***
Tentative
Intro:
Maxine Hong Kingston’s story
“White Tigers” is a fan fiction of the famous tale that originated from “The
Ballad of Fa Mu Lan” of a girl taking her father’s place in war. In Hong
Kingston’s version she places herself in the story and changes certain things
about it to make it suit her – she amplifies some things, downplays others, and
even adds some new parts to the story. Fan fiction is often written to boost self-esteem,
so one would think that in writing “White Tigers,” the changes that Hong
Kingston makes are to improve the character, to make her even more heroic than
the legendary Fa Mu Lan. A reader should feel a great deal of respect and awe
for such a great hero.
And
yet while reading “White Tigers” I felt no respect for this character. In fact
I found myself looking down on her, despising her at times and pitying her at
others. She did not seem a hero to me – she seemed like a puppet who did
nothing valuable or constructive on her own. So it could be possible that girls
going to war to save their families just do not impress me. However, in reading
the original “Ballad of Fa Mu Lan” my feelings were quite different. I did not
look down on, despise, or pity Fa Mu Lan – I admired her. There was something
so majestic, yet so humble, about her I found myself really aspiring to.
Clearly other people have felt that same admiration, considering that her story
has been retold and remade repeatedly, such as in the Disney movie. But “White
Tigers” was empty of that quality, of that great heroism, for me. So if I would
expect that Hong Kingston in her fan fiction would try to make the character of
Fa Mu Lan even more heroic, and yet while I was reading “White Tigers” she did
not seem like a hero to me at all, what about Hong Kingston’s writing style
made me react this way?
Radical Revision:
Maxine Hong
Kingston’s style moves that she uses to fill in the gaps in “The Ballad of Fa
Mu Lan” are what make her heroine seem less heroic than Fa Mu Lan. Some of
these moves include the lack of choices given to the narrator and her
submissive attitude towards others making choices for her, how the narrator is
treated as an object and a tool by the other characters, and how her wartime
success is only because she’s had help. Indeed, the very places in “The Ballad
of Fa Mu Lan” where Fa Mu Lan seemed the most heroic to me are the same as the
places in “White Tigers” where the narrator seemed the least heroic. If you
hold these two versions side by side and look at the similar passages, it is
apparent that the added information from Hong Kingston makes the character seem
weaker – if you strip away these additional details the character will seem
just as heroic as the original Fa Mu Lan. “White Tigers” is undoubtedly a
broken telephone retelling of “The Ballad of Fa Mu Lan” where new ideas that
were not present in the original are muddled in and the outcome leaves you
feeling entirely different. It is not as though Hong Kingston leaves out anything
crucial from “The Ballad of Fa Mu Lan” – she instead adds in new parts that
alter the experience irreversibly.
The
narrator seems like less of a hero because she is given no choices – others
make choices for her. Although she does volunteer to go to war in her father’s
place (Hong Kingston, 34) it is not as much a choice as an obligation; she has
been prepped for this her whole life, as exemplified when the narrator’s father
says “You knew from her birth she would be taken (Hong Kingston, 22). It is her
birthright so really her volunteering for her father is merely superficial. Radical Revision: However, in “The Ballad of Fa Mu Lan
she volunteers to go even though no one expects her to: “I want to buy a saddle
and a horse, and serve in the army in Father’s place” (Tzu-Yeh, 1). Notice, she
says that she wants to do this. This
is not an obligation, it is her firmly declaring that she wants to go to war.
At this same moment in “White Tigers,” however, the narrator only says “I will
take your place” (Hong Kingston, 34). It is not at all something she wants to
do. Fa Mu Lan willingly putting herself in danger to save her family – not
because she has to but because she wants to – is a far more heroic beau gest
than what the narrator of “White Tigers” pulled off. Heroes are chivalrous and
brave like Fa Mu Lan, not puny and submissive like the narrator of “White
Tigers.”
