With high marks from the critics, and some $55 million in ticket sales in its first two weeks, the new Disney animated feature "Mulan" seems to have found a place in the sun. This 36th animated feature from Disney Studios is the first with an Asian theme -- the story tells of a Chinese woman who leads an army into battle and saves her country. Here three Asian-American women discuss the film as a window into our own world. Katherine Kim, Andrea Quong, and Marian Liu are members of Brave New Word, a Pacific News Service-based coalition of writers in their twenties.

BELOW THE SURFACE, THIS WONDERFUL WORLD LOOKS VERY FAMILIAR

By Katherine Kim

I have a complex relationship with Mulan.

Expecting to be painfully offended by the Disney studio film, "inspired" by a beloved 2000-year-old Chinese legend, I ended up enjoying the film because it was relatively benign. Instead of buck teeth and chopstick accents, I saw a pretty, politically correct tale with a lead character I could relate to -- a feminist of color.

But it was still another movie showing the west as superior to the east.

According to the legend, Hua Mu Lan, sometimes called "the Chinese Joan of Arc," took her father's place in battle and led the Chinese troops to victory. I first met her as "Fa Mu Lan" in Maxine Hong Kingston's novel "The Woman Warrior." The tale raised my fist in the air. She was a virtuous, badass sista.

But the film "Mulan," released in the midst of intensifying anti-Chinese sentiment in the United States, is yet another Hollywood treatment of Asians as exotic. Recently, heightened political interest in Asia has brought heightened interest in commodifying anything eastern -- spirituality, fashion, food, and even women, as the sheer number of female Asian roles in film shows. They may be more empowered and less passive this time around, but they are still sexual and still paired with white men.

Suzy Wong, Madame Butterfly and geisha girls have played this role in the past. Since she impersonates a man for most of the movie, Mulan is thankfully not the cliched object of "Yellow Fever," nor a Disney-style sexpot like Pocohontas who ran around in a low-cut deerskin or the Little Mermaid with her strapless tube top and sexy fishtail.

But Disney depicts the up-to-date Asian woman riding her horse with the Great Wall rolling in the distance, eating pot stickers, bowing to her father -- all non-threatening images of what westerners love about Asians.

Disney's Americanized Hua Mu Lan is an affable character with G-rated allure -- she has eastern looks with western values. Her face, according to a Disney release, is "based on the Chinese ideal of beauty with its round egg-shape and cherry blossom lips." Her free-spirited personality and forthright manner make her palatable to western audiences.

She is a banana -- yellow outside, white within. With her name anglicized, her perfect unaccented English, and her wild gesticulations, it is easy to see she is not a Chinese woman warrior, but an Asian American feminist.

My mother -- a first-generation Asian American -- would say this film shows we've come a long way.

But this is Disney, after all. Everyone my age is cynical about Disney's simplistic, hyper-romantic epics, and too savvy to be manipulated. With our anti-corporate attitude, in the age of takeovers and technology, Disney is an enemy.

In "Mulan," the simplistic banality of the Wonderful World is evil because it is culturally imperialistic. By focusing on a girl whose "irrepressible spirit clashes with her tradition-bound society," the film shows China as an unfree society.

Indeed, the view of China is one-dimensional and stereotyped throughout. Mulan is summed up in fortune cookie prose, "the flower that blooms in adversity is the most rare and beautiful of them all." A musical sequence ends with Mulan and other conscripts leaping in the air, giving a kung-fu kick, and exclaiming "Hi-Ya!" A brass gong reverberates every so often. Mulan's sidekick, a dragon named "Mushu," shouts "Call out for egg rolls" at the end of the film.

Mulan's arch enemy Shan Yu has slanted, malarial yellow eyes and an ominous anthracite visage. In the duels, there is a striking visual contrast between Mulan's western qualities and his "Oriental" features.

Of course, the film ends with a triumphant Mulan in the Forbidden Palace, throngs of Chinese bowing to her reverently, after she has sent the villain rocketing in the distance on a firecracker.

In Disney, goodness will prevail. In Disney, the west will always win.

UNADULTERATED ASIAN FEMINISM -- WITH (UNBOUND) FOOTNOTE

By Andrea Quong

The promotional materials for the Disney feature "Mulan" were intriguing -- a warrior-girl breaking out of the mold of her "tradition-bound" society. I wondered how Disney would deploy cultural paraphernalia -- bound feet perhaps? -- in some commentary on China.

At the theater, little kids spilled over the seats in barely contained excitement and gregarious teenagers -- most of them Asian -- congregated in the aisles, giddy on popcorn and gimmicks (a Hum-vee giveaway, a real live Mulan in a short cheong-sam). I began to see that Disney not only has to hold the short attention spans of kids accustomed to Saturday morning cartoons but must also appeal to older kids hungry to see reflections of themselves or at least be swept away in a good story.

Luckily "Mulan" has a decent, clear message -- 100 per cent unadulterated feminism. The woman warrior who not only survives war but ultimately saves China, and is offered the position of the Emperor's highest counsel -- spectacularly bypassing both the walls of the Forbidden City and China's rigid examination system -- is no "girl" to be dismissed. Every time she is shunted off, she rises again, driven not by the need to "prove" herself so much as by the necessity to do the right thing and go beyond her own self for the greater good.

