Episode 173: Mulan (with Jeannette Ng)
/This week we’re joined by Jeannette Ng, who is kind enough to walk us through the multitude of Mulan stories that span centuries. We discuss cross-dressing in Chinese literature, the political influences of the story, and Mulan’s importance in the Chinese diaspora.
Content Warning: This episode contains conversations about or mentions of cannibalism, war, nationalism, death, suicide, child death, patriarchy, misogyny, social discord/political movements, and sickness/illness.
Guest
Jeannette Ng is originally from Hong Kong but now lives in Durham, UK. Her MA in Medieval and Renaissance Studies fed into an interest in medieval and missionary theology, which in turn spawned her love for writing gothic fantasy with a theological twist. She used to sell costumes out of her garage. She runs live roleplay games, performs hair wizardry and sometimes has opinions on the internet, including in Foreign Policy.
She has won the Astounding for Best New Writer in 2019 and the Sydney J Bounds Award (Best Newcomer) in the British Fantasy Awards 2018. You can find out more about her work by visiting her website or following her on Twitter.
Housekeeping
- Recommendation: This week, Julia recommends Descendant of the Crane by Joan He! Buy a copy and see our new lists of previous recommendations, guest books, and more at spiritspodcast.com/books
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Transcript
Amanda:
Welcome to Spirits Podcast, a boozy dive into mythology, legends and folklore. Every week, we pour a drink and learn about a new story from around the world. I'm Amanda.
Julia:
And, I'm Julia.
Amanda:
And, this is episode 173, Mulan, with Jeannette Ng.
Julia:
Oh, gosh. Jeannette provided such interesting insight into the Mulan story that I just can't imagine anyone else telling it to us, so I'm really, really glad that we had her on.
Amanda:
Yeah. Sometimes, there is a guest who I just want to listen to and not say anything because, then, they can't talk anymore. And, this was definitely one of those, where I was just like, "Ah. I want to do so much reading." I have so many books on my list now. It's amazing.
Julia:
Yeah. Absolutely. And I want to get us into the episode as soon as possible, Amanda, so let's hit our usual stuff, and start by thanking our new patrons.
Amanda:
Yes. Adam, Raven, Lady Gerbassio, Patricia, Heather, Bobby, Katy and Alexander, thank you for joining. Welcome. We appreciate you. We support you. We think you are beautiful and wonderful.
Julia:
And we feel very similarly about our supporting producer level patrons, Philip, Landon, Nicky, Tyree, Meghan, Deborah, Skyla, Molly, Samantha, Sammy, Neal, Jessica, and Phil Fresh.
Amanda:
And, our legend level patrons, Kylo the Husky, Francis, Clara, Lacy, Brittany, Josie, Kylie, Morgan, Beam Me Up, Scotty, Audra, Necrophancy, Mark, Mr. Falk, Sarah, and Jack Murray.
Julia:
All of you are so wonderful. You deserve people to tell epic poems about you for centuries to come.
Amanda:
Ah. So nice, Julia. And, can you remind us of the delicious cocktail you made?
Julia:
I used a sesame oil infused bourbon that I made at home for Jake and I. Again, this is one of the few brown liquors I can actually manage to drink nowadays. And it was super easy to make. If you're one of our patrons, I'm going to share the recipe of how to make a sesame-oil-infused bourbon with you as part of our recipe cards. I think you're really going to enjoy it.
Amanda:
Absolutely. I feel like, as I level up my cocktail making, adding fats to cocktails is sort of that's the next level. Whether it's egg white or butter washing the glass. So good.
Julia:
Yeah. Fat washing is so interesting with the different liquors. I really want to get more into it.
Amanda:
Yeah. Shaker and spoon. Very good way to do that.
Julia:
Great.
Amanda:
And, Julia, I think you also have a recommendation for us this week.
Julia:
I've been reading, and it feels like a really perfect pairing to go with our Mulan episode, The Descendant of the Crane by Joan He. It is extremely good. I bought it when we were at the Ripped Bodice in LA. And, honestly, it was fantastic. Really, really enjoy it. It's a murder mystery, and there's also a little bit of magic, and there's a little bit of romance. It's great.
Amanda:
Oh. That sounds amazing. And, I also want to recommend, if you are looking for more content, more fun, lighthearted, get your mind off of things-type podcast to listen to, you can always join the Multicrew for just $5, and get a new weekly podcast from Multitude. Head, Heart, Gut is our weekly friendly debate show. And we just wrapped up a fast and furious round which was extremely good and very fun to participate in. So, you can learn more about it at multicrew.club.
Julia:
Check it out. It is an absolute blast. And if you're also looking for more content, you can join our Patreon. You can get bonus content for as little as $1 per episode. And, that is at patreon.com/spiritspodcast.
Amanda:
We really appreciate everybody who supports us, whether that's as a member of the Patreon, of the Multicrew or just sharing spirits with your friends. All of these are material ways to help us out and make sure that we can keep doing this as our jobs. So thank you. We love you all. Be well. And for now, enjoy Episode 173, Mulan, with Jeannette Ng.
