It never fails. When I walk into the classroom, some students are alert and engaged, ready for class. Other students may be tired, having stayed out late the night before or pulled an all nighter studying for a test. Still others may be indifferent and uninterested, English not being their favorite subject. In my hand, I hold a copy of "No Name Woman," the often anthologized first section of Maxine Hong Kingston's award-winning tale of adolescence, The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts (1977). To my class of both engaged and disengaged listeners, I read the story's first sentence, uttered by Maxine's mother to her newly adolescent daughter: "You must not tell anyone what I am about to tell you" (p. 3).

It never fails. At this moment, ears prick up and, no matter how tired, all eyes turn to me awaiting the rest of the story. After all, who does not like a good story, especially one so forbidden that it must be told in secrecy, with details so private that listeners must never repeat them? The rest of the story lives up to its dramatic opening. What follows is the harrowing tale of Maxine's nameless aunt, her father's sister, who invoked the wrath of her famine-ridden Chinese village by becoming pregnant outside of marriage.

According to Maxine's mother, who claims to have lived with the aunt, "on the night the baby was to be born" (p. 3) the villagers descended on their farm, ransacking the fields and food stores, killing the livestock, and hiding behind "white masks" as they smeared the window panes with "red prints" (p. 4). Almost as a side note, Maxine's mother mentions that the next morning she found the aunt and her new baby "plugging up the family well," the aunt an apparent suicide (p. 5). The mother concludes her short narrative with an ominous warning for young Maxine:

Don't let your father know that I told you. He denies her. Now that you have started to menstruate, what happened to her could happen to you. Don't humiliate us. You wouldn't like to be forgotten as if you had never been born. The villagers are watchful. (p. 5)

As storytelling, Kingston's "No Name Woman" effectively captures students' attention with vivid details and action. Just as important as holding students' attention, though, is conveying to our students the power of words, and Kingston offers her readers an image of "words so strong" (p. 15) that they can kill and destroy or give life and resurrect. Maxine's mother makes it clear that the aunt's greatest punishment is not the raid but her "family's deliberately forgetting her" (p. 16), denying her existence by refusing to speak her name. Bringing this aunt back to life in "No Name Woman" Kingston offers an important lesson about language, its powerful ability and equally potent inability to fix meaning, in this case to establish the facts of the aunt's life. This is an important lesson for our students as...