Just Like a Ghost

To strip someone of their name is the same as stripping someone of their identity. Your name is used to identify who you are when you are meeting new people or even when someone is taking about you. It may be small but your name is a very big deal. Reading “No Name Woman” which is a memoir written by Maxine Hong Kingston, made me very sad and at the same time mad. I understand that in cultures if a girl gets pregnant before she is married or even when she is married with someone else that it is a very shameful thing but to pretend like she never existed is just cruel. I understand that the author’s mother was telling her the very brief story of her aunt getting pregnant so that the author knows not to make that mistake or she will bring shame to the family but I personally don’t think it was a very good way to teach your daughter something. The author was the only one who seemed to really care about the story behind her aunt getting pregnant and then committing suicide. She tried her best to patch up the missing pieces and although it is not accurate, it still seems believable. For her aunt to not even have a name or rarely get mentioned shows how strict the author’s culture was. But reading it was also degrading because it did not matter who got the aunt pregnant, all that mattered was that she got pregnant. No one took the time to really understand her side of the story. This again makes my feminist senses kick in because the guy who did that to her just got away but she had to suffer along with her newborn baby. She suffered so much to the point where she just became a ghost and that was just so sad.