Analytical Response to "No Name Woman"

"You must not tell anyone," my mother said, "what I am about to tell you. In China your father had a sister who killed herself. She jumped into the family well. We say that your father has all brothers because it is as if she had never been born."
The story starts out screaming silence and restriction. Kingston's family did not find that the "aunt's" death was enough punishment for her, so they erased her memory permanently. According to Chinese tradition, it is worse to be forgotten than to simply be dead. This story is full of themes, motifs and symbols.
One major theme of this work is the role of Chinese women in their society. Ironically, the male influence is conspicuously absent throughout the story, except as the imagined rapist responsible for the unnamed aunt's shame and subsequent death.
A motif that I found particularly interesting was the ghost motif. According to Kingston, ghosts are contradictory - good and bad, family and foe. Ghosts, although a motif, are ever-changing throughout the story. Warriors, on the other hand, stood for struggle. The irony in the first sentence of this story is that Kingston was told that she must never tell anyone, yet in writing it, she has told everyone. Kingston fought back against the silence that was restricting her, just as the de-feminizing of the women after marriage by cutting their hair restricted them, just as binding the feet of young female children restricted them.