Reimaging Mulan

Reimagining Mulan: Gender, Ethnicity, and Otherness Xiyan Gu, The High School Affiliated to Renmin University of China, 21’

Abstract

This paper explores the figure of the Chinese woman warrior Mulan in contemporary media using the concept of the Other. Specifically, two works that adapt the original Mulan folktale (Ballad of Mulan, 386-534 AD) are examined from perspectives of gender, ethnicity, and Otherness: The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood among

Ghosts (1976) by Asian American writer Maxine Hong Kingston, and the Disney animated movie “Mulan” (1998). The paper shows how the former successfully portrays a Chinese American woman warrior who views her Otherness positively, while the latter Americanizes Mulan and suppresses her Otherness. The comparison serves as a tool for scholars to examine future cultural productions.

Introduction

With escalating calls for gender and racial equality today, news about Disney’s recent live-action remake of the 1998 animated movie Mulan raises much discussion. Originating from the Chinese folksong Ballad of Mulan in the Northern Wei Dynasty (386-534 AD), the figure of Mulan, a woman warrior who goes into battle disguised as a man, has inspired numerous writers and movie creators from various cultural backgrounds throughout the years. One of these writers is Chinese-American author Maxine Hong Kingston, who published her first book, The

Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood among Ghosts, in 1976. Winning the 1976 National Book Critics’ Circle Award for nonfiction,1 the book describes Kingston’s true experience growing up as a Chinese American while incorporating some of her childhood fantasies. Written in a first-person perspective, the protagonist of the story— Kingston— explores her identity as a girl and tries to find a balance between Chinese and American cultures. While specific adaptations of the story of Mulan appear in the second chapter of the book, “White Tigers”, the theme of being a woman warrior like Mulan is addressed throughout the book and serves as an important message Kingston expects to convey to her audience. Later in 1998, the Disney animated film Mulan hugely publicized the figure of Mulan by earning a global box office of $304,320,254.2 Portraying Mulan in a Disney-princess-style, the movie adds some romantic and imaginary details to the original Ballad of Mulan. 1 . The Editors of Encyclopedia Britannica. “Maxine Hong Kingston: Chinese-American author,” last modified May 2, 2019, https://www.britannica.com/biography/Maxine-Hong-Kingston. 2 . “Mulan,” Box Office Mojo by IMDbPro, accessed August 7, 2020, https://www.boxofficemojo.com/release/ rl3664086529/weekend/.

60 Paper and Commentary Both The Woman Warrior and Mulan present a woman warrior as the protagonist and an Other, but they portray her figure in vastly different ways. The word “Other” is defined as “one considered by members of a dominant group as alien, exotic, threatening, or inferior (as because of different racial, sexual, or cultural characteristics)”.3

More specifically, the concept of “the Other” is widely discussed among philosophers. The philosopher Hegel argues that self-consciousness depends on the acknowledgment (or recognition) of another self-conscious subject4—that people can only be self-conscious and establish their own identity when they recognize “the Other”. In all versions of the story of Mulan, the female warrior understands her otherness as a woman on the battlefield when she is conscious of all the male soldiers around her. As a result, she dresses up as a man to fight. However, when the original Mulan’s tale is adapted in The Woman Warrior and the cartoon Mulan, is her otherness still only related to gender? If so, how is this otherness represented? If not, what are some other circumstances in The Woman Warrior and Mulan that would make a woman warrior feel like the Other? Would race or culture influence people’s interpretation of woman warriors’ otherness? In this paper, I compare The Woman Warrior and Disney’s movie Mulan using the concept of the Other. In

addition to the media difference, I would argue that there are more central differences between these two works. The

Woman Warrior successfully portrays a Chinese-American woman warrior who views her otherness positively while Mulan suppresses Mulan’s otherness as a Chinese figure due to its limitations as a children’s film.

