Strength is a funny thing. You think it’s about lifting weights, or keeping your mouth shut when your parents announce your grades over the dinner table like it’s Exhibit A in some kind of courtroom drama. But that’s not real strength. Not the kind that lives deep down in the bones. Not the kind that sings in your blood like a half-remembered war song.
I remember watching Mulan for the first time when I was younger. It was one of those moments that felt like it had always been there, hovering just out of reach. The animation was beautiful, the songs catchy, and the battles grand.
Hong Kong was home, but it wasn’t soft. It was not the postcard skyline, not the sanitised tourist blur, but the dense, lived-in city where the walls sweat in summer and the air smells like traffic, steam, and last night’s soy sauce. It was high expectations and low patience. My hair was cut short as a small girl—practical, unremarkable, the way my grandmother liked it because it made washing my hair easier. Sometimes, looking in the mirror, I wondered if I looked like a boy. I didn’t mind it—what I minded was not knowing whether I liked it because it made me different, or because it helped me hide.
My grandmother lived in the apartment one MTR station away from ours, and she was the one who raised me when my parents were busy, her eyes always searching for something in the old ways, in the old rhythms. When I was a child, my hair grew thick and unruly, a constant source of friction. It clung to me like a memory I hadn’t yet learned how to forget, one that refused to let go. Because home, to a young me, was my grandmother’s kitchen.
She wasn’t just the matriarch of our family. She was the one who had kept me close, the one who raised me when my parents were busy with work, with her hands always stirring something in the kitchen, always busy with the kind of care that could only come from years of experience. Her cooking wasn’t just about food. It was a ritual, a performance, a form of love. Every day, I would return to the smell of ginger, soy, and the rich umami of her cooking. Her hands, aged and steady, moved like clockwork, cutting and stirring in a rhythm that made the house feel alive. Cooking wasn’t just about filling a stomach—it was about nurturing, controlling, and holding everything together with a thread of tradition. Her dishes were like pieces of a map to a past that she couldn’t escape. The choy sum, the char siu, the fragrant jasmine rice—it was all part of a world that had shaped her, and through her, it shaped me, too. She made sure I ate well, too well sometimes, and every meal came with an implicit understanding: the more you consumed, the more you belonged. Food, like tradition, was a thing to be kept close, a form of care, but also a form of control.
We had an apartment high up in a building where the elevator trembled if it rained too hard. My twin sister shared my room, my books, if she’d ever wanted to, and my face, but not the same timeline. While I learned to conjugate French verbs and overthink text messages, she stayed wrapped in a softer rhythm. She laughed too loud at old nursery rhymes and never quite understood that the moon changed shape. Time did something different to her, like it skipped over pieces or slowed to a crawl. We were the same age, same womb, same round face. But I was unavoidably going to become the grown-up for both of us. That’s what my mother told me. “You must be good, okay? Behave. Help your sister. She needs you.”
As I grew older, something started to shift. I went to international school. English became my dominant tongue, and the walls of my world expanded beyond the narrow streets of our neighborhood. At home, I was corrected for forgetting tones. At school, I was congratulated for “sounding native”. The girls at school had different names, different faces, different ways of speaking. They wore their hair differently, too. Some wore it cropped, others tied it in messy buns or let it fall in waves down their backs. And I—suddenly and inexplicably—wanted that. I wanted to shed the child they saw me as, and step into the girl I wanted to be. I spoke English just like them—fluent, maybe even better. I read all the same books, knew all the same references.
But I didn’t fit the mould, you see. I wasn’t graceful like the girls in TVB dramas, with their careful eyeliner and effortless laughter. I hadn’t cared before I realised this was supposed to be a bad thing. I was blunt, a little too loud, always forgetting to keep my knees together when I sat. And that didn’t go unnoticed. At school, the teachers would cluck their tongues and say things like “a girl should know her place”. At home, my aunties would make pointed comments about how I’d never find a husband if I didn’t grow out my fringe. I didn’t even want a husband.
I remember the first time I tried to cut my hair on my own. I was young, but the desire to do so was urgent. My grandmother, who had spent years trying to teach me the intricacies of Cantonese cooking—showing me how to stir-fry beef with bitter melon (not that I actually liked bitter melon), demonstrating how to properly steam siu mai (the best dumplings in my years of life)—looked at me with a mixture of surprise and confusion when I insisted I wanted short hair. She didn’t understand it.