Amanda:
We are joined today for a rollicking discussion of Mulan by Jeannette Ng, who is a speculative fiction novelist and award-winning author, and just a fabulous person on Twitter and the Internet. And we're so excited to be joined by you. Hello.
Jeannette:
Hello. It's a pleasure to be here and talk about my favorite Chinese folk tale.
Amanda:
I'm sorry to recite your accomplishments to you.
Jeannette:
I just said "Chinese folk tale." And, that's the trap, because it's not.
Amanda:
Oh. There we go. Let's start there.
Jeannette:
Exactly. The most exciting thing about Mulan or the most interesting thing about Mulan for me, starting at the beginning. Everyone knows the story of Mulan because of the Disney movie. Girl disguised as a boy joins the Army because her father's too sick and has an injured leg. She's got no brothers. She goes to disguise in the Army and returns in glory and there's a ballad of Mulan, which is the oldest known version and that dates back to round about 400 AD and the magical thing about it for me, is because I knew it off my heart from a teenager, and it's always taught to me as a Chinese folk tale.
Jeannette:
Ask anyone, it's most obviously Chinese. And a lot of discourse right now is about its inherent Chinese-ness. But the ballad of Mulan is not a Chinese, and certainly not a Han Chinese story. Mulan is Turkic. She serves a Khan and not an Emperor in the ballad and it says so, [foreign language 00:05:18]. Her trappings of her culture, they are all of a Turkic origin.
Jeannette:
When she goes to war, she buys a horse and a saddle and a bridle and the emphasis of horse culture, for example. That's the kind of thing about Mulan that fascinates me the most, it has been sort of co-opted. And, admittedly, co-opted many hundreds of years ago, into and has become this Chinese story. And become a very nationalistic Chinese story.
Jeannette:
Over time, the way the story evolved is very much... there was as much to tell about the changes to the story of Mulan over time, because there were so many versions as there are to the story itself. Which is a very simple one, because the details do differ in various versions.
Julia:
Could you walk us through the beats of the story that tend to show up in all of the different versions, rather than just the variations?
Jeannette:
So the most basic story of Mulan is this, is the story of the Khan and sometimes later versions, the Emperor is summoning an Army. There is war and every household has to bring a male soldier to join the Army. They go to war and she goes into disguise and she comes back. Then you start going into the details like who she is fighting. That changes from version to version.
Jeannette:
Mulan's own culture and ethnicity changes. Sometimes she's fighting with exotic, exciting names like Leopard Skin. Sometimes she's fighting the [Xian Nu 00:07:05]. Sometimes she's fighting the Tibetans. Sometimes it doesn't even really say who she's fighting. It's very ambiguous who she's fighting and that's really interesting to me. And she's been set in very different periods and obviously, there's quite an interesting revolving cast.
Jeannette:
During the height of bound feet, there are versions of Mulan where she unbinds her feet to go into the Army.
Julia:
Wow.
Amanda:
Whoa.
Jeannette:
And what it's promising to the audience that she's got a secret recipe that she can make her feet small again, after the war. It will be fine. She'll get married.
Amanda:
That is so interesting.
Jeannette:
That's in a 16th Century play and what's really exciting about that one is how remarkably, it's kind of very sexual in a way, where there's a lot of sexual tension around the treat of being in the Army and that's also the version where she marries her neighbor's son. So the basic beats are very simple and it's in the variations where it kind of gets strange.
Jeannette:
Even cross-dressing itself is quite a common story beat in a lot of Chinese folklore and I think one of the very interesting things to me about Mulan is European, "Western" culture has this idealization of the warrior. You have the class of people, the knights and the warrior king character in King Arthur type stories. The idea of masculinity being bound up in martial pursuits is very fundamental to that idea. And it follows very naturally that women warriors would be a sort of egalitarian feminist take of we can be warriors, too. We can attain this highest mark of society.
Jeannette:
So there are kind of all these threads of Mulan that I'd like to explore with you, including stuff like how cross-dressing is a very common beat in Chinese drama across the centuries and Chinese stories across the centuries, but and this is kind of the bit that I find very exciting, is that the ones authored by women, that are told by women, what women like, that are found in the Nüshu cache of stories.
Jeannette:
So Nüshu is a script that only women use in Jiangyong County. It's a wonderful, really unique bit of Chinese culture. Basically the women of that county have a writing system of their very own and it is phonetic and it is notably different to so-called man's writing.
Julia:
I wish you could see my face right now, because this is so interesting. I love this. It's so fascinating.
Jeannette:
And it's done things like a [inaudible 00:09:54] credit, it showed up in an episode of Sherlock once.
Julia:
I don't know why I didn't know that.
Jeannette:
Obviously, we have that cache of stories because they write to each other letters and they write these books that they basically give to each other when the get married. Basically they're scrap books, in a way. And one of the things they do, because it's a county that produces a lot of needlework and embroidery and that's one of the things they produce, women spend a lot of time in the manufacture of clothes and embroidery and so forth and they sing stories to each other.
Jeannette:
So then we have a cache of stories which basically the ones that they copied out, that they liked to repeat to themselves. We have a very interesting cross section of the stories that basically these women, real women liked. And very much, to the exclusion of men, whilst obviously if they read it out loud, men would understand it. It was primarily used by women.