Another
way that others make choices for her is when her parents marry her off without
her consent, albeit to a childhood friend (Hong Kingston, 31). But rather than
retaliating, which she hypothetically could with her amount of training, she is
submissive and goes along with being forcibly married. Radical
Revision: While in “The Ballad of Fa Mu Lan” no one directly mentions
marrying off, in the first stanza it is hinted at in “They ask Daughter who’s
in her heart, they ask Daugher who’s on her mind” (Tzu-Yeh, 1). This passage
clearly depicts that her family is looking for a man that she is interested in
so they can marry her off. And yet instead of playing along, Fa Mu Lan
immediately shuts them down when she says “No one is on Daughter’s heart, no
one is on Daughter’s mind” (Tzu-Yeh, 1). As portrayed here, she makes the rules
and no one challenges her. If her family tried to marry her off, Fa Mu Lan
wouldn’t go along with it, but the narrator of “White Tigers” complacently
does. But it is not only that Fa Mu Lan says what she wants to say and makes
her own choices, it is also significant that she is given such a choice. They
ask her if she is thinking about a guy – they don’t tell her too. In contrast,
the family of the girl in “White Tigers” never ask her even if she likes the
guy before they marry her to him. She is not given a chance to have an opinion,
to argue. Fa Mu Lan is given these choices because there is a central sense of
respect that others have for her, something that others do not feel for the
narrator of “White Tigers.”
In
contrast with her being forced to go to battle, she is also forced to return to
being “a wife and a slave” (Hong Kingston, 20). When she gets home from battle
she says to her parents-in-law “I
will stay with you, doing farmwork and housework, and giving you more sons”
(Hong Kingston, 45). The certainty with which she uses the word “will” has the
dutiful feeling that her going to war does. She has no other options at this
point than to become a housewife, despite her victory in war. It is pretty
insulting that someone who was supposedly such a hero in war should have to
succumb to such a hapless future, yet she does not protest. Radical Revision: Fa Mu Lan does change back into her
“old-time clothes” when she gets home, but her fate is still left ambiguous
(Tzu-Yeh 5). She does not have the obligation of returning to her husband and
producing more sons. She does not have to do farmwork and housework, or if she
does have to do any of these things, Tzu-Yeh decided not to tell us. In the
very least it seems like Fa Mu Lan herself will get to choose where to go from
here, but the narrator of “White Tigers” does not get such a choice. And
although everyone else is deciding her fate for her, she never fights back. A
real hero would, because heroes make their own choices and are masters of their
own fates.
In addition to letting others make
choices for her, the narrator also seems to be less of a hero in the way she is
treated like an object/tool by others. An example of this is how no one seems
to care if she lives or dies as long as she serves her purpose, like in the
part “She meant that even if I got killed, the people could use my dead body
for a weapon” (Hong Kingston, 34). No one, even her parents, is worried whether
the narrator lives or dies as long as she serves her purpose. They look at her
as an object, as an asset, not as a human being. But also, they don’t care if
she dies as long as it doesn’t inconvenience them. This is demonstrated where the old woman says “If you go now,
you will be killed, and you’ll have wasted seven and a half years of our time”
(Hong Kingston, 32). She is not concerned about the narrator dying because she
actually cares about her, but because it would inconvenience the old woman.
Her being married off (Hong
Kingston, 31) is a less extreme form of objectification but still worth noting.
She is married off as if she is an object, or a product in a store, not a human
being with feelings and opinions of her own. So overall the narrator is
dehumanized and treated instead as a mere object, which makes her seem less
heroic because heroes should not be looked down upon, they should be looked up
to. *MIGHT NEED SOME MORE EVIDENCE FOR THIS POINT.*
Another
reason that she seems less heroic is that she is completely prepared and
equipped to go to war. Firstly, she has received state of the art training from
two old people her entire childhood. They have transformed her from the clumsy
novice she was at the beginning, “When I stepped carelessly and mussed a line,
my feet kicked up new blends of earth colors, but the old man and old woman
walked so lightly that their feet never stirred the designs by a needle” (Hong
Kingston, 21) into this graceful, agile being, “I could jump twenty feet into
the air from a standstill, leaping like a monkey over the hut” (Hong Kingston,
23). The original Fa Mu Lan, on the other hand, had absolutely no preparation,
and was thrust into battle – and survived – as the clumsy novice the narrator
of “White Tigers” was as a child.
