Tigers, Tigers Everywhere and Not A Bite to- Ooo, a rabbit!

“It turned its face once toward me, then jumped into the fire.”

And so the cute little rabbit sacrifices itself to quell Fa Mu Lan's hunger. 

 

Hunger

1. a compelling need or desire for food.

2. the painful sensation or state of weakness caused by the need of food: to collapse from hunger.

3. a shortage of food; famine.

4. a strong or compelling desire or craving: hunger for power.

5. to feel hunger; be hungry.

6. to have a strong desire.

Thanks to Merriam-Webster for a quick list of reasons why “hunger” is a term that can be explored with a lot of depth.

Hunger is absolutely integral to the shared experience of humanity. It is a feeling that all people can understand and are drawn together by much in the same way that all humans are united by the certainty of death.

So what exactly is Fa Mu Lan's hunger? And what is the narrator's hunger? Are the two related in any real way?

The first hunger is the most basic and primal as it is simply our first definition of “a need for food” covers it pretty well. However, this is a hunger that has been brought on intentionally by the people training Fa Mu Lan and Fa Mu Lan herself. To impose this on oneself, there must be a certain goal. In this case, Fa Mu Lan's physical hunger(definition 1) seems to bring about a mental hunger(definition 4) which is shared by the narrator living in the present.

This is the unity of the human spirit. We feel shared emotions and shared ties with others because we are capable of feeling many of the same things. In the case of the narrator and Fa Mu Lan, they are both battling against their culture's perception of them as both chinese people and as women. This, coupled with their hunger for more than what they were given, drives them forward while pulling them closer together.