In a particularly vivid section of the chapter, Kingston imagines the time when her aunt's family casts her aunt out. Alone, her aunt is lost in the wilderness, and when the baby comes, she resorts to giving birth in a pigsty. Kingston believes that her aunt decides to kill herself and her baby together in order to spare the child a life without family or purpose. Kingston also notes that the baby was probably a girl, and as such would already have been considered practically useless to society "a theme that reappears throughout The Woman Warrior. At the end of the chapter, Kingston imagines her aunt as a lonely, wandering ghost, begging for scraps from the gifts given other ghosts by their loving relatives.
Analysis .
"No-Name Woman" is one of the more frequently anthologized sections of The Woman Warrior because it encapsulates so many of the rest of the text's themes: the ambiguity and complexity of "talk-story," the place of women in traditional Chinese society, and the difficulty of growing up as a Chinese- American. The struggle of Kingston's aunt "a woman who gives into a dangerous sexual passion and then is cast out by her village "is likened to the struggle of Kingston herself, who is attempting to make sense of the old customs and traditions "which she knows only from her mother "in a vastly different country.
Kingston, to illustrate this struggle, sets up a number of dichotomies and conflicts: between private and public, frivolity and necessity, the individual's need for expression and society's need for control. As she imagines what old world China was like, she paints a picture of a repressive, strictly ordered society in which people were essentially unable to have private lives. Everything had to be done for the sake of the family's or village's well- being "what Kingston calls "the Necessary." In such a world, Kingston's aunt represents the worst kind of transgressor, one whose private lusts "made public by her illegitimate child "disrupted the social order and threatened the very existence of the village.