The Meaning of Mulan, Part 3

III. Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior (1976)

Right: The Original cover of The Woman Warrior, 1975.

Historical Context1

The Qing were the last imperial dynasty. The final years of China’s more-or-less uncontested monarchy were not particularly glorious. In Chinese, the long 19th Century is known as “the Century of Humiliation.” Though the Manchu had finally defeated their nomadic rivals to the West, forcing the Dzungars, Tibetans, and Mongols into vassaldom or complete submission, a new threat came from the east.

Europeans had been coming to China via the sea since the fifteenth century as traders, missionaries, and arms dealers. Often as all three. The Portuguese pioneered the route around Africa, and the Spanish across the Pacific. When the Ming completely abandoned the seas, they left an opening for woukou pirates, which waned, but waxed again in the Golden Age of piracy. These South Sea pirates caused the Qing a great deal of stress and exposed the vast weaknesses in their system to none other than the British.

To give an insultingly short history of 1800s China, Britain triggered the Opium Wars, which saw land ceded from China to Britain (Hong Kong). This, along with long-standing corruption and weakness led to the devastating Taiping Rebellion. Afterwards, European powers – Britain, France, Russia, Germany, Italy, plus the United States and Japan – agreed upon an “Open Door” policy, basically allowing Western powers unrestricted access to China, a deep insult to the besmirched Son of Heaven. The door was left open to the Boxer Rebellion, at which point the Manchu were too weak to deal with it and an alliance of Western forces crushed the revolt. This led to the First Sino-Japanese War, (indirectly to the 1904 Younghusband Expedition to Tibet,) and finally the Xinhai Revolution in 1911.

The Revolution, sometimes more simply referred to as the Chinese Revolution, began with Chinese men cutting off their queues, soldiers abandoning their commanding officers loyal to the Manchu regime, and soon swept as far as the Manchu flag flew.

At this time, China was an heterogeneous ideological soup. Republicans, monarchists, communists, and separatists abounded. Everyone pulled which way in China, though through the work of revolutionary strongmen like Sun Yat-sen and Yuan Shi-kai, they managed to hold things together for a bit under the flag of the Republic of China.

Then they started to pull in different directions, and new strongmen took their place. This was a whole new period of division – comparable to the Taiping Rebellion, a whole new scale of chaos and destruction – known as the Warlord Period (1916-1928). At that point in time, Chiang Kai-shek, leader of the Nationalists, led the “Northern Expedition” in which he basically conquered China, bringing it under the de facto as well as de jure rule of the Republic.

The Republic was never untroubled, and the Second Sino-Japanese War began in 1937, i.e. World War II. Japan invaded China from three sides, unleashing a new tide of destruction.

Now, while all this was happening there was a whole other China, one across the Pacific.

The first Chinese arrived in America in 1815. They tended to come from Guangdong Province, the area around the Pearl River (i.e. Hong Kong). This is largely because that’s where the trade was, and in particular, where the British had been allowed to trade, even before the Opium Wars. Things picked up in the 1850s, with the Gold Rush that drew immigrants from all across the Pacific. It wasn’t just shiny rocks that drew people, but work, voluntary and otherwise.

Many Chinese – disproportionately from southern, Cantonese-speaking China – were attracted to all sorts of business opportunities in the New World. European and American businesses also required cheap labor, and the 19th Century was a period where business interests felt free to hire workers by the drove and bring them to plantations, mountains, and factories in enormous numbers. Sugar and pineapple plantations in Hawai’i, the Trans-Pacific railroads in the American West, the forests of British Columbia, not only Chinese workers, but Japanese and Indian workers found their way to the New World. In a tale as old as the Columbian Exchange itself, the poor and disenfranchised found their way across the ocean to a strange world, filled with people who were none too pleased to have them there.

Above: Chinese immigrants to the United States having a meal. San Francisco, 1880s. Note the queues.

From early photographs in the 19th Century, like early European Americans, it appears that these first Asian immigrants always intended to go back. After all, this was just a temporary work opportunity. Literally everything they knew was back in China: their families, their ancestral tablets, their culture. This is partially why the queue became such a ubiquitous image of the Chinese immigrant: though it was a hated symbol of Manchu oppression, Chinese men who arrived in the New World knew that returning without it would be a criminal offense.

But as returning across the Pacific was not an option for lots of immigrants, they sought to make new lives in the New World. Lots of immigrant men were sent photos of women from their homelands, women that their parents wanted to set them up with. Which was what happened: women from Japan, Korea, and China were sent to their prospective husbands in the New World, to men they’d never met, in a world they could only imagine.

These waves of immigrants left during the Qing, during the Taiping, during Revolutions, and Warlords, and the Japanese. When they arrived across the Pacific, they faced intense hardship, along with preconceived notions of what they were as human beings.

Asian men were hated for “taking jobs away from real (i.e. white) Americans.” A feature of American society as old as the republic itself. To get a sense of the common North American attitude at the time regarding Asian immigrants, just ask 1872 Presidential candidate, Horace Greeley,

what can be said? They are for the most part an industrious people, forbearing and patient of injury, quiet and peaceable in their habits; say this and you have said all good that can be said of them. They are uncivilized, unclean, and filthy beyond all conception, without any of the higher domestic or social relations; lustful and sensual in their dispositions; every female is a prostitute of the basest order; the first words of English that they learn are terms of obscenity or profanity, and beyond this they care to learn no more.2

Above: "Waiting for the Signal From Home..." Japanese-Americans line up to receive packages labeled "TNT" at a booth labeled "Honorable 5th Column." This 1942 cartoon was drawn by none other than Theodor Geisel, a.k.a. Dr. Seuss.

The United States’ entry into World War II after the bombing of Pearl Harbor led to the internment of Japanese Americans – including many who were born in the United States, and therefore citizens – in camps in the desert. Japanese-American property was seized by the government. Entire homes and businesses were lost out of the paranoid fear of a Fifth Column that could disrupt the war effort in Hawai’i or the West Coast.3 Americans of Japanese descent were neither apologized to nor compensated for their losses 1988.