Not
only was she better prepared, but the narrator of “White Tigers” also had more
resources, like a perfect horse with a perfect saddle (Hong Kingston, 35) and
her own army (Hong Kingston, 36). Fa Mu Lan, meanwhile, does not have her own
army to defend and support her, and must buy a cheap horse and saddle from
market rather than having hers miraculously gifted to her (Tzu-Yeh, 2). Indeed,
it is a recurring theme that the narrator of “White Tigers” is just given
things that Fa Mu Lan actually had to work for. Another example is the magical
weapons that she masters during training and brings with her to war, such as “I
could point at the sky and make a sword appear, a silver bolt in the sunlight,
and control its slashing with my mind” (Hong Kingston, 33). She literally has a
magical indestructible sword, with which she foils giants and other foes. As
far as we know, Fa Mu Lan had to deal with whatever makeshift weapons she could
find, and yet she survived the war. It seems far less of an achievement that
the narrator of “White Tigers” survived the war considering that she had so
much help, whereas Fa Ma Lan seems more heroic for surviving war singlehandedly
with no experience. Heroes are people who are special, who work hard so that
they can do what ordinary people cannot. Yet any person given the resources and
training that the girl was given could probably survive the war. So there
really is nothing special, and by extension nothing heroic, about her.
Going
off of the idea of her not being special, she may seem special while in battle,
but once she returns home she takes up “farmwork and housework” (Hong Kingston,
45), very mundane, average tasks. While at war she did seem special in that she
was the general of the army that defeated many opponents and unseated the
tyrannical emperor to replace him with one of their own, when you think about
it all of her success came from other people. She would not have gone to war if
it hadn’t been for the pressure of her family, and without her training,
equipment, and army, she wouldn’t have lasted the night. Heroes have something
special about them that is not material, that is beneath the surface. Yet strip
the narrator of everything superficial and she is no one, no one at all. We
know nothing about her interests and hobbies, about who she is, about what
makes her special. Aside from a few bizarre personal details like those about
her period, we only know about her what the other characters in the book know
about her. There is nothing special about her that is not skin-deep, but
everything about Fa Mu Lan is special – her heroic nature in taking the place
of her dad, her singlehandedly surviving the war, etc. And yet we know less about
her – the storytelling is far vaguer than that of “White Tigers.”
Tentative
Conclusion:
Furthermore,
the reason why the narrator in “White Tigers” seemed less heroic than the
original Fa Mu Lan whom Hong Kingston is developing upon is because of the way
Hong Kingston fills in the gaps in the tale. If her intention was to create a
more fully fleshed-out character, Hong Kingston only partially succeeds; we are
given more information about the character as we watch her transition from
childhood to adulthood, and yet this information comes mainly from other
characters – we still get very little about the character herself, what she
likes, what she wants, etc. What we are given only serves to weaken and
dehumanize her. Admittedly, “The Ballad of Fa Mu Lan” is very vague and one
could do a lot with it, so Hong Kingston could’ve easily gone in and made her
version the even more likeable, heroic, admirable figure. But she didn’t – she
creates a character who is a tool in the aspirations of others. As far as why she
does it this way, the clues may lay buried in the Afterword, where Hong
Kingston explains how growing up, girls were given no opportunities to do
something meaningful. They were looked down upon and objectified. Her culture
treats women awfully, and “The Ballad of Fa Mu Lan” is one of the most
deep-rooted parts of her culture. So maybe it is possible that her motive can
be summed up in the phrase near the beginning of her narrative “She said I
would grow up a wife and a slave, but she taught me the song of the warrior
woman, Fa Mu Lan” (Hong Kingston, 20). Maybe Hong Kingston is criticizing the
unrealistic story she has been told, how it makes girls of her backgrounds wish
for things they can never obtain: heroism, glory, pride. She could be
theorizing that the only way Fa Mu Lan could have completed such a feat is if
others had gotten her there – an achingly cynical view. We can never know if
this was her reason or if it was something else, but nevertheless, she
reimagines Fa Mu Lan into someone a lot less heroic. NEED TO WORK ON
CONCLUSION.
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