Amanda:
It makes a lot more sense now why there is a Mulan show that, as you wrote in your wonderful article, has half to do with needlepoint. Half the episodes are just about needlepoint and that seems to have a lot more resonance than when I originally read it and was like, "I'm here for it, but that seems a little unexpected to me."
Jeannette:
Well, the thing about this corpus is its absence of women warriors. It has two stories of female characters, ballads basically about women who basically changed their gender. One is the classic Butterfly lovers where [Ju An Tai 00:11:25] goes to school, she disguises herself as a scholar, she meets her rue love and they die tragically because they can't get married and they become butterflies. It's super tragic. It's probably the most important piece of Chinese folklore and it's also gay as fuck.
Amanda:
Yes, it is.
Jeannette:
Since obviously, they fall in love.
Amanda:
We covered it on the show with a very good friend of mine, Linda. And it was incredible.
Jeannette:
Exactly.
Amanda:
I just feel like I know beat for beat, everything she told us because it just was seared into my memory. It's so dramatic, it's so extra.
Jeannette:
And there's another one, which is about a woman who becomes very holy, doing this Buddhist meditation and sutra's and basically she dies and she comes back as a man. He aces all his exams and then he asks the emperor to help him locate the husband and children of his previous life. They get back together and they basically disappear together to refine the teachings of Buddha and read and become transcendent beings.
Amanda:
Sounds great.
Julia:
What a life.
Jeannette:
But the thing about it, again, is that the view of escape isn't to enter into that martial world and my favorite saying whenever I talk about Mulan is, in terms of Chinese culture at least, is there's a saying that you don't make nails out of good iron, and you don't make soldiers out of good men.
Jeannette:
The military is not, in at least in the eyes of Chinese scholars and the Chinese literati and therefor Chinese dominant culture, is not seen as a glorious, good pursuit for a lot of its history. There are exceptions, because there's a lot of that history and obviously, the culture is more complicated than I'm saying. But it certainly doesn't have that same martial tradition, like the knight cast type things, that European stories are valorized, that kind of martial world.
Jeannette:
It's quite interesting to me that we have, for example, these female courtesan poets writing during the Ming Dynasty, the late Ming, the Fourth Ming and so forth, they wrote a lot of poems. They were very active in the South of China and they became quite celebrated figures and they wrote plays and when they write stories about people who were women or assigned female at birth, since some of them read as very trans, they don't write about people who become warriors.
Jeannette:
They write about people who become scholars, who pass exams, who prove their worth by scholarly pursuits. I find that kind of fascinating.
Julia:
What about it do you love?
Jeannette:
It's kind of that contradiction of how European or even the sort of standard stereotype of how we view Mulan as this story of liberation that she assumes a male identity and it's this story of transcending the barriers of gender. That she attains this glory. And in some ways I don't think that overall, Chinese tradition is not to see it as a story of liberation. It is a story of duty.
Jeannette:
Thought duty to what does change and that brings me innately round to talk about how Mulan's motivations do shift over time. Where at first, they're very rooted in filial piety to her father and the loyalty to her father and keep him safe so that he doesn't have to go to war. Over time, it shifts to a more nationalistic protecting the nation of family, the borders, the emperor, service to the emperor is not just an obligation, but is something that she's truly passionate about. And that kind of dovetails into the rise of nationalism and that is a very interesting trajectory for a character as well.
Amanda:
You've written about Mulan as a nationalizing project and I think it is so fascinating to tease out the ways in which... what exactly is the moral of the story? What exactly is the thing that we are valorizing about this character?
Jeannette:
Yes. No, that was the other thing. The animated Mulan in the song, Bring Honor to Us All, in the Mandarin version... I'm sorry this is very obscure, but in the Mandarin version, you can cut this.
Amanda:
No, I love it.
Julia:
We live in the obscure. We're here for it.
Jeannette:
I bring honor to us all, this is the one that was presumably, that was in mainland China, there is a line which in English is basically men go bare arms and that's their duty and women bear sons, basically. And in the Mandarin version, it's men become ministers and attend court and women have children.
Julia:
Interesting.
Jeannette:
It's reflecting that scholarly tradition of how the greatest attainment isn't to go to war.
Julia:
Wow.
Amanda:
That is so interesting.
Jeannette:
Obviously, in the English version, it's acting as a foreshadowing for all the stuff that's to come, whereas the Mandarin version is like, "No, we're not doing that. Not here."
Amanda:
Yeah, but also I think undergirds U.S. values of service and duty and a militaristic protection. Obviously not for the U.S., but there is that background there.
Jeannette:
I think the militaristic heroism is quite important and it's a bit of a Chinese thing that heroes in stories, and people writing in general, love using the past as exemplars. So they would say, "I'm doing this because it is like, insert famous person here, they did this. And they were a good person, so I'm being like them and this validates my actions," basically.
Jeannette:
And in a lot of the different versions of Mulan, who she compares herself to in her monologues shows you what qualities she's emphasizing. So very often, she will compare herself to [Ti Ying 00:17:52], who is a woman whose father was being done for treason or something, was to be executed and she volunteers to be executed on his behalf.