Chinese Americans suffered rather uniquely in this political climate. Looking Asian was enough to be assumed Japanese, and hate crimes and discrimination was common. Chinese shopkeepers often resorted to putting signs in their windows clarifying their ethnicity to white neighbors. In one famous photo, a Chinese woman took the flag of the Republic of China to the beach in an effort to not be misidentified.4

Left: Ruth Lee, a hostess at a restaurant enjoying a day off sunbathing at a California beach on 15 November 1941, a week after the attack on Pearl Harbor. Almost every detail of this is up for debate. See the footnote below and my future article on this topic.

And through the War, it kind of worked. China was viewed as a trusted, favored ally in the fight against Imperial Japan. Americans have always had a fascination with China, viewing Asia as their domain, the ultimate “Manifest Destiny,” America’s duty to civilize, proselytize, and uplift China was America’s responsibility, as Africa was Europe’s.5

Only, after the war ended, things took a sour turn.

Americans never really liked Chiang Kai-shek. Known as “the little peanut” and “Generalissimo.”6 When the Civil War between Chiang’s Nationalists and Mao’s Communists picked back up after the conclusion of World War II, the Nationalists fled to Taiwan to wait what they thought would be an inevitable siege of their island. Meanwhile, the Communists took the whole of mainland China: from the Korean border, right up to Hong Kong, finalizing their unification of what they regarded as “theirs” with their invasion of Tibet in 1950.7

Now, all of those Chinese Americans who had labeled themselves as such found that their self-identification had now made them a target. In less than five years, Japan went from being the enemy, to now being in chic. American soldiers were returning home with Japanese souvenirs: calligraphy, pottery, wives, etc.8 China, meanwhile, had betrayed them.

Well, not really. But it certainly felt that way.

This long bit was all just background information. And yet, it feels too short to even be remotely begin understanding that this was the world of Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior.

The Text

Right: Maxine Hong Kingston's author photo, included on the jacket cover of the first edition of The Woman Warrior.

Kingston’s work might be the most widely taught author by a living author.9 There are a number of reasons for this (possibility), one of them being the particular blend of genre and perspective that makes it a rather unique piece of literature. The Woman Warrior is subtitled Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts, directly implying that it is very much a memoir. But if it’s a memoir, then whose memories exactly is Kingston relaying? Memoir would imply it is the author’s, i.e. Kingston’s. But a large percentage of the book is devoted to Kingston’s mother, Brave Orchid.

Much of the book doesn’t describe anyone’s memories at all, either. Rather, they relay variations of Chinese legends and mythology. King-Kok Cheung in his article “Chinese and Chinese American Life-Writing” refers to this genre as “literary autobiography.”10 I’m partial to thinking of it as a mythoir. The writing takes on a surreal, ethereal tone, as the story drifts from myth, to dream, to memory.

In “White Tigers,” the second part of The Woman Warrior, her mother talk-stories to her the legend of Fa Mu Lan. This story (26 pages out of the book’s 209) begins with the author recalling memories from her childhood:

Instantly I remembered that as a child I had followed my mother about the house, the two of us singing about how Fa Mu Lan fought gloriously and returned alive from war to settle in the village. I had forgotten this chant that was once mine, given me by my mother, who may not have known its power to remind. She said I would grow up a wife and a slave, but she taught me the song of the warrior woman, Fa Mu Lan. I would have to grow up a warrior woman.11

From there the story commences in a first person narrative, with Mu Lan going off to train as a warrior. Immediately, Mu Lan’s sex is identified: she is a woman, being trained as a warrior woman.

We are given an extensive description of Mu Lan’s warrior training – a metaphor for the hardships women must endure as they ascend to normalcy in the world – when at last she returns home. Her return is mixed. A little girl breaks the silence,

“Some of the people are saying the Eight Sages took you away to teach you magic,” said a little girl cousin. “They say they changed you into a bird, and you flew to them.” “Some say you went to the city and became a prostitute,” another cousin giggled. “You might tell them that I met some teachers who were willing to teach me science,” I said. “I have been drafted,” my father said. “No, Father,” I said. “I will take your place.”12

Already heavily departing from both Guo and Chu’s incarnations of the Mulan story,13 Kingston’s Mu Lan, is then taken to the “family hall” where her parents wash her back and then carve words into it.

“We are going to carve revenge on your back,” my father said, “We’ll write out oaths and names.” “Wherever you go, whatever happens to you, people will know our sacrifice,” my mother said. “And you’ll never forget either.” She meant that even if I got killed, the people could use my dead body for a weapon, but we do not like to talk out loud about dying. My father first brushed the words in ink, and they fluttered down my back row after row. Then he began cutting; to make fine lines and points he used thin blades, for the stems, large blades. […] When I could sit up again, my mother brought two mirrors, and I saw my back covered entirely with words in red and black files, like an army, like my army. My parents nursed me just as if I had fallen in battle after many victories. Soon I was strong again.14

After this, Mu Lan takes a horse, puts on her “men’s clothes and armor and tied my hair in a man’s fashion.” Notably, she receives notice from onlookers, who say, “How beautiful you look… How beautiful she looks.”15

Is this she (emphasis mine, above) intended as acknowledging that the village people know that Mu Lan is a woman dressed up as a man? Or is this another incident where the English object is absent in the Chinese? Even though The Woman Warrior was written in English, it’s possible that this is another “The Khan asks her what she wants” situation. Kingston described, in a 2006 interview, her “fusion language,”

My hands are writing English, but my mouth is speaking Chinese. Somehow I am able to write a language that captures the Chinese rhythms and tones and images, getting that power into English. I am working in some kind of fusion language.16

From this display, Mu Lan attracts an army of volunteers.

A young man stepped out of the crowd. He looked familiar to me, as if he were the old man’s son, or the old man himself when you looked at him from the corners of your eyes. “I want to go with you,” he said. “You will be the first soldier in my army,” I told him.17

Immediately after this exchange, another soldiers joins her. And then a groundswell of support as the village offers up their sons to Mu Lan’s command. Mu Lan’s army gathers, organizes, and charges into battle, winning victory after victory.

