Essay: “No Name Woman.” Maxine Hong Kingston. 1975.
One-minute review: The treatment of women in Chinese tradition. No one is allowed to mention her mother’s sister's name. It’s as if she hasn’t been born. She committed the crime of adultery. The entire village attacked the family which is disgraced. She gives birth and then she takes her baby with her to her suicide by drowning. The terror of tradition.
Comment: A powerful story of the effects of traditionalism that strangles humanity. Rays.
Best American Essays of the Century. Editors: Oates and Atwan. Boston, New York: HoughtonMifflin Company. 2000.
10-second review: The author provides a number of thought-provoking ideas on the subject of suicide. It may sound silly or callous to suggest that this essay is an antidote to thoughts on suicide, but that’s what it is. I remember a poem once that listed all of the gory ways that one could commit suicide and concludes, “You might as well live.” That’s about what happens in this essay. The author gives the reader some serious thought about the topic of suicide.
Quotes:
“…and many who court death have no desire to wed her….”
“…desire isn’t adultery whatever Jesus preached.” [Thinking about suicide is not a sin so long as the suicide doesn’t commit it.RayS. ]
“The Kamikaze pilot intends his death, but does not desire it.”
“Soldiers charging the guns at Verdun neither wished for death nor were bent on it, though death waswhat they expected.”
“Some simply think of death as the absence of their present state, a state which pursues them like a malignant disease and which cannot be otherwise escaped.”
“The question of whether it is better to be or not to be arises with real relevance for the first time….”
“…but to be sick of life is not the same as having a painful illness or suffering a shame so denobling that life is no longer endurable.”
“…death-in-life….”
“…most [would-be suicides] can be expected to mess up their deaths exactly as they’ve messed up their lives.”
“…the ironic thing about suicide…is that it is a wholly empty act.”
“Death will not fill up an empty life….”
“The world of the suicidal is…a private and impenetrable one, hence the frustration of those who are trying to help.”
“…and succeed at failure one final time.”
Comment: This essay is a thought-provoking meditation on life and suicide. RayS.
Best American Essays of the Century. Editors: Oates and Atwan. Boston, New York: HoughtonMifflin Company. 2000.
Ten-second review: The single cell with its complexity.... "...with too many working parts lacking visible connections...." is like the complexity of the earth and the earth is most like the single cell.
Quotes:
“Man is embedded in nature.”
“My cells…are ecosystems more complex than JamaicaBay.”
“Our genomes are catalogs of instructions from all kinds of sources in nature, filed for all kinds of contingencies.”
“Evolution is still an infinitely long and tedious biologic game, with only the winners staying at the table.”
“I have been trying to think of the earth as a kind of organism, but it is no go. I cannot think of it in this way. It is too big, too complex, with too many working parts lacking visible connections…most like a single cell.”
Best American Essays of the Century. Editors: Oates and Atwan. Boston, New York: HoughtonMifflin Company. 2000.
10-second review: Growing up in Stamps, Ark., the author as a young girl suffers both indignities herself and the indignity of watching her relatives threatened or taunted by whites. Her mother always sang hymns to help her endure existence and to dream of relief from that existence in God. That's why the "caged bird" sings.
Comment: An unforgettable, powerful expression of the African-Americans’ existence in a white world through the eyes of a young girl. RayS.
Best American Essays of the Century. Editors: Oates and Atwan. Boston, New York: HoughtonMifflin Company. 2000.
Ten-second review: Interviews and incidents in the Vietnam War. They add up to its incomprehensibility to the men who fought it. "The Intel report lay closed on the green field table and someone had scrawled, 'What does it all mean?' across the cover sheet."
Quote: “…in that village the f------g ducks are VC [Viet Cong].” p. 332.
Paraphrase: The bird colonel didn’t like calling the VC “Charlie” because he liked an uncle named Charlie. So he called the VC “rinky-dinks” which fit them perfectly except it was too long, so he called them “dinks.” p. 335.
Quote: “ ‘After the first tour, I’d have the goddamnedest nightmares. You know, the works. Bloody stuff, bad fights, guys dying, me dying…I thought they were the worst,’ he said. ‘But I sort of miss them now.’” p. 341.
Best American Essays of the Century. Editors: Oates and Atwan. Boston, New York: HoughtonMifflin Company. 2000.
10-second review: The author reflects on the meaning of the death of Martin Luther King. She suggests that the Christian religion will no longer play a part in the battle for civil rights.
Quote: “Since films and television have staged everything imaginable before it happens, a true event, taking place in the real world, brings to mind the landscape of films.” p. 319.
Quote: “Perhaps what was celebrated in Atlanta was an end, not a beginning—the waning of the slow, sweet dream of Salvation, through Christ, for the Negro masses.” p. 326.
Best American Essays of the Century. Editors: Oates and Atwan. Boston, New York: HoughtonMifflin Company. 2000.