Jeannette:
I think that's part of the idea of war in some of these stories, which is, some of these versions, view war as a choice of basically death. So the trading of yourself for your father to go to war. It's not about the valor, the glory of the fight. It's about they need an extra body and you will do.
Amanda:
Yeah, filial piety to the absolute extreme.
Jeannette:
Yeah, well there are many, many stories of filial piety. The cutting off your own thigh to feed your parents is always a favorite.
Amanda:
That's metal. There's no other way to describe it.
Julia:
Pretty metal.
Jeannette:
It's one of the things that Chinese history [inaudible 00:18:43] quite well documented and having criminal laws, had a lot of laws against cannibalism because the stories are filled [inaudible 00:18:52], that one of the things that would core you is the flesh of your child.
Julia:
Ooh, okay.
Amanda:
Not great.
Julia:
Dark.
Jeannette:
So there are... various dynasties have laws emphasizing how you shouldn't eat your children.
Julia:
Probably a good rule, in general.
Amanda:
But it makes sense in context. It's not just people are making wild decisions. With context, is some amount of understanding.
Jeannette:
Usually it's cutting off a piece of your child rather than murdering them, by the way.
Amanda:
Yes, good.
Jeannette:
If that makes it any better, I have no idea.
Amanda:
You're not murdering a child, so a little bit?
Jeannette:
Though there is one where one of the parables of filial piety does involve a man basically saying, "I only have one mother, I can always have more children." It's in the height of famine, and he chooses to save his mother instead of his child.
Amanda:
Wow.
Jeannette:
Exemplar filial piety. He is kind of right. One of them is slightly more replaceable than the other in very specific-
Amanda:
That's the thing, though. It's like on the one hand it is, #justfilialpiety things, but also you see the logic. People are not cartoon villains. Even though something we may see now as horrifying or something that we would never choose, people are making real choices with the options in front of them. I don't condone it, but I understand it.
Jeannette:
There's a Bannerman version and this is a fragment rather than a full version. It ends shortly after she arrives in the Army. It's also the version with what is probably the ancestor of sexy Li Chang, because it's one where the general is very handsome and they kind of flirt, depending on how you read it.
Amanda:
Listen, that's enough.
Jeannette:
But he's notably young and handsome, rather than in other versions, where he's also sur-named Li, but he is not young and handsome. And, in fact, is best friends with her grandfather.
Amanda:
That's also cool.
Julia:
Yeah. Just as long as you're not romancing your grandfather's friends.
Jeannette:
The Bannerman version has her basically argue with her father about the validity of warrior women stories that she has heard in the past and basically he dismisses them as fantasies written by bards. That they're all basically bullshit. And she shouldn't try to emulate them. She argues quite the opposite, that people can, women herself, can do remarkable things. And that she will.
Jeannette:
It's quite amusing in terms of the argue of historical precedent.
Amanda:
It is. It's very much like a legal argument, like just because a decision was made, or a story exists, doesn't necessarily mean that it's worth emulating. But also, who's to say? You can choose the things that best align with what you want to do and hearing that meta-textual acknowledgement in a story is so fun and validating for me.
Julia:
Yeah, I was going to say it's very interesting that it's self-referential in a way.
Amanda:
Yeah.
Jeannette:
So here is a line from it. This is her father saying, "Just look at the women of the world. Who of they have ever been like the scarlet thread maiden? Most of such tales found in books are merely the fabrications of writers."
Amanda:
And therefore bullshit? Come on.
Jeannette:
Yeah, [crosstalk 00:22:13] bullshit. So she retorts like, "Are the stories of women warriors all untrue?" And then they kind of, you deny the ancients and say their lies. It's a really, really fun conversation and it's a real shame that this one isn't complete, because it's one of the most interesting ones I've read, because it also has things like her mother arguing that the war is just created by evil councilors, saber rattling in the borderlands.
Amanda:
Dang.
Jeannette:
So it's not about, that war isn't about aggressive, arrogant neighboring barbarians attacking. It's because ministers have too much time on their hands.
Julia:
Very 1984. I'm into it.
Jeannette:
Yeah, and it's really odd because that is not one I had specifically seen before, but she's very often comparing herself to people who basically die for their fathers. Or, choose to die for their fathers even though the emperor basically makes it not happen or their filial piety is-
Amanda:
Proven.
Jeannette:
... is rewarded and they don't have to die. So I think that's again, it's back to that point where I'm making, whether or not this is a story of liberation versus a story of sacrifice. I think those two parts are somewhat at odds with each other because sacrifice implies eradication of the self. It is an act of selflessness. And on a thematic level it works counter to the idea of liberation, where you are creating and claiming the self.
Jeannette:
I think that's the paradox of Mulan as the legacy of the character has been left to us, that you have these two aspects to her.
Amanda:
That's such a powerful duality, too. Because I feel like so much of the human experience is choosing between the two or weighing that scale. Which one do you prioritize over the other at any given moment?