She describes her army as in a kind of idealized fantasy sense,

I inspired my army, and I fed them. At night I sang to them glorious songs that came out of the sky and into my head. When I opened my mouth, the songs poured out and were loud enough for the whole encampment to hear; my army stretched out for a mile. We sewed red flags and tied the red scraps around arms, legs, horses’ tails. We wore our red clothes so that when we visited a village, we would look as happy as for New Year’s Day. Then people would want to join the ranks. My army did not rape, only taking food where there was an abundance. We brought order wherever we went.18

It’s then that Mu Lan leads her army to attack fiefdoms and pursue enemies. Her first opponent is a giant. After this victory, the Emperor himself gathers Mu Lan’s enemies together and sends them after her.19

On this campaign, a man appears and asks Mu Lan if he can join her in her tent. She responds that she doesn’t often fete strangers, but she makes an exception for him. She soon realizes that this is the man she was promised to long ago.

And there in the sunlight stood my own husband with arms full of wildflowers for me. “You are beautiful,” he said, and meant it truly. “I have looked for you everywhere. I’ve been looking for you since the day that bird flew away with you.” We were so pleased with each other, the childhood friend found at last, the childhood friend mysteriously grown up. “I followed you, but you skimmed over the rocks until I lost you.” “I’ve looked for you too,” I said, the tent now snug around us like a secret house when we were kids. “Whenever I heard about a good fighter, I went to see if it were you,” I said, “I saw you marry me. I’m so glad you married me.” He wept when he took off my shirt and saw the scar-words on my back. He loosened my hair and covered the words with it. I turned around and touched his face, loving the familiar first.20

Mu Lan and her husband then conceive a child. Mu Lan rides into battle with her armor altered for the last four months of her pregnancy so that she appears as merely “powerful, big man.” She even dismounts and walks with the foot soldiers “so as not to jounce the gestation.”21 In this form, she recalls her naked body “a strange human being indeed—words carved on my back and the baby large in front.”22

The baby belly is unambiguously a mark of Mu Lan’s femininity. The scar-words on her back… masculinity? One would think so (and there will be more reason to think so later), though there is really nothing inherently masculine about warfare and warriorhood, merely the implication and connotation projected by our culture: something Maxine Hong Kingston, as a Buddhist, would be more than likely to have as a part of her worldview.

Rather, our projection of Mu Lan’s warriorhood as her “masculinity” is contrasted with the femininity of her baby bump challenging notions of gender roles altogether. Xiran Jay Zhao, a Chinese-Canadian, non-binary (and polyamorous) author explicitly addresses this kind of non-binary gender classification in their science-fiction retelling of the life of Emperor Wu Zetian.

“That butterfly has two different wings!” [...] Our eyes didn’t trick us. One wing is black with a white dot, and the other is white with a black dot—like the yin-yang symbol. These butterflies were named after exactly that, but I’ve never seen one with both yin and yang wings. “How did this happen?” I gawk. […] “Apparently having different wings means a butterfly is…both male and female.” My frown springs loose. I gape at the sentence. “That can happen?” “Oh, yeah, biological sex has all sorts of variations in nature.” Yizhi crawls beside me on the bamboo mat, gathering his robes away from the gray dirt beneath. “There are even creatures that can switch sex depending on their needs.” “But I thought…” I blink fast. “I thought females are female because their primordial qi is yin-based, and males are male because their primordial qi is yang-based.” Yin and yang represent the opposing forces that churn the universe into life. Yin is everything cold, dark, slow, passive, and feminine. Yang is everything hot, bright, fast, active, and masculine. Or so my mother told me. Yizhi shrugs. “Nothing’s ever that rigid, I guess. There’s always some yin in yang, and some yang in yin. It’s right on the symbol. Now that I think about it, I’m pretty sure there are even cases where humans are born like this butterfly, where you can’t really pin down which sex they are.”23

An interesting comparison, but I don’t think that’s what’s going on here. When Mu Lan meets her husband, she undoes her hair, letting it fall and cover the scar-words, the symbol of her warriorhood, and by (presumable) extension, her masculine half. When she’s pregnant and pondering her naked form, the scar-words are visible, and she considers one half of her femininity, and the other her warriorhood.

Her warriorhood doesn’t cancel out her womanhood.

And perhaps I’m being presumptive, but none of The Woman Warrior is drawing on themes of gender non-binary, or a reevaluation of gender as a concept. Rather, it is challenging the notion of what it means to be a woman, specifically a Chinese woman. And in this form, Mu Lan sees that her ability to exact righteous vengeance is not determined by her sex, but by her will.

Mu Lan returns to battle after her baby’s birth. They tie the shrunken umbilical cords to one of their battle standards, and tie a sling for her to carry their son underneath her armor. She sends the baby with her husband away. Mu Lan slinks into a depression without her family, knowing that she must complete her mission.

Her war continues right to the capital.

I stood on top of the last hill before Peiping and saw the roads below me flow like living rivers. Between roads the woods and plains moved too; the land was peopled—the Han people, the People of One Hundred Surnames, marching with one heart, our tatters flying. The depth and width of Joy were exactly known to me: the Chinese population. After much hardship a few of our millions had arrived together at the capital. We faced our emperor personally. We beheaded him, cleaned out the palace, and inaugurated the peasant who would begin the new order. In his rags he sat on the throne facing south, and we, a great red crowd, bowed to him three times. He commended some of us who were his first generals.24

But Mu Lan’s war is not over. She and some soldiers go to see the “Long Wall” which marks the edge of the world. En route they chase the Mongols before them. Mu Lan touches the wall with her own hand, and realizes that she has not achieved victory yet: her brother, drafted by the baron who rules their home province, still has him.

Mu Lan journeys home where one more battle awaits. She attacks the baron’s stronghold on her own, wandering the halls “like a guest” until she finds him.

He was counting his money, his fat ringed fingers playing over the abacus. “Who are you? What do you want?” he said, encircling his profits with his arms. He sat square and fat like a god. “I want your life in payment for your crimes against the villagers.” “I haven’t done anything to you. All this is mine. I earned it. I didn’t steal it from you. I’ve never seen you before in my life. Who are you?” “I am a female avenger.”25

Despite identifying herself specifically as female, the baron tries to charm her, and appeal to her “man to man,” literally. He also seems unable to read a room, possibly indicating that the misogynists of Chinese talk-story cannot conceive of facing a female enemy holding them at sword point.

