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Fa Mu Lan, also known as Hua Mulan or Mulan, is a folk heroine in a premodern ballad of China who has evolved into an internationally celebrated iconic female warrior. The tale of Mulan narrates the heroic deeds of Mulan, a legendary young Chinese girl who disguises herself as a man to fight for her country in place of her father to fulfill her duty as a devoted child and a loyal citizen. Due to the widespread popularity of the legend of Hua Mulan in popular culture, augmented by the Disney children’s version, Mulan is one of the most recognizable characters from the Chinese cultural tradition in the United States as well as the world in recent times. The original story of Mulan is derived from an anonymous folk song that is supposed to have emerged in China during the fourth century and was perhaps first published in a twelfth-century anthology of poems, lyrics, and folk songs.
In Chinese folktales and poetry, the legend of Hua Mulan can be traced through different versions of the legend as far back as the fourth century CE, but there is no conclusive evidence about the existence or real identity of Mulan. The story of Mulan was apparently first recorded in the sixth century in the now-lost Zhijiang’s Gujin Yuelu (Musical Records of Old and New). “The Mulan Ballad” or “The Song of Mulan,” the only extant and commonly accepted version, is said to have been composed during the Northern Dynasties period (386–581) and later anthologized in Yuefu Shiji (Collection of Music-Bureau Poems), compiled by Maoqian Guo in the twelfth century during the Song dynasty (960–1279).
The ancient classical Chinese poem known as Mulan shi, “The Song of Mulan,” or “The Ballad of Mulan” is believed to be the earliest written account of the legend of a brave girl by that name, who impersonates a young man to take her old and unfit father’s place in the army and who fights against the invaders that threaten the security of her nation. Mulan chooses to return home and to her life as a woman instead of accepting the benefits of a high official state rank offered to her by the emperor after she and her fellow soldiers had courageously defended the empire and routed the enemy. Mulan’s triumphant homecoming at the end celebrates the overt morals of the ballad—the exemplary filial piety and loyalty shown by the young heroine.
Statue of Hua Mulan, Chinese Garden, Singapore, 2012. Also known as Fa Mu Lan or simply Mulan, this figure of Chinese folklore has become an important heroine and female role-model for Americans, most especially since the release of the Disney animated feature film Mulan (1998), in which the eponymous protagonist was introduced as the most powerful of the Disney princesses. (Verdelho/Dreamstime.com)
In the original Chinese ballad, as translated by H. H. Frankel (1976), Mulan decides to serve in the army in her father’s place because she has no older brother to fulfill her father’s duty to his country. She then buys a horse, a saddle, a bridle, and a whip, the things that she needs to go to war, and bids her family goodbye before finally going to camp on the banks of a river alone. Fa Mu Lan rides in the mountains, traveling for ten thousand miles, and battles valiantly against the enemy for twelve years. After the victory, when Mulan meets the emperor who is conferring honors and gifts upon the brave soldiers, she only asks the emperor for a fast horse to take her home.
After she returns home to her family, her siblings and parents welcome her, and Mulan ceremonially removes her soldier’s clothing and changes into her feminine attire, complemented by an elaborate hairdo and makeup. Her female identity surprises her fellow soldiers, and the ballad ends as Mulan wonders about the differences between the sexes and how to tell the sexes apart. The story thus begins with Mulan’s transgression of the boundaries of her socially sanctioned gender role to satisfy the demands of her filial duty as a responsible daughter and loyalty to her country as a citizen, and concludes as the gender conflicts are reconciled with the ultimate restoration of the societal norms as Mulan sheds her identity as a valiant warrior and a national hero and takes up her mundane domestic identity as a woman again.
Many versions of the tale exist in Chinese culture as Mulan evolves, first from a local folk heroine to a national one, and then to a figure of international repute. An integral part of a tradition of heroic womanhood in premodern Chinese culture, the story of Mulan has been popularly adapted and transformed and, as such, it has undergone countless variations in folklore, prose, drama, operas, verse, and fiction, as well as cinema. But the most widespread and thorough transformation of the Mulan theme has been made in America by the Chinese diaspora. From the heroine of a Chinese folk ballad, Mulan has evolved into a transnational character as her story has been variously translated and adapted across cultural and geopolitical boundaries, and interpreted for a wide international audience.
