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.
Chapters 16-20Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 16 Summary
Minli and Dragon travel for several days. At night, Minli gets homesick, but she feels determined to complete her mission for the sake of her family. She continues to follow the compass west toward the City of Bright Moonlight. There, she’ll ask the Guardian of the City for the “borrowed line,” something the goldfish told her to ask for, but something she doesn’t yet understand. As they cross a body of water, Dragon and Minli meet an orange goldfish with a black fin who mistakes them for his long-lost Aunt Jin. The fish tells them a story he claims every fish knows.
Story Summary: “The Story of the Dragon Gate”
The Dragon Gate exists at the top of a waterfall and is an “entryway to the sky” (92). If a fish were ever to swim to the top of the waterfall and pass through the gate, the dragon statues on the roof would turn the fish into a dragon. The orange fish’s Aunt Jin struck out to find the elusive Dragon Gate, and he’s missed her ever since.
The orange fish directs Minli toward the City of Bright Moonlight, which is visible and striking in the distance. The fish warns them that its citizens might fear Dragon, having undergone a traumatic experience with a dragon before (what Minli and Dragon don’t yet know is that the City of Bright Moonlight is where Dragon flew from his painting and fled the city a century earlier). Dragon plans to wait outside the city gates while Minli goes inside.
Chapter 17 Summary
Minli enters the city gates without Dragon. She instantly spots a boy a little older than her walking beside a water buffalo. When she asks him how she might find the king, and the buffalo boy informs her that she’s only made it as far as the Outer City and that the Inner City is blocked off by gates that only open to Outer City residents once a year during the Moon Festival. Minli has missed it. The buffalo boy dislikes the people in the Inner City: he once met a lowly stable man in the Inner City who told him he was king, but the buffalo boy believed he was an imposter because he wasn’t wearing the golden dragon that all kings wear. The soldiers at the gate demand Minli and the boy leave, and Minli follows the buffalo boy to his home.
Chapter 18 Summary
Minli joins the buffalo boy for dinner in his small, run-down hut near the edge of the Outer City, where he lives alone with his buffalo, his parents having died four years earlier. This causes Minli to reflect on her own home life and her nurturing parents: “[T]he 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). The buffalo boy is skeptical that Minli will be able to reach the king and ask him for the “borrowed line” she seeks.
Story Summary: “The Story of the Buffalo Boy’s Friend”
One day, the buffalo boy followed his buffalo to a freshwater lake and discovered seven sisters swimming. Six of the sisters disappeared upon noticing the boy, but the one girl who lingered struck up conversation. She explained that she lived under strict supervision and it was hard for her to get away, but on full moons, she’d try to sneak in a visit to the buffalo boy on her way to visit her grandfather, to whom she delivered spun thread.
Minli notices how much the buffalo likes the girl: “It was funny how the buffalo boy’s whole manner changed when he talked about her—his vaguely mocking attitude and tough expression washed away and he lit up like a lantern” (109). The buffalo boy believes his friend, the weaver girl, will know how Minli can see the king.
Chapter 19 Summary
Minli wakes up in the night in the buffalo boy’s hut to find him gone, and she feels a jolt of loneliness. She spies on the buffalo boy just outside the hut and sees that he’s talking to the weaver girl. Minli gazes upon her in awe: “Everything about her seemed finer and more delicate than the average person” (112). The weaver girl predicts the king will be at the Market of Green Abundance the following day. Minli finds the friend mysterious and asks the buffalo boy questions about her, but the boy is uncurious.
Chapter 20 Summary
Chapters 16-20 Analysis
Minli’s meeting with the goldfish looking for his Aunt Jin seems like an incidental meeting, but in Where the Mountain Meets the Moon, every interaction between Minli and a new character is immediately important or becomes important later. “The Story of the Dragon Gate,” about a goldfish who can ascend to dragon-hood, is foreshadowing for the orange dragon Minli and Dragon will see later on their return to Minli’s village and who will become Dragon’s partner. The story is also emblematic of the idea that people and animals are not always what they seem: a dragon can be a former painting, a goldfish can be a future dragon, an old man with a book can be an omnipotent immortal. Thematically, this contributes to the idea of faith in the impossible.
“The Story of the Buffalo Boy’s Friend,” which features a mysterious weaver girl whose comings and goings are unexplained, foreshadows Minli discovering the weaver girl’s true identity as the granddaughter of the Old Man of the Moon later in the narrative. The author uses Minli’s curiosity again and again in the novel as a device to signal something that will come up again later.
The buffalo boy is an ally in Minli’s hero’s journey, as he takes her in and gives her valuable information. The buffalo boy’s home life is different from Minli’s in that his hut is not as nice, and he lives alone without parents. The author uses this contrast in setting to allow Minli to reflect on the home life she’s been so desperate to improve. The “strange tightness in her throat” (104) she feels when thinking of her own family is a physical manifestation of understanding that she has more than the buffalo boy has. Minli is seeing more of the world, and more of the world’s suffering, and her perspective on her own life is starting to shift.
Ma is also evolving, as evidenced by her relationship to the goldfish. First, she offers to carry the bowl. The goldfish counsels Ba: “Let her, old man. It’s her way of saying she’s not angry anymore” (115). Then, Ma shares her food with the silver goldfish. This is an act previously unthinkable for Ma, who berated Minli for purchasing a goldfish at the beginning of the narrative; it’s also an act Ba previously performed in secret so as not to incur Ma’s scolding. However, Minli’s absence is forcing Ma to nurture her own sense of faith, and the sharing of food with the goldfish represents this change. She’s having to reconsider the things she once thought were silly or fruitless.
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By Grace Lin
