Throughout her absence from home, Fa Mu Lan views her family and village by looking into a water gourd that the old man possesses. She sees her brother taking their father’s place in the army conscription, an act of perfect filial piety—complete obedience and service to one’s parents. She also watches her own wedding ceremony, in which her parents wed her to her childhood friend, who marries her despite her absence. He, too, is conscripted into the army.
When the village families are called upon once again to send male family members for service in the army, Fa Mu Lan, having trained for fifteen years with the old couple, returns to her village to take her father’s place. Upon arriving, she is showered with glories by her family “as if they were welcoming home a son.” However, before her parents allow her to leave to take her father’s place in the army, they force her to kneel before the family’s ancestral shrine while her father uses a knife to carve a “list of grievances” into her back. Fa Mu Lan does not cry despite the pain. Should she die while fighting in battle, the list, including the oaths, names, and address of her family, will serve to remind everyone of the sacrifices she and her family made.
Fa Mu Lan’s father’s physically carving words into his daughter’s back is a shocking act that seems cruel and inhumane, yet another example of a patriarchal society that sanctions violence against women. Paradoxically, however, his actions are also a testament to the power of language. Fa Mu Lan becomes a text—literally—of written words: “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.” The ideographs, or symbols, of revenge that Fa Mu Lan’s father carves into her back transform her into a woman who is revenge incarnate—revenge made flesh. Earlier in the chapter, Kingston noted the bird that led Fa Mu Lan up into the mountains: “In the brush drawings it looks like the ideograph for ‘human,’ two black wings,” and the mountains themselves “look like the ideograph ‘mountain.’” By drawing attention to how much these ideographs—revenge, bird, and mountain—look like the very idea or objects that they represent, Kingston emphasizes how language defines experience, which otherwise would remain unrecorded—for example, No Name Woman’s life story, or Maxine Hong Kingston’s own identity as a female Chinese American.
Her back healed, and now disguised as a man, Fa Mu Lan forms an army of her own rather than fight in anyone else’s. Becoming the rallying point for her family, her village, and, eventually, the whole country, she leads her army into battle, fighting for justice and overthrowing the corrupt and morally depraved. Although she remains disguised as a man throughout her crusades, her husband recognizes her, and together they conceive a child. She hides her pregnancy by altering her armor to allow for the increased girth of her waist, and when the child is born, her husband takes it home to his family.
After overthrowing the country’s evil emperor and slaying the corrupt baron who had terrorized Fa Mu Lan’s village for years, the woman warrior returns to her village to fulfill her filial duties to her husband’s family. She declares to his parents, “Now my public duties are finished. . . . I will stay with you, doing farmwork and housework, and giving you more sons.” She has also fulfilled her filial duties to her own parents: During her absence, she did not neglect them, but rather ensured that her “mother and father and the entire clan would be living happily on the money [she] had sent them.” With these words, Fa Mu Lan, the perfect woman warrior, embraces her traditionally female Chinese moral obligations.
Kingston abruptly concludes Fa Mu Lan’s story with an ironic proclamation: “My American life has been such a disappointment.” Having encouraged us to believe that it is possible for a woman of Chinese descent to gain respect and success, she reveals a sense of betrayal in her mother’s talk-stories. She tries to please her mother by modeling herself after Fa Mu Lan, who, she acknowledges, is “the swordswoman who drives me,” but when she announces that she earned “straight A’s” in school, her mother, instead of praising her daughter, undermines her success by reminding her of “a girl who saved her village.” Again, as in “No Name Woman,” Kingston finds herself confused by the messages in yet another of Brave Orchid’s talk-stories. Recalling her sense of confusion, Kingston writes, “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.” To Kingston, who views getting straight A’s as something her parents should be proud of, her mother seems to put impossible and confusing demands on her.
What the appropriate role of a village is in relation to its individual members constantly changes throughout the memoir and is one of the major paradoxes that troubles Kingston. Because each female protagonist in The Woman Warrior interacts differently with her respective village, Kingston is unable to summarize categorically how a woman should be treated by her village, and what that individual’s responsibilities are to her fellow villagers. In “No Name Woman,” both Kingston’s aunt’s family and village ostracize her because she gets pregnant by a man who is not her husband. However, whereas we might then expect No Name Woman to reject her family and certainly her village, her separation from these two social communities is more than she can stand psychologically, and she wavers precipitously between consciousness—represented by comforting thoughts of her family—and unconsciousness—symbolized in her fear of open spaces. Kingston imagines of her aunt, “Flayed, unprotected against space, she felt pain return, focusing her body. . . . For hours she lay on the ground, alternately body and space.” No Name Woman’s desire to be contained—both physically and socially—within some structure finally drives her to seek refuge in a pigsty: “It was good to have a fence enclosing her, a tribal person alone.”
Fa Mu Lan’s relationship with her village is diametrically opposite of No Name Woman’s with hers. Returning to her home after training for fifteen years with the old couple, Fa Mu Lan is greeted by her parents “as if they were welcoming home a son”; in other words, they are ecstatically happy. The villagers, represented by two cousins of Fa Mu Lan, question where she has been during her absence, but no one takes seriously the possibility that she “went to the city and became a prostitute,” as one giggling cousin suggests. When Fa Mu Lan is finally ready to leave her village to fight the evil emperor and tyrannical barons, her departure is radically different from No Name Woman’s: The villagers present the woman warrior with gifts—including “their real gifts . . . their sons”—that honor the self-sacrifice that she is making on their behalf. Ironically, the villagers note how beautiful Fa Mu Lan is only after she disguises herself as a man; however, they at least acknowledge that this warrior is a woman dressed “in man’s fashion” when they continue referring to her by using the female pronoun “she”: “‘How beautiful you look,’ the people said. ‘How beautiful she looks.’”
Later in the chapter, as Fa Mu Lan and her army approach Peiping, the governmental seat of power, the woman warrior basks in the sight of a united Chinese population acting as one total, all-encompassing community. Although Kingston, of course, created the words she attributes to Fa Mu Lan, even she must realize that her own search for an identity as part of a larger community never will produce the pride and sense of belonging felt by Fa Mu Lan as she looks down at her people from atop a hill: “. . . 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.”
Listening to her mother’s talk-stories about women warriors, young Kingston does not even understand whether the village that Brave Orchid alludes to when she chides her daughter, “Let me tell you a true story about a girl who saved her village,” is the family village in China or the Stockton, California, community in which she and her family live. Because many immigrants considered their sojourn in America to be temporary, Kingston’s parents might have discussed returning with their family to their village in China, which would have confused the young girl trying to fit into an American culture but hearing stories only about China.
