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"Those of us in the first American generations have had to figure out how the invisible world the emigrants built around our childhoods fit in solid America." Maxine Hong Kingston is a native of Stockton, California, born in 1940. The essay, "No Name Woman", was taken from her book ,"The Woman Warrior" (1976). Kingston is , in her everyday life, surrounded by "ghosts" from her past cultural heritage. The role identity concept parallels Ms. Kingston's essay. In the role identity concept, factors surrounding us in our daily life are continuously shaping and reshaping who we are and what we will become. In this concept, taken from the structural school of symbolic interaction, we tend to conform our sense of self to adapt to individual social situations as we are exposed to them. The theory in the concept of role identity is that we all play different "roles" in society, on various levels , which can include our families, our workplaces, our peers, daily experiences, and even within ourselves. Therefore, we are continuously changing and evolving into our "sense of self". Kingston, born a Chinese-American, struggles with her sense of self as she attempts to balance her American lifestyle with that of her Chinese family's rich cultural beliefs; although, even as she begins to accept her "role identity" within her family structure, as an author, she realizes that she will be "haunted", merely by writing about it.

The body of Kingston's essay refers to a story her mother told her about her aunt. Her mother used stories reflecting events of the family's past to try to teach her important lessons of life. In the story, Kingston's aunt becomes pregnant outside of her marriage. Since the pregnancy occurred during a time period when f...

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...ey have surrounded her with. She longs for a deeper connection with her past, but she realizes this is not to be, at least not as far as her family is concerned. She must adhere to the role of the loyal daughter as it has been established through many generations, and strive not to shame the family as her aunt did many years ago.

As a writer, and author of the essay "No Name Woman", Maxine Hong Kingston finds herself continuing to struggle with her sense of identity. She feels a sense of betrayal to her family, torn between her loyalty to them, and her desire to write about her aunt. She feels that as she writes about her, revealing her story, her aunt is "haunting" her even today. She writes" The Chinese are always frightened of the drowned one, whose weeping ghost, wet hair hanging and skin bloated, waits silently by the water to pull down a substitute."