“Oh, come now. Everyone takes the girls when he can. The families are glad to be rid of them. ‘Girls are maggots in the rice.’ ‘It is more profitable to raise geese than daughters.’” He quoted to me the sayings I hated. “Regret what you’ve done before I kill you,” I said. “I haven’t done anything other men—even you—wouldn’t have done in my place.” “You took away my brother.” “I free my apprentices.” “He was not an apprentice.” “China needs soldiers in wartime.” “You took away my childhood.” “I don’t know what you’re talking about. We’ve never met before. I’ve done nothing to you.” “You’ve done this,” I said, and ripped off my shirt to show him my back. “You are responsible for this.” When I saw his startled eyes at my breasts, I slashed him across the face and on the second stroke cut off his head.26

Notably, it is Mu Lan’s breasts, and not her scar-words that startles the baron. And it seems to be the answer to “you’ve done this,” i.e. “you’ve made me suffer for being a woman.”

In a huge twist to the Mu Lan mythos, Kingston’s Fa Mu Lan is a revolutionary! Mu Lan kills the baron and throws open his house to the villagers. They distribute his ill-gotten gains, put on trials for his supporters, execute those who can’t be reformed, and reform those who show honest repentance for their crimes against the people.

Mu Lan locates a locked room in the baron’s house. After breaking down the door,

I found women, cowering, whimpering women. I heard shrill insect noises and scurrying. They blinked weakly at me like pheasants that have been raised in the dark for soft meat. The servants who walked the ladies had abandoned them, and they could not escape on their little bound feet. Some crawled away from me, using their elbows to pull themselves along. These women would not be good for anything. I called the villagers to come identify any daughters they wanted to take home, but no one claimed any. I gave each woman a bagful of rice, which they sat on. They rolled the bags to the road. They wandered away like ghosts. Later, it would be said, they turned into the band of swordswomen who were a mercenary army. They did not wear men’s clothes like me, but rode as women in black and red dresses. They bought up girl babies so that many poor families welcomed their visitations. When slave girls and daughters-in-law ran away, people would say they joined these witch amazons. They killed men and boys. I myself never encountered such women and could not vouch for their reality.27

It’s then that they tear down the ancestral tablets, convert the shrine to a hall for village meetings, and start a new calendar, this being the Year One. The calendrical move is significant because it marks the change of a new dynasty.28

Kingston’s Mu Lan ends her tale, saying,

From the words on my back, and how they were fulfilled, the villagers would make a legend about my perfect filiality.29

There is a brief pause, and then Kingston continues her story, this time in America. A stark reality hits the reader through page and time,

My American life has been such a disappointment. “I got straight A’s, Mama.” “Let me tell you a true story about a girl who saved her village.” I could not figure out what was my village. And it was important that I do something big and fine, or else my parents would sell me when we made our way back to China. In China there were solutions for what to do with little girls who ate up food and threw tantrums. You can’t eat straight A’s.30

Kingston soon describes a scene with a new baron, her white American bosses. In one incidence, her boss at an art supply house asks her to order more of a specific color of paint, that for no reason, he chooses to refer with a slur. In Kingston’s “bad, small-person’s voice,” says that she doesn’t like that word, and her boss doesn’t even acknowledge her with a response.31

At a land developer’s association, her boss is planning a banquet for the local real estate industry. Kingston approaches him and says,

“Did you know the restaurant you chose for the banquet is being picketed by CORE and the NAACP?” I squeaked. “Of course I know.” The boss laughed. “That’s why I chose it.” “I refuse to type these invitations,” I whispered, voice unreliable. He leaned back in his leather chair, his bossy stomach opulent. He picked up his calendar and slowly circled a date. “You will be paid up to here,” he said. “We’ll mail you the check.”32

Kingston’s Fa Mu Lan, a bloody revolutionary, a scarred hero, a woman in control of not just a legion that can fight giants and demons, but can topple a dynasty, crown an emperor, and set order to the world, is juxtaposed right up against all these stories where a young Kingston can’t do anything right on account of both her sex and her race.

Kingston has Fa Mu Lan dress up in men’s armor and men’s clothing, but at no point are we told that the people following or watching her are under the impression that Mu Lan is actually a man. There is no reveal. The closest we ever get is to the man she was betrothed/married to recognizing her from a distance, and revealing that he knew it was her.

Mu Lan’s sex never hinders her. The poetry of the passages leaves vast territory open to interpretation, for the reader to put their own ideas of the exact nature of this conflict in order.

What’s more, Mu Lan’s filiality is explicitly brought up as the legendary quality about her. Though, while she is supportive of her family: parents and siblings particularly, she’s the very definition of a bad subject. Filiality explicitly refers to children being obedient and loyal to their parents.

Chu’s Hua Mulan would rather commit suicide rather than join the Emperor’s harem. The Extraordinary Biography’s Mulan would rather cut out her own heart rather than bear accusations of disloyalty to the Taizong Emperor. Kingston’s ideal, dream-form Fa Mu Lan has come a long, long way from them and executes the Emperor.

It’s worth remembering at this point that The Woman Warrior was published in 1976. After Vietnam, and Civil Rights, and the Counter Culture of the 1960’s. This era saw huge changes in perspective regarding class, gender, race, sex, and politics.

Analysis

Below: A political cartoon from a The American Federation of Labor, printed in a publication titled "Meat vs. rice; American manhood against Asiatic coolieism. Which shall survive?" Note the brackets holding down the American Gulliver labeled "cheap labor." The more things change, the more they stay the same...

If you asked the average American prior to 1998 to tell you about “Mulan,” they’d probably reference The Woman Warrior. Indeed, even the title of the book is an epithet for Mulan, though the “woman warrior” in question is more open ended than simply describing her.

Of course, I’m probably overestimating the average American’s literacy, especially as it regards literature by minority writers.

Which is probably why there was such a big backlash against The Woman Warrior by other Asian-American writers.

It’s not worth going over every single review of The Woman Warrior. Lots of people were taken in by the story, its innovative techniques, its introduction to the exotic, and mysterious far east. It was also a look into the inner lives of a minority that most Americans didn’t think much about, or whose most recent media understanding was the occasional M*A*S*H* side-character, or that one Blazing Saddles (1974) joke.33

Many Asian-American writers took issue with such a prominent portrayal of their cultural experience. Particularly, they saw inaccuracies in Kingston’s work, which they believed reflected poorly on them, and portrayed Asian immigrants as backwards, superstitious, and overly exoticized.