Jeannette:
What's also quite interesting is given how the [inaudible 00:24:28] of filial piety to nationalism, how her story is often one that people use to talk about nationalism, dynasties, warfare across time. The classic is, of course, the Tang Dynasty rewrite of the Song of Mulan where the theme is basically the shaming of men for not being as good as this paltry woman. If she could do it, why can't you?
Jeannette:
So it's emphasis is less on women turn out to be awesome. It's much more, "Well, women are obviously terrible. But if this one can do it, why can't you?" And that kind of rhetoric... it's not unique to this one Tang Dynasty poem. There are plenty of... it's a rhetoric that shows up whenever people are trying to shame men into volunteering for the Army. It's in a lot of WWI posters across the world, for example.
Amanda:
Women can work in factories, why can't you go to battle?
Jeannette:
Exactly. So it's very much the same tone of rhetoric. The Tang Dynasty is also one where she wears a turban, notably. I have a sort of chart here that I'm skimming through.
Amanda:
Love it. On my God.
Julia:
Love a chart.
Amanda:
This is the best thing I've ever heard.
Jeannette:
I've got nine versions here and they're not all of them.
Amanda:
Incredible. [crosstalk 00:25:51].
Jeannette:
And fortunately, it's the case where you just continue finding new versions. And I emphasize Mulan is not the most popular bit of folklore.
Amanda:
I would not say that's unfortunate, at all.
Jeannette:
You've got the Tang Dynasty version of [Chu Ng Meng 00:26:06] and you move into... you've got a lot of early teen novels which are, for example, trying to make the point about... they're basically trying to subtweet the dynasty because the Qing Dynasty, they're Manchurian, they're not very popular because they're not Han Chinese and they're seen as a conquest dynasty, they're invaders. They're awful, they need to be overthrown, to literati, they like to write novels about how terrible the current dynasty is, but they can't directly say the current dynasty is terrible because that would get them into trouble.
Jeannette:
So they'd often write about a previous dynasty and basically cast some kind of shade.
Amanda:
Incredible.
Jeannette:
Mulan gets co-opted into Chu Renhuo's romance in the Sui Tang Yanyi where it's this vast epic about the Sui and the Tang Dynasties and it's very much trying to make the point of what makes a dynasty valid? What gives them the right to rule and implicitly saying that the Qing Dynasty is invalid and you can tell by me describing these ones.
Jeannette:
In it the story of Mulan shows up halfway through it, where she's specifically bi-racial. She's a Tujia in Chinese and she fights for Khan but for an alliance between the Tujia and a Han Chinese faction. She [inaudible 00:27:42] to war, but her part in the story is very much about this sheer... her story is very much a tragedy in this one because she ends the Khan basically. She saves the Khan's life but when he works out that she's a girl, he proposes marriage to her and then she discovers her father has died while she's at war.
Jeannette:
So she asks to see her father's grave and at her father's grave, she commits suicide saying she's only loyal to her father.
Julia:
Dang, girl.
Jeannette:
This version very much has that kind of feeling where filial piety and potential loyalty to the dynasty to the emperor to the Khan is set at odds with each other. She ultimately very obviously chooses her father over the Khan. Also notable in this version, is that she does have a sister, who she sends disguised as a man, but this time as a scholar on a message and another warrior woman, [foreign language 00:28:49], end up married to the same man.
Julia:
What a plot twist.
Jeannette:
And it's all very, it's one of those feelings like, "What? She has a sister, she's also in disguise? Are you sure that you're not smushing together... that you've not done that classic thing where you've split a character into two?" It's like, ah yes, her sister. It feels very folkloric in that regard.
Julia:
More like a butterfly lover's crossover event.
Jeannette:
Kind of. But yes, she does sometimes team up with other women warrior, is pretty cool. But mainly in the novels, partly because the novels are 15 million chapters long, each. No, sorry, they're only about 100 chapters long each.
Julia:
That's a lot of chapters.
Jeannette:
It's a lot of chapters and I assume they just run out of plot and they all have a million characters.
Julia:
Like Game of Thrones.
Jeannette:
There's a 19th Century one where, there's a side story where she fights an invisible fox spirit who then disguises as a general and she has a camel who has the soul of a snake.
Julia:
Oh, damn.
Amanda:
This is so good.
Jeannette:
This is the very, very supernatural one. This is the 19th Century novel that's very, very supernatural. And it's primarily about her grandfather who has massive magical powers who has a mentor with dark magic and he gets enlightened whilst meeting the goddess of smallpox to realize that he must withdraw from society and that is what true enlightenment [crosstalk 00:30:23]-
Amanda:
You're just hitting all the beats for me.
Jeannette:
... from using his dark magic for good or evil. It's very important not to use dark magic. And he teaches that dark magic to Mulan who, in this version, is a spiritum, who is the spirit of the Mulan Mountains incarnate-
Amanda:
What?
Jeannette:
Because her parents were infertile and they prayed to the mountain, because there is an actual mountain called Mulan. It's in [Wuhan 00:30:52], I believe. And there's a Mulan temple there, by the way.
Amanda:
Wow.
