No Name Woman by Maxine Kingston

For today, we were suppose to read "No Name Woman" by Maxine Kingston. Kingston was born in Stockton, California and her first language was Say Yup, which is a dialect of Cantonese. She learned a lot about story telling from her community which consisted of mainly Chinese from the same village that her family grew up in. This essay is about a girl trying to discover her Chinese heritage and background. It starts off with her mother telling her the story of the girl's aunt that she never knew of. Her mother tells her that her aunt had an arranged marriage and then her husband soon after left for America. When her husband was gone she ended up pregnant and the town knew that there was no way that it was her husband's baby. So the night she was suppose to deliver, the townspeople killed all of their family's livestock, tore up their yard, their house, and all of her aunt's belongings. She went on to have her baby that night. The next morning, the girl's mother went outside to get water from the well, where she seen the aunt and her newborn. She had committed suicide. No one in their family claims her or talks about her because she was considered a disgrace on them. So the family acts like she never existed and this is why the girl never knew she had an aunt. Her mother is deciding to tell her this story now because the little girl has started menstruating so she knows now that there is a possibility that she could end up pregnant. The mother wants the girl to know the consequences and what could happen to her if something like that ever happened. This leads the girl to try to figure out her and her family's past and her chinese heritage. She also tries to imagine what could have happened to her aunt. She believes that her aunt was raped and forced to have sex with some man and he got her pregnant. She does not believe that she was just sleeping around and cheating on her husband. The girl discovers alot about Chinese history, but she will never know for certain what happened with her aunt's life.