As I said, we’re not going to go over every review and critic… but we do have to talk about Frank Chin.

Frank Chin (b. 1940) is a Chinese-American playwright.

He also hates The Woman Warrior.

Chin’s criticism of Kingston’s work has broad and specific angles. The broad angle is that the concept of autobiography is itself “a peculiarly Christian literary weapon” which “destroyed Chinamen [sic] history and culture.”34 Chin identifies the concept of an autobiography as beginning with St. Augustine’s Confessions (401). This notion is categorically dispatched by Cheung, who goes through multiple examples of native Chinese autobiographies that predate Western Christian influence in Chinese literature.35

Rather, where Fa Mu Lan is concerned, Chin has this to say in his essay “Come All Ye Asian American Writers of the Real and the Fake,” the prefatory essay in his book The Big Aiiieeeee!

[M]yths are, by nature, immutable and unchanging because they are deeply ingrained in the cultural memory, or they are not myths.36

His criticism here is explicitly about Kingston’s recasting of the Mulan mythos. Chin is very explicit about this, following his statement about the immutability of mythology by reprinting Guo Maoqian’s Ballad of Mulan in its entirety, “as though the Chinese poem were the ‘real’ that had not gone through revisions.”37

I am not Chinese or Chinese-American. So I really can’t speak to a tradition from the subjective level. But I am an historian of Buddhism, and I study mythology and religion quite extensively, in case this article series was but an indication.

And I have to say, in my absolute, most academic perspective.

This is complete nonsense.

Myths change all of the time.

Mythology is practically defined by its mutability.

Let’s leave Mulan and go to another figure which Disney raided mythology to package and sell to the masses: Thor.

Thor, as most people are generally aware, was38 the Norse God of lightning and thunder. Most stories of Thor are found in the Prose Edda by Snorri Sturluson (1179-1241). These stories include those about how Thor’s hammer was formed, of Ragnarok and how Thor would fight with the Gods against the Jotuns, of Thor’s journey into Helheim to retrieve his hammer, dressing as as bride, and so on and so on.

Sturluson’s purpose in writing the Prose Edda wasn’t religious – he was a devout Christian – but cultural. Icelandic language had a lot of features that only made etymological sense in the context of their stories. And as Icelandic society in particular (and Norse society in general) became more Christian, and diverged from its pagan roots, they were losing that linguistic connection which Snorri, a gifted poet and historian, prized so highly. Thanks to Sturluson’s efforts, this aspect of Icelandic culture was well-preserved, with near hundreds of stories being passed on to new generations of Norse writers.39

Fast forward to the 20th Century. In 1962, Stan Lee and Jack Kirby developed the idea for a character who was stronger than the Incredible Hulk. They landed on Thor and passed it along to Lee’s brother Larry Lieber. Kirby and Lieber’s interest in mythology saw them repurpose and reframe a lot of those stories from the Edda, recontextualizing them in the comic book framework of the Marvel Universe.

In a 2018 video analyzing the political rhetoric surrounding Black Panther, Shaun takes a moment to analyze the colonial themes in Thor: Ragnarok. Black Panther suffers, Shaun says, from being a Marvel movie, as the closer it approaches reality, the more uncomfortable (and less marketable) it will be to audiences (including, if not especially, white audiences). Initially, T’Challa (i.e. Black Panther, the King of Wakanda) realizes how damaging his country’s isolationist policies are for the rest of the world, and that he needed to open up and share Wakandan technology and society for the benefit of all humanity.

This was prompted by his cousin and claimant to the throne, Killmonger, who wanted to start a worldwide revolution by shipping weapons to black liberation cells in Hong Kong, London, and New York. T’Challa stops him, retakes control of Wakanda, and… opens a community center?

Contrast this with Thor: Ragnarok, in which Thor comes to realize the damage that Asgard’s imperialism causes, the logic of the story dictates that Asgard needs to be destroyed. So he destroys it, planting the seeds for a new, better society in the process.40

Now, I’m the last person to extol the virtues of Marvel movies. I can count the ones I’ve seen on one hand41 but if mythology is immutable, then according to Chin, Marvel is doing a massive crime against literature and culture by awkwardly shoving an ancient Norse God into the role of an alien superhero in space, to frame an anti-colonialist narrative.

Try telling that to all the kids that dress up as Marvel’s Thor for Halloween.

Maybe that sounds trite and ridiculous, but at the end of the day, stories are stories because they mean something to us, at a subjective, internal level.

When I adopted a dog of my own, and became responsible for the well being of this creature that looked at me with love and affection and security, the themes of fatherhood in The Mandalorian and The Last of Us42 resonated with me at a much deeper, much more intimate level. Dealing with loss and burdens in life, Frodo Baggins from The Lord of the Rings took on a whole new meaning to an older, wiser, much more experienced writer.

Stories have the meaning we give them.

And this is a good thing.

It requires that they change to meet the psychological, emotional, and spiritual needs of the reader/listener/viewer/player.

Let’s take Guo Maoqian and Snorri Sturluson: the origin points for our myths regarding Mulan and Thor. Except, even they are not the origin points. They’re merely all we have. Guo Maoqian was recording folk songs, which absolutely could not have been 100% faithfully translated from the Northern Wei to the Song Dynasty. And even if a version was, there would have been multiple versions.

That’s what a folk song is.

And Sturluson, as a devout Christian, couldn’t refer to Thor and Odin and Frey as gods, so he referred to them as heroes. We see the same process in whomever wrote down Beowulf, which my Celtic and Norse Mythology Professor once described as “Christian icing easily scraped off a Norse pagan story.”

Does Fa Mu Lan, as the ideal state of Chinese womanhood: fierce and filial, mean somehow less to Kingston than Hua Mulan, depressed and suicidal heroine who no longer sees where she fits in in the world? Does she mean any less to all of the little Asian girls who grew up and finally saw someone who looked like them be crowned a “Disney Princess”?43

I’d say no.

And I’d say anyone that says yes, well, doesn’t understand what it means to be human.

