"No Name Woman"

27 November 2017: "It's like how sometimes we don't want to remember bad things we've done. The story makes them remember what they want to forget." --a student in my ENGL 204 class, talking about the "No Name Woman" section of Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior.

I had asked the class (more than once), "Why does Kingston tell this story, even when her mother tells her not to?" Student answers usually include catharsis and (really important) ideas about telling a story as a way of understanding. This student's particular answer, though, was a sort of new one for me and made me think of monuments to painful or tragic moments/places. It added another dimension to the way I think about this piece.