The Mountains Sing

“As my mother left, Heaven cried his farewell in big drops of rain. […] The rain swept across us and swallowed her up into its swirling mouth.”

Hương’s lament at her mother’s departure is strikingly poetic, and it conveys her personal belief in the forces of fate and heaven. Rain functions as two distinct metaphors in this image: first as manifestation of divine sorrow at the separation of mother and daughter, and then conversely as the agent that divides them and even devours Ngọc. Taken together, this image implies Hương’s belief that, tragic as losing her mother is, it is nevertheless a part of their destiny.

“Oh how I longed to run my fingers through my mother’s hair again. We’d always washed our hair together, under the shade of our báng tree. Those days seemed like a dream away; even our beloved tree was now just a memory.”

Here, Hương falls prey to the very human tendency to wish things could go back to the way they were. It is naïve (though very reasonable, especially considering she is a child) to expect that life will be the same once her mother returns. Her recognition that the tree that formed such an important part of this ritual is itself gone confirms this. Still, she cannot help herself.

“As long as I have my voice, I’m still alive.”

This line of Diệu Lan’s, which she utters about her successful escape from the Land Reform purge, is so important that it is actually included twice in the novel: here when Hương recalls her grandmother saying it as times improve for them in Hanoi, and in Chapter 11 in its original place in Diệu Lan’s own story. If possible, the primacy of having a voice becomes even greater for Hương given the role of writing in her life, yet another gift from her grandmother.

“My friends were now Laura the American girl, Pinocchio the wooden boy, and Mèn the cricket.”

Although Hương tries to look on the bright side in uttering this line, there exists a subtly sarcastic subtext. While Hương is fortunate to have access to books she loves, her social isolation gets to her; her inability to maintain friendships is a result of her grandmother’s job rendering the absence of her parents and uncles unbearable. Her attempts to fill these gaps with literature fall apart when her mother goes to stay with Duyên, leading her to destroy the final page of Little House in the Big Woods.

“Chew carefully […]. Our stomachs have been empty for too long. Eating too much and too fast can kill us.”

While Diệu Lan’s mother gives her daughter this advice in the very specific context of having just found food during the Great Famine, its advocacy for caution and moderation can be applied widely, both within the novel and beyond. Even within this scene, Diệu Lan’s mother’s words can be read as a call for a more careful approach to the very discovery of the cornfield, which might have prevented them from getting caught by Wicked Ghost and thus saved the speaker’s own life.

“Oh, Guava, I used to think that we were the ones in charge of our destinies, but I learned then that, in time of war, normal citizens were nothing but leaves that would fall in the thousands or millions in the surge of a single storm.”

When Diệu Lan utters this line, she is overcome by the helplessness war brings as she reflects on the deaths of her mother and Trinh. Though by the novel’s end, she will progress toward a more moderate conception of fate, she cannot be blamed for doubting the existence of free will when recalling such senselessly tragic events.

“I’m not proud of this now, but at that time I felt as if all the rivers of her tears had flown toward the spirit of my uncle, leaving her motherhood for me dry.”

Ngọc’s condition upon her return prevents her from functioning as a mother for Hương. While this is understandable given what Ngọc has endured, it is equally understandable that Hương would struggle to deal with this, especially when she sees her mother investing energy in other relationships. For Hương, her mother’s love is a necessity, hence the water metaphor. Ngọc’s extenuating circumstances, however dire, do nothing to mitigate that thirst.

“Yet on the day the war ended, Grandma and I didn’t celebrate. For us, peace would only arrive when all our loved ones had returned home. Our house was the only one in the neighborhood without the red flag unfurling above its door.”

Celebrating the end of a war requires conviction that the right side won. For Hương and Diệu Lan, the war never made enough sense for there to have been a right side, and even if it had, the fact that so many of their dearest loved ones remain missing makes the cost of that win too great. This moment also speaks to Diệu Lan’s nonconformity. For her, family always comes first, and she is willing to shift her politics as needed to support that priority.