For instance, Mulan’s tale has been reimagined as a Chinese American story of the woman warrior in Jeanne M. Lee’s The Song of Mu Lan (Front Street, 1995) and Song Nan Zhang’s The Ballad of Mulan (Pan Asian Publications, 1998), both of which are bilingual picture books for the Chinese American diaspora and their children. Chinese American writer Maxine Hong Kingston has famously used the fable of Mulan in The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood among Ghosts (Knopf, 1976); Kingston presents a contemporary version of the popular legend that reimagines the woman warrior and focuses on the relevance of the legend of Mulan for the Chinese American women of the present time rather than simply presenting a classical Chinese myth about the bravery and filial piety of a daughter. Kingston’s book tries to envisage Mulan as a viable model for Chinese American women caught between American and Chinese cultures.
The present-day recreated stories of the Mulan legend work together to construct a contemporary Chinese American tale that, on one hand, captures the cultural heritage of China acting as a socializing agent for children, and, on the other hand, conveys possibilities for women and their choices of subjective identity in the context of the Chinese American diaspora. The legend of Fa Mu Lan has been retold and reinterpreted by many authors and for many audiences. The narrative of Hua Mulan is popular as a children’s story because it is a tale of an ordinary woman’s adventure and empowerment; it also has been attractive to adults for its theme of gender crossing and the female protagonist’s unconventional decision to disguise herself as a man, transgressing the boundaries of socially and culturally defined gender roles. More recent versions for young readers as well as adults include C. C. Low and Associates’ Mulan Joined the Army (1995), published in Singapore, and Xiang Li’s Hua Mulan (1998), published in Taiwan.
Kingston, Maxine Hong (1940–)
Although the Chinese folktale of Fa Mu Lan is best known to popular American audiences through Disney’s Mulan, the deepest and most abiding Chinese American literary adaptation of key elements of this story is that of Maxine Hong Kingston in her 1976 best-seller, The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood among Ghosts. Although Kingston has been criticized by some Chinese American writers and critics for her appropriation and transformation of the source folktale, one could certainly argue that her manifestation of vital folkloric motifs in her account of a contemporary Asian American woman’s coming-of-age narrative—especially its notions of the construction of identity—is by definition both “Chinese” and “American,” is in its adaptive spirit truer to the original function of folklore than would be recitation of the source text, and is by nature more likely to attract a wide audience of Americans from all backgrounds and ethnicities.
C. Fee
A contemporary and highly popular American adaptation for children of the ancient Chinese tale is the animated feature film Mulan (1998) by the Walt Disney Company. Mulan shifts the central theme away from loyalty to the nation and filial duty, values that traditionally find resonance in Chinese culture, and instead foregrounds typically Americanized themes of rebellious individualism and of honoring one’s family that have broader appeal to an international audience, thus producing a culturally hybrid text that is neither fully Chinese nor completely American. This film about the courage and achievements of the heroine Mulan has generated multitudes of products, including picture books modeled on the Disney version of the tale and illustrated with stills from the animated film. This has made Mulan’s story not only extremely popular with a wide range of audiences but also a highly profitable commodity for the American as well as the international market. The recent reimaginings and recreations of the popular legend of the woman warrior, though sometimes castigated by critics as being commercial or hybrid, ultimately appropriate and revitalize the figure of the legendary heroine by transplanting Mulan into a new egalitarian and multicultural context, expanding the meaning and the milieu of the original version for a broader and more eclectic audience, mingling the cultural past and present reality of the Asian American community.
Sutapa Chaudhuri
See also Bok Kai Temple, Folktale, and Parade; Fortune Cookie, Origins of; Guandi; Monkey King, or Sun Wukong; Zodiac, The
Further Reading
Dong, Lan. 2011. Mulan’s Legend and Legacy in China and the United States. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.
Kwa, Shiamin, and Wilt L. Idema. 2010. Mulan: Five Versions of a Classic Chinese Legend, with Related Texts. Indianapolis: Hackett.
Mair, Victor H., and Mark Bender, eds. 2011. The Columbia Anthology of Chinese Folk and Popular Literature (Translations from the Asian Classics). New York: Columbia University Press.
Xu, Mingwu, and Tian, Chuanmao. 2013. “Cultural Deformations and Reformulations: A Case Study of Disney’s Mulan in English and Chinese.” Critical Arts: South-North Cultural and Media Studies 27 (2): 182–210.