I thought of Mulan. It wasn’t the epic battles or the dragons that spoke to me, though I’d be lying if I said those didn’t have their pull. It was that moment, the one where she grabbed the sword. I thought of the way she cut her hair in that moonlit temple, the way the blade didn’t just transform her appearance—it liberated her.
Years later, I found myself in a red-stoned city in England that had just declared bankruptcy, where the air smelled like wet leaves and the boys drank too much and the girls talked fast and free. The air there didn’t feel like Hong Kong’s—dense and close—but still, it wrapped around me like a fog. I was there to study literature (against my parents’ wishes, of course) and I was surrounded by people who spoke about self-actualisation like it was something you could pick up at the corner store. The questions changed from “why aren’t you feminine enough?” to “what are you?” People asked where I was really from. They went quiet when I said “la” at the end of a sentence. I learned to laugh off the jokes. “You’re really Westernised!” “Your English is so good!” “Is Hong Kong in China now, or…?” And suddenly, I saw Mulan differently. Not as the warrior who swung a sword, but as the woman who chose to wear armour at all. Who walked into a space that was not made for her, knowing she’d be spat out or chewed up, and did it anyway. I saw myself in that: the Asian girl in a white classroom, code-switching with every breath, softening my consonants so I wouldn’t sound “too fobby,” nodding at Chaucer while wondering if any of this had a place for someone like me.
That’s when Mulan came back to me. Not as a cartoon. But as something older. The ballad version. A girl cuts her hair, dons her father’s armour, and disappears into war. She passes as a man for 10 years, then returns home—and no one ever knows. No one. That’s the part that haunted me. She wasn’t found out. She didn’t get punished. She simply was both soldier and daughter, legend and outcast, all at once. That was strength, wasn’t it? Not the swordplay or the big musical numbers, ut the quiet act of becoming what you weren’t supposed to be and surviving it.
In England, I kept my hair short. I told the stylist not to worry about making it pretty. Not to disappear, but to reclaim it. Not because it was easy, but because I chose it. I began writing my name in Cantonese again, even when no one could read it. I told my classmates that Hong Kong isn’t just geography, it’s history. I still think about Mulan in these moments. When she cuts her hair, there’s no ceremony. There’s no warning. There’s only the moment before and the moment after. And when I returned home, my grandmother’s cooking hadn’t changed. The pots still simmered with the same smells, the steamed fish with a dash of soy and a sprinkle of green onions still had its tender aromatic bite, and the rice was always perfectly fluffy. But the atmosphere was different. I was different. She reached for my hair again, her fingers lightly grazing it, as though she could undo the change.
She still cooked, of course. I’d hear about the meals she made, about the dumplings she’d prepare, the chow mein with just the right amount of oil. I could almost smell the ginger in the air. And yet, each story she told me felt more distant than the last. She was still shaping the food I loved—but I wasn’t the child she had made it for anymore. I could feel the weight of the years in those calls back home, as if she was wondering where her little girl went. The one who used to sit at the table, eyes wide, waiting for her food. She’d ask how I was doing in England. “Are you still cutting your hair short?” she’d ask. And I’d say, “yes, Grandma. I am.”
I still wear my hair short. I speak in Cantonese when I’m tired, when I’m honest. I don’t flinch when people ask where I’m really from. And when I go home, I sit with my sister and she holds my hand like she did when we were children. I wonder if she knows about carrying the parts of you they tried to prune off. Even the quiet ones. Even the ones you share with someone else. Even the ones you had to fight to keep. Because she still thinks we’re the same. Maybe we are. But only one of us knew how to disappear and come back different.
I smiled, but not because it was easy. Because it wasn’t.
You cut your hair off once, and it doesn’t just grow back the way it was. It twists, takes on a life of its own, like a scar that sometimes itches when no one’s around. Mulan knew that. You don’t just slice your hair to wear a sword—you slice it to cut through the lies you’ve been living.
That girl from the story—she vanished into a world that never had a place for her. And maybe that’s what real strength looks like: not the battles, not the glory, but the quiet knowing that you’ve become something they never expected, and you’re still standing when the smoke clears.
Sometimes I wonder if Mulan’s sword was magic—or maybe it was just the courage to be invisible in plain sight, to disappear into someone else’s story and come back changed, like a ghost no one can catch.
I keep my hair short. I keep my voice loud enough to be heard but quiet enough to be dangerous. And when the night falls, and the city hums beneath me, I think about the girl in the moonlight, cutting her hair and walking into war.
Because some battles don’t end with a song. They end with survival.
And that’s a story worth telling.
Words by Cassandra Fong
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