Essay on Maxine Hong Kingston's "No Name Woman" and how she utilizes this story to help her integrate her two cultural identities into her own.

Essay by sbaek0103College, UndergraduateA+, November 2003

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A person's identity cannot be given to them, instead a person must achieve a sense of her character through personal experience and self search. In "No Name Woman", Maxine Hong Kingston recalls the events of her aunt's life in the elusive world of her Chinese roots. The story of her aunt is told by her mother and Kingston recreates the events into an exploratory story to help herself figure out what part of her existence is Chinese and help her better understand the Chinese culture. By retelling her aunt's story, Kingston seeks to incorporate both her Chinese and American identities and mold them into her own individual identity.

Kingston, a first generation American, finds that as a result of her cultural heritage and current surroundings, it is extremely difficult in resolving her identity. She is a product of a very strong Chinese culture growing up in American and so her identity becomes multifaceted.

In attempting to resolve who she is and her cultural roots, she discovers that her identity is characterized in relation to her Chinese identity, her American environment, and the combinations therein.

In the opening scene of the story, the audience is immediately presented with a tragic story within a story. The events viewed in retrospect through the eyes of the narrator's traditional conservative mother seem skewed and moralistic, delivered in an instructive voice. The mother's speech is purely didactic. She is telling this story to Kingston to teach a lesson; never do what your aunt has done and do not bring shame upon the family name. Instead of clearly accepting this tale, Kingston has a hard time believing and consenting to her mother's message. Although Kingston is to never speak of the aunt and pretend that the aunt never existed, she disobeys her mother and comes up...