In times of plenty, notes Kingston, adultery might have been "only a mistake"; when the villagers needed everyone to work together to provide food, however, it became a crime.
The story of No-Name Woman serves as a backdrop for Kingston's own experience growing up as a Chinese-American, torn between the world of Chinese customs and traditions that surround her like "ghosts" and her new, permissive American environment. (Note that for Kingston's mother, the word "ghost" is used in the opposite sense, to refer to the Americans themselves.) Kingston's struggle is especially difficult because she is effectively forbidden from talking about it with anyone. "You must not tell anyone," her mother tells her "a powerful, ironic opening sentence to a memoir. As the subject is forbidden, Kingston knows nothing about her aunt beyond the broad details of the story, and instead must make up her own stories and scenarios about her aunt. This forced fabrication presents us with another dichotomy, that of fiction versus truth. Is Kingston probing what really happened to her aunt, or is she simply making up stories to satisfy herself? Is she doing justice to her aunt's memory or harming it? The ambiguous nature of "talk-story," a blend of the real and fantastic, surfaces again and again throughout the book. How is Kingston, in trying to make sense of her own life, able to tell from these talk-stories what is peculiar to her own family and what is true for all Chinese "or, more importantly, what is Chinese and what is "the movies"?.
Stylistically, "No-Name Woman" is a blend of imaginative detail, rich metaphor, and personal musings. The "narrative" jumps back forth between past and present, fact and fiction, Kingston's life and the society in which her aunt lived. A description of how it was vital in the village to eliminate sexual attraction among kinsmen segues into Kingston's own peculiarities about making herself attractive to boys.