Jeannette:
She's the spirit of the mountain, implied. It's a really, really odd one, this version. Because of the supernatural elements, in effect it kind of becomes much more of this story about all the magical powers that she's not using. This is very important that she doesn't use her magical powers because this is very... one of the key ideas that this author is very into, is the importance of withdrawal from society being the only moral thing to do and in an immoral world, which is again, is a very literati theme-
Amanda:
And very contemporary.
Jeannette:
Arguably yes. A lot of the Ming Dynasty literati when the Ming Dynasty fell and the Qing Dynasty came about, they all had a massive crisis and they didn't know how to cope for obvious reasons. A lot of loss in power, a lot of the structure of society they believed in vanished. And obviously, food shortages and everything.
Jeannette:
A lot of the things that they wrote, not just novels but also plays, dealt very much with theme of how to cope in this world. For example, oh God, I'm going to misremember which one it is now, but there is a 100 act play where it's a convoluted love story and the Ming Dynasty falls and basically the lovers are reunited in the last scene. And they're like, "Yes, finally we're together, even though the world is falling apart. We've finally found each other." And basically a monk shows up and reminds them that it's immoral to be happy when the world is falling apart.
Jeannette:
They're like, "Yes, you're right," and they split up and one of them becomes a monk and the other one becomes a nun and they-
Amanda:
That's how Romeo and Juliet should have ended.
Julia:
Yes, that probably would have been a better ending.
Jeannette:
It's very easy to see this ethos of the time where there are a lot of issues that they're trying to work out. But in the flip side, there were also people who, this is also the rise of romanticism as an idea. The idea that you should retreat from society with your one true love and live forever and ever with your one true love and not care about anyone else, was also kind of one of the themes where loyalty to a loved one.
Jeannette:
Yes, sorry. Biography Mulan is also about shit insane, because it ends with a prophecy where she is given the title of Wu Zhao, by the emperor in this. The Wu Zhao, general, and then the Wu Zhao. At the end, there's a prophecy and the emperor's like, "Oh my God, the prophecy says that someone by the name of Wu Zhao, is going to destroy my dynasty."
Julia:
Oh no.
Jeannette:
She basically carves out her own heart to prove her innocence?
Julia:
What?
Amanda:
Mulan, why?
Jeannette:
By the way, if you haven't worked out who Wu Zhao, is, that is the name of Wu Zetian, the one and only Chinese emperor of Chinese history.
Julia:
Dang.
Amanda:
Oh wow. There's so much happening there.
Jeannette:
I have no idea what it means or why. But it's a weird, at least to me, why it sort of shows up where she's basically accused of being Wu Zetian and she's like, "No." And dies to prove her innocence, which is again, very classic Chinese folklore move.
Amanda:
Oh my God, I cannot wait to hear more. But first, Juliet, let's grab a quick refill.
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Amanda:
I also must know about the version with the kitchen gods that you wrote about?
Jeannette:
Oh yes, sorry. That is going to very modern versions.
Amanda:
Yes.
Jeannette:
Slight background is that after or around Disney's animated Mulan, I feel like East Asia just went, "We can make Mulan versions, too." So it felt like there was a renaissance of TV adaptions of Mulan and the kitchen god version or rather Taiwan in the late '90s made a version, and it was something like 50 episodes. It's ludicrously long, where the god of her kitchen gets sent along with her to help out.
Amanda:
That's a great thing to pack for some time away from home.
Jeannette:
He's a comic relief, bumbling, loser character.
Amanda:
Of course.
Jeannette:
Not terribly useful.
Amanda:
In theory.
Jeannette:
If I remember correctly, his love interest was the goddess of the toilets.
Julia:
Beautiful. Remarkable.
Amanda:
They go hand in hand.
Jeannette:
It was all very slapstick. This is also the version where she marries the general. I don't believe he was Li Chan, he was Li something else. He's also sur-named Li. She marries the general halfway through the episodes and the rest of it is them being co-generals together.
Amanda:
Oh my God, love it.
Jeannette:
And it's quite interesting because it incorporates a lot of women in the workplace themes as a result, where he has to cope with the idea of a wife who is his equal in his workplace, the Army. But the Army part is less important at this point, where a lot of the plots are less about fighting a war and it becomes much more things like, "Oh no, there's a serial killer who's killing all the flower sellers. We need to go undercover and disguise ourselves as flower sellers to set a honey trap."
Amanda:
Incredible.
Julia:
I want to watch all 50 episodes of this now.
Jeannette:
It's very late night TV. But I think it's also quite interesting and I think some of it is the limitations of their TV budgets that they don't really want to or can give you battle scene after battle scene, so a lot of it is these kind of shenanigans plots.
Amanda:
That's a big part of having a job as well. So I really love that lens of workplace drama.
Jeannette:
One of the interesting evolutions of Mulan in terms of... since we touched on him repeatedly is the love interest character because it really highlights, I think, different priorities. It's one of the things that is ever changing. Depending on how you translate the original ballad, it actually begins with a question of Mulan, who are you lovesick over? Who are you pining after?
Jeannette:
It opens with a question of Mulan, the why so sad is framed as, "Are you sad about a boy?" And then she reveals, "Well yes, but not like that."
Amanda:
Yeah, but it's my dad.
