FENG LAN

            THE FEMALE INDIVIDUAL AND THE EMPIRE:
            A HISTORICIST APPROACH TO MULAN AND KINGSTON'S WOMAN WARRIOR

PERHAPS THE BEST-KNOWN Chinese literary figure outside of China, Mulan in several recent English reconfigurations has both inspired and bewildered the American imagination. Among them, Kingston’s rewriting of the Mulan legend in the "White Tigers" chapter of The Woman Warrior is the most controversial.  The debate it generated has left a deep impression on the study of Asian American literature and transnational cultural production.  Yet critics on both sides of the debate typically de-historicize Kingston’s Mulan narrative and so preclude a careful examination of the complex connections among Kingston’s story, the Mulan of Chinese tradition, and the Communist revolution led by Mao Zedong.

Critics of Kingston’s revision deny it any historical grounding because they find in it only "distortions of the histories of China and Chinese America." In their view the revision is first of all a reckless hodgepodge of autobiography, history, and myth. As such, it "violates" the coherence of Chinese historiography and so, in the words of one Chinese American reader, "take[s] away our history, as well as our magic."  Second, because Kingston’s reconfiguration reinterprets an indigenous legend from an Orientalist perspective, it perpetuates, they argue, Western prejudices about social relations in Chinese history. Central to both charges is the belief that the original legend of Mulan—inviolable both in form and content—enshrines the essential values of Chinese culture. Thus, in Frank Chin’s well-known critique of Kingston the legend serves a Chinese heroic tradition by celebrating "the perfect Confucian individual" in "Confucian romantic love." Such a reification of a "Confucian Mulan" raises a number of issues that have not been addressed either by Kingston’s expert readers in America or by Mulan scholars in China—namely, the precise relation between the Mulan legend and the institutions of Confucian ideology, as well as the role the legend has played throughout Chinese history in helping to construct a "Confucian" vision of the Chinese individual. Both concerns are vitally important to understanding not only the Mulan legend but also Kingston’s recreation.

Kingston’s defenders are equally quick to erase history from her Mulan revision, largely because that seems to be an easy way to neutralize the criticisms of her detractors. The strategy assumes two shapes. The first is to treat Kingston’s Mulan as an American tale by completely removing its association with Chinese history. For instance, in response to Frank Chin’s charge against Kingston’s Mulan, Yan Gao insists: "Her employment of Chinese materials should be explored with an American rather than Chinese point of view, and within the realm of American literature rather than Chinese literature." But Kingston’s Mulan is hardly intelligible if it is read as an "American" tale. Especially for those who view minority experiences in America as informed chiefly by struggles with racism, a story about a girl who in male disguise leads a peasant uprising against the emperor in Beijing seems irrelevant. As a result, the second strategy employed by Kingston’s defenders is to label the story a "fantasy," a "pure product" of a fertile imagination. Thus, Sau-Ling Wong states that "the ‘White Tigers’ segment on the woman warrior is meant to be read as a fantasy, not historical reconstruction." However, reading Kingston’s Mulan story as an "ahistorical" piece is no less problematic than reading it as a "distortion" of history, for dissociating Kingston’s work from a historical framework considerably reduces the persuasiveness of its social agenda.

Indeed, we must rehistoricize Kingston’s revision of Mulan in order to locate its appropriate position in relation to the Mulan matrix, clarify its historical implications with regard to what Kingston calls "my imaginary China," and examine its ideological underpinnings. It is with these concerns that I revisit the evolution of the Mulan legend and, in that context, re-evaluate Kingston’s revision. I make two major claims. First, initially a hybrid product of multicultural interactions, the image of Mulan became a Chinese icon of heroic patriotism only after a historical process of appropriation—fueled especially by the powerful tradition of orthodox Confucian ethics—turned the folk tale to the service of an imperial hierarchy. Second, Kingston’s English rendition is a "reconstruction" of Chinese history by which she explores the nature of Chinese womanhood in terms of its potentials as well as its limitations. While severely undermining the patriarchal assumptions historically imposed upon the legend, Kingston’s revision also captures the dilemma of the Chinese female caught in the contradiction between individual pursuit and communal commitment under specific historical circumstances—a dilemma that sheds light on the shared identity of Kingston’s Mulan and the canonized "Confucian" Mulan, both of whom end up serving as the tool for the grand scheme of national salvation.