Maxine Kingston's No Name Woman
...ed to be a soap-opera gone bad, the villagers trashed the house, and rather than just describe the damage they had done, Kingston’s mother, probably with the help of Kingston’s embellishment, describes in full detail what actually happened. “Like a great saw, teeth strung with lights, files of people walked zigzag across our land, tearing the rice,” she says, confusing the reader on whether to be amazed at such a wonderfully written sentence, or to sad over the damage that has only just begun. As she continues on, the images only get worse: “One woman swung a chicken, whose throat she had slit, splattering the blood in red arcs about her.” Again a horrible image to behold, but it is because of the words Kingston uses to convey this bloody image that make it so powerful. Now after the long story about the attack, the reader is left wondering why it even happened in the first place, and here is where Kingston takes advantage and inserts the Chinese culture to explain why the raid occurred. After reading the paper for the third time, it became obvious that there were two stories actually being told: the mother’s and Kingston’s. The mother’s story consists mainly of the raid and explains why the raid happens in one quick sentence, “On the night the baby was to be born the villagers raided our house;” on the other hand, Kingston’s story talks about before the raid and after it, and works in the values and ways of life of the Chinese. She first reveals an idea that seems common to most Asian cultures and that is the dominance of the male over the female, which Kingston expresses clearly when saying, “Women in the old China did not choose. Some man had commanded her to lie with him and be his secret evil…She obeyed him; she always did what she was told.” This apparently did not matter to the people the aunt lived with because she still had to sit at an “outcast table” in which “the powerful older people made wrongdoers eat alone,” yet another element in Chinese culture. Now these elements ...