Zena: Woman Warrior, "White Tigers"

Important terms and characters:

• Ideograph - a symbol that represents an idea
• Drinking gourd - a dried and then hollowed-out melon or squash, often oddly shaped, that can be used as a drinking vessel
• Baron - socially and economically, the most important group of landowners—next to a country’s ruler—during feudal times.
• Brave Orchid – Maxine Hong Kingston’s Mother
• Fa Mu Lan – A character in the Chinese Folk story derived from “The Ballad of Mu-lan”. This woman warrior fights in place of her father when he is drafted into the emperor’s army and returns home to her family and resumes her normal life after battle.

 

   The “White Tigers” chapter opens up with Kingston saying that she was taught that she could be more than a wife or slave. She remembers how her mother, Brave Orchid, would talk story about the woman warrior Fa Mu Lan. Kingston then fantasizes about being Fa Mu Lan.

      She follows a bird up a mountain until she reaches a hut. There, an old couple tells her that if she stays with them for fifteen years they will train her to become a woman warrior. She would then return to her village and avenge her village against the baron and robbers. She agrees to stay and for fifteen years she undergoes intensive training, both physically and mentally. She spent years trying to survive the forest of the white tigers.

      While she is away, Kingston watches her family from a water gourd that the old man gave her. She sees her wedding ceremony and later her brother and husband being conscripted into the army by the baron. She wants to go help them but she can’t leave until she is 22 and ready.

      When the old couple tells her she is ready to leave, they give her powerful beads. She returns to her parents with the vow to go and fight the baron's army. Early in the morning, her parents take her and carve oaths and names on her back as a sign of revenge if she got killed. When she recovers from the pain, a white horse appears and she puts on a man's armor, clothing and ties up her hair. She prepares to leave and the villagers volunteer the sons that had hidden during the last conscription to go and fight with her.

      She becomes a great warrior and has many victories. When she meets her husband they stay together for a little and eventually have a child. They tie the umbilical cord to a flagpole out like her mother used to do so it dries out. When the baby is one month old, she sends her husband and baby away. She again becomes the slim young man she was before but she is lonely, becomes careless, and is almost defeated. She eventually leads her people to overthrow the corrupt emperor and replace him with a peasant who understands the people. When she returns to her village, she confronts the baron alone and beheads him because he drafted the village boys and terrorized village so while he enjoyed the rich life. Afterwards, she returns to her husband’s parents to fulfill her filial duties by doing farm work, housework, and bearing more sons.

      As a conclusion, Kinston says that she and the woman warrior are not so different. “What we have in common are the words at our backs. The idioms forrevenge are ‘report a crime’ and ‘report to five families.’ The reporting is the vengeance—not the beheading, not the gutting, but the words. And I have so many words—‘chink’ words and ‘gook’ words too—that they do not fit on my skin.” (Kingston 53). Using her talent with words and talk story, Kingston will be a woman warrior and fight against prejudices against women and races that threaten the welfare of the people. 

      How Does Maxine Hong Kingston’s Fa Mu Lan differ from the traditional Fa Mu Lan? How are they the same?