No Name Woman Analysis

People learn from the past by taking others mistakes and applying them to their own lives. In “No Name Woman,” Maxine Hong Kingston writes of her personal experiences. She tells her memoir through a narrator while explaining the hardships of growing up in a Chinese-American family and living in the shadows of her dead aunt’s mistakes. Kingston’s memoir is a mixture of autobiography, imaginative fiction, Chinese myth, and folklore due to the surreal events shared. Throughout the story, the reader’s question if mother is exaggerating the story of the aunt to scare the narrator from making poor decisions. Kingston applies her own unique experiences growing up in China; therefore, the events she writes of are not typical for the normal American …show more content…
The aunt took fourth in events not only affected her life, but the whole family’s as well. Becoming pregnant with a man who is not one’s husband would cause havoc in the community because it is against their beliefs. This is why the mother thinks it is best to scare her daughter away from the thought of poor choices. Kingston shows the reader this by writing, “Don’t humiliate us. You wouldn’t like to be forgotten as if you had never been born. The villagers are watchful” (Kingston 175). The mother is trying to install fear inside her daughter so her daughter will not follow in her aunt’s footsteps. Rules of the Chinese society are strict and demanding and if one does not follow them they will be shunned. In “The Most Important Lesson I Learned From Momma,” activists Coretta Scott King mentions how her mother, Mrs. Bernice Scott, taught her the lesson of values and Christian morals just as the narrator’s mother teachers her their family’s morals. Kingston points out key aspects of the aunt going against the typical rules of the Chinese community by writing how a mother teachers her daughter to not be a person like her aunt. Kingston lets the reader key in on the events most people did not know while the narrator’s mother is telling her to follow righteous

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