Gender and Otherness

Gender and its relationship to otherness are often discussed in philosophical works. As the philosopher Simone de Beauvoir points out in her well-known book, The Second Sex, “He is the Subject, he is the Absolute – she is the Other.”5 Beauvoir contends that in a patriarchal world, women can never be equal to men and are regarded as the Other simply due to their gender. The idea that women should rely on men and be good wives is so ineradicable that people accept it as the social norm. Woman warriors in The Woman Warrior and Mulan are a direct defiance to such beliefs. As women who challenge their conventional roles in the domestic sphere and learn to fight like men, the otherness of women warriors takes on complex directions by differing from societal understanding of gender roles.

In The Woman Warrior, Kingston describes her experience growing up in the United States in five separate stories. In the second story, “White Tigers”, Kingston adapts the tale of Mulan and imagines herself as a brave woman 3 . “Other,” Merriam-Webster, accessed August 6, 2020, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/other. 4 . G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 111. 5 . Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, trans. Constance Borde and Sheila Malovany-Chevallier (New York: Vintage, 2011).

Hope Humanities 61 warrior. As the book is published as a non-fiction work, the narrator and protagonist in the story can be understood as Kingston herself. Thus, in the following texts, the protagonist of The Woman Warrior and “White Tigers” will be referred to as “Kingston”. “White Tigers” starts with the real experience of Kingston’s mother telling her about the story of Mulan, which leads young Kingston to imagine herself becoming a warrior woman. After a long description of her imaginary life, Kingston comes back to reality, recounting her childhood memories in Chinatown and her experiences as a Chinese-American woman in America. Fantasy and reality intertwine in this story, both showing the protagonist as an Other although she experiences her otherness in different ways. In her fantasy, she has the ability to ignore or cope with the differences in gender, which means that she can imagine herself as one among the crowd and not as an Other or that she can keep only the positive aspects in her gender; in reality, she has no agency and is challenged with gender discrimination that marks her as someone who does not belong. In Kingston’s imagination, being a woman warrior is supported by her family and everyone from her village, thus letting her ignore her otherness. At the beginning of her fantasy, she follows a bird into the mountains and meets an old man and an old woman who offer her the chance of staying with them for fifteen years to learn to become a warrior. Kingston hesitates as she is worried about leaving her parents for such a long time. However, in the old man’s magical water gourd, she sees her parents looking at the sky and talking calmly about her sudden absence. Her father is telling her mother, “You knew from her birth that she would be taken.”6 Then, the couple turns away towards the field to continue harvesting the family’s potatoes. In the imaginary world, Kingston’s parents accept her absence coolly since they believe that it is her destiny and they have no control over her fate. Therefore, they discuss the incident in a matter-of-fact tone with no grief or feelings of loss— they can return to their daily work as if nothing has happened. Although it is not said explicitly what being “taken” means, we can infer from Kingston’s parents’ actions of looking up at the sky that people think Kingston is being taken by some supernatural figures. This assumption can also be confirmed by one of Kingston’s cousins later in the story, who tells Kingston, “Some of the people are saying the Eight Sages took you away to teach you magic.”7 Despite the fact that having the chance to learn magic from immortals is considered a man’s privilege in traditional beliefs, here among Kingston’s family members, no one is saying that she does not deserve to be “taken”, and there is no mention of her gender in any case. Therefore, Kingston has the power to decide whether to “go pull sweet potatoes” or “stay with [the old man and old woman] and learn how to fight barbarians and bandits,” 8 without being influenced by anyone else. Eventually, she makes her choice

6 . Maxine Hong Kingston, The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood among Ghosts (New York: Random House, 1977), 27. 7 . Kingston, 40. 8 . Kingston, 27.

62 Paper and Commentary of staying with the old man and the old woman easily, without challenging her family’s authority. Here, Kingston’s gender is overlooked by everyone including herself— she is the child who is destined to be taken from her family and to become a warrior despite being a girl. With her agency in fantasy, Kingston successfully lets everyone ignore the contradiction of her being a woman and a “manly” warrior at the same time, which eliminates the otherness caused by gender.

