Task 4 (I put this on Disqus by accident)

"During the charge, I singled out the leader, who grew as he ran toward me. Our eyes locked until his height made me strain my neck looking up, my throat so vulnerable to the stroke of a knife that my eyes dropped to the secret death points on the huge body. First I cut off the his leg with a single sword swipe, just as Chen Laun-feng had chopped the leg off the thunder god. When the Giant stumped toward me, I cut off his head."

Kingston, Maxine Hong. "White Tigers." "The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a
Girlhood Among Ghosts." New York: Knopf, 1976. 38. Print.

This describes the Narrator's first battle in command of her army, and the first opponent she faced: A giant. After this passage, she continues narrating the battle and the consequences of the battle.

What interested me originally about this section of the story was the difference from The Ballad of Mu-lan. I remembered the difference so vividly because I remembered that Kingston's fantasy/fan-fiction element was basically the story of Mu-lan with some edits. Indeed, it often felt like that. However, this part was to me the most different. Most of what the Narrator in Woman Warrior talks about is the fighting and war. But in the Ballad, while we know there was a war, the author seems more focused on everything but the war. I remember that there was very little mention of war, even though that seemed like the thing the Ballad was based around- a woman at war. This made me really interested to look deeper into both stories and see why Maxine Hong Kingston might have changed this element of the book so dramatically.

In the content of this passage, we can see the Narrator finally at war, which is actually interesting and distinct when compared to Mu-lan: we never saw Mu-lan actually fighting or doing anything related to war at all, besides joining the army. Kingston gets very specific to the Narrator's actions, which is an interesting contrast to the Ballad.

I think it's interesting how Maxine Hong Kingston writes this passage. We can clearly see the elements of fantasy, with the giant growing in size, and just the idea of a giant in general. However, looking more deeply, we can see that the Narrator compares herself to other Heroes (Chen Luan-feng), and being heroic herself, obviously. But when comparing this to the war-scenes in the Ballad of Mu-lan, it gets very interesting. Mu-lan is never even shown in a battle at all, and isn't compared to heroes or heroines, even though she clearly did excellent work, because she could have gotten anything from the Khan after the war. This is interesting, because clearly Kingston diverted from the norm in writing this with much more attention to detail and to the wars and battles (which, along with the extensive training that Mu-lan didn't have either, take up most of the text).

This idea of a more action and heroic style of writing used by Kingston for this section is very interesting. I think that the importance of this is that Kingston doesn't want to limit the role that the Narrator played in her fan-fiction version of the Ballad. I think this shows some of her deeper intentions with the story: She wanted the Narrator to take a more active role, and for the reader to actually see and understand what the Narrator actually did, rather than just having the reader know that SOMETHING happened. I think that this shows that Maxine Hong Kingston was much more interested in the portrayal of her female characters rather than the actions of the characters. I think that Kingston, when writing the book, thought that having actual actions would speak for Women in the role of men much louder than just words would, like what the Ballad did. So in Kingston's "fan-fiction" version, she was intent on portraying the narrator, essentially the key to the ideas in her story, as a more epic character rather than an amazing character with little detail, like Mu-lan.