Dualities and Opposites in “No Name Woman" Claudia Excaret Santos Campusano College

“No Name Woman,” (1989) by Maxine Hong Kingston is a short story of the book The Woman Warrior about an American-Chinese narrator. She speaks for an immigrant culture with two traditions, two names, and which actions often carry double meanings. The text also carries these dualities. The first part is narrated through dialogues, and the second one is permeated with silence. These dialogues create stories, what fills them and completes them is the silence. In Maxine Hong Kingston’s text, the dual narrative (of the mother through dialogues and the daughter as the narrator) serves as a tool to understand how traditions work in the Chinese culture and construct a narrator that is shaped by these dualities that are sometimes opposites.

Some of these double meanings are constructed by opposites. First, the mother is the one who tells the story of the aunt. She states that “[the narrator] must not tell anyone […] because it is as if she had never been born.” (Kingston 1) The mother is the one that keeps the story a secret, but she is also the one that keeps the secret alive; thus transmitting the aunt’s story whilst creating the feminine tradition of remembering what the narrator is constructing with her story. It is through the...