When you cast a story out into the world, as soon as you gain an audience, at a certain degree, that story no longer belongs to you.

And again, for what it’s worth, while it may be one thing to criticize Kingston for mixing mythology and memoir into an entirely new genre – the mythoir – that may be confusing to those not educated in Chinese literature, history, or culture, it’s entirely another to say that Kingston isn’t representing those things appropriately. Kingston was speaking to her own experience growing up. An experience in which language is identical with personhood.

Night after night my mother would talk-story until we fell asleep. I couldn’t tell where the stories left off and the dreams began, her voice the voice of the heroines in my sleep.44

Kingston’s experience with her mother’s talk-story is how culture is communicated across generations. It’s how “the woman warrior,” i.e. the “ghost” of an idealized Chinese woman is passed from mother to daughter. Hell, it’s the very definition of “culture,” and how it is passed from person to person, across time and space.

At the very beginning of the mythoir, Kingston writes,

Chinese-Americans, when you try to understand what things in you are Chinese, how do you separate what is peculiar to childhood, to poverty, insanities, one family, your mother who marked your growing with stories, from what is Chinese? What is Chinese tradition and what is the movies?45

And this is a sentiment that you don’t have to be Chinese to understand. I grew up with a Puerto Rican mother, but spoke no Spanish, and she didn’t talk-story to me. All the Puerto Rican stories I know, all the history I’ve learned since, all the Spanish I speak, and the Taíno mythology I’ve learned, I’ve learned in the years since. My culture and heritage was not passed on to me, and so in this day and age, I find it hard to understand where I stand in relation to my own heritage. I feel like I’ve been raised an American, yet when I try to understand what things in me are Puerto Rican, how do I separate what is peculiar to my childhood? To my class? To my mental health? To one side of my family? Or just my mother? From what is American, and Puerto Rican?

Where Kingston also draws criticism, not solely from Frank Chin, is that her story of Fa Mu Lan is seen as both exoticized and watered down. This critique then blames Kingston for either not understanding her role as such a high profile Chinese-American author. By definition, she becomes a linchpin in (white) American readers’ understanding of the Chinese(-American) experience, as most minority stories do.46 And so, being unofficially crowned Representative of a Chinese-American Woman’s Experience, writers who disagree with Kingston’s presentation of Chinese culture are naturally miffed that the work is being presented as representative of them.

A part of this stems from the re-writing of the Mulan story. Kingston’s Fa Mu Lan has an array of scar-words carved onto her back. Neither Guo’s Mulan or Chu’s Hua Mulan have this feature, nor any other incarnation of Mulan as far as I can tell. Rather, this is a piece of another Chinese story of legend: General Yue Fei.

This, uh, “article,” is already long enough. So in brief, General Yue Fei (1103-1142) was a General of the Song Dynasty, possibly a contemporary of Guo Maoqian. He is well-known for his battles against the Jurchen (the people who would, in several centuries, become the Manchu and establish the Qing Dynasty), and is still today renowned as a loyal and patriotic hero.

A big part of Yue Fei’s loyalty and patriotism is associated with the story of his tattoo. As a young man, his mother tattooed the words jin zhong bao guo (盡忠報國), meaning “serve the country with the utmost loyalty.”47 Several times in his career, both in his biography and later fictionalized versions of the events, he removes his clothes to show his tattoo, at times to profess his loyalty to the Emperor, and at times to rally men to his side.

By folding this piece of Chinese historic lore into the story of Fa Mu Lan, other writers, including Chin, have accused Kingston of presenting an overly exotic version of events that is not true to Chinese history. In an open letter to Kingston by Katheryn M. Fong, “I read your references to mythical and feudal China as fiction… The problem is that non-Chinese are reading your fiction as true accounts of Chinese and Chinese American history.”48

But is that on Kingston? Or on the reader?

Kingston opens her book by saying that she cannot tell Chinese tradition from the movies, well before we are introduced to Fa Mu Lan. And

The section about Fa Mulan [sic] is not presented as a traditional Chinese story but as the narrator’s fantasy of herself morphing into the legendary warrior: ‘I couldn’t tell where the stories left off and the dreams began.’ Superimposing the story of Yue Fei, a male general whose mother carves words on his back, on that of Mulan allows the author to redefine heroism by transferring power from ‘sword’ to ‘word’ – using the pen as weapon.49

Kingston’s story may not be representative of everyone’s experience and understanding of Chinese myth and history, but it is representative of Kingston’s experience. And in her own words, responding specifically to criticisms of her representation of Chinese-American writers, Kingston wrote,

Why must I “represent” anyone besides myself?50

And as a minority writer, yeah. One hundred percent.

I’m Puerto Rican, but my experience is not representative of anyone’s experience other than my own. There are a billion Chinese people just in China. How many more live all across Asia, the West, and everywhere else? Their experiences are going to be vastly different, colored by their gender, sexuality, class, profession, geography, age, and a thousand other factors.

Yet, I can see that writers of any minority might experience anxiety regarding how they’re represented, especially when such representation becomes wildly prominent in the public space, becomes a darling of white audiences, and people begin to associate that representation with people who don’t feel represented at all.

It’s a bit of a paradox.

Where minority writers often feel unrepresented is in descriptions of aspects of culture. Either they are watered down, with certain cultural practices and attitudes being unsavory, inexplicable, or considered wrong in (white) Western eyes. But if they’re not watered down, then they’re “specifically selected” to bring an “exotic” culture to (white) Western audiences, exoticized representation being just as inaccurate and just as bad.

In other words, if you’re a minority writer writing about culture, you’re either watering down the culture to appeal to a wider (whiter) audience, or you’re exoticizing it to appeal to a wider (whiter) audience.

You can’t win.

So what’s the final word here?

Obviously, there is none. Maxine Hong Kingston is still alive, writing, and speaking today about her work and experiences. As is Frank Chin. And no matter what people think of The Woman Warrior, it will continue to be pored over.

That said, just as we can read into Northern Wei society’s outlook from Guo Maoqian’s work, and the attitude of the recently conquered Ming under the new Manchu Empire in Chu Renhuo’s, we can see shifting and changing attitudes of gender, and anxiety over a turbulent society. Most fascinatingly, in my opinion, is that we see the clash of two Chinas: the old world of an ancient civilization that had only barely crawled out of the Century of Humiliation, and the new one of immigrants, which was still largely invisible to most of white America.

