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.
Symbols & Motifs
Light and the Moon
Light is a symbol that appears often in Where the Mountain Meets the Moon, sometimes as literal moonlight, and other times, as a more figurative description of someone’s spirit or energy. Light and moonlight signify truth, pure goodness, faith, and a higher state of being. There’s a moment when Minli is away from home and Ba and Ma wonder if Minli will ever return. It’s their darkest moment, and just as they’re in danger of losing all hope, Ba insists they keep their faith. Just then, “A faint, gray light seeped into the room, as if the moon was escaping from the clouds” (152). This light from behind the clouds symbolizes hope amidst despair. The buffalo boy, when describing the immortal weaver girl, says: “Her hair floated around her like a midnight halo and her white face looked like a star in the sky” (106). This description goes beyond beauty and implies majesty or godliness.
The moon itself represents the source of light, spirituality, and wisdom. The Old Man of the Moon is a personification of these traits, with his wisdom and uncorrupted power. Humans in the story look to the moon for spiritual connection or guidance: the king in his pavilion; Ma seeks him through her window, and Minli in her courtyard.
Light often appears in contrast with dirtiness. Where light symbolizes enlightenment or a higher state of being, dirt symbolizes short-sightedness, closed-mindedness, or weariness. The goldfish man is someone whose life has been touched by magical intervention, and light imagery helps to present him as a character who knows something that Ma and Ba do not:
The bowls of goldfish caught the sifting from the sun, slivering it into flashing sparkles of light. The goldfish man’s eyes also flashed as he looked at Ma and Ba and their dust-covered clothes and haggard, tired faces (60).
Ma and Ba don’t yet fully believe in the likelihood of Minli’s dreams coming true, which is why they are dull and dirty in this image, but the goldfish man understands what is possible, which is why he’s filled with light. Perhaps the most prominent instance of the contrast of light and dirt is in the novel’s title: Where the Mountain Meets the Moon, which can be understood as the balance in human life between earthiness and godliness, between reality and possibility.
Food
Both actual food and food imagery are prominent in Where the Mountain Meets the Moon. At the beginning of Minli’s journey, food is one of the main things missing in her life. At home, she only eats rice, and there’s barely enough of it to go around. Fruitless Mountain doesn't grow any fruits or vegetables until the resolution of the novel, when food becomes abundant. Over the course of her quest, Minli’s allies share their food with her: the buffalo boy shares bamboo, the king gives the best dinner she’s ever had, and—when she returns home—her family celebrates with breakfast. Food is a symbol of status, as wealthier characters have more and better food than poor characters. It’s also a symbol of togetherness and generosity, which makes food imagery an important pillar of theme.
Lin repeatedly uses food imagery to describe non-food things. When Minli first meets Dragon, he weeps with tears “the size of lychee nuts” (48). The novel also describes Da-A-Fu in fruit imagery: “with their dimpled faces swollen with smiles and their matching, bright red clothing, they looked like two rolling berries” (175). The novel’s rich colors play out in food language, too. When the buffalo boy's buffalo nibbles on lettuce at the market, the vendor grows angry, “as red-faced as the radishes he was selling” (119). The goldfish-turned-dragon, whom Minli and Dragon meet on their way back from Never-Ending Mountain, is “orange, the color of the inside of a ripe mango” (261-262).
Cooking metaphors are also common. When Minli enters the City of Bright Moonlight, she observes that “The city seemed to be bubbling with people like boiling rice” (97). When in the comfort of Da-A-Fu’s hut, Minli feels “as if she were in a warm oven of kindness” (193). Cooking imagery reinforces the simplicity of Minli’s world and how she processes unfamiliar experiences by relating them to things she understands well.
Magic and Nature
Magical elements appear in the founding myths of Minli’s village, in the stories she hears from other people, and in her own experiences. While surreal and fantastical, most of the magic in Where the Mountain Meets the Moon takes place in nature and through natural processes. For example, the king in the fruit market uses magic to make a tree grow right in front of him: “Green leaves sprouted and, as they cascaded over the branches, pail moon-colored balls like pearls developed” (122-123). Similarly, the seeds that fall from the sky in the Village of Moon Rain turn immediately into gold-and silver-colored trees, but they do not, for example, turn into gold or silver coins. Other surreal elements include talking goldfish and dragons—animals whose magical abilities still don’t make them totally unnatural. Even the talking lion statues are made of stone, which is from the earth. Lin seems to be making a statement about the wondrous possibilities in nature, which contributes to the novel’s theme of gratitude, specifically of appreciating what already is all around.
There are also large, sweeping magical events, including the Village of Moon Rain moving to a different location at the hand of the gods (according to Da-A-Fu’s tale). The climax of the novel takes place on Never-Ending Mountain, a destination Minli reaches via a bridge that magically forms in front of her eyes from a single piece of red string. However, most magical events are merely backdrops for moments of realism and humanity. For example, even though Minli is atop a heavenly mountain and conversing with a god, she’s still bound by the terms that restrict her ability to ask multiple questions, and the outcome of her choice is informed less by magic and more by lessons learned down on earth. In Minli’s world, and in the novel’s events and images, magic and nature—fantasy and reality—are always in balance.
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