Oddly, what one comes away with is not the notion that Chinese people have a great love for bowls of steaming grain or kowtowing in front of their ancestors' altars, but that a very smart, intrepid, teenage girl saved China when the men were incapable (the Durga of Disney?).

But a sad footnote, buried in the feminist message, cautions girls and young women on their own eventual relationships with men. There are suggestions of a romance between Mulan and her commanding officer, Shang. He respects and trusts her when he believes that she's a male army conscript, but shuns her once her gender is revealed. By saving and outperforming him, she blows his ego to bits.

Later, when the country itself is at stake, he fumbles his second chance, so blinded by social mythologies he is unable to deal with the reality confronting him. After all, a woman, who is supposed to have no instinct or talent for war, cannot possibly be taken seriously.

What are we to think when he follows her to her parents' house, contrite and totally enamored of this amazing goddess? She's so much better than any of the men -- he's light years behind her, but Disney implies that she'll end up with him and all of his immaturities. The message seems to be, "Girls, you can do with or without them, but be prepared to accommodate some pretty childish behavior." For all the film's feminist messages, they are being broadcast into a world in which the relationships between the sexes are still far from ideal, and women as a matter of course compromise their own personhood to accommodate the damaging insecurities of the men in their lives.

Visually, Disney does an unabashedly American take on a kitschy Chinese backdrop. Bamboo forest, steaming bowls of rice, gong fu, pandas, the Great Wall and ancestor worship, assure us that we're talking China. But as soon as the first character to appear -- a Chinese guard on the Great Wall -- opens his mouth to speak with brisk American intonations, we know we're in America, not China. "Mulan" deftly avoids negative stereotypes by peopling its China with sympathetic characters. There are no 101 Dalmatian "We are Chi-a-neeesee if you pleease" numbers this time around. Mulan may live in a patrilineal Confucian society, but her father is a noble individual, not a product of some deterministic (otherly) culture. The Emperor is not only wise and good, he accepts Mulan's impulsive hug. The cultural critique refers to our contemporary, western world -- it's not bound feet that Mulan rejects, but the powder and lipstick on her face.

A golden light washes over this mix of feminism and cultural projection. Chinese from China are the Good Guys. Mulan is a hero because she saves China from the invaders. (A century ago, it was the West that launched the Opium War in response to the Middle Kingdom's rejections of outsiders.) For a few moments, "Mulan" creates Chinese patriots out of all of us.

MIXED MOTIVES, MIXED MESSAGES, MIXED RESULTS

By Marian Liu

For years the mainstream American media have depicted the Asian male as sexless, strange, even obsessive and the Asian female as an exotic dominatrix who becomes powerless when faced with a European male, as in the James Bond series.

But since Asia has become such a strong player in the U.S. and world economy all that has changed. The current attitude seems to be a mix of awe inspired by an exotic culture and a desire to exploit that culture. Clinton's visit to China reflects both -- China may be an offender in human rights, but it is a gold mine of business opportunities.

The new view has brought a desire to look Asian but a hesitation to embrace Asians themselves. Dresses are cut like chi paus, baby tees are emblazoned with bamboos and dragons, and models are made to look Asian. Rap groups use dragons as mascots and music video sets are dressed in Asian style. Buddhism and acupuncture are becoming more and more popular -- yet Asians are still the despised minority that steals opportunities from others. Anti-Asian violence and racism is at an all time high.

So I was wary when I went to see the movie "Mulan." But, truthfully, I was impressed. Mulan is not only a story of Asians, but a story of sheer triumph. It features a girl, a minority girl, who breaks all the bonds of adversity-- outsmarts the Huns, honors her emperor, her country, her father, and lands her man -- a thoroughly modern story of a woman who defines the world in her own terms, shedding her Cinderella image to fill the role of a man.

The film uses predominantly Asian actors for the characters' voices, music with Chinese instruments, graphics integrated with Chinese brush drawing.

"Mulan" is not without flaws. At times Mulan's eyes reached an inhuman slant. And the Asian male conforms, once his shell cracks, to the sexless stereotype, a man who cannot rescue himself but relies on a woman to win the war.

There are deeper flaws. Mulan's feisty sidekick, a dragon -- godly and mythical, symbol of the emperor -- is called Mushu, the name of a favorite Westernized Chinese dish. Mulan's lucky cricket is named Cri-kee -- is this a joke on the way Chinese pronounce English?

And the film's treatment of ancestors in Mulan is far from respectful. Mulan's ancestors wonder why she can't be an acupuncturist, like stereotypical Chinese parents in an American sitcom pressuring their kids to become doctors. These ancestors don't lift a finger to help Mulan, and are oblivious to her struggle during the whole war. When, after it's over, they finally realize what's been going on, their response is to party to Western music and play volleyball with one of their heads.

Is "Mulan" the familiar story of empty acceptance -- or a step toward making the Chinese as American as chicken nuggets? And if so, are these nuggets to be gobbled or savored?

Ignorance, racism, and stereotypes still exist in our country. As an American with a Chinese face, I still get mocked on the subway and on the street with remarks that make sneering fun of my language and the way I look. "Mulan" is only a tiny step in a rocky road. We can only hope this road leads to the celebration of Asian culture, and not to assimilation or hatred.