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.
