Photo courtesy of Revda Info
It was the first sentence my Chinese father uttered as we watched the opening scenes of Mulan.
I admit I headed into this film with an already negative opinion. It had irked me when it was announced and still irks me now that Disney hired white screenwriters and a white director to produce a story that is Chinese to its core. Niki Cora shattered a lot of barriers at Mulan’s helm, directing the most expensive live-action film by a woman. She is, however, quite white, and despite her insistence that she is the right choice for Disney, I was apprehensive when I saw the trailer.
Having seen the movie, I can now say my fears were well founded. The live-action remake is beautifully shot, with breathtaking frames and a lovely soundtrack, but the story falls short, for one primary reason: it is still a Chinese story told through the white gaze. (Minor spoilers below.)
I loved seeing Mulan’s village, knowing my grandparents lived in a similar structure. I loved seeing Chinese characters carved into metal and stroked in calligraphy. I loved seeing the intricately built palace and Chinese traditions. But something felt off throughout the entire movie.
Other Asian American viewers agreed. “The stunning, sweeping landscape camera angles and beautiful set and costume design did not make up for the at-times reductive presentation of Chinese culture, which felt akin to walking through a Chinatown novelty store,” Grace Wong wrote for the Chicago Tribune. “It reeked of Western pandering to a Chinese audience, attempting to prove its knowledge of Chinese cultural elements without any real substance, while simultaneously managing to alienate its American audience.”
(It’s worth noting that the original animation was directed by white men, though Rita Hsiao, a Chinese American woman, is credited on the screenplay.)
Part of the issue with Mulan lies with its narrative, which pushes honor and family obtusely without examining why Chinese people so highly value honor. It erases nuance and instead shoves honor down the viewer’s throat, sending the message that (family) honor takes priority over life.
The topic of filial piety is often a source of internal conflict for Asian Americans. Filial piety, a virtue of respect for one’s parents, is a pillar in many Asian cultures. At the same time, non-Asian folks have weaponized the principle, calling us robot children who submit to our parents. They have accused Asian “tiger parents” of driving their children to suicide. They have assumed that our career and personal choices are under our parents’ thumb, and they have always made that out to be a bad thing — a restriction. It’s why we are wary of embracing the ideal even when it holds true in our families.
Watching Mulan, I found myself wondering if those same insults would surface again, because the movie doesn’t address any of that. It points to filial piety as a static mode for Chinese people and doesn’t think to ask what honor really means to them.
I commend Caro for working with Chinese historians and consultants to try to adhere to authenticity, but the script's lack of complexity and emphasis on qi — the backbone of the story — only further fetishizes Chinese culture.
The only “acceptable” representation of Asians in Hollywood up through the early 2000s was in martial arts. Bruce Lee, Jackie Chan — these are household names because Western media ate up their moves while giving them few lines, causing Americans to see value only in an Asian person’s martial arts ability. It does not go unnoticed now that Mulan’s writers and director chose to focus on martial arts and qi in lieu of the popular music that made the original animation shine, reinforcing the kinds of Asian stories Hollywood allows to be told. This is the kind of Chinese story we like. This is the kind of Chinese story we glorify, so much so that we forget Chinese people — and Asians — aren’t all borne of that same story.
The qi that operates in this story isn’t even reflective of Chinese people’s actual beliefs. In Chinese culture, qi is considered a life force that is constantly in flow and connects the energy in and outside one’s body. In the movie, however, qi is turned into a superpower (and witchcraft), as an unnamed Malaysian blogger writes on the website A Naga of the Nusantara. “Yeap, they just straight up gave her superpowers,” the blogger says. “The film summed up these special abilities Mulan displays as ‘qi’ but it’s really just the ability to use wire-fu.”
In this film, Mulan’s realization of identity is linked with her connection to qi. In the first half of the movie, she hides and suppresses her qi, told by her father that she cannot wield it because she is a girl. When the moment comes for her to embrace her womanhood and unmask herself, it’s only after realizing her qi is not working to its full potential because she is still hiding her truth. The moment is supposed to be empowering but feels tacky and rushed.
Aside from the dramatic slow-motion sequence of her pulling her hair down and thrusting aside her upper body armor, the film seems to subtly imply that womanhood, or identity, matters only in the context of what you can produce. She steps into her true identity and in the next second is able to access new abilities, storming off to the battlefield to overwhelm her enemies. Is she special because she is a woman? Or only because she now has powerful qi that can be put to good use?
I believe white directors and writers can tell compelling stories about people of color. Mulan, however, does not examine the nuances that make this Chinese story compelling. Its narrative reduces Chinese people to the film’s inaccurate portrayal of qi and the overused trope of honor.
It’s not simply about representation here; it’s also about redress. Redress for the decades excluding Asian stories, writers, actors, producers, directors, cinematographers. Redress for the waves and waves of uncomfortable movies Asian Americans had to sit through as white people around them laughed at yellowface characters or emasculated Asian nerds.
So if you’re going to make a movie about Chinese folks that is solely focused on Chinese cultural values, you can’t hire a non-Chinese person and expect to do it justice in a country that has mistreated and hated Chinese people for centuries.
Chinese people have been denigrated in this country since their first step on land. The Massacre of 1871, when 500 white and Hispanic people attacked the Los Angeles Chinatown, led to 17-20 Chinese deaths by hanging and is considered the largest mass lynching in American history.
Mulan is a Chinese tale. It originated in China and tells the story of a Chinese woman. But with this movie, tailored clearly in hopes to succeed in the lucrative Chinese market, Disney indicates its priorities: money over true diversity and equity; a simplified plot over a more complicated narrative.
I guess I can’t complain. It’s a Disney movie, after all. But Disney’s exploitation in the case of Mulan is a disappointing reality in this age of racial reckoning.
Editor’s note: I weighed whether or not to use the word “lynching” to describe the Massacre of 1871 because of the long history of Black pain and death by lynching. That history runs far deeper, and I don’t want to take attention away from the fact that white people have lynched Black people en masse in efforts to assert systemic control over the Black community. I use the word here to take power away from the acts of violence by calling it what it is: racially motivated murders.
It's in English because it's made by an American company that primarily markets to Americans, an adaptation made in China for a Chinese audience would surely be in Mandarin or Cantonese, as would the dubbed version that gets shipped overseas. The original animated adaptations of Beauty and the Beast or Snow White doesn't lose their meaning and sensitivity by not being in French or German.
The lack of a deeper respect you point out is more likely attributed to Disney dumbing down their recent movies to get past the CCP censors, especially one that so obviously has the potential to be a hit in China.
An international blockbuster movie that, on the surface, appears to represent traditional Chinese values without any of the nuance is precisely what an authoritarian communist government pushing censorship of thought on its population (born from revolution against the traditions of Imperial China), wants. The credits thanking every specific branch of the Chinese Communist party that Disney worked with in China for this movie attests to that. Big-budget Hollywood movies covering an originally Chinese story aren't going to put in the effort to make a culturally sensitive movie if the country home to the population who would benefit the most have government censors dictating what the party mandated groupthink will be.