Xiu's Stuffed Rabbit

Xiu's Stuffed Rabbit is a battered cloth toy that carries the memory of Mulan’s sister and, through its fading embroidery, helps Mulan recognize the plant needed to save Xiu and the Rabbit. First a keepsake Mulan protects during their journey, it becomes a clue connecting her childhood to the Rabbit’s hidden history; at the story’s end, its return to her home preserves an uncertainty about what she experienced.

Identity and Material History

Mulan finds the toy among the remaining supplies in the saddlebags she had taken from Black Wind. The journey has left the supplies soggy and slightly damaged, but the toy itself is unharmed. She holds it close while thinking of Xiu smiling with her eyes closed, making the object a tangible connection to the sister she has left behind in order to seek a cure.

The toy’s condition records the passage of time. Mulan has clutched it hundreds of times, so often that she no longer remembers its original appearance. Once reddish orange and neatly embroidered, it is now dark copper, with most of its silk stitching worn away. A flower and a spider remain visible. Its changing surface matters: the object has been familiar through repeated use, but the worn design conceals information that Mulan needs to recover.

A Keepsake Shared with the Rabbit

Mulan presses the toy close to the motionless Rabbit, who has not awakened since their encounter with the sea beast. She hopes that placing it beside him will make him look less alone. In this moment, the toy links the two figures Mulan is trying to save: it belongs to her memories of Xiu, but she offers it as a small comfort to the Rabbit as well.

Later, the Rabbit stirs and the stuffed toy drops to the ground. Mulan finds it and sees that he has pushed it out of the carrier, though she cannot tell whether he did so by accident or for some other reason. The gesture receives no explanation. Its ambiguity sits beside the earlier image of Mulan placing the toy near him: first she uses it to offer comfort, then its movement prompts her to look at it anew.

The Embroidery as a Clue

The surviving flower leads Mulan to a discovery. She remembers the Rabbit’s medicine bag from an earlier time, which had seemed familiar when she smelled it as a child with a stuffed nose. Its silk and design matched those of the toy: a floral pattern surrounded by a viper, spider, toad, centipede, and scorpion. On the toy, most of those poison-fighting animals have disappeared with the thread; only the flower and spider remain.

That comparison turns a worn keepsake into practical evidence. Mulan recalls that the flower on the toy once had nine petals and asks Lu Ting-Pin about the two purple-flowered plants he has found. One has nine pointed petals; the other is horn-shaped, with a star spreading from its center. Counting the nine tapered triangles embroidered on the toy, Mulan identifies the nine-petaled plant as the Essence of Heavenly Majesty. The recognition directs her and Lu Ting-Pin toward the medicine they need before the new moon. The object does not merely evoke the past: its surviving pattern helps resolve a present danger.

The recognition also opens a question about the toy’s origin. Mulan remembers receiving it as a young girl from an old peasant woman with light amber eyes. Since the Rabbit can change into different kinds of beings, she wonders whether he had taken the woman’s form and given her the toy because she would need it someday. The connection is suggested through Mulan’s recollection and the matching designs, but the possibility is not confirmed. The toy brings the Rabbit’s concealed history close to her childhood without fully explaining it.

Return and Narrative Significance

After the adventure, Mulan remembers that she left the toy on a stone bench and calls out for it as she is stepping onto a cloud. She falls through the cloud and arrives back at home, where Xiu remains still on the bed and the family is present. In that bewildered moment, Mulan questions whether she imagined the Rabbit, Lu Ting-Pin, and the White Fox.

A tall Healer beside the window is tying a cloth toy to a leaning pole. He says he is returning it because it must have fallen off. Mulan recognizes the Healer’s amber eyes and silver beard, but the scene does not explain how the toy traveled from the stone bench to her home. Its return therefore works in two directions: it is an ordinary object restored to its place beside Xiu, and a surviving link to an experience Mulan is now unsure how to understand.

Across these scenes, the toy moves from keepsake to comfort, from comfort to evidence, and finally to a reminder of the journey’s uncertain aftermath. Its fraying embroidery makes memory visible as something incomplete but not wholly lost: the image has worn down, yet the nine-petaled flower still gives Mulan the knowledge needed to act. The surviving object connects the sisters, the Rabbit’s possible past, and the remedy that may save them, while its unexplained return leaves those connections resonant rather than fully resolved.