Symbol Across Time & Place

As a famous legendary woman in Chinese history, the story of "Hua Mulan" has been sang from generation to generation. Chinese men of literature in different times from North and South Dynasty to Late Qing Dynasty portrayed her in a variety of genres such as folk songs, dramas and novels. They rooted in Chinese Confucian culture and molded the figure with "Loyalty and Filial Piety" as a start. In addition these authors reinterpreted the story grounded on different epochs in order to project its distinctive cultural appearances. To this day, Maxine Hong Kingston, an American nationality person of Chinese descent writer created her The Woman Warrior in which she added a multitude of Chinese and western cultural components to the traditional verse of The Ballad of Mulan based on the cultural background where she grew up. In her works she employed mix forms to express her inner confusion and bewilderment as a dual "other" living at the edge of Chinese and western cultures with her membership as the second generation of Chinese migrants. Enlightened by the figure of "Mulan " in the text of The Woman Warrior by Maxine Hong Kingston, American Disney company produced and distributed animated cartoon titled "Mulan" in 1998. This movie examined the oriental story with the eye of American and carried out cultural shifts toward the original spiritual core of Chinese Music Bureau Poetry: "Mulan" with their American cultural orientation. By doing so, the distributor on one hand tried to attract the audiences all over the world touching upon Chinese topic; on the other hand they should see to it that they would not lose the global market with a kind of exoticism going too far. In this paper I expect to explore and dig up the western and eastern cultural disparity after combing different portrays of "Mulan" constructed by these three cultural backgrounds.