How important is your name? In Susan G Kingston's "No Name Woman" she talks about her nameless aunt who committed adultery and was forgotten because of it. Chinese culture is very strict and unforgiving and led this woman to commit suicide along with her newborn baby because she could not bear the torture of living and constantly being judged for a possible mistake. This world that Kingston lived in, names were like a privilege. If you did something to distort Chinese culture, your family and strangers would forget you as if you never existed. Names are very important for every individual because it is nothing like having your own identity to separate you from everyone else and gives you a way to directly remember a person. The story is titled “No Name Woman” (221 Kingston) because the identity of the author's aunt was taken from her for committing adultery. Women in the world Kingston lived in were expected to be civilized and were not able to have their own opinion on things. In my opinion these women didn't have much freedom, they were always expected to do certain things and be a certain way. Since things were so uniform when women did things out of the ordinary, it was a big problem for their population and their surroundings. Understanding Chinese culture was confusing for Kingston. “Chinese-Americans, when you try to understand what things in you are Chinese, how do you separate what is peculiar to childhood, to poverty, to madness, to a family, your mother who marked your growth with stories, from that who is Chinese? What is Chinese tradition and what are the films?” (Kingston 223). Kingston questions her tradition and she doesn't seem too sure what it is. He wonders if what his mother did... middle of paper... are his mistakes as well as those of his families. Kingston may be his aunt's “substitute” (233) because just as his aunt made the horrible mistake of committing adultery, Kingston also did so by betraying his mother's guidelines of keeping the affair a secret. Kingston made several books about her aunt and her secrets, the only thing her mother asked her not to do was not to tell anyone and she did anyway. Kingston did this because she didn't want Auntie's ghost to haunt her. There will always be a substitute: the unnamed woman will not be the last person to fail to respect Chinese traditions. His aunt will always be the woman with no name because Kingston never found out his aunt's name. People should live by such strict rules because they are bound to be broken by someone. People should also be forgiven and not taken to the extremes of forgetting someone.