" 'You must not tell anyone,' my mother said, 'what I am about to tell you. In China your father had a sister who killed herself. She jumped into the family well. We say that your father has all brothers because it is as if she had never been born.' (3)" Right from the beginning of "The Woman Warrior", Maxine Kingston grasps the reader's attention and places them in the climax of the chapter, leaving …showed first 75 words of 690 total…

…showed last 75 words of 690 total…of the ancestors carved around us, and looked straight ahead (4)," .Maxine's family didn't look at their ancestor's portraits out of shame. These portraist symbolize the ancestors "watching" in disapproval of the family who now must hang their heads in shame due to the "no name woman's" individuality. Ultimately, this recurring struggle between following the honorable traditional Chinese ways and finding one's own individual persona proves to be one of the central themes throughout this chapter.