“And Auntie, we can’t just leave. The workers and their families depend on us. The graves of my parents are here to be looked after. Besides, how can we just abandon everything? My parents and grandparents built all this with their lives. We can’t just run away because of some rumors.”

Despite the tragedies Diệu Lan has already endured by this point, she doubts the legitimacy of Tú’s concerns. The fact that Communists recently murdered her own husband ought to provide enough reason for her to take this situation seriously. Her denial, then, as well as the illogical rationale she provides, speaks to the very human tendency to downplay threats when to heed them would necessitate radical change.

“As we moved away, thunder exploded above our heads. Lightning ripped open the black sky. The rain punished me with its cold lashes. For the first time in years, I allowed myself to cry, because the rain could hide my sorrow. With the exploding thunder, I was able to beat my fists against my chest and scream.”

Many characters in this novel, and indeed most of us in the real world, can identify with Đạt’s cathartic expression in this scene. Although the army specifically prohibits him from showing emotion, people are generally expected to swallow their emotions and keep their chins up. However, just as sunny skies sometimes give way to violent thunderstorms, so do we find ourselves overcome with anger and sadness from time to time. Đạt’s poetic phrasing conveys what happens when we fail to process such emotions in a healthy manner.

“I wanted to tell my uncle not to blame himself but feared I’d interrupt his thoughts. Perhaps he had to untangle his feelings on his own, by talking out loud, so that he could understand how it was to be alive, and to be dead at the same time.”

While Hương often comes across as childish in her adolescence, these lines reveal a stunning degree of maturity. Her willingness to listen to her uncle’s story that night, simply to listen without giving advice or minimizing his feelings, is a gift. Although the power of friends and family to help one another heal is at the core of this novel, in this scene Hương demonstrates an understanding that much of that healing must be done alone.

“In your schoolbooks, you won’t find anything about the Land Reform nor about the internal fighting of the Việt Minh. A part of our country’s history has been erased, together with the lives of countless people. We’re forbidden to talk about events that related to past mistakes or the wrongdoing of those in power, for they give themselves the right to rewrite history.”

Diệu Lan hates the state propaganda that characterizes this period in Vietnamese history. Having seen personally how denial opens the door to continued suffering, she now firmly believes that learning from and avoiding the mistakes of the past requires brutal truth-telling about that past. When those stories are not only withheld but rewritten by the villains themselves, there is little hope that tomorrow can be any better than yesterday.

“It didn’t look right. Farmers of my region were known to be industrious, always arriving at their fields before sunrise. That morning, though the sun was up, the fields were empty.”

While the concerns that fueled the Land Reform were legitimate, its execution was a violent mess. The violence is made abundantly clear in the experiences of Diệu Lan’s family, but her observation here reveals the messy bit. It is bad enough that her family has had to suffer such terrible tragedies, but the fact that the perpetrators are too caught up in the purge to reap the benefits of land redistribution, that the crops are instead left untended, their harvests doomed to be wasted, makes the tragedy that much more senseless.

“I might be a fool but not foolish enough to employ a grownup. They’d execute me for being a rich person, an exploiter, a member of the bourgeoisie. […] I’m not hiring your son, understand? He’s the son of my faraway brother, and he’s just helping out.”

The pho shop owner who employs Đạt is an unsympathetic character. If she could simply have hired Diệu Lan instead or as well, perhaps the whole family might have moved on from the Land Reform purge more quickly and easily. However, the woman’s explanation here justifies her apparently cruel behavior. Diệu Lan is so occupied with her own family’s hardships that she fails to consider how the Land Reform might be threatening those around her. Although this woman could have stood to be kinder, her words reveal the pressures she is under and the significant risk she is taking on even in employing Đạt.

“Today I rubbed my body until it bled. I want to wash the filth from my skin, but it’s too late.”

