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she could not concentrate on her own thoughts. Night after night the songs filled the desert no matter how many dunes away she walked. She hid in her tent but could not sleep through the sound. Then, out of Ts’ai Yen’s tent, which was apart from the others, the barbarians heard a woman’s voice singing, as if to her babies, a song so high and clear, it matched the flutes. Ts’ai Yen sang about China and her family there. Her words seemed to be Chinese, but the barbarians understood their sadness and anger. Sometimes they thought they could catch barbarian phrases about forever wandering. Her children did not laugh, but eventually sang along when she left her tent to sit by the winter campfires, ringed by barbarians.

After twelve years among the Southern Hsiung-nu, Ts’ai Yen was ransomed and married to Tung Ssu so that her father would have Han descendants. She brought her songs back from the savage lands, and one of the three that has been passed down to us is “Eighteen Stanzas for a Barbarian Reed Pipe,” a song that Chinese sing to their own instruments. It translated well.

Vintage International Edition, April 1989

Copyright © 1975, 1976 by Maxine Hong Kingston

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published, in hardcover, by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., in 1976.

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

Kingston, Maxine Hong.

The woman warrior.

1. Kingston, Maxine Hong. 2. United States—

Biography. I. Title.

[CT275.K5764A33 1977] 979.4’61’050924

[B] 77-3246

eISBN: 978-0-307-75933-7

“No Name Woman” originally appeared, in slightly different form, in the January 1975 issue of Viva.

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