Blooms Literary Themes - THE HEROS ... - ymerleksi - home

220Maxine Hong KingstonThe narrator suffers agonies of resentment and rage because of hermother’s high-handedness, her bossiness, and her inability to accommodatethe American cultural differences her children are forced toaccept at public school. Nevertheless, her abiding wish is to tell hermother the truth about herself:Maybe because I was the one with the tongue cut loose, Ihad grown inside me a list of over two hundred things that Ihad to tell my mother so that she would know the true thingsabout me and to stop the pain in my throat. . . . If only I couldlet my mother know the list, she—and the world—wouldbecome more like me, and I would never be alone again.(197-198)In every chapter, Kingston emphasizes that Chinese culturalattitudes dictate silence for women. A woman never speaks, nor isshe spoken of, lest she become unspeakable, never named. “No NameWoman” never reveals the name of the man who impregnated her;her persecutors, who never question her, expect her reticence. Thenarrator reports her own mother’s admonition: “Don’t tell anyoneyou had an aunt. Your father does not want to hear her name. Shehas never been born” (15). The narrator cannily recognizes, though,that “there is more to this silence: they want me to participate inher punishment. And I have. In the twenty years since I heard thisstory I have not asked for details nor said my aunt’s name; I do notknow it” (16). She defies her family’s insistence on silence both byrecounting her mother’s talk-story and by embroidering it throughpages of speculation on the aunt’s motivations, avenging her auntthrough words.Even the warrior woman Fa Mu Lan, though physically forceful,is obediently silent, not trusted to speak her revenge: Her father cutswords into her back to inscribe the family’s grievances in her scars.Her body, not her words, becomes the text.Nevertheless, women must speak in order to teach, even if silenceand obedience are the lessons. “You must not tell anyone what I amabout to tell you,” says Brave Orchid to her daughter the narrator inthe book’s first sentence. The mother reserves the right to speak and totell the daughter not to speak. Brave Orchid is a forceful and ingenious