Task 4

"So for a time I had a partner-my husband and I, soldiers together just as when we were little soldiers playing in the village. We rode side by side into battle. When I became pregnant, during the last 4 months, I wore my armor altered so that I looked like a powerful big man," (Kingston, 39).Kingston, Maxine Hongston. "White Tigers." "The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts." New York: Knopf, 1976. 34. Print.

So Mu Lan here was at war, disguised as a man, and suddenly got married and pregnant. My original thoughts on this was that it didn't seem like good parenting to get pregnant in the middle of a war, because it seems like the baby would die.

The content in this part of the story is odd because, as I said before, a pregnant woman is fighting in a war. First of all, at the time women were supposed to be wives, but here she was fighting anyway. But the story explains that. She was fighting because she had been trained from a young girl, and fought in place of her father. But then I wondered why she was fighting if she was pregnant? Also, I thought about if she is supposed to be disguising as a man to fight in the army, then why did she get a husband?

In the balad, Mu Lan never gets a husband or gets pregnant. In the balad she tells her family that she does not have any man in her heart. Also, it's just unexpected that an army member would get pregnant, because of the dangerous conditions. But in this version she does. At the same time as going out and kicking everybody's ass, Mu Lan is fulfilling the traditional roles of a woman. She is a warrior, but she also is pursuing what she wants to do, even though these womanly characteristics clash with the ones people connect with masculinity.

I can't tell why Kingston wrote this for sure, but it might relate to her childhood. Her mother told her she would be just a wife. But at the same time, her mother taught her the original story of Mu Lan. So to me this fan fiction seems like a balance between those two things. She roughly follows the story of this swords woman, but also goes back to the values her mother taught her. And the swords woman in the story doesn't feel embarrassed of her feminine traits even though she doesn't make them public knowledge. So it seems that Kingston made this fan-fiction, and then put her own morals into it. Maybe that is a writing style.