The Mountains Sing

The sudden switch back into Diệu Lan’s voice to start Chapter 5 indicates that Nguyễn is establishing a pattern of alternating between the two characters’ perspectives and deepening the importance of the parallels between grandmother and granddaughter. Underscoring this theme even more profoundly is the fact that this introductory segment is centered around a haiku that Diệu Lan employs to help her granddaughter process the difficult lesson that, despite having killed Diệu Lan’s father and wreaked havoc across Vietnam, the Japanese are human beings who happen to bear significant similarities with the Vietnamese. That Diệu Lan relies on a brief work of poetry for this hefty task speaks to her own recognition of art’s power and reveals a major source of Hương’s personal reverence for art, a reverence that will be solidified later in this section when Đạt presents her with the novel’s most intimate and persistent symbol: the Sơn ca her father carved for her, a work of art itself.

Destiny and tradition also remain forces in these three chapters, most neatly embodied by the legend behind Hoàn Kiếm Lake: “Hundreds of years ago, when China’s Ming Dynasty invaded Việt Nam, Heaven helped the Vietnamese by sending a magical sword” (122). The legend holds that the sword both provided for Vietnam’s victory and secured its subsequent peace when a huge turtle “ask[ed] the Emperor to return the sword. ‘The world will only be at peace if all people let go of their weapons,’ the turtle said” (122). The Emperor obliged, and the turtle disappeared with the sword. Hương reflects, “The ancient legend couldn’t be truer. If both Americans and Vietnamese had laid down their weapons, no one would have had to die” (123). Hương takes stock in the story’s wisdom and subscribes to the connected superstition that “whoever sees a Great-Grandparent Turtle in this lake will be blessed” (123).

The Americans and Vietnamese did not lay their weapons down though, nor do Hương and her grandmother see any such turtle that day, and so it is fitting that later that evening Hương again misidentifies a returning family member, thinking she sees her father when it is in fact her uncle Đạt. Of course, Đạt’s miraculous survival and his successful delivery of the Sơn ca are blessings of their own. However, Hương struggles to remain optimistic as prospects of her father’s return are dim, suggesting that to ascribe life’s vagaries to destiny requires the right perspective. If the wisdom of the legend could have prevented the war, and if sighting a turtle might have brought her father back instead of her uncle, then the fact that these events did not come to pass can be read as evidence that life is in harmony with the forces of destiny.

Conversely, a more optimistic and inclusive interpretation might ascribe the war’s eventual end and the safe return of some of Hương’s family members to the legend and superstition. Hương does not take this perspective, though, and increasingly in these chapters she comes to view destiny as a trap. When she curses her mother for encouraging her father to enlist and names his return as a prerequisite of her forgiveness, she sets her own destiny. As she reflects on this episode, she realizes her hopes for her father's return now carry an unfortunate extra weight: “Come home, Papa. Come home and make things right between Mama and me” (110). Tragically, Hoàng will never return, and so fate will not save his daughter’s relationship with his wife. They will need to do that themselves.

Hương’s impulse to blame others for her problems is a significant, albeit understandable, character flaw, a true mark of her immaturity. In addition to blaming her mother for her father’s disappearance and for abandoning her, she blames Diệu Lan for being “the one who’d chased my mother away” (103). That Hương takes her mother’s side in the argument that occurred during Duyên’s visit is a tragic betrayal of her grandmother given how much Diệu Lan has done for Hương, especially considering the suggestion that these decades-old events could be the cause of Thuận’s death is flatly illogical. Of course, Ngọc’s trauma has left her little more than a child herself at this stage, and so it is not surprising that she too is engaging in immature blame games. Fortunately, she begins to improve under Duyên’s care, and she soon progresses to blaming herself, a more sophisticated response if not a healthier one.