Rather than completely neglecting Kingston’s gender, in Kingston’s imagined world, people sometimes realize her gender but do not regard it as a source of otherness. In other words, everyone is treating men and women in similar ways. When Kingston finishes her learning with the old man and old woman and becomes a warrior fifteen years later, she goes back to her village. After she learns that her old father is drafted for battle, she directly tells him, “No, Father… I will take your place.”9 Her family shows no objection and “[her] parents killed a chicken and steamed it whole, as if they were welcoming home a son”.10 Kingston’s parents are not treating her as a girl who should only stay in the domestic sphere. They agree that she can take her father’s place in the battle and are giving her the respect as if she is a son. Later, when Kingston is dressed for battle in her “men’s clothes and armor and tied [her] hair in a man’s fashion”, people from her village are saying, “How beautiful she looks.”11 Kingston’s choice of going into battle is known and supported by everyone in her village. Even though she dresses in men’s clothes and ties her hair in a man’s fashion, her gender is never blurred or forgotten by the villagers when they refer to her as “she”. People in Kingston’s fantasy have no discrimination against women; a woman can be a warrior and also be admired as a beautiful girl. Kingston’s gender never marks her as the Other in people’s hearts.

Besides other people’s attitudes, Kingston herself also recognizes her female sex but can view it as a gift instead of a burden in her fantasy. As Kingston gets pregnant in the army, she keeps fighting and “wore her armor altered so that [she] looked like a powerful, big man”.12 She only hides from the battle once as she gives birth to her baby. In this case, a woman warrior’s probable weakness on the battlefield—being weak while pregnant—is eliminated. The only inconvenience Kingston feels is having to adjust her armor so that she can look like a man to meet the social standard for soldiers. This standard that only men can serve in the army even seems unnecessary here when a woman like Kingston can fight just as well as men so that her female sex is not even recognized by others. Therefore, Kingston’s sex does not prove to be a burden for her in the army. Instead, as a woman, she has the unparalleled opportunity to give birth to her own child. As her mental state is hardly directly mentioned in the story, we can only infer Kings-

9 . Kingston, 40. 10 . Kingston, 40. 11 . Kingston, 42-43. 12 . Kingston, 47.

Hope Humanities 63 ton’s thoughts for her otherness. However, even if Kingston believes that her pregnancy and her gender marks her as the Other in a group of men, she can still accept her otherness and take it as something positive—being the person who has more possibilities in life compared to men. In short, in Kingston’s imagination, her gender is either overlooked—that it is no longer a cause for her otherness—or is seen as something positive. The woman warrior fantasy she creates for herself is a utopian world where gender and otherness do not ever come together negatively and where she meets no discrimination as a woman.

The reality Kingston actually lives in is the complete opposite of her vision. Growing up in Chinatown, Kingston faces all kinds of criticism just because of her gender. Her parents or some immigrant villagers will sometimes say, “Feeding girls is feeding cowbirds.”13 Implying that girls are useless, this saying always makes Kingston scream angrily. However, no one around her will take her anger seriously and will simply define her as a bad girl because she is yelling. Moreover, when she wants to go shopping with her great-uncle, he will turn on her and roar, “No girls!”14

Young Kingston is looked down upon and not being respected because she is a girl. She has no agency in her real life to fight against all these unjust discriminations, and she is automatically the Other in her family and in Chinatown. Kingston completely understands her otherness as a girl and has to accept this disappointing fact. When she leaves home for college, “[she] would have liked to bring [herself] back as a boy for [her] parents to welcome with chickens and pigs”,15 but she knows that she cannot be a boy and cannot be treated equally. Forming a stark contrast with her imagination, Kingston’s gender directly makes her the Other in her real life, in which she has no power to control or change.

In conclusion, The Woman Warrior addresses many aspects of gender and otherness. With the narrator—Kingston—travelling between fantasy and reality, we can see how she lives happily in the imagination but tries in vain to become the One instead of the Other in her real life. The imagination is a world that Kingston hopes to live in, where her uniqueness as an individual is valued beyond her gender and where she can be herself and be a woman but not be the Other in the society. In another sense, even when she is an Other in the imagination due to her female sex, her otherness is seen in a positive way of allowing her to have more possibilities in her life. On the other hand, in reality, Kingston is the Other in Chinatown because of her gender. Her otherness is not reconcilable, and she cannot change it into something positive, which leads to her final resolution at the end of the book; she intends to sing high and clear, using her song as the weapon to fight against discriminations, and to make her anger and sadness heard by everyone, including her own people. 13 . Kingston, 54. 14 . Kingston, 55. 15 . Kingston, 56.