Jeannette:
Yes, exactly. And it's about war. It therefore has this implicit rejection of romance as its core theme. And a lot of later versions, partly because romance is always popular, play with having different sorts of love interest. The 16th Century play, for example, has her marry the neighbor who is a scholar. She's like the head librarian or something ridiculous like that.
Amanda:
Incredible.
Jeannette:
Which is, I think, quite unusual for a modern pairing. I think in some modern Western mindset, we always like to pair our warrior women with other warrior dudes. There is a rarity of that kind of gender swaps and idea where the woman gets to be the stabby one.
Amanda:
No, I love that so much. And I'm also for more librarians in romance.
Jeannette:
Though obviously in this case, it's very much again reinforcing the idea that the best trajectory for a man is to be a scholar and all the rest of that. Then also it kind of loops back to how Li Chang as a body type is not as drawn by Disney's Mulan, is not seen as the classic idealized body type of even in animated stories of men. He does not have the romantic hero body type.
Jeannette:
Though obviously very idealized and attractive and obviously in the Western mind, he's built like Superman in a comic book. But he is not, if you compare it to say how they draw characters in any of the mainland Chinese animated stories, or even some of the Hong Kong ones, he's martial and he's blocky in a way that love interests get drawn, often get drawn as svelte. Some times even shorter than the woman.
Amanda:
Really?
Julia:
Interesting.
Amanda:
Speaking of Hong Kong, I know you've also spoken and written about Mulan mainland versus diaspora elements and whose tale is this? Who's it for? So if you'd like to speak a little bit about that, you're absolutely welcome to.
Jeannette:
The live action Mulan is very much part of this trajectory of framing Mulan as this nationalistic story that's very fundamentally Chinese and leaning into all these elements of it. Not just because it is made for in some ways, it's Disney's grab at the mainland Chinese market, the film market which is growing and is worth a lot of money, blah, blah, blah.
Jeannette:
It contrasts frustratingly with the animated Mulan, because for all that a lot of people like to say, "Oh, it's not very accurate. There are all these ways that it deviates from Chinese culture. Or, what people think Chinese culture is like."
Jeannette:
I remember it came out, my mom said, "They all look really Japanese in it." Incidentally because it's based on Quon Dynasty China and China's [inaudible 00:45:24] aesthetics do share a certain aspect with Japan because that was when the period of cultural exchange happened. But Japan has better branding so people look at it and sometimes go, "Oh, those Japanese." Because of a very old cultural exchange.
Jeannette:
But it doesn't matter, thought they also have better records for certain things, so if you're trying to recreate, like build a Tang Dynasty building, you'd have to talk to Japanese people.
Jeannette:
Chinese people, mainland Chinese people especially are not very happy when you point that out. Disney's animated Mulan was a work of Asian Americans. It spoke a lot to the Asian American diaspora experience. It spoke a lot to the third culture kids feeling of not fitting in, of not quite belonging to the culture of your parents. A lot of Asian Americans worked on it and they cast Asian Americans as their voice actors. And in contrast, the upcoming currently on live action Mulan has very much gone out of its way to court people who are already famous in mainland China, who are known box office draws, because they're bankable stars.
Jeannette:
Not bankable starts in America. Bankable stars in mainland China. To me, that tells you all you need to know about who they're looking to make the primary audience of this film. And it very much... and the discourse around it has been very frustrating because it very often cuts out the diaspora as part of the conversation, because when people are like, "Oh, it's directed by a white person." Or, the costume designer is white, and it becomes this matter of why don't you hire someone from mainland China. "Mainland China's full of people, why don't you hire them?"
Jeannette:
It's like, "Well. Yes, but this is still an American production and I think it is valid to remind people that Asian Americans exist." Asian Americans actors and costume designers and scriptwriters and directors, all exist.
Amanda:
Every role you could possibly need.
Jeannette:
They don't always get a lot of breaks and much like how we know when people are talking about Parasite getting an American remake. They're like, "Oh yes, we're going to cast someone who's not Asian because the idea is Asian people live in Asia and over here, we will cast a white person," sort of thing. It's this idea that the people who live in a [inaudible 00:48:00] land, they are the most authentic, that the people who live, the diaspora, they don't get a say in how Chinese is because they are, in many eyes, no longer authentic.
Jeannette:
That's a lot of the frustration out of this conversation where it's very easy to reduce it to white people versus Chinese people when there are these nuances. And who the mythology is for is important because that's in some ways how you judge the story and what it's trying to say. Because that nationalism is very strong in it and I think the claim of Mulan being a Chinese story. And it is not a Chinese story.
Jeannette:
There's been thousands of years of Chinese people writing stories, but not all of them are. The Bannerman story, that's arguably Manchu. It is Manchurian, Bannermen are Manchus. And you've got the Turkic traditions and the idea that the Chinese culture is not itself a unified, singular whole. That there isn't one version of Mulan. That all is important to remember when we start making jokes about it.
Jeannette:
Obviously how much is Mulan a rebel and how much she is basically propping up the status quo and the patriarchy in that breath, because in some ways, at the heart of Mulan is also this idea that this is a story about someone who breaks the boundaries of gender but she does it in order to reinforce filial piety and often she is used, her story is used in a morality tale about the importance of how men should get their act together.