No one is harder on themselves than Diệu Lan, though. She blames herself for her father’s death, reasoning that “[i]f I hadn’t been driving the cart, we would have gone faster, and my father wouldn’t have met Black Eye” (80). She blames herself for her mother’s death too, suffering from nightmares for months in which she would “wake up screaming, telling her that I was sorry for not being able to save her” (91-92). Her greatest source of guilt, though, might be her failure to heed Tú’s warnings about the Land Reform: “If I hadn’t been so naïve, perhaps we would have had time to escape. If I hadn’t been so involved with the new planting season, perhaps I would’ve learned a thing or two about the secretive plan to punish us” (146). Of course, it is absurd and counterproductive for Diệu Lan to feel guilt over her parents’ deaths, as Công and Hải attempt to tell her, and the sudden and chaotic violence of the Land Reform purges make it hard to imagine how anyone could have done much better in Diệu Lan’s place, especially considering Tú only announces her concerns the very day that the attack occurs. However, considering the scope of the tragedy Diệu Lan and her family have endured, it is not surprising that she dwells on how she might have acted differently and prevented some of this suffering. Her struggles with these feelings are reminders for Hương and the reader that even this remarkable woman still has room to grow.

Moderation is key when negotiating the space between forgiveness and blame. While Diệu Lan, Ngọc, and Hương might blame too readily, it is Hạnh’s and Sáng’s failure to recognize that the Communist Party is the source of many of the calamities that have befallen both their family and Vietnam that allows them to rationalize and even embrace its authoritarian rule. It is no coincidence that they are the youngest of Diệu Lan’s children and thus remember the least of the Land Reform, the most trying experience the state put their family through. As becomes apparent in the next section, they happened to have the least traumatic experiences of the group during their flight north, with Hạnh being taken in by a loving family and Sáng never being separated from his mother at all.

It is worth noting that the peasants who persecute Diệu Lan’s family have legitimate grievances. While their actions certainly go too far and the kindness of Diệu Lan’s family toward their own laborers is commendable, the fact remains that the Trầns are extremely lucky. Moreover, centuries of inequitable land ownership are bound to take a toll on those exploited by such a system. Though the perspectives presented in The Mountains Sing do not privilege the voices of these figures, the facts of Diệu Lan’s life prior to this point cannot obscure the truth of their suffering. The best example of this comes from the Great Famine. While Diệu Lan reports that “more than half of Vīnh Phúc” (91) died of starvation, Trinh is the only member of Diệu Lan’s household to suffer this fate, making the Trầns’ death rate a comparatively merciful 12.5%. Even if Diệu Lan’s mother’s death is counted as well, which would double their death rate to one in four, the power of the Trần family’s aristocratic privilege remains undeniable.

In this section it first becomes apparent that Diệu Lan’s children can serve as stand-ins for the various factions working to solve Vietnam’s problems, bringing a new dimension to the novel’s allegory. This possibility emerges in Diệu Lan’s recounting of the day the purge reached their home. Having assuaged Tú’s concerns about the impending Land Reform, Diệu Lan encounters Đạt, Thuận, and Hạnh, who present her with a young, shivering sẻ bird, “featherless, its wings drooping by its side” (138). The children bicker over who saw the bird first, but Diệu Lan laughs off their petty squabble and tells them to “[b]ring the poor creature back to the tree. […] If you can’t find the mother, feed it water and insects” (138). Ngọc rushes in to join the excitement, and Diệu Lan leaves them “studying the bird and debating what to do next” (138). Though they mean well, the children would likely have killed the helpless creature without Diệu Lan’s intervention. Whether Diệu Lan’s simple and humane advice is sufficient to save the creature’s life cannot be known. Even under normal circumstances, it might have been too late, and these are not normal circumstances, as the purge begins almost immediately thereafter, thrusting reality into metaphor. The sẻ bird is a type of songbird, and songbirds have often served as symbols for Vietnam. This one is no exception, and so, by obsessing and bickering over it instead of simply giving it what it needs, the children are inadvertently harming it, just as the perpetrators of the purge and the Communists and even those who opposed them often lost sight of what matters most and, in their endeavor to save Vietnam and its people, instead doomed them.