64 Paper and Commentary Compared to the complexity of The Woman Warrior, the Disney movie Mulan tells a much simpler story. When her old and wounded father is drafted for battles against the Huns, the young girl Mulan dresses in her father’s armor and decides to take his place in the army. After enduring many difficulties, Mulan and her friends finally defeat Shan Yu, the Hun leader. Mulan goes back home with honor and a newly gained romantic relationship with the young general Li Shang. Although the movie does not give deep interpretations of Mulan’s otherness, it can still be seen that Mulan tries hard to blend into the crowd and not be an Other in her village and in the army, where she feels a sense of otherness due to her gender. Before Mulan goes on to the battlefield, she lives with her family and tries to become a proper young lady. For the girls in her village, the ultimate goal of their lives is to have a good marriage and honor their families. Mulan appears as the Other as she cannot meet the social standards for “proper girls”. When she dresses up to visit the village’s matchmaker, she makes some mistakes while pouring tea and angers the matchmaker, who exclaims, “You are a disgrace! You may look like a bride, but you will never bring your family honor!”16 This is a direct demonstration of Mulan’s otherness; she cannot please the matchmaker like all the other girls and cannot “bring [her] family honor”, which means that she might not have a good marriage. In a traditional Chinese village, women’s value is determined by their femininity and whether they can become a good wife. Therefore, Mulan’s clumsiness marks her as a bad wife and a person of minimal value to her family. She is the Other in her village due to her divergence from the conventional standards set for women. After Mulan dresses up as a man and takes up her father’s place in the army, she is still an Other due to her gender. As soon as Mulan is found to be a woman, she is being expelled from the army despite her great contributions in the battle. Being left in the mountains by the troops, Mulan questions her motivations for leaving home and taking her father’s place in the battle: “Maybe what I really wanted was to prove that I could do things right. So that when I looked in the mirror, I’d see someone worthwhile. But I was wrong. I see nothing.”17 This quote demonstrates Mulan’s mental state of trying to discover her identity in the world. She cannot blend into the traditional roles for women, but she also cannot fit into the group of men—she is the Other wherever she is due to her gender. However, instead of directly defying the social norms—believing that women are also qualified as warriors— to eliminate her otherness, Mulan turns to question herself and her rebellious actions of becoming a woman warrior. Mulan is influenced by conventional social beliefs. She believes that people’s value depends on whether they can bring honor to

16 . Mulan, directed by Tony Bancroft and Barry Cook (1998; Burbank, CA: Walt Disney Animation Studios, 1999), DVD. 17 . Mulan, directed by Tony Bancroft and Barry Cook (1998; Burbank, CA: Walt Disney Animation Studios, 1999), DVD.

Hope Humanities 65 their families. For women, it is becoming a good wife and having a good marriage; for men, it is to be a warrior and fight bravely in battles. When she fails to meet either of these standards as a woman warrior, she begins to question her value. In short, Mulan is influenced by the education she receives as a girl who grows up in a traditional household. She feels a strong sense of otherness when she cannot find her place in the army. All in all, in both The Woman Warrior and the movie Mulan, the figure of a woman warrior and her otherness is presented clearly and creatively. As the two woman warriors in both works try to find their place in the world and discover their identity, their characteristics differ. In The Woman Warrior, Kingston explores her identity by imagining a perfect world with no gender discrimination. With the fantasy in mind, she decides not to bend to the social norms and to accept her gender and otherness positively. She is willing to directly fight against all the discriminations she meets in her life in the hope of staying true to herself and to change the unjust world. In contrast, in the Disney film Mulan, the protagonist is less rebellious. She is trying to cope with her otherness by changing herself and her actions. Either at home or going on to battles, she is always obeying the social norms in order to blend in. Just as Beauvoir points out in her work, many women in society are used to and will accept their traditional roles as wives while some others will try to fight against their place in the world and their otherness. Mulan in the movie is the former as Kingston is the latter: Both being the Other due to their gender, Mulan tries to eliminate her negative otherness whereas Kingston decides to remain a positive Other.

