Summary: In your summary, you should strive simply to put into your own words an overview of what
we’ve read. Focus here on saying what you take to be the author’s main ideas. Don’t use this area to voice
your own opinions, or ideas that occur to you based on this author’s ideas. That comes later.
Quotes: Share no fewer than three quotes that turned your head. Maybe you strongly agree. Maybe you
strongly disagree. Maybe you think they sound weird. Maybe they sound cool. Maybe they’re funny.
Maybe they’re cold-hearted. Maybe they make sense to you. Maybe they don’t. Just make sure that
you’re sharing no fewer than three quotes from the reading. And for each quote, write a sentence or two
explaining why you’re noting it.
Response: Finally, in this final section, you may share your own opinion about what you read. Here you
may begin to develop an argument about the reading (either for or against). You may develop questions
about the reading. You may describe an experience from your own life that seems related to one of the
author’s ideas. Or you may explain a new idea that occurs to you based on the reading.
If someone turned Maxine Hong Kingston’s “No Name Woman” into a film, it would be rated R. To say it contains violence might be an understatement. It contains what many may consider cruelty to animals (the chicken). It contains the suggestion of sexual violence and it contains a suicide. I am warning you so that you may be prepared for it. But I also think Maxine Hong Kingston gives us an important story. Her essay asks what it means to be Chinese in America, but arguably more importantly, it asks what really happened to her aunt, the woman who became the “No Name Woman.” Did her aunt even truly exist? Or did her mother make up her aunt and tell her the story just to scare her? If so, why? What’s the moral of her mother’s story? How does Maxine Hong Kingston make sense of it? These are just a few questions you may ask.
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