 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 Kingston then returns to the story of the aunt and definitely decides that the pregnancy is due to a rape rather than a voluntary love affair. She says the guilty man might have been someone of her own family, but even a man outside the family would have been abhorrent because "all the village were kinsmen." In a population that has only one hundred surnames, the Chinese studied birth charts to prevent incest. Because of such kinship ties, sexual advances were thought to be dangerous. Kingston says that as a girl, she used to add "brother" silently to boys' names to hex them or to make them less appealing or less scary. She adds that she had also hexed herself because she did not date while growing up. She had trouble making herself attractive to the Chinese boys in her class. Kingston next digresses into the Chinese village structure, where "spirits shimmered among the live creatures, balanced and held in equilibrium by time and land." If one person acted outside the norm, the violence of that action "could open up a black hole, a maelstrom that pulled in the sky." Returning to the aunt's story, Kingston realizes that the villagers were frightened by the aunt's violation of custom in getting pregnant. The raid was punishment for her acting like she could have a private life. Kingston next imagines what it would have been like after the raid. The family cursed the aunt, calling her a ghost, claiming she had never been born. The aunt would have run out into the fields to lie down with the first pains of childbirth. She would remember that "old-fashioned women gave birth in their pigsties to fool the jealous, pain-dealing gods, who do not snatch piglets." She would then run to the pigsty before the next contraction. When the baby was born, she would touch it in the dark, feeling for fingers and toes. But the aunt realized that the child had no family and decided to take the baby with her to death.
Kingston returns to Brave Orchid's original warning. For twenty-five years, since she has heard this story, she has kept silent about it, never asking questions. She does not even know her aunt's name. She decides that the real punishment to the aunt was not the raid, but the family's deliberately forgetting her in a culture that worships heritage and ancestors. Kingston ends the chapter by admitting that her aunt still haunts her all these years. She knows that her aunt performed a 'spite' suicide, downing herself and her infant in the family drinking water, knowing that the drowned ghost is a fearful figure in Chinese culture. In spite of the suicide and infanticide, Kingston gives the no name aunt the history that she deserves, and in doing so, makes a statement that all women are important and have value. She also defies her mother who has warned her to remain silent about the story. Table of Contents | |
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