Courageous fighters like Mulan acted from love and duty rather than glory

Evidence

When the long war was finally won, the grateful emperor offered Mulan high honors and a great official post as a reward for her valor. But Mulan asked for none of it — she wanted only a swift horse to carry her home at last to her family. And when she returned home and put off her armor and put on her old dress and combed her hair as a woman again, her astonished army comrades, who came to visit, could not believe that the fellow soldier they had fought beside for ten years had been Mulan all along. The ballad ends with a sly image: that just as you cannot always tell a male hare from a female when both are running, so you could not tell that the brave soldier was a woman. — , A Year of World Stories, 15676

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the book’s own week-32 Burmese judge tale and the Selkie for the ‘love means giving up’ pattern.