“No one said anything. We did not discuss it.” This is an apt summary of a haunting tradition in Eastern honor-shame culture: silencing disgrace. In “No Name Woman,” taken from her book The Woman Warrior, Maxine Hong Kingston describes a cautionary, and possibly legendary, story told to her by her Chinese immigrant mother of an aunt driven to suicide by her shame.

In the tale, we learn that after being shunned and abused for her promiscuity, signified by her illegitimate child, the woman and the baby are both found dead in a well. Her family’s response to the tragedy is not grief or remorse, but silence: erasing any memory of her shameful existence. Yet her blot on the family is never completely gone; she and her child live on as “ghosts,” haunting future generations of mothers and daughters. 

The ghosts in my own Korean family may not be born of such legends, but they derive from a similar cause. My parents’ divorce, as is common in Korean culture, is a taboo amongst not only my relatives, but my mother and father themselves. Since their divorce, silence has pervaded my time with each of them, whether we’re sitting at the dinner table, riding in the car—basically during any opportunity for emotional intimacy and vulnerability. Like Kingston’s family, my mother’s shame is swept safely under the rug. The silence of my family keeps her a ghost under their power. While they play divinity, however, the real gods—powerful Korean cultural influences—keep them under command. 

Yet Kingston’s “No Name Woman” reminds us of an important truth: that power to break the silence, to set the ghosts free, lies in our own hands. Other gods—necessity, the structure of community, personal guilt—are at play. Our family’s silence is a response to these prevailing influences. It is only by battling these gods that we can break the bondage of silence—for my relatives, chained to their power, and for my mother, trapped as a ghost. 

“Necessity,” the “riverbank that guides” the life of the immigrant, is one of the earliest “gods” that drives a parent like the mother of the narrator of “No Name Woman” to keep silent  about familial shame. It is the natural consequence of an immigrant parent’s scarcity mindset.  “Poverty hurt,” the narrator explains, “and that was their first reason for leaving” their homeland for America. The stereotypical Asian values of frugality and economic bargains are undoubtedly tied to these times of scarcity. This is particularly true of South Korea in the early-to-mid twentieth century: after extensive suffering under Japanese internment and post-war poverty, Koreans had to learn to hold everything dear to them with a tighter grip. This includes their dignity. 

“Adultery is extravagance in a country ridden by war,” Kingston writes, noting that “to be a woman, to have a daughter in starvation time was waste enough…Women in the old China did not choose.” The former state of poverty in China similarly influences beliefs about womens’ rights and sexual freedom. The communal sense of shame surrounding “adultery, perhaps only a mistake during good times,” may not have necessarily been a cultural norm until it “became a crime when the village needed food.” Poverty adds greater shame to cultural identity, and in turn a greater hardness towards those who heighten their shame. Shameful events like infidelity are consequently reduced to silence. My mother’s refusal to speak about our financial dependence on my father after the divorce, along with  her unwillingness to waste his money, reflects this scarcity mindset adopted by many Asian immigrant parents. A characteristic often associated with stereotypical Asian culture, one I often resented in my mother, is in fact shown in Kingston’s narrative to be a response to this god of necessity. Necessity drove  both the narrator’s family and my own to maintain silence in avoidance of shame.

In comparison to this circumstantially-constructed god of necessity, the worshipful devotion to community is an intrinsic part of Asian collectivistic culture. “The village” is Kingston’s literal and metaphorical embodiment of this cultural standard: community is the god that keeps every member’s private life in check. “The villagers are watchful,” the narrator’s mother warns, reminding both her daughter and the reader of the power of communal law and justice in Chinese culture. The only way for a family to “clean their names” is to “guard their real names with silence.” By avoiding any “wrong word” altogether, they maintain status and power within their wider community. 

My own family, in some fortunate ways, is an exception to this typical Asian value. Most of my relatives do not care, or at least do not outwardly demonstrate concern, about our reputation in “the village.” Our isolation from our community reflects the growth of individualism in urban Korean culture, following after Western traditions. Yet despite cultural  and economic changes, concepts like divorce and remarriage still remain taboos in Korea. My relatives’ response to my parents’ divorce is one of hushed pity towards me. They may pity my mother for my father’s hardness towards her, but they fear my father far too much to speak to him directly. Expectations set by the head of the family must still be met. As long as my father continues to perpetuate the silence about his split from my mother, the power remains in his hands. As Kingston describes in her story, “the village house[s] no strangers.” Under the cultural law of communal ostracization, my relatives can never peacefully welcome my mother without my father doing so first. Community in the familial sense keeps my relatives from speaking up for my mother, imprisoning her in her shame and alienation by their silence. 

But what haunts Kingston’s family—and my own—most deeply is guilt. Using the metaphor of water and rivers, Kingston personifies this guilt as the “weeping ghost” of the “drowned one.” The haunt of the narrator’s aunt—the ghost blotted out of their family history—is birthed not from “the raid swiftly inflicted by the villagers, but the family’s deliberately forgetting her.” The family recognizes that the guilt belongs to them. The narrator’s missing knowledge about her aunt, the imagination she must use to fill the deliberate holes created by her family, is how she is forced to “participate in [her aunt’s] punishment.” Like a ghost, the inherited silence about personal shame and guilt follows each generation of their family. The punishment is perpetuated, ensuring that the shamed individual “suffer forever, even after death.” 

Like the no-name woman, my mother also has to “beg food from other ghosts.” She is “always hungry, always needing” the connection to my family through me. It was only after coming to college that I learned the full depths of the brokenness and pain that caused the bitterness and anger in my father towards my mother. Ironically, this knowledge came from my mother, who recognized her own guilt. By refusing me the truth about their divorce, my father and relatives acted like “gods.” They maintained the power of silence over my mother, the “ghost” erased from our family’s history. In keeping me in ignorance, they turned me into a “ghost” as well. But we ghosts have reconciled while the gods remain in silence. My mother’s courage to finally speak to me about her broken relationship with my father is her resurrection from the dead.  

I am no longer haunted. Breaking her silence was how my mother freed herself, and consequently freed me from the “neglect” and suppression of our family. Narrating her verbal release is my own vocalization—passing onto the future generation not the ghost of our family’s guilt, but a living, honest testimony about its mistakes and imperfections. I, too, “devote pages to her” in hopes of breaking the haunt of silence in my family. I, too, hope to resurrect the dead through life-giving words.