Maxine Hong Kingstons No Name Woman Essay examples -- Chinese Society

Maxine Hong Kingston's No Name Woman "A highly fictive text [whose non-fiction label gives] the appearance of being an actual representation of Asian American experience in the broader public sphere." (Gloria Chun, "The High Note") Such a disparaging remark about the misleading nature of Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior has been readily refuted, notably by Leilani Nishime, who proposes in her essay "Engendering Genre..." that it is a text that transcends genre confines; it challenges traditional definitions of genre and demands redefinitions. Whatever the case, "No Name Woman" (NNW) is remarkable in the way the reader is given a candid social commentary in the guise of an intriguing tale of scandal and oppression. In a vivid representation of traditional Chinese society, Kingston artfully manipulates perspective, or more aptly character filter (Chatman, Reading Narrative Fiction 130), to reflect the culture of an entire society in the vicissitudes of one family's life. The opening scene itself suggests the structure of the entire story: we are immediately presented with a tragic story-in-a-story, or framed-narrative (Chatman, 97), of the narrator's adulterous aunt. Somehow, the events viewed in retrospect through the eyes of the narrator's traditional, conservative mother seem skewed and moralistic, rendered with an objective, instructive voice which complements the primary narrator's didactic tones as she takes over the discussion from her mother following the opening tale. A little later on, the filter switches almost seamlessly over to that of the aunt, in a radically different retelling of her tale by the (primary) narrator (14). Such smooth filter-character transitions occur frequently throughout the text... ...le viewpoints, overlapping timelines and a dominating, though largely implied narrator's (possibly author's) slant work together to present Kingston's unique view of gender roles and their assimilation into Chinese-American culture; a far-reaching yet intimate projection of her history, society and self. Bibliography: Chatman, Seymour. Story and Discourse: Narrative Structure in Fiction and Film. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1980. Reading Narrative Fiction. Ed. Seymour Chatman. New York: Macmillan, 1993. Chun, Gloria. "The High Note of the Barbarian Reed Pipe: Maxine Hong Kingston." Journal of Ethnic Studies 19.3 (Fall 1991): 85-95. Kingston, Maxine Hong. The Woman Warrior: Memoirs Of A Girlhood Among Ghosts. London: Picador, 1981. Nishime, LeiLani. "Engendering genre: gender and nationalism in China Men and The Woman Warrior." MELUS20.1 (Spring 95): 67-85.