Maxine Hong Kingston’s “No Name Warrior” story from her book, The Woman Warrior, tells a story filled with culture, irony, detail, analysis, and fear. The story is told from the perspective of the daughter who is assumedly Kingston, the author. She tells us about the story taught to her by her mother. The story is about her aunt who had been purposely forgotten by the whole family because of what she had done: gotten pregnant while her husband had been gone for years. The opening of Kingston’s story is somewhat ironic. From the perspective of the girl, her mother says, “You must not tell anyone…what I am about to tell you” (1). This is ironic since she is literally telling us this story while she supposed to never mention it to the family or to anyone else. I think this story, “No Name Woman” was told to her by her mother, in hopes that it would scare her, prevent her, and teach her a lesson of the consequences that she would face if she got pregnant or did anything in an untraditional way.
Kingston tells this story with storytelling techniques in order to represent the Asian-American experience to its full extent. The structure in which stories are told and sentences are built has a lot of effect on how the reader intakes the things they are told. Throughout the chapter, Kingston takes pauses from telling the story of her aunt once in a while to speak on the Asian-American experience she faces in relation to the story. When Kingston’s mother says, “Now that you have started to menstruate, 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” (5). This shows us her mother told this story as a warning and preview of the consequences she would face if she broke tradition. Kingston then goes on to tell us about the stories her mother told “to grow up on” and that “tested our [her] strength to establish realities” (5). This all leads to one of the places where she gives insight on the Asian-American experience: “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?” (5-6). Kingston taking a pause in the story to analyze it for us, allowing readers to both reflect and take in what has happened so far. The question she poses shows the identity crisis Asian-Americans may face while having deep expectations to follow Asian culture and traditions but also living in the American culture. Without her taking time to express this thought by Chinese-Americans, we might have been able to assume the same, however, her doing so gives us the opportunity to actually think about the Asian-Amerian experience in relation to the story. In addition to taking pauses throughout her storytelling, she also speaks on her realizations and takeaways from the story she was told. Kingston creates powerful sentences that both effectively and efficiently show us her thoughts. For example, Kingston says, “The real punishment was not the raid swiftly inflicted by the villagers, but the family’s deliberately forgetting her…she would suffer forever, even after death” (16). This passage talks about how her aunt was not only purposely forgotten for the rest of her life but beyond that as well. Kingston tells how for the rest of her aunt’s after-life, she will suffer because of what she had done. The quote that I mentioned, I think, is created with powerful words such as “suffer forever” to effectively reflect her aunt’s forever pain and shame; her punishment will never leave her. Kingston, as a Chinese-American is torn between the tradition of Chinese culture and current American culture. Kingston also writes, “My aunt haunts me- her ghost drawn to me because now, after fifty years of neglect, I alone devote pages of paper to her… I am telling on her, and she was a spite suicide, drowning herself in the drinking water” (16). This quote is not only intense but also ominous and scary. She talks about how her aunt haunts her and I believe she feels this way because she fears to experience the nightmare of her aunt’s fate. Kingston ends this story by saying, “The Chinese are always frightened of the drowned one, whose weeping ghost, wet hair hanging and skin bloated, waits silently by the water to pull down a substitute” (16). Ending with this powerful sentence, it both sums up the purpose of her mother telling her this story and her inevitable fate if she were to do something similar. This sentence is wildly descriptive, detailed, and frightening. To think that one mistake might lead to being “pull[ed] down [as] a substitute” is frightening. Her saying “pull down a substitute” includes her fear to experience the punishment similar to her aunt and her fear that her family would be quick to do the same to Kingston if she were to break tradition.
In conclusion to Kingston’s way of storytelling, she uses powerful sentences and structure of her storytelling in order to express the Asian-American experience throughout re-telling us the story told by her mother. The majority of the text is the story of her aunt told in her own words, however, she occasionally takes a pause from telling the actual story to give her insight and analysis of the perspective of a Chinese-American individual, such as herself. This method allows us as readers to take a step back from the actual story to think and reflect on what it means and what it is like to be an Asian-American. Other than that, when Kingston is giving her own insight and showing her own fears and thoughts, she builds powerful sentences that efficiently reflects the experience of a Chinese-American girl. Personally, I relate a lot to Kingston’s experience and story being an Asian-American individual myself. In my opinion, Kingston’s powerful wording explains perfectly how an individual immersed in both Asian and American cultures might feel and fear in a similar situation.
