Having reclaimed the discarded memory of her aunt by telling her story in “No Name Woman,” Kingston continues her search for a Chinese-American identity in a more assertive and positive tone in “White Tigers,” which relates the heroic struggle of Fa Mu Lan, one of the women warriors from whom the memoir gets its title.
Whereas the previous chapter begins with an entreaty for silence, “White Tigers” confidently proclaims that many successes are possible for women and, more specifically, for “Chinese girls.” Prominent among the many talk-stories Kingston heard while growing up is one involving a woman warrior accomplished in martial arts, a story that Kingston narrates in the chapter’s first paragraph as a segue between No Name Woman’s history and the tale of Fa Mu Lan. The description of this woman’s “combing her hair one morning” recalls how Kingston wanted to believe that No Name Woman “combed individuality into her bob.” Also, the comment, “Perhaps women were once so dangerous that they had to have their feet bound,” evokes the implied threat in Kingston’s mother’s telling her daughters that they should be glad that they were not forced to have their feet bound when they were seven years old, and foreshadows the later incident in “White Tigers” in which an evil baron’s wives, once freed from the cruelly inhumane bandages used to wrap their feet, become fierce women warriors themselves.
For most of this chapter, Kingston relates the talk-story of Fa Mu Lan, the woman-warrior heroine about whom she learned as a child. She blends aspects of the Chinese legend of Fa Mu Lan with other myths stemming from Eastern philosophy and religion. Some of the talk-story’s images that appear most extraordinary or fanciful, such as people and swords flying through the air, are based on Chinese popular culture and folklore; Kingston saw these images depicted in Chinese movies while she was growing up in Stockton, California.
Kingston’s talk-story about Fa Mu Lan is derived from a classical Chinese folk story about a woman named Mu-lan. Anonymously written in the fifth or sixth century by a Chinese poet, “The Ballad of Mu-lan” sketchily details how Mu-lan, about whose deeds many different versions have since been composed, fights in place of her father when he is drafted into the emperor’s army. After the war ends, Mu-lan returns home to her family and resumes her normal life.
The scarcity of detail in the many versions of Mu-lan’s story is markedly different than in Kingston’s revision of the tale. For example, one version of “The Ballad of Mu-lan” begins with the folk heroine volunteering to fight in place of her father, whereas Kingston details Fa Mu Lan’s education as a woman warrior; Fa Mu Lan has an older brother who replaces his father in the first round of army conscription, but Mu-lan has no older brother so must go in place of her father when the army first drafts him; and Kingston’s woman warrior fights against the emperor, but Mu-lan fights for him.
The greatest similarity between Mu-lan and Kingston’s Fa Mu Lan is that each heroine returns home after fighting and assumes her traditionally female duties. In one version of “The Ballad of Mu-lan,” when the folk heroine, who is weaving at the beginning of the poem, comes home from fighting, the first thing she does is remove her “wartime gown” and put her “old-time clothes” back on, an act that symbolizes that she will resume her duties as a daughter in the household. In Kingston’s talk-story, in which Fa Mu Lan marries and has a son, the woman warrior conforms to Chinese custom by going to live with her husband in his family’s home. Kneeling at her parents-in-law’s feet, she tells them, “I will stay with you, doing farmwork and housework, and giving you more sons.”
Whether or not Kingston personally sees herself as Fa Mu Lan has been hotly debated in recent criticism. Is she the woman warrior? Much of the confusion occurs because Kingston initially believes that she first heard the Fa Mu Lan story only after she became an adult, but then she remembers that she and her mother used to sing about the woman warrior when she was yet a child. “After I grew up,” Kingston writes, “I heard the chant of Fa Mu Lan, the girl who took her father’s place in battle. Instantly, I remembered that as a child I followed my mother about the house, the two of us singing about how Fa Mu Lan fought gloriously and returned alive from war to settle in the village.”
