The Mountains Sing

The unresolved tensions and questions of The Mountains Sing come crashing together across two climaxes in the novel’s final chapters, each a mixture of joy and pain. While the long-awaited reunion with Minh seems a happy occasion, the tragedy of his life story, his imminent death, and Hạnh’s repudiation cast dark shadows over the occasion. Meanwhile, the discovery that Tâm’s grandfather is Wicked Ghost evokes trauma and threatens to ruin his relationship with Hương and, consequently, both of their lives, and yet the relationship survives this crisis, and Wicked Ghost’s death provides closure for both families. These episodes also resolve many of the novel’s lingering thematic questions while revealing Hương matured into a strong, virtuous adult who has learned lessons from her family’s experiences.

Minh’s allegiance to the South is difficult for his family to accept, and it forces each of them to choose between doubling down on their political loyalties or recognizing the inherent absurdity of war; only Hạnh goes the former route. Though her familial situation makes overlooking Minh’s past potentially dangerous, it is hard to deny that, had she wound up in the South alongside him, she would be far more sympathetic to his plight. Unsurprisingly given his own experiences in the war, Đạt says, “Sister, it was the stupid war […] . Not all those who fought on the other side were bad” (320). In his letter, Minh asks his siblings a series of questions that illuminate the existential crisis these realities incite: “If we were to meet each other, would you shoot at me? I wouldn’t. But what if one of my comrades had his gun pointed at your forehead? Would I kill my brother in arms to save my brother in blood?” (315). Minh’s much greater certainty that his own family members are on the other side leave him with the deepest understanding of war’s absurdity: “I thought I’d find satisfaction seeing my enemy dead, but the sight only made me empty and sad. I realized that blood that is shed can’t make blood flow again in other people’s veins” (315).

The value of honesty, even when the truth is painful, is also established. Despite Diệu Lan’s repeated repudiations of state censorship and her earlier assertion that “there’s only one way we can talk about wars: honestly” (79), she deceives Minh during their visit, chiefly by obscuring the true reasons that Sáng and Thuận are not joining them. Similarly, Ngọc tells Hương to keep the truth of Minh’s cancer from Diệu Lan. While Hương seems to sympathize with her mother’s request, wondering, “How could [Grandma] cope with such awful news?” (299), she cannot preserve Diệu Lan’s lie when he asks about Thuận a second time. Though this news causes Minh pain, it also brings him closer to Diệu Lan: “He reached for Grandma’s hand, tears flowing down his cheeks. ‘Mama, I’m sorry. You’ve suffered so’” (303). Having experienced and been hurt by deception herself, such as her mother’s refusal to disclose the source of her trauma or Đạt’s omission of crucial details regarding the last time he saw her father, and then experienced the healing potential conveyed even by truths as harsh as these, Hương has internalized her grandmother’s wisdom on the topic in a way that neither Diệu Lan nor Ngọc has. As she is an aspiring writer, this is a crucial lesson for her.

The novel’s progressing treatment of fate also concludes in these chapters, with Diệu Lan’s moderate, individualistic conception winning out over the rigid interpretations that mark earlier chapters. It is this sort of understanding that allows Diệu Lan to believe that Tâm can be free of his grandfather’s evil. She explains to Hương, “I used to believe that blood will tell, but blood evolves and can change, too. Young people can’t be blamed for what their ancestors did” (337). Diệu Lan has not lost faith in the existence and power of fate, but she believes it operates in conjunction with each individual’s personal choices. Hương demonstrates a similar maturity in her understanding even earlier when they encounter the butcher-woman who persecuted their family during the Land Reform. She has fallen on hard times, and Diệu Lan bears her no grudge. Rather, Diệu Lan helps this pitiable woman reach the toilet. As Hương watches, she considers how, “[f]or the pain Grandma had suffered, she could’ve pushed her former enemy into the hole filled with human waste,” but is satisfied that justice has been meted out without Diệu Lan’s intervention: “As we turned to go, I looked back at the white-haired woman squatting on the ground, a cloud of flies her company. ‘Heaven has eyes,’ I said. ‘Cruelty dispensed, cruelty returned’” (331).

Apparently, Diệu Lan has forgiven the butcher-woman, and she seems the happier for it. This episode speaks to the novel’s advocacy for the value of forgiveness. Earlier, as she tells Hương the story of her mother’s death, she reflects on the challenges of unconditional forgiveness: “Years later, when I became a Buddhist, I learned that I should forgive people for their wrongs, but when it comes to Wicked Ghost, I can’t, Guava. I don’t ever want to breathe the same air as such a terrible man” (93). This struggle manifests viscerally when she encounters Wicked Ghost at the home of Tâm’s family. Still, the extreme response that follows is Hương’s conviction that to remain with Tâm would be a betrayal of her family rather than that Wicked Ghost is beyond forgiveness. While neither Hương nor Diệu Lan go so far as to voice forgiveness of this horrible man, they do forgive his family, especially once the facts are laid bare. In a vindication of the value of forgiveness, Hương notes that letting this hatred go leaves Diệu Lan looking “as peaceful and calm as Buddha” (337). Given Diệu Lan’s earlier characterization of her inability to forgive Wicked Ghost as a failing of her piety, this image suggests that she might well have achieved the incredible, saintly feat of forgiving such a terrible man. Again as with the butcher-woman, Diệu Lan is the greatest beneficiary of her own charity.