Jeannette:
There are also theories that her story originated as basically a barbarian warrior princess story. Barbarian warrior princess being a certain type of story where basically a type of character who basically threatens masculinity and they're scary because they're basically masculine, but they're also women, but they're hot, but they're also terrifying. They're very emasculating and they're always other. The barbarian parts very important.
Jeannette:
They don't just exist. So, for example, the warriors of the [Yang 00:50:26] family, for example, the women in that could be because there's a very theist female general in that who her dad's abandoned basically and these stories of barbaric women are slowly folded and over time, they become Han, they become nationalistic as the demands of the story... but the barbarian trope, for example, there are buckets of medieval romances like European medieval romances about Saracen princesses. And they're always extremely badass. They wrestle lions and tigers and they're just all really badass and magnificent.
Jeannette:
Or, if you look at Arabian Nights, you'll find fairy tales about Christian princesses who will only marry the man who can beat them at chess and also wrestling.
Amanda:
So good.
Jeannette:
They're also incredibly badass and angry. It's almost this kind of idea where you project this masculine, aggressive, sexy but also scary woman to be outside of your society.
Amanda:
Well, I can confirm my husband was only able to marry me after he beat me at chess and then wrestling.
Jeannette:
Well, exactly. That is the recipe for romance.
Amanda:
Honestly.
Jeannette:
And Mulan's trajectory of being, possibly originally being this... she was acceptable because of these ambiguously barbaric roots slowly being folded into this very Han tradition is very interesting to me where she lost those barbaric traits and she becomes fully sort of a Han national hero, as the needs of war. As the needs of... especially, really the biggest note was during the 20th Century when China was at war and revolution was happening and women being called to arms. That was a big aspect of it.
Jeannette:
Oh, and I was going to rant about Yifei Liu being pro Hong Kong police. She stars in Live Action Mulan as Mulan and she's [crosstalk 00:52:40].
Amanda:
I was going to say anti-diaspora, yeah. Ew.
Jeannette:
She posted basically, "I stand with the Hong Kong police," type stuff on mainland Chinese social media. It was a hashtag that was going around, so arguably she was just jumping on the bandwagon, but again, it kind of reinforces that feeling of Mulan being not a figure who is a rebellious spirit, but actually very much the status quo, kind of reinforces that feeling.
Jeannette:
Which I find very interesting as the evolution of the story.
Amanda:
There are so many layers here and I feel like we have just scratched the surface. Thank you so much for introducing us, for giving us such an extensive list of things that I'm immediately going to go read.
Jeannette:
Can I give you one more ridiculous-
Amanda:
Please.
Jeannette:
One more hook to Mulan that I really like that is related. In Disney's animated Mulan, reflection, she starts singing about reflection. I'm sure you all know the lyrics. But in the Cantonese version, she specifically talks about the water. She talks about her reflection being herself being in the water, the reflection in the water. And herself in the mirror. I was listening to it and I realized that it's an accidental reference to Qiu Jin, the feminist martyr of the 20th Century revolutionary, whose title is Female Knight of the Mirror Lake.
Julia:
Oh, interesting.
Amanda:
That is awesome.
Jeannette:
I think this is incredibly, this is almost certainly accidental. But Qiu Jin she died a revolutionary, she was executed. She was a bit of a Han supremacist. She was not a big fan of the Manchu Qing Dynasty, she was a revolutionary, she was trying to bring them down, she was trying to create a republic in China. Really awesome, fascinating character. Badass as fuck and she was very into the idea of martial pursuits for women and very much went around in men's clothes. That was part of her-
Amanda:
Fuck yeah.
Jeannette:
... her whole thing. And that kind of element and one of the people that she was emulating was, in a way, Mulan, was one of the people she would cite as her inspiration of those female heroes in the past exemplars. I thought accidental or not, the Cantonese lyrics of Mulan kind of half-reference her title, which I loved.
Julia:
[crosstalk 00:55:09] that's incredible.
Amanda:
[crosstalk 00:55:09] canon is canon.
Julia:
Yes.
Amanda:
As far as I'm concerned.
Jeannette:
[crosstalk 00:55:11] yes, as being my head canon.
Julia:
Jeannette, thank you so much for joining us. This was one of the most fascinating conversations I think we've had on the show, genuinely. We were completely enthralled. Where can people find you on the internet if they want to learn more about you, your work, your writings about Mulan, etc.?
Jeannette:
I'm on Twitter as Jeannette, with underscore, Ng. Jeannette is spelled with two n's. I'll probably be tweeting about Mulan too much in the coming days. I am technically on team Boycott Mulan, so I will not be talking about the film directly. But I think it's an unavoidable part of the conversation that I will end up talking about Mulan too much.
Jeannette:
I wrote a book, it's called Under the Pendulum Sun. It has nothing to do with Mulan or Chinese culture. It's about missionaries who go to fairyland. It's weird, but I like money, so here's a plug for it.
Amanda:
It sounds so cool. All of our listeners will love it. Well, thank you again, and listeners remember, stay creepy, stay cool.