I thought both of these stories were sad and they were both about someone's aunt. To me an aunt is someone I see every few years and get Christmas presents from. To the storytelleres, the aunts were a more intimate part of their lives.
In "No Name Woman" the speaker has never met her aunt, yet she feels connected because she's the first to tell her aunt's story. The story is very tragic. First the aunt is forced to marry, then she's forced to have an affair. Then she's forced to have a child not from her husband. Then she was forced out of her family. Then she was forced to kill herself and the child. Finally, she's forced to roam the world as a ghost who gets no help from her descendants.
In "At the Western Palace" the aunt is an old lady who moves in with her sister in Ameica. She's had a disappointing life in Hong Kong, where she stayed while her husband became rich in America. When she moved to the US she proved to be useless and annoying, but, nevertheless, she was family and her relatives took car of her. Then she met her husband who rejected her as the old maid she was, and she broke down slowly into madness. Her sister, and her sister's family to some extent, tried to stop her decline, but they couldn't. She became haunted by "ghosts" and eventually became a ghost of her former self, and died.
Both stories were sad stories of how women are mistreated, discarded, and forgotten - by either a husband or an entire family. It seems in every story we've read, a Chinese wife has a husband with either a concubine or antoher wife. You'd think that the women would want to avoid being hurt but I guess it's Chinsee tradition. The authors of these books must have recogninzed the injustice Chinese women go through and are trying to get the message out. Another theme in both stories is ghosts, which supports the fact that the Chinese seem to be very superstitious. I believe their ancestor worshipping is akin to our God worshipping and that our demons and devils are like their wandering ancestral spirits and ghosts. I thought these two stories gave a good view of a villiager's plight and an immigrants' plight.
