairly in the extreme. First, she marries a man she doesn’t know who leaves a day after the wedding for years of absence in America. Then she is forced, through loneliness, youth or the simple whim of a man who cares only for his own enjoyment, into adultery resulting in a child. Hints that the aunt had been returned to the paternal home indicates that perhaps this adulterous affair was discovered well before the baby began developing, yet the young woman’s treatment, even within the home, suggests she would not have risked this kind of outcast status willingly. “She [Kingston] tries to excuse her aunt on the assumption that she might have simply been a victim of a prearranged marriage. If she didn’t know her husband, why should she be held responsible. Because she is Chinese, not American. She then tries to excuse her based on the possibility that she was the victim of rape. This might satisfy both cultures. She then tries to excuse her on the grounds that she fell in love with the father of her child, and having only met her husband briefly, and his being far away for a long time, makes it understandable that she might yield to temptation. Understandable, but not excusable for her Chinese parents or the village from which they come” (Hendricks, 2001). The outcast status of the Chinese society, as Kingston explores it, is just this side of death to the girl, perhaps making the condition of death seem like an end of the suffering. However, as Kingston illustrates the way in which this aunt has lost her name, her identity and everything important to her, even death does not provide the release from her torment she hoped for. This has direct bearing on Kingston’s own direction in life as she attempts to determine whether she should follow the Chinese half of her heritage in order to retain connections with her family or if she should follow the American half of her upbringing in order to function in the world outside of the family, the ‘village’ in which she now lives. “The villagers had punished the aunt because she had taken an unacceptable road that undermined their values just as Kingston’s search for her identity in America questions the Chinese culture imposed on her” (Yan, 2008). In Kingston’s fictional ideas of what her aunt might have been thinking following the birth of her baby, she illustrates how the poor girl had very few options left open to her. She had already experienced life at the outcast table, being fed nothing more than the leftover food from the family table and no longer able to take part in family activities. “Instead of letting them start separate new lives like the Japanese, who could become samurais and geishas, the Chinese family, faces averted but eyes glowering sideways, hung on to the offenders and fed them leftovers” (Kingston). Considering this outcast status and knowing it would follow her throughout the remainder of her life, this woman had to consider this status as it would apply to this little child at her breast. “At its birth the two of them had felt the same raw pain of separation, a wound that only the family pressing tight could close. A child with no descent line would not soften her life but only trail after her, ghostlike, begging her to give it purpose” (Kingston). Without a family, without status of her own, there was no way in which she could provide this purpose for the child, forcing it to live its entire life in the darkness she had experienced since the pregnancy was first discovered. In attempting to discover what might have happened to her aunt through her own imagination, Kingston is attempting to work out what will happen to her once she makes her choice of whether to follow her Chinese or American inclinations. “She is trying very hard to understand what it means to be a Chinese-American woman. In the end, she has still not decided. She is still dealing with ghosts and the unspeakable” (Hendricks, 2001). That she feels threatened by this story is made clear, though, in Kingston’s last lines, in which she informs her audience that the Chinese culture remains afraid of drowned people, constantly concerned that the individual waits just beneath the surface waiting to pull in a substitute for her pain. Through her story of her aunt, and her reflections regarding what her aunt’s story might mean for her, who is forced, through her unique living situation, to make a choice between two cultures, Kingston reveals the cultural and social complexities of being Chinese-American. There are no clear definitions and the two cultures are seemingly diametrically opposed. The Chinese culture expects absolute obedience from its women while also expecting absolute fidelity, but provides no guidelines as to what a woman should be expected to do when these come into conflict, such as when a man not her husband makes a demand of a married woman. The result of disobedience, which would have been the case in either course taken by the aunt, is exclusion from her entire society as well as her family. This exclusion is so complete that she loses her name and identity even in death. Meanwhile, the American society has much different expectations, including a much more understanding approach to the plight of women. As Kingston attempts to determine the consequences of her own choices in life, her reflections on what she knows of her aunt and what she imagines of her only serve to add more confusion to her thoughts even as they make it clear why these thoughts are so weighty. Works Cited Feng, Pin-chia. “Maxine Hong Kingston.” National Chiao-Tung University, Taiwan. (2003). October 7, 2008 < http://www.cc.nctu.edu.tw/~pcfeng/CALF/ch1.htm> Hendricks, Thomas J. “Maxine Hong Kingston’s ‘No Name Woman.’” Lecture Series. Columbus, OH: Columbus University, 2001. Kingston, Maxine Hong. “No Name Woman.” Norton Anthology. 7th Ed. Yan, Martin. “’No Name Woman’ by Maxine Kingston.” Associated Content. February 25, 2008. October 7, 2008 Read More