Musings on 'Mulan': Becoming Who We Are

I had the chance to watch Disney’s “Mulan” 2020 recently. It is not a genre of movie I am usually a fan of, but somehow - quite surprisingly - it stuck with me and I resolved to write a blog post about it. (Warning: spoilers to follow!) 

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Becoming Who I Am 

But where to begin? There are so many reasons why this movie is thought-provoking (aside from its "behind the scenes" controversies, which are not the subject of this post). At base, perhaps, is that it is a coming-of-age story... a story about someone discovering their own unique gifts and using them... a kind of story that never gets old, as we are all living it to some extent, young or old. I used to think that coming-of-age was something that happens once when you are a teenager or young adult, but at 33 - an age at which I used to think my life path would be settled - I am discovering that the process goes on! Perhaps at certain ages one wrestles with the question of “who I am” in a more pointed and existential way... but always we are discovering more and more of who we really are... and who we are not. 

Ignatian spirituality, in particular its emphasis on finding God in all our experiences and desires, and of ‘discernment’ of what is life-giving, has been a great help to me on this journey. I still remember the joy of discovering that ‘God’s will’ is not something external or imposed on me, but is at the root of my own deepest desires. A line from ‘Mulan’ reflects something of this. The narrator says this at the point when Mulan (aka Hua Jun) is re-discovering her gift:  

“The chi pervades the universe and all living things. We are all born with it. But only the most true will connect deeply to his chi, and become a great warrior.”  

Star Wars fans like me might have an unexpected flicker of recognition here. This sentence would fit into the Star Wars universe if ‘chi’ was simply replaced with ‘the Force’! Perhaps what both of these conceptions are alluding to is the universal experience that when we tap into those gifts that are our own true heritage - when what we do arises from our deepest, truest selves - we are tapping into a power that is greater than our own; a power that holds the universe in being and lives in all things. And so we see that when Mulan starts to tap into this power, she climbs limberly to the top of the mountain - a feat both she and her fellow companions previously considered impossible by their own strength. 

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Becoming Who I Am: Woman 

But, of course, Mulan is not simply a coming-of-age story. It is a story set in a particular context: a woman coming into her powers in a society where traditional gender roles forbade it. From the beginning we see the child Mulan defying the gendered expectations of her family, community and society. After a humorous incident in which she darts about on rooftops chasing an escaped chicken, her father - whom she loves - is forced to go against the counsel of his own heart and have a serious talk with her, for her own good. What he says arises out of his love for her and recognition that her gifts would bring her to grief in such a rigidly gendered society: “It is time to hide your gift away... to silence its voice.” 

Again, this is a line with universal appeal: all of us have at some point have heard this message from those around us. We have all had to adjust in some way - ‘hide our true selves away’ - for the sake of survival in environments that have not accepted us as we are. Hopefully, at some point, and with help and courage and delight, we are able to rediscover those parts of ourselves that we have locked away.  

But this goes beyond the universal to the particular. Some of us have had to ‘hide ourselves’ because of our ethnicity, or class, or nationality, or gender, or some other alienating social construct (or an intersection of them). One sees the negative impact of rigid gender roles in the movie both on Mulan’s father, who believes it is his duty as a man and father to fight for the emperor despite his obvious frailty, and on Mulan herself.  

The interesting thing, perhaps, is how insidious and invisible discrimination can be, especially for those who have lived so long in the systems that hold us. It is easy for us to see gender discrimination in ancient China. But what about in our own ‘modern’ societies? I used to think it was a thing of the past. But my feminist consciousness awoke in law school when a very enlightened Canadian male professor introduced us to feminist legal theories. I started taking courses and writing papers on women and gender, and became quite passionate on the subject. Still, it was not till three years later that I woke up to the gender issues in the Catholic Church that I had grown up in and was so attached to. It happened like this: a female friend of mine was interested in Catholicism and had asked to go to mass with me. I was very excited and brought her there, only to realise, as the male priests and altar boys in their white finery processed with pomp down the aisle and to the altar, that there was no way I could defend this exclusion of women in the 21st century to her - or to myself any longer. It was looking through the eyes of an outsider that lifted the veil from my own.  

I have often thought that the process of coming to consciousness is like learning to see. Before the moment when it dawns, one is like someone who cannot see, to whom someone else is trying to describe what colours look like. It doesn’t take. There are so many ways in which we defend the way things are, perhaps most especially in a religious context. But at the moment of consciousness, one suddenly sees the colours for oneself, and understands... and then cannot ‘un-see’. Now that I have ‘seen’, the exclusion of women from practical and ceremonial leadership and power in the Church are not just something I can name, but an oppression that I feel in my body. Debates about inclusive language are not exercises in political correctness, but arise from (and become) real experiences of alienation. While I feel these deeply, I also know that many of the people involved in the system (both 'oppressors' and the 'oppressed') have not yet “seen” and are - not by their fault but because of temperament or long conditioning - perhaps incapable of it. 

One of the most poignant moments in the film for me, then, is when Mulan, rejected by her own fellow soldiers whom she had risked her life to save, is confronted by the “witch” (whose name we never find out) on top of the mountain. Why go back to them? The “witch” asks her. They will never accept you. For me, this brings up the very real question of why I still stay in the Church and identify with it, when so many have already left in droves. 

Mulan’s answer to the “witch” is both surprising and dissonant: “I know my place. And it is my duty to protect the kingdom and fight for the emperor.” It is surprising because it entails a sacrifice on her part, a choice to experience discrimination and rejection in the search for greater values that mean more to her than her own individual well-being. Those of us who consciously choose to remain in a Church that marginalizes us probably do so because of greater values: of love of God and neighbour, of solidarity and hope.  

But Mulan’s answer is also dissonant because of her uncritical defence of “kingdom and emperor”, guardians of the very structures that keep her and her fellow women in their “place”. Therein lies the difference between strands of feminist thought. The story of Mulan - incredible in that it arose in its time and culture - is in the liberal feminist tradition, who assert that women can do what men do, and should be allowed to do so. In this vein women have seen great advances in the past decades, starting with getting the vote in Western societies, and going on to jobs and careers once seen as men’s rightful preserve - including the military, as in Mulan’s case. But it does not go further, as some other feminist traditions do, to question the underlying patriarchal ordering of society. The emperor’s kingdom of ancient China evidences a rigidly hierarchical and patriarchal society that perhaps none of us would identify with today. But hierarchy and patriarchy still pervade so many of our institutions (both secular and religious), and the spirit that sustains them, of ‘power over others’ - whether ‘others’ are those who are different from us, or nature and the planet - have created the world of dehumanising inequality and environmental degradation that we live in today. 

A sympathetic (male) seminarian with whom I was having a discussion about women’s marginalization in the Church recently asked me, “So what do you think we can do about it?” Part of the answer, I think, is for each of us to try to live fully our own particular gifts, as Mulan did. But that is not enough; we also need to go further and question the structures and practices we see around us that exclude. And we do this not just by speaking truth to power, but also by living out the kind of inclusivity, respect and equality in our own relationships that we wish to see in the world. 

What do you think?