Where the Mountain Meets the Moon
By Grace Lin
Publication Year: 2009
Type: Fiction
Genre: fantasy, myth retelling
Read on 2020-09-05
View additional specs on this book in Muhan’s 2020 Reading Survey ➞
★★☆☆☆
I am definitely too old for this book (which skews on the young end of middle grade) and found it pretty boring with no stakes or real character development. It’s a historical fantasy/a collection of myth retellings about a girl who runs away from home on a quest to find an elixir of life (of something like that) to alleviate her farmer parents from a life of poverty. She quickly pairs up with a kindly dragon who can’t fly and meets many other people and creatures on her journey who each tell her their stories adapted from traditional Chinese folklore and classical stories. I recognized a few - including the story of the painted dragon who was so lifelike he came to life as soon as the painter finished his eyes, and the myth of Chang’e - but there were definitely a lot I didn’t know.
As an English language re-presentation/adaptation of traditional Chinese myths, I’m not really sure what this book was going for beyond a very 90s multiculturalism thing. I don’t really know who this book is for or what it’s trying to teach. Is it aimed at a non-Chinese white/Western audience? Is it to teach Chinese immigrant kids and adoptees about their culture? Is it a good representation/adaptation of Chinese folklore? Or does it capitalize on Orientalist features and tropes like filial piety to feed into the early 2000s market for multicultural content?
I really don’t believe in the idea that Chinese immigrants and diaspora need to “connect with their roots” or “learn about their traditional culture” in the way that mainstream Western/American society tends to understand culture. Like culture and cultural practice is not static and contemporary China exists and has its own constant adaptations, reinventions, bastardizations of classical texts, folklore, religious practices, language, food, etc. Culture is a living, breathing thing so it’s important to always acknowledge - for instance - that something like this book has absolutely nothing “traditional” about it - it is just one of many English language adaptations for a Western audience.
Moreover, kids who grew up in any kind of diaspora usually have their own unique experience of culture, as transmitted and practiced in piecemeal fashion from their family and community, and hybridized with lots of other cultural ephemera in TV, film, books, etc. For instance, I grew up learning a lot of these myths from either Mandarin Chinese cassette tapes my parents bought for me from China or my Chinese language classes and textbooks which used these stories for didactic purposes. As an adult reading about these now I don’t exactly have a nostalgia for these stories - they weren’t told to me as bedtime stories or anything - but I also feel like they are weirdly decontextualized presented as they are here. A lot of these myths were originally presented to me as fables with specific moral principles and lessons attached. However my lived experience of cultural friction and cognitive dissonance growing with a different culture and parenting style at home than in the rest of the mainstream Western culture I consumed meant that “Chinese culture” always carried with it a lot of baggage and burden and expectation - far more than I could mentally process or take on as a child.
So what is the moral of this book? Of the protagonist’s story? Rather than speaking to the unique experience of culture of English-speaking/reading Chinese kids in the diaspora, it merely regurgitates principles of filial piety and watered down classical stories/myths to no real end. It doesn’t read as a book written /for/ kids in the diaspora, but rather like a book written for white moms and teachers with Chinese kids and misguided notions of how “culture” is lived. I don’t know anything about this author or the context in which this book was written and published, but I feel very protective of the right of diasporic and immigrant kids to pave their way through the minefield of culture and familial obligation for themselves. And through that lens, this book is unsuccessful, and not something I would recommend to my 8 year old brother for instance.
