Kingston, however, does not fully understand the story's importance when she first hears it.
Kingston notes of her mother, "Whenever she had to warn us about life, my mother told stories that ran like this one, a story to grow up on." Brave Orchid uses the "talk-story" of No Name Woman to pass on codes of proper conduct and values to her daughter. The villagers are watchful." Here, Brave Orchid's phrase "The villagers are watchful" transcends time and geography: No Name Woman severely crippled her family's social standing in the Chinese village similarly, Brave Orchid warns her daughter not to embarrass her family, which was among many others that emigrated from their village in China and settled in Stockton, California. Brave Orchid explains to her daughter about the aunt, "Now that you have started to menstruate, what happened to her could happen to you. Due to failing crops and a poor domestic economy, many of the men from the ancestral village in China were forced to leave their farms to seek work, traveling as far as America, which the Chinese nicknamed "Gold Mountain" because the original Chinese immigrants initially perceived it as a bountiful land where a good living could be made working in the gold-mining industry.īrave Orchid's story about Kingston's aunt is a cautionary tale meant to discourage the young Kingston from engaging in premarital sex hopefully, the fear of humiliation, ostracism, and death will serve sufficiently as a deterrent for sexual promiscuity. The next morning, Brave Orchid went to gather water from the family's well, where she discovered that No Name Woman had committed suicide by throwing herself and her child down into the well.Įxplaining that the aunt had become pregnant by a man whose identity the aunt never disclosed, Brave Orchid also relates that at the time - 1924 - the aunt's husband was working in America. Shunned by her family, the aunt gave birth in a pigsty, alone. Brave Orchid relates how on the night when Kingston's aunt gave birth to an illegitimate child, the people of the Chinese village in which the aunt and her family lived ransacked the family's house, killed all of their livestock, and destroyed their crops. Because of this realistic-magical aspect, a talk-story can be as confusing to its audience - Kingston and her readers - as it can be inspiring.īrave Orchid's story of No Name Woman provides one valuable inroad into Kingston's discovering her cultural history. She tested our strength to establish realities." Similar to a folktale, a talk-story often involves the fantastic and fuses realistic events with magical qualities.
For example, here in "No Name Woman," Kingston says of her mother, who, we later learn, is named Brave Orchid, "Whenever she had to warn us about life, my mother told stories that ran like this one, a story to grow up on. Throughout The Woman Warrior, Kingston will refer to her mother's historical tales as "talk-stories," culturally based, primarily oral stories whose general purpose is didactic. Because she is most concerned with exploring how her Chinese cultural history can be reconciled with her emerging sense of herself as an American, Kingston must uncover just what this Chinese cultural history is, and one way of doing so is by listening to, and then altering, her mother's stories about the family's Chinese past. We say that your father has all brothers because it is as if she had never been born." Of course, keeping silent is exactly what Kingston is not doing.
In China your father had a sister who killed herself. Ironically, the first thing we read is Kingston's mother's warning Kingston, "You must not tell anyone. Maxine Hong Kingston begins her search for a personal identity with the story of an aunt, to whom this first chapter's title refers.