The Woman Next Door Character Analysis

One of the people that Kingston mentions to illustrate her point that speech makes “the difference between sanity and insanity.” The woman next door had a husband had “bought her and married her” in China, but he had a child—“half Chinese and half white”—with another woman, whom the woman next door raised. Kingston describes her as “chatty one moment…and shut up the next.” The children fear her, “though she said nothing, did nothing.” Kingston recalls that she “died happy, sitting on the steps after cooking dinner.”