The subtitle to The Woman Warrior is Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts. Ghost-hood, if we can call it that, is a constant motif in the story. Kingston is haunted by the ghosts of her aunt who jumped in the family well back in China. She is haunted by an America full of “machines and ghosts,”

But America has been full of machines and ghosts—Taxi Ghosts, Bus Ghosts, Police Ghosts, Fire Ghosts, Meter Reader Ghosts, Tree Trimming Ghosts, Five-and-Dime Ghosts. Once upon a time the world was so thick with ghosts, I could hardly breathe; I could hardly walk, limping my way around the White Ghosts and their cars. There were Black Ghosts too, but they were open eyed and full of laughter, more distinct than White Ghosts.51

There a more: garbage ghosts, newsboy ghosts, grocery ghosts, well ghosts, and on and on. In one vivid passage, Kingston’s mother recounts dealing with a sitting ghost, an actual specter this time, not a euphemism, but the most obvious ghost throughout the book, is Kingston herself. She exists in a parallel dimension to reality, unable to speak up, except in thin, whispy hauntings that the “living” seem to take pleasure in torturing her over.52

The conversation around The Woman Warrior is really the mark of the culture it was both created in and continues to be read in. One which sees a fractalization of cultural perspectives. And that’s what we see in The Woman Warrior and the response to it: no one agrees on what it is or even why, and everyone’s got an opinion about it.

This whole exploration has got me really interested to read more Kingston, and Frank Chin, too. But we’re not quite done with our exploration of Mulan yet, and that requires us to move on to 1998, and the 21st Century beyond.

But for that, READ ON!

Next: Part 4 of 4. Disney's Mulan (1998)

Discuss this Article on the r/JackAdrian subreddit.

Footnotes

1. In retrospect, I should have divided up the previous sections into subcategories as well. The historical context for Maxine Hong Kingston is as long, if not longer, than for Chu Renhuo.

2. Salkeld 2021.

3. “On February 13, 1942, just days before the Roosevelt administration’s decision to incarcerate all Japanese Americans living on the West coast, Dr. Seuss drew “Waiting for the Signal From Home…”65 It shows the West Coast—Washington, Oregon, and California—and a horde of smiling, bespectacled, virtually identical Asians lining up to pick up blocks of TNT from a warehouse labeled “Honorable 5th Column.” A smiling fellow on the roof looks through a telescope out to sea for that “signal from home.” It is a scurrilous cartoon. For one thing, no Japanese American on the West Coast was ever convicted of an act of sabotage.” (Minear 2001. The Home Front.)

4. The photo, included in this article, is allegedly of a woman named Ruth Lee. Many of the comments I found in relation to the photo include the detail that it was taken on 15 December 1941, merely a week after the attack on Pearl Harbor, in California. Ms. Lee was, again, allegedly, a hostess at a restaurant and went to the beach on her day off as she did often, though she did not usually bring her flag. Apparently, she thought this time it was necessary for her own safety. There is must more to be said about this topic… particularly the trouble I’m having confirming any of these details. I found one person straight up denying that the woman in the photo was Chinese, and was in fact Japanese, trying to fly under the radar by flying the Chinese flag (and then someone responding that she didn’t “look” Japanese… so scientific). Either way, it makes the same exact point.

5. Bradley 2015 describes at length the China Lobby that developed and was instrumental in FDR’s policy towards Asia, and the surprising feeling of shock and betrayal that consumed American culture when the Communists took over in 1949 and China, once the provenance of American Capitalism and American Christianity, turned to the Soviet Union.

6. See Coble 2023.

7. The People’s Republic of China, just as the Republic of China before them, claimed “all” of the Qing Dynasty’s former borders. This would, in theory, include all of modern Mongolia, Tana Tuva (which is currently in Russia), as well as a couple of glaciers in modern Kashmir, claimed by India and Pakistan, most of Arunachal Pradesh state in India, as well as two pieces of Bhutan (in Haa and Gasa Dzongkhags), as well as the long-standing Spratly Islands dispute in the South China Sea, which they contest with Malaysia, the Philippines, Brunei, and Vietnam. Then, of course, there’s Taiwan. So they didn’t accomplish all of their border ambitions. But enough of them to matter.

8. My grandfather was stationed in Hokkaido in the mid-50s during the last days of the Korean War. No, he did not come home with a Japanese wife. But I do have his Japanese letter opener.

9. Cheung 2015. p. 4.

10. Ibid. p. 11.

11. Kingston 1976. p. 20.

12. Ibid. p. 33-34.

13. And all of the others that were touched or not in this series already.

14. Ibid. p. 34-35.

15. Ibid. p. 36.

16. Powell’s Books 2006.

17. Kingston 1976. p. 36.

18. Ibid. p. 37.

19. Ibid. p. 38.

20. Ibid. p. 39.

21. Ibid.

22. Ibid. p. 39-40.

23. Zhao 2022. Chapter One. There is something to be said for how (the character) Wu Zetian’s story as a parallel for Zhao’s own exploration of gender and self-identity parallel’s Kingston’s Mu Lan as an exploration of her gender and self-identity.

24. Kingston 1976. p. 42.

25. Ibid. p. 45.

26. Ibid. p. 45-6.

27. Ibid. p. 44-45.

28. Keay 2010. Qin’s Cultural Revolution. “The calendar was also realigned and recalibrated. This was a ritual responsibility for every new ruler...” This ritual would take place at major turns with every change of dynasty, and the rise of a new Emperor would usually see a realignment of the calendar on a smaller scale. This was important both for civic as well as ritual functions.

29. Kingston 1976. p. 45.

30. Ibid. p. 45-46.

31. Ibid. p. 48.

32. Ibid. p. 48-9.

33. See Charlie Lee (Jack Soo) in Season 1 Episode 2, “To Market, to Market,” or Young Hi (Virginia Ann Lee) in Season 1 Episode 5, “The Moose,” to name two prominent examples. As for Blazing Saddles, when selecting workers, a company man says, “All right, we’ll take the blacks and the Chinese, but we don’t want the Irish,” and all of the black and Chinese workers shakes their heads and agree that they don’t want the Irish.

