Mulan’s Legend and Legacy in China and the United States by Lan Dong (review)

The figure of Mulan, the young Chinese girl who takes her father’s place in the military by disguising herself as a man, has become one of the most recognizable characters from the Chinese cultural tradition. Through an examination of Chinese ballads and history, Chinese American novels, children’s picture books and animated features, the book traces its repeated transformations as it moves from historical China to the contemporary United States.

Dong’s book parses the meaning of Mulan’s Chinese origins through an exploration of a Chinese female heroic tradition represented by the many women who served in military capacities and were celebrated as female heroes. It makes the compelling argument that the heroism demonstrated by each of these women “is still well defined within the Confucian doctrine because her conduct consistently adheres to such core principles as loyalty or filial piety or both,” making it “possible for a woman to disrupt social norms by crossing the boundaries defining gender roles without incurring severe punishment” (13). Such an argument intervenes in scholarly discourse that defines Chinese heroism in popular culture in overwhelmingly male terms, such as John Christopher Hamm’s Paper Swordsmen: Jin Yong and the Modern Chinese Martial Arts Novel and Stephen Teo’s Chinese Martial Arts Cinema: The Wuxia Tradition.

This historical backstory on a female Chinese heroic tradition provides context for later transformations in Chinese American cultural production. Dong sees Chinese American writer Maxine Hong Kingston’s treatment of the figure in her novel The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts as another phase of the transformation of Mulan within the United States. Kingston seeks to create a viable model for Chinese American women caught between American and Chinese cultures. While the historical antecedents and previous literary versions of Mulan negotiate Confucian values using a Chinese female heroic tradition, Dong argues that Kingston ultimately casts the warrior aside, viewing her as ineffective for the contemporary Chinese American woman. The inability for Mulan to function as warrior in a contemporary context seems to contradict her multivalent origins in the Chinese heroic and historical tradition. For Kingston, the woman warrior represents a phase through which the Mulan character passes on her way to a more effective way of dealing with her environment.

A transnational feminist lens comes more to bear in the discussion of Disney’s treatment of Mulan in animated form. Dong argues that Disney’s Mulan sacrifices elements central to her character in the Chinese source material, such as seeking justice, in order to appeal to a global audience. Dong suggests such efforts to make a cross-cultural film, such as including iconic images such as The Great Wall of China, are superficial at best because they use clichéd elements of Chinese culture. Such choices fail to resonate with Chinese audiences who may “interpret the film as an imperialistic appropriation and distortion of Chinese culture” and ultimately “presents a hybrid product that is neither Chinese nor American” (173–4).

In mapping the convoluted trajectory of the Mulan figure, this book adds significantly to transnational American studies by showing the necessity of knowledges of both American and Chinese cultures for the hybrid figure.