Ethnicity and Otherness

In the original Ballad of Mulan, ethnicity is never raised as a matter of discussion since Mulan’s people and her enemy all come from similar ethnic backgrounds. However, when the tale is adapted in a Western setting and is intended for another group of audiences, people’s ethnic backgrounds and the backgrounds’ influence on the interpretation of the character Mulan cannot be overlooked. Both created in English, The Woman Warrior and Mulan

are intended originally for the American audience, including Chinese Americans. Also, with Kingston being a Chinese-American author and the main creators of Mulan coming from American cultural backgrounds, their portrayal of the Chinese figure Mulan is not completely Chinese but reflects American or Chinese-American cultures. Thus, when comparing The Woman Warrior and Mulan, their creator’s cultural backgrounds— their ethnicity— should come into discussion.

Before the comparison starts, it is important to distinguish the nuance between ethnicity and race: ethnicity is defined as “a particular ethnic affiliation or group”,18 while race is “a category of humankind that shares certain distinc-

66 Paper and Commentary tive physical traits”.19 In other words, ethnicity would include people’s cultural backgrounds while race is merely how one looks and the color of one’s skin. As Chinese Americans are an important part of my discussion, their ethnicity should be understood as neither completely Chinese nor American but stands alone as a unique culture that incorporates influence from two distinct countries of China and the United States.

Maxine Hong Kingston’s ethnicity and feelings of otherness impact the creation of the figure of a woman warrior in The Woman Warrior. Born in California in 1940, Kingston is the eldest American-born daughter of two Chinese immigrants.20 The Chinese tradition in her family and her American education experience give her a complex cultural background, which is shown in The Woman Warrior as how Chinese folk stories and Western children’s tales intertwine. In the chapter “White Tigers”, the whole imagination of Kingston becoming a woman warrior is based on the Chinese folk tale of Mulan. However, some Western elements also come into play. When the protagonist, Kingston, is learning with the old man and the old woman in the mountains, a white rabbit jumps out from the snow and sacrifices itself in a fire as Kingston is starving. The figure of a white rabbit comes from Alice in Wonderland, a Western children’s story, while its action of sacrificing itself in the fire reflects some Buddhist fables. This mixture of the East and the West is a direct reflection of Kingston’s cultural identity growing up as a second-generation Chinese American; she is influenced by both Chinese and Western cultures. Yet this cultural identity also marks Kingston as the Other to both Chinese and Americans when she does not faithfully retell any stories in a purely Chinese or American way. As an insider representing people coming from Chinese-American ethnic backgrounds, Kingston successfully establishes her own culture as a unique combination of two different sources of influence. Thus, the woman warrior in the book is not the traditional Chinese Mulan. She is a Chinese-American warrior who grows up in the United States but is also being influenced by Chinese values.

On the other hand, the Disney film Mulan shows how a group of Americans try to put a traditional Chinese character on stage. Tony Bancroft and Barry Cook, the two directors of the film, are both born in the United States and have no Chinese background. Thus, the story of Mulan is completely foreign to them, and they look at the story from an outsiders’ perspective. Departing from the original Ballad of Mulan, which stresses themes of filial piety and bravery as a warrior, the movie Mulan portrays a typical Disney protagonist who seeks independence and self-realization while developing a romantic relationship in the process. Apart from seeing Mulan from an American point of view, Bancroft and Cook also put some stereotypes into the movie. The country of China in the movie is stripped of con-

nicity 19 . “Race,” Merriam-Webster, accessed August 20, 2020, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/race 20 . Helena Grice, Maxine Hong Kingston (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006), x.

