 Support the Monkey! Tell All your Friends and Teachers |
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Support the Monkey! Tell All your Friends and Teachers |
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Table of Contents Chapter Summaries With Notes Chapter 1: "No Name Woman" The narrator is a girl who has just reached puberty. Her mother tells her the story of her "No Name Aunt" as a means of warning her away from premarital sex. The story is completely secret in the family. The chapter begins, "'You must not tell anyone what I am about to tell you." The voice is Kingston's mother, Brave Orchid. She first tells Kingston very briefly and crudely that the no name aunt was her father's sister who committed suicide by jumping into the family well. Brave Orchid adds that the family acts as though she had never been born. In 1924, their native village in China had just celebrated "seventeen hurry-up weddings" between men who embarked for the United States, called "The Gold Mountain," and women of the village. The marriages took place to ensure the men's eventual return to the village. Brave Orchid, living with her husband's family as was customary for Chinese wives to do, noticed that her new sister-in-law was pregnant even though it had been years since her husband had departed the village. The family remained silent about this fact, but the people of the village had noticed it, too. One night just before the due date of the baby's birth, the villagers wearing masks, raided the house of the no name woman as punishment. They destroyed the family's crop, slaughtered their livestock, broke their household goods, and ruined their supplies. During the raid, the family could only stand and stare in disbelief. The woman gave birth in the pigsty that same night and Brave Orchid found her sister-in- law and the baby the next day drowned in the family well. Brave Orchid gives a warning to Kingston: "What happened to her could happen to you. Don't humiliate us. You wouldn't like to be forgotten as if you had never been born." Kingston follows her mother's story with a meditation. As a second-generation Chinese American, she is confused about fitting the stories of past Chinese generations to "solid America." She adds that the elder Chinese confuse the gods by using false names. Kingston thinks they also confuse their children who are always trying to get things straight and to name the unnamable. She says that the younger Chinese Americans that she knows hide their real names and struggle with trying to separate out what in them is Chinese and what in them is American. She admits that she also struggles with her identity.
Kingston returns to the story of her no name aunt and says that if she wants to know something more about her than what her mother has told her, she cannot ask her mother directly. Her mother is guided only by necessity and has already told Kingston all the necessary parts. She remembers that as children, whenever she and her siblings did anything fun or frivolous, they were accused of needlessly using up energy. In thinking about the no name aunt, Kingston says, "adultery is extravagance." She tries to figure out how her aunt could have been so extravagant as to have committed adultery. She adds that in the China of her aunt's time, the people wasted nothing, not even the gizzard lining of the chickens. Also at that time, women in China were considered to be a definite waste. Kingston then reasons that her aunt "could not have been the lone romantic who gave up everything for sex." She decides that her aunt must have been forced to have sex with some man, likely one of the villagers who raided her home. She imagines that the aunt had probably encountered this man while working in the fields. He had ordered her to have sex with him, and she had obeyed because she had been taught to always do as she was told. Table of Contents | |
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