34. Chin 1985. p. 109.

35. Though both my English and History degree would like to point out that an author writing in English, as Kingston, is by definition, building off of an English literary tradition in some way. So to say that Kingston is drawing explicitly from a Chinese tradition, and not an Anglo-American one is not a fair statement. That said, I do not believe that this requires English-language autobiography and memoir to be defined by the concept of confession in an Augustinian tradition. I mean, there’s certainly something to be said about that. But how much of that is just a feature of personal story telling?

Indeed, there might be a lot more to say about this, but let me just consider some of the most recent memoirs/autobiographies I’ve read. It’s usually not a genre I consider largely because I don’t appreciate this form of storytelling. As Richard Castle once said, “Remind me if I ever decide to write a memoir, never to write a memoir… Because memoirs are about truth, and I’m not a very truthful person.” (Spicer 2009.) 

Born a Crime by Trevor Noah is a “confession” in the sense that the crime that Noah is “confessing” is that he was born to a mixed race marriage in South Africa. It’s an exploration of growing up in a racist, divided society.

A Life in Parts by Bryan Cranston was a particularly interesting memoir to me because it is more an exploration of creativity, though, yes, I can see that it can be read as a sort of “confession” in the sense of a “creative” confession, with Cranston recounting some of the most telling moments and unforgettable performances of his career, going over how those moments developed behind the scenes, along with his creative input.

A Bad Idea I’m About to do by Chris Gethard is an exploration of growing up Irish Catholic (talk about confessions) and Gethard exploring the development of his depression and mental illness as his career progressed from manic-depressive days at Rutgers to a Netflix special.

Cheung points out that discussing one’s life and life history is not a strange or Western import into Asian writing. Asian authors (Chinese and Tibetans among them) long before Western contact were writing short biographies of themselves to elucidate their writing. However, the stereotype of a demure Asian can definitely be said to hold true in this aspect. Asian authors were often self-effacing in their self-descriptions, as “cultural expectations, such as modesty, reticence about one’s abilities and achievements, and even self-deprecation, as well as keeping family affairs private, placed severe restrictions on the development [of autobiography as an Asian genre].” (Cheung 2015. p. 6.) I’ve noticed this a lot among Tibetan authors, with the words kha che (big mouth) and kha chung (little mouth) being both rather common. Kha che, (not to be confused with kha che which also means “Kashmiri” and by extention, “Muslim,” nor the kha che which refers to Padmasambhava, believed to have come from the Kashmir region… and yes, all of which spelled the exact same way) carries the connotation as it does in English: “big mouth” as in “talks too much (without saying much).” Whereas kha chung is the more self-effacing. As in, “I have just a few small things to say.”

While we can forgive Frank Chin, a Chinese-American playwright from not knowing the intricacies of Tibetan literary culture, you’d think that someone who claims to be such an authority on Asian history and culture in general, and Chinese history and literature in particular would know something as simple as this.

36. Chin 1991. p. 4.

37. Cheung 2015. p. 5.

38. Or “is” if you’re a modern Asatru.

39. Even today Iceland produces an obscene amount of writers per capita. Iceland is often considered a “writer’s paradise,” and this aspect of their culture and literary tradition is highly prized.

40. “But again, it's a Marvel movie. The closer that Black Panther gets to real-world problems and situations, the duller it’s edge gets, you know? It’s held back by its proximity to reality. I guess there’s almost no white racism in the movie for instance. And for a movie that references colonialism a bunch, having the conflict be between a black man and his cousin within a royal family, at that, it felt like an imposed half. You know they want this movie to sell to white audiences too, clearly. The more direct colonialist story would be the world finding out about Wakanda’s vibranium deposits, invading it to plunder them, and having Wakanda have to fight back. But that story would be a little embarrassing. I imagine this is partly why I prefer Thor: Ragnarok to Black Panther, because the Thor movie being set in a fictional space empire has a lot more freedom to go where the story needs to. You can have Thor recognized that colonialist Asgard needs to be destroyed. And doing it. And setting out to create a better society.” (Shaun 2018.)

41. Ok, let me see… Ironman, Ironman 2, Black Panther… uh… The Avengers. Oh! I recently watched Dr. Strange and Guardians of the Galaxy v.1. So, yes, ok, I lied. One hand… plus one finger.

42. Please recommend to me other movies/shows where Pedro Pascal plays a badass dad.

43. More on that in the next part.

44. Kingston 1976. p. 19.

45. Ibid. p. 5-6.

46. “Readers, especially non-Asians, who read Kingston […] in part for ethnographic reasons, may assume that their work is representative of the ethnic group, much in the way The Narrative of Frederick Douglass tells about slavery. (Behind the assumption also lies a certain condescension that American writers of Asian descent are only capable of unmediated representation and are not creative enough to venture beyond their own life experiences.)” (Cheung 2015. p. 5.)

47. Note that the legend always has his mother doing the tattooing. Refer to the Classic of Filial Piety in Part 2 re: Chu Renhuo. The body is a gift from one’s parents, so you are not to alter it. Only they are allowed to.

48. Cheung 2015. p. 13.

49. Ibid. p. 12.

50. Chen 2017.

51. Kingston 1976. p. 96-97.

52. There has been some criticism that Kingston is mis-translating the word “ghost,” again, in an effort to appeal to white American audiences. That she is taking the word gwei lo and translating it as “white ghost.” I was once referred to this way, too, by an ex’s mother. The term they used to translate it to me was “white devil,” or “white demon.” Since then, I’ve found multiple translations that prefer the term “ghost.” This may be a case of reciprocal misattribution, with people reading The Woman Warrior or similar media, and recontextualizing the term as “ghost” rather than “demon.” I say may because this is beyond me, I’m nowhere near an expert in Chinese, nevermind Chinese etymology. However, as a relative expert in English (and Western religious sensibilities, for that matter), ghost certainly fits Kingston’s meaning far better than demon. “Demon” would heavily imply malevolence, and ill-will. For the most part, what Kingston seems to be fighting against isn’t malevolence, but irrelevance. Much more of a feature of ghosthood than demonhood.