Task 4: White Tigers

Quote from White Tigers:
"My mother washed my back as if I had left for only a day and were her baby yet. 'We are going to carve revenge on your back,' my father said. 'We'll write out oaths and names.'
'Wherever you go, whatever happens to you, people will know our sacrifice,' my mother said. 'And you'll never forget either.' She meant that even if I got killed, the people could use my dead body for a weapon, but we do not like to talk out loud about dying."

Context:
Mu-Lan arrives back to her village. Her parents wake her up the next morning, and begin cutting and carving words into her back.

Citation:
Kingston, Maxine Hong. "White Tigers." "The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts." New York: Knopf, 1976. 34. Print.


Questions (my response is a mix of answers to all three):

2) Introduce your passage, and explain your original interest/thoughts about it.

3) Describe and observe what stands out about the content of this moment. What’s distinct about it? 

4) Step back and consider HOW the moment is written.  What stands out about Hong Kingston’s style and delivery?  What does it add to the experience of the content?

5) So what? What does this add?  Why do you think she would add this? What does she accomplish? 

I remember reading this and getting angry, initially: "our" sacrifice? What?! Their daughter bravely goes away from home, from her family, and lives with complete strangers for 14 years while training tirelessly to become a warrior, and all they can acknowledge is that they made a sacrifice? I found the parents very troubling and odd throughout the whole story. The parents definitely seem more connected, involved, and caring than the parents in the original Ballad, yet at the same time, they're strangely selfish and unusual. Also, the last line: "she meant that even if I got killed, the people could use my dead body for a weapon." Maybe this is clear to others, but I'm pretty confused on what this means. I was thinking as some sort of "sacrifice," as the story mentioned the sacrifice of animals earlier, but I'm not sure if this is right. Using it as a weapon? Hmm. This quote is chock-full of puzzling details, and I want to further explore in order to get a deeper inside on what it really means.

The content of this bit is, once again, strange. First of all, it comes so unexpectedly. Mu-Lan arrives home and we expect her to be greeting with welcoming and embrace. And she is, to a certain extent. But when her parents welcome her, their actions are completely contrary to what we might think. The parents are literally using knives and ink to cut into the skin of their daughters back, and carving out moths and names. Wait–"oaths?" An oath is a promise, a pledge, a guarantee. What is this oath for? Who is this oath towards? So not only is the content itself completely bizarre and out of place, but it raises many questions that lack definite answers.

This moment is juggling between how it defines the character of the parents: both affection, when Mu-Lan says, "My mother washed my back as if I had left for only a day and were her baby yet." And also this unusual, distant, almost cruel attitude: "we are going to carve revenge." Do they mean revenge on the people who trained her? Revenge for taking her? Or revenge on their daughter for leaving them? Hong Kingston writes this passage as if we are on a boat, and the text is the ocean, taking us one way with a big wave, and then shifting us another with another wave. We don't quite know what to think.

I think Hong Kingston adds this bit on purpose, in order to make us readers ask questions. She may have done it to prove our status quo assumptions about what a fan faction on this story would entail: since Hong Kingston has the supreme power, as the author, to create everything in this world, we'd think she'd make all the unfortunate parts of the ballad into positive, fairy-tale versions. But she doesn't. Within the first few pages of the fantasy part of the story, I liked her parents. They seemed more caring, more involved than in the ballad. But when Kingston puts in this particular passage, it makes me question my labeling of the parents as "good" (for lack of a better word) characters. Now, they're not "bad" characters. They're somewhere in between. Their motives are confusing. But maybe rereading the whole story while looking out for details on the parents might give us a clearer answer on not only who they truly are, but what their purpose is and why Kingston makes them so troubling.