Kingston's Ethnic Passages Analysis

Upon a closer analysis Kingston’s writing, one may argue that Kingston criticizes the unjust silence her family has maintained to deliberately forget her aunt. As Ferraro argues in “Ethnic Passages: Literary Immigrants in Twentieth Century America”, Kingston depicts the “narrative as an object lesson in Cantonese village misogyny” (161). As a matter of fact, Kingston implies in her younger narrative to the importance of basic necessities outweighing the existence of women: “To be a woman, to have a daughter in starvation time was a waste enough” (386). Comparatively, she notes the incapacity of women to express their will by remarking, “Women in the old China did not choose” (386). According to Kingston’s illustration of women, women’s duty in Chinese society is based on function: to bare children and “keep traditional ways” (387). …show more content…
Having romantic thoughts were considered a luxury. Not to mention the preference of boys in Chinese society, as described in the chapter which confirms the hostility towards women, when Kingston reconstructs the suicide of her aunt concluding there “is some hope of forgiveness for boys” (393). If the baby were a boy, there may have been a possibility of the villagers’ mercy, but because it must have been a girl, her aunt committed double-suicide, in Kingston’s imagination. Additionally, Kingston criticizing her mother for the lack of explanations, due to her strict principle of merely speaking upon “necessity” and therefore never gaining clarity on her aunt’s background (385). In connection, Ferraro observes Kingston’s resentment towards her mother’s codes of conduct by proposing the problem