Hope Humanities 67 text and lacks historical accuracies with the scenes of Mulan meeting the matchmaker and the presence of the Huns.21

More specifically, the movie scene of Mulan going to the matchmaker’s house with other girls would not take place in a traditional Chinese setting because matchmakers would usually visit each girl’s family and talk to the girl’s elders. However, in a Hollywood movie that stresses independence, it makes more sense to let Mulan and the matchmaker have some direct interactions. Thus, in this case, the matchmaker in the movie only serves as a stereotypical symbol of Chinese culture instead of an accurate reflection of Chinese tradition. Added to this, historically, the Huns existed before there was the Northern Wei Dynasty, so they were not whom the original Mulan was fighting. Yet in the movie, the directors simply assume that the Huns would be Mulan’s enemy since they are a comparatively well-known tribe in Chinese history. In short, the original Mulan and China are the Other to the Western world, so they are modified in a Disney movie to eliminate this otherness and make them understandable for the American audience. Through depicting Mulan in the film, the movie creators make Mulan one of them— a brave protagonist who is willing to fight against social norms in order to achieve self-realization— and suppress her Chinese features of growing up as a traditional Chinese girl. In conclusion, the Disney Mulan is a Westernized version of the original Chinese woman warrior with American characteristics and aspirations for her life. Yet with her suppressed but not eliminated Chinese-ness, she is still not a complete Disney protagonist and remains an outsider for the American mainstream culture.

All in all, the ethnicity of Kingston, Bancroft, and Cook impact their ways of portraying a woman warrior. Their otherness and its relationship to the different portrayals of Mulan can be explained by the philosopher Emmanuel Levinas, who states, “The absolutely other is the Other. He and I do not form a number.”22 In this quote, Levinas suggests the way in which otherness should be addressed. He believes that when looking at people who are different from us, we should understand their difference without trying to make them the same as us. This concept applies to both The Woman Warrior and Mulan; Kingston’s understanding of otherness is closer to that of Levinas’s while the movie creators oppose Levinas’s idea. The Woman Warrior is a book in which Kingston explores her own identity. As Kingston herself is the woman warrior in the book, she does not try to make the original Mulan be the same as her. She sees the original Mulan as part of her Chinese background and builds on this cultural heritage, while also understanding her difference from a completely Chinese figure. In contrast, Bancroft and Cook, the two Disney movie directors, are trying to change the original Mulan. They try to make Mulan into one of them—one of the American protagonists— and let Mulan “form a number” with them. However, this is not a successful attempt due to the exotic

21 . Lan Dong, Mulan’s Legend and Legacy in China and the United States (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2010), 172. 22 . Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1969).

68 Paper and Commentary sense of the Chinese character Mulan. Also, the movie makers’ attempt of Americanizing Mulan differs from what Levinas proposes as the best way of approaching the Other without eliminating people’s diversity. The woman warrior created by Kingston is an insider for Asian American cultures, while the Americanized Mulan in the movie is an insider for none ethnical groups; she is not Chinese, American, nor Chinese American.

Conclusion

Building on the original figure of a woman warrior in the Ballad of Mulan, The Woman Warrior and Mulan

give new interpretations to a traditional Chinese folk story. A woman warrior is reimagined in an American setting, where her otherness is not only related to gender but also correlates with ethnicity. In The Woman Warrior, Kingston looks at her own Chinese-American otherness through portraying herself as a woman warrior. She feels her otherness due to gender in Chinatown, where she is also an insider because of her ethnicity. Kingston is willing to write for Chinese Americans and proudly demonstrates her ethnicity, but she also wants to make changes for women who feel like the Other in Chinese-American societies. For the film Mulan, movie creators manage to show Mulan’s otherness as a woman. However, as outsiders for Chinese culture, they do not present Mulan as a completely Chinese figure to suppress her ethnic otherness in front of American audiences. As The Woman Warrior creates a new Chinese American woman warrior figure, the movie Mulan publicizes Mulan in an American way even though there is no new figure portrayed. With promotions of globalization and cultural exchange throughout the years, the story of Mulan has been retold numerous times, with her figure continuously reimagined to fit into the global trend. Disney’s recent release of another Mulan movie shows the never ceasing attraction of this woman warrior. My paper provides terminology for people to look at the new Hollywood live-action remake of Mulan. It can also be generally used on cultural productions when one culture adapts the works of another. From Northern Wei Dynasty to the 21st century, from an ancient ballad to new action movies, the story of Mulan inspired thousands of people in the past and will continue to encourage future imaginations.

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