81 pages • 2 hours read
Grace LinWhere The Mountain Meets The Moon
Fiction | Novel | Middle Grade | Published in 2009A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Themes
The Value of Gratitude
The dominant theme in Where the Mountain Meets the Moon is also the primary lesson Minli learns on her journey and Ma learns in Minli’s absence: the value of gratitude. At the beginning of the novel, Minli’s family experiences the struggle of hard work and low reward, and their neighbors constantly battle tough natural conditions just to farm enough rice to eat. Still, the main problem is Ma’s discontent with her surroundings, which plants in Minli a sense of anxiety over their future and a desire to fix things. This discontentment is the catalyst for her journey, and it’s also the problem that the journey solves. When Minli finally reads glimpses the secret word on the paper of happiness, it’s thankfulness.
Minli arrives at this interpretation of happiness as a result of her interactions with other characters. She learns it from characters who have less than even she, like the buffalo boy. Though Minli feels sorry for the buffalo boy, he doesn’t feel sorry for himself; what’s more, he actually feels that he’s lucky because of his friendship with the weaver girl. Minli feels empathy for Dragon, who grew up without a family—something she has never had to go without. She’s touched by Da-A-Fu’s love for their grandparents and, when Da-A-Fu turn down the chance to meet the Old Man of the Moon, she’s taken aback by their contentment with what they already have, as they wonder, rhetorically: “Why would we want to change our fortune?” (221). After each of these experiences, Minli’s reflections and emotional responses are authorial clues to the narrative import of gratitude. Similarly, back at home, Ma realizes that when Minli was there, she had a full family and enough ingredients for a happier life; it’s noticing what she’s missing that teaches her what she had.
The theme of the value of gratitude is also present in many of the stories-within-a-story. "The Story of Wu Kang” is a cautionary tale of how a lack of gratitude and contentment make for a lifetime of suffering. The stories of Magistrate Tiger illustrate how greed—gratitude’s opposite—turns easily to wrath and violence. Likewise, were the monkeys to let go of greed and relinquish the rice, they’d be free from Minli’s trap.
The lesson of gratitude also appears in subtle ways. For example, the compass Minli uses to begin her journey to Never-Ending Mountain—the tool that makes the adventure possible—she fashions from the bowl she’s had since she was little, an illustration through objects that what one needs, one already has.
The Virtue of Sacrifice
The virtue of sacrifice is something Minli comes to appreciate as a result of her experiences on the road, and it rises to the level of a major theme because of its importance in her character arc. When Minli shares a meal in the buffalo boy’s home, the physical details of the sparse hut resonate with her and make her think of her own home. She attributes the difference in the two homes to her parents, who labor to make her home more comfortable: “Minli thought about her own home—the wood floor always swept by Ma, the extra blanket Ba put over her when the wind blew cold—and she felt a strange tightness in her throat” (104).
This feeling of emotion in her throat occurs again later, when Minli leaves the Village of Moon Rain and Da-A-Fu's family: “As they waved, Minli saw each of them had missing material in their sleeves. Her goodbyes froze in her throat as she realized her warm coat was made of pieces cut from the family's own clothing” (208). The villagers use squares of their own clothing to make a coat for Minli, a personal sacrifice for a relative stranger. The poignancy of this catches Minli off-guard, and her emotional reaction is a clue to the thematic importance of sacrifice.
The novel repeatedly marks Ba as a character who embodies sacrifice. Sometimes, his sacrifice is as subtle as telling a story to comfort his family when he, too, is suffering. Other times, it's more distinct. When Minli first purchases the goldfish, Ma makes the point that there’s not enough rice to feed a fish, and Ba stops Minli from sharing her own food: “‘Eat all your rice, Daughter,’ he said, and with his shaking hands he scooped the last of his own rice to feed the fish” (25). Ba’s trembling signals his own hunger and fatigue, but still, he offers his food so his daughter won’t have to. Toward the end of the novel, Ma feeds a different fish from her bowl so Ba doesn’t have to, sacrificing for him. The parallel nature of these scenes draws attention to small moments of sacrifice and elevates them to big moments of theme-development.
Lessons in sacrifice ultimately inform Minli’s decision at Never-Ending Mountain when she decides to ask the Old Man of the Moon Dragon's question and not her own. She’s absorbed the lessons so deeply that they alter the goal of her quest. Her selflessness still reaps a reward, as Dragon’s gift turns out to directly benefit Minli, and she still earns the things she set out to get in the first place through different means. This double happy ending suggests that sacrifice doesn’t preclude a life of abundance but rather makes it possible.
The Power of Faith
Where the Mountain Meets the Moon presents the idea of faith in different forms. There's the faith characters place in fantastical stories: Minli believes at least some parts of Ba's tales to be true, which is why she pursues the Old Man of the Moon. Ba introduces the idea that believing in stories “is impossible. But it is not ridiculous” (45). The goldfish man believes stories, too, and indeed many of the fantastical-seeming elements in the novel’s many stories turn out to be true.
The ability to hear goldfish talk is another symbol of faith in the novel. As the first goldfish says to Minli of her ability to hear the fish speak, “One, of course, must want to hear” (28). This idea—that magic is possible for those who believe—is common in fairy tales and folklore. In folklore, faith is a choice rather than a natural state. Ba embodies this choice: his life is just as hard as Ma’s, but he chooses to be faithful, which is why he can hear the talking goldfish right away. Minli can hear, too. Ma takes longer, but eventually, she’s able to hear, too.
There’s also the kind of faith that characters have in each other, like when Ma and Ba decide to let Minli continue on her journey with confidence, or at least hope, that she’ll return safely. It’s in their deepest sorrow and anxiety over her departure that Ba makes a guess as to what the secret word written on the paper of happiness must be, and he guesses faith. Dragon places his faith in Minli, despite a life utterly devoid of loyal friends, and she always comes through.
And finally, there’s the faith ordinary people place in the gods. The citizens of the Village of Moon Rain believe their ancestors’ salvation from Magistrate Tiger came from divine intervention. The King of the City of Bright Moonlight, presented as a generous and wise ally of Minli’s, is also a spiritual person: he communes with the moon, and he derives wisdom from divine sources, like the page from the Book of Fortune. The last glimpse of Minli in the novel, after her visit to Never-Ending Mountain, is a repetition of the image of the king in his own courtyard. Minli sits alone in the back courtyard, staring up at the mountain and the moon, and seemingly maintaining her connection to the higher powers that helped change her life.
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