The familial loyalty that drives Hương’s rejection of Tâm might have been misplaced, but the value of this instinct is another undeniable takeaway from the novel’s concluding chapters, even if circumstances somewhat complicate said takeaway. Despite the intensity of Diệu Lan’s physical response to encountering Wicked Ghost, there is no evidence that she wants Hương to end her relationship with Tâm. While it takes a visit from Tâm’s family to motivate Diệu Lan to intervene on his behalf, it is possible that Hương and Tâm endure unnecessary hardship in the name of blind familial loyalty. The immaturity of Hương’s response becomes clear in that this experience allows her to accept her father’s death: “I accepted now that those I loved so dearly could be taken away from me so suddenly” (335). While the net result of acknowledging her father’s death might be positive, connecting his departure with Tâm’s, departures that are both inadvertent, reveals a vindictive and illogical framing of these unfortunate circumstances, a sense that her father’s death and Tâm’s lineage are failures of loyalty despite in both cases being out of these men’s control.

Similarly complex is Minh’s decision to remain in Vietnam while his wife and children escape to the United States: “They begged me to come, and I wanted to,” his letter reveals, “but my mind turned to the North. I’d lost you once. I couldn’t do it twice. I had to go back for you first” (117). While his loyalty to his birth family is admirable, it is unclear how much good it does any of them. Fortunately, they reunite before his death, but the lives of Linh and his children in America have been far more difficult without Minh present. While Hạnh’s decision to leave is tragic and casts her in a negative light next to Minh’s loyalty, Hạnh is in fact acting out of a different sort of familial loyalty: “Tuấn asked me to leave if Brother Minh is a Ngụy,” Hạnh tells her family. “I promised him I would. And I can’t break that promise” (321). Having revealed a host of struggles her family has faced as northerners in southern Vietnam, Hạnh is making just the sort of tough decision that her mother had to make to protect her family during the Land Reform, even if she is framing that decision somewhat heartlessly. Remarkably, Sáng appears just as Minh dies, completing a total reversal of his and his sister’s positions relative to their siblings and mother. Of course, unlike Hạnh, Sáng no longer has a family of his own to sway his decision-making.

The actions of Minh, Hạnh, Sáng, and Hương herself amount to a nuanced portrayal of the value of loyalty to family, so nuanced that Hương must turn to art to process it. In the immediate aftermath of Minh’s death, she notices Sáng’s “white hair for the first time” and wonders which traumas aged him while also deciding “it was time I got to know the undercurrents of Auntie Hạnh’s life, the undercurrents that threatened to pull her away from us,” and so “I took my notebook to the back of the house” and “wrote for Grandma, […] for my uncles, my aunt, and my parents” (324). Considering the next chapter reveals Sáng “visited our home from time to time” and “joined Grandma, my mother, and me in visiting Hạnh in Sài Gòn” (326), perhaps Hương’s art helped.

“My Grandmother’s Songs,” the novel’s brief final chapter, is a vindication of Hương’s growth into a complete human and a capable artist. In 2017, accompanied by Tâm and their two children, Hương offers a completed manuscript at Diệu Lan’s grave, presumably the work of five years given the date of the corresponding first chapter and apparently the text the reader is now finishing reading. After a century of tragedy, here is something simple yet beautiful that the novel has barely featured: a joyous scene of a loving, complete, fortunate family, and one that values where they come from.

This final chapter and the first, both far shorter and set decades later than the others, function as bookends for the novel. While the first one features Hương independently reflecting on Diệu Lan and the broader history of her family and her homeland, the final one reveals that Hương is very much not alone, that she is sharing these experiences and lessons with her own family. The final chapter also provides Hương’s personal spin on Diệu Lan’s saying from Chapter 1 (see Chapters 1-4 Analysis) that set the stage for the entire narrative:

Grandma once told me that the challenges faced by the Vietnamese people throughout history are as tall as the tallest mountain. I have stood far enough away to see the mountaintop, yet close enough to witness how Grandma became the tallest mountain herself: always there, always strong, always protecting us (339).

While the first usage of this saying justified Hương in sharing this story, she makes it clear in revisiting her grandmother’s wisdom that to understand the experiences of Diệu Lan is to grasp and appreciate the full scope of what it has meant to be an honorable Vietnamese person amidst the turmoil of the nation’s modern history.