Margins and Mainstreams: Asians in American History and Culture

3. Recentering Women

3 Recentering Women Yo u 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.'''1 Thus began Maxine Hong Kingston's story "No Name Woman" in her 1975 book, The Woman Warrior: Memoirs ofa Girlhood among Ghosts. Kingston's narrator tells the story of her aunt, who committed suicide after having given birth to a girl, conceived not of her husband, who had gone to sojourn in Gold Mountain, but of another man. The story is rich with symbolism and lays the foundation for Kingston's entire collection of "talk stories," explicating the position of women in Chinese and Chinese American culture. The aunt, this "no name woman," like all other "no name women," existed on the margins of Asian culture, dominated by a patriarchy that held that "it was better to raise geese than girls." Even in death she was punished by being deliberately forgotten, unconnected to the living-the descent line-and became a "wandering ghost," who was "always hungry, always needing," begging or stealing food from other ghosts, who had living kin to give them gifts of food and money. The aunt, this "no name woman," was expunged from the family record, "as if she had never been born," and even her name was erased from memory, like all the countless other "no name women," who fail to appear in the pages of history books "as if I Kingston, Woman Warrior, p. 3. they had never been born." Her illegitimate child, too, who died with her, could not have been included within the circle of kin, because she posed a severe critique of male dominance, having been conceived out of either rape or defiance of "female chastity." The aunt, this "no name woman," defied exclusion, and her story passed from mother to daughter, albeit in secret and out of earshot of the narrator's father. And the aunt's memory haunts Kingston's narrator: "her ghost [is] drawn to me because now, after fifty years of neglect, I alone devote pages of paper to her, though not origamied into houses and clothes." Still, the telling and recording were acts of resistance, and the paper, however fragile and brittle, gives reality to the figurative hand that reaches from the depths of the family well to touch us, her kin, today. Asian American history is replete with the deeds of men. Women constitute a forgotten factor in Asian American history. They have "no name." During Korea's Yi dynasty (1392-1910), women had no names of their own. They were identified relative to men, as so-and-so's daughter, so-and-so's wife, and so-and-so's mother. When she married, not her name but her family name was entered into her husband's family registry, and her name was removed from her family registry, where only the name of her husband was recorded.2 Having no name thus meant being defined in relation to men, and having no name meant erasure and ostracism. The exclusion of Asian women from the "pages of paper" is not without meaning or effect. Their omission serves to bolster a system of male dominance, a system of privilege and oppression. "The scholarly disciplines, like society at large, are dominated by those on the inside," wrote political scientist Jo Freeman. "They reflect a desire to explain, justify, and maintain the status quo of human and institutional relationships. The result is a consistency of approach that is almost stifling." The inclusion of women on 2 Yung-Chung Kim, ed. and trans., Women ofKorea: A History from Ancient Times to 1945 (Seoul, Korea: Ewha Woman's University Press, 1976), pp.85-86. RECENTERING WOMEN those "pages of paper"-their recentering-challenges those relations of power and presents a truer account of our collective past. "A feminist perspective is practical as well as theoretical," concluded Freeman; "it illuminates possibilities for the future as well as criticizes the limitations of the present."3 This project, this recentering of women, subverts the s~cial relations of patriarchy and, at the same time, deconstructs the body of knowledge upon which those relations of power are built. Historian Connie Young Yu wrote of two kinds of histories...