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5 / One Heroine, Many Characters: Mulan in American Picture Books Mulan’s story is so well known and so beloved, I wanted to do what I could to preserve the heart of her story, present it honestly, while making it interesting to the widest possible audience. . . . There are many positive values youngsters can take from both the movie and book. Male or female, everybody has dreams and potential inside them. —robert d. san souci, “robert d. san souci homepage” Robert D. San Souci, author of the children’s picture book Fa Mulan: The Story of A Woman Warrior (1998) and the film story for Disney’s animated feature Mulan (1998), leads the reader to another valuable creative engagement with Mulan’s story in contemporary America.1 Writers and artists of children’s literature have reimagined this character and represented her tale in many ways.2 Although their texts arguably target young readers, they include elements for adult readers to comprehend in an attempt to appeal to adult mediators, such as parents, teachers, and librarians. Although the visualization of Mulan is not a contemporary American invention, the assorted images of her character that are portrayed in picture books and animated films in the United States since the 1990s are of particular significance in expanding the heroine’s international reputation as well as embedding new meanings into her tale through textual and visual retelling in a cross-cultural context.3 Leaving the examination of the cinematic versions of Mulan’s story for chapter 6, I focus here on children’s picture books that help foster Mulan’s iconic characterization in China and North America.4 In addition to San Souci’s work, six picture books had been published in the United States before 2008: Wei Jiang and Cheng An Jiang’s The Legend of Mu Lan: A Heroine of Ancient China (1992); Charlie Chin’s China ’s Bravest Girl: The Legend of Hua Mu Lan (1993, illustrated by Tomie Arai); Jeanne M. Lee’s The Song of Mu Lan (1995); Song Nan Zhang’s The Ballad of Mulan (1998); Janet Hardy-Gould’s Mulan (2004, illustrated by Kanako Damerum and Yuzuru Takasaki); and Gang Yi and Xiao Guo’s 124 / one heroine, many characters The Story of Mulan: The Daughter and the Warrior (2007, illustrated by Xunzhi Yin).5 All seven books are unrelated to Disney’s animated film and display different approaches to visualizing the character of Mulan and representing her story in verbal and visual narratives.6 Like earlier artists who produced illustrations and paintings to capture the character of Mulan, picture book writers and artists have the added task of transforming a literary work into visual images when they digest, modify, or rewrite her tale. “Picture books,” argues David Winslow, “are documents and witnesses which can furnish us with a guiding thread, supplementing the complementing textual and oral materials. Furthermore, they allow us to recognize and establish the continuity of traditions and to trace the directions in which they are extending” (142). Although the picture books I examine in this chapter either are written and drawn based on the Chinese folk “Ballad” or refer to it as a cultural inspiration, each distinctively alters the plot as well as Mulan’s characterization, and at times the books go well beyond the parameters provided by the poem; thus, the books react to the cultural context from which they come and implant their authors’ varied critical and political agendas. Jack Zipes’s scholarship on the social function of the fairy tale has redirected critical attention of children’s literature to cultural patterns in traditional tales and their ideological implications. Like many fairy and folk tales, Mulan’s story is elastic: its evolution reveals “a process of organic reshaping around a set of core elements in response to historical and cultural influences” (Tosi 384). The abovementioned pictorial presentations, though quite distinctive from one another in terms of textual narrative and artistic style, in general retain the “core elements” established by the “Ballad” while still realizing the imaginative potential of Mulan’s tale within the context of contemporary children’s culture. Therefore these authors and illustrators all revitalize traditional values, develop new meanings, and visualize the characters and episodes. Because these picture books are targeted primarily to children and their families, they imagine Mulan in visual languages as well as in text narratives that are accessible to young readers through highlighting, amplifying , or rewriting specific aspects. In this process, they add another layer to...

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