Also adding to the confusion surrounding just how much Kingston personally identifies with Fa Mu Lan is Kingston’s use of the subjunctive mood—“would”—as the narration transitions from her remembering hearing the talk-story as a child to the actual tale itself, which is told from the first-person “I” perspective of Fa Mu Lan. This narrative technique of using the subjunctive mood begins with Kingston’s recalling how her mother told the young Kingston that she would grow up to be a wife and slave, but she rejects these roles and instead promises, “I would have to grow up a warrior woman.” This promise is then immediately followed by the transitional section that begins, “The call would come from a bird that flew over our roof,” which signals a change in who is narrating the story: “our roof” seems to refer to Kingston and her mother’s house, but “The call would come from a bird” begins Fa Mu Lan’s story. Only after the old couple on top of the mountain asks Fa Mu Lan if she has eaten yet, and she replies that she already has, does it become clear that the persona of Kingston appears for the last time. After Kingston breaks into the narration at this point and says in a child’s pouting voice, “No I haven’t. . . . I’m starved. Do you have any cookies? I like chocolate chip cookies,” she transitions this modern-day childlike voice into the long-ago voice of Fa Mu Lan, who was seven years old when she began her training as a woman warrior.
The legendary Fa Mu Lan remembers being led by a bird through brambles and over rocks. The narrative then changes to the present tense: Fa Mu Lan finally reaches the summit of a mountain, atop of which stands a thatched hut. There, an old man and an old woman, who represent ultimate wisdom and enlightenment, greet her. They offer to teach her to be a warrior if she will stay with them for fifteen years, but the choice is hers: Either she can return home to pull sweet potatoes in the fields with the rest of her family, or she can become a young woman warrior who will “avenge [her] village” and “recapture the harvests that the thieves have taken.” “You can be remembered by the Han people for your dutifulness,” the old woman assures her. Fa Mu Lan gladly agrees to stay with the old couple and so spends the next fifteen years undergoing intensive martial arts training in mental and physical activities and disciplines.
The seventh year of Fa Mu Lan’s training culminates in a test in which she must demonstrate her survival skills. The old couple leads her—blindfolded—to the mountains of the white tigers, where they abandon her to seek her own way back to their hut, which she eventually finds. Most notable among the many episodes of Fa Mu Lan’s ordeal is one in which a white rabbit sacrifices itself for Fa Mu Lan’s nourishment. On the brink of despair because she is famished, Fa Mu Lan builds a fire to warm herself and is joined by the white rabbit, which hops close to the woman warrior, sitting next to the fire. Fa Mu Lan resists killing the rabbit, but the animal freely jumps into the flames and turns into meat, “browned just right.” “I ate it,” Fa Mu Lan explains, “knowing the rabbit had sacrificed itself for me. It made me a gift of meat.” This important episode, which symbolizes Fa Mu Lan’s attaining enlightenment by refusing selflessly to kill the rabbit, which in turn sacrifices itself for Fa Mu Lan, parallels a similar mythical ordeal attributed to Buddha, the venerated Eastern mystic who preached self-enlightenment. During a period of testing in which the starving Buddha achieved nirvana only after setting aside all thoughts of personal comfort and hunger, a white rabbit self-immolated itself to feed the hungry man.
For the next eight years, Fa Mu Lan acquires adult wisdom through a training process in “dragon ways.” According to traditional Chinese myth, dragons—a metaphor for nature, including the problems and paradoxes in life—encompass the whole world: “The dragon lives in the sky, ocean, marshes, and mountains; and the mountains are also its cranium . . . and sometimes the dragon is one, sometimes many.” However, the old couple tells Fa Mu Lan, “You have to infer the whole dragon from the parts you can see and touch.” Because dragons are too immense to be seen in their entirety, only by understanding their individual parts can the woman warrior grasp their totality.
Getting to know the different parts of the world as represented by dragons enables Fa Mu Lan to face difficult situations. “I learned to make my mind large,” she states, “as the universe is large, so that there is room for paradoxes.” In other words, she learns to broaden her mind in order to accept the contradictions in life. And, of course, reconciling cultural paradoxes is what Kingston herself is seeking by writing The Woman Warrior: She integrates her mother’s talk-stories—and her own versions of these same tales—into her identity as a first-generation Chinese American and, perhaps more significantly, as a female Chinese American who is not limited to the subservient gender-biased position that Chinese patriarchal society traditionally demanded of its women.