This line from Ngọc’s diary is a painful indicator of the depths of her shame over her experiences in the war. Naturally, she is not actually dirty, but her rape and abortion have left her feeling so emotionally unclean, and she is so ill-equipped to process that trauma, that she must literalize that filth to have some method of attempting to clean herself.

“In our family, love is something that we show, not something we speak about. Mama has never said that she loves me, but she shows it by caring and cooking for me. Now that I’m incapable of taking care of Hương and cooking for her, I wish I had the courage to tell her how much I love her.”

Although most would agree that actions speak louder than words, the reluctance of those in Ngọc’s family to speak about their emotions puts an additional burden on their actions. When any among them fails to convey love through behavior, no matter how good the reason behind that failure might be, all evidence of love vanishes. Fortunately, despite the betrayal Hương commits by reading her mother’s diary, her actions lead to the honest communication Ngọc wishes for.

“A cool breeze rushed at us, unfolding a sweet fragrance. Across the road, giant leaves and pink flowers brimmed a pond. Lotus. Why hadn’t I noticed them before?”

Hương makes this observation as Tâm takes her to a shop to repair her bicycle. As is common throughout the novel, Hương notices natural beauty when life is good for her. In this case, her confusion about this beauty speaks to her reluctance to let herself fall for Tâm. Moreover, the lotus itself is foreshadowing, as soon thereafter Tâm will steal a lotus for Hương, and lotuses will continue to act as a motif in their relationship.

“Streets blurred past me. The air that rushed by my ears sounded like the whizzing of bombs being dropped. The thumps of my footsteps on the ground sent tremors through my body like explosions. I saw my father in the jungle, roasted by flames. I heard him call my name as tongues of fire ate into him, disfigured him. I howled.”

As Hương rushes out of her house, fleeing her mother and uncle and their request to set up an altar for Hoàng, she perceives the world around her as a warzone. Her father’s death is, by this point, nearly certain. The lack of any news about him implies that whatever killed him left him unrecognizable. Especially given Đạt’s recent revelation, it is likely that Hoàng died in a manner similar to what Hương is experiencing in this scene, but her unwillingness to accept the possibility of his death has kept her from considering these details. Now, in a flood of emotion, her capacity to resist them is gone, and her father’s grisly death consumes her.

“A soldier had been injured in an explosion and lost his memory. At the beginning of this year, he listened to the radio and heard a poem about the river that runs through his village. The poem evoked such powerful emotions that he remembered his way home. His family had no news from him for nine years, and then he turned up. Can you imagine how happy they were?”

This anecdote, which Ngọc shares with Minh, speaks to both the power of art and a hope of Hương’s. Of course, the possibility that Hoàng is not only out there but in a similar position to the man from this news story is incredibly slim. Nevertheless, the hope this story inspires does not amount to an obsession, not even for Hương. Ngọc’s final question suggests that the family is at a point where they can feel joy at any good news related to the war, even if that good news does not directly concern them.

“But being a good Catholic isn’t easy. God asks me to forgive those who harmed me. But how could I ever forgive those who murdered my father and my uncle and tore our family apart?”

Minh’s desire to practice universal forgiveness is admirable, but what is most striking about Minh’s struggle is its similarity to his mother’s. Notably, both Minh and Diệu Lan feel their religions compel them to forgive their enemies. These lines, then, are a reminder that, although The Mountains Sing is deeply rooted in Vietnam, it is nevertheless a story for people from all backgrounds and a vindication of universality.

“[I]f you meet me before I die, please find the strength inside of you to look past my pitiful appearance and see a fire inside of me. It burns for you, for our ancestors, and for our village. It burns, asking for your forgiveness.”

This plea, which comes from the final paragraph of Minh’s letter, is a heartfelt entreaty to his family to look past his unfortunate circumstances and see the good in him. As problematic as 24 years of no contact might seem, Minh’s story suggests that everything he did was rooted in love for his family. Moreover, Minh’s use of fire as a metaphor in this way eerily echoes Hương’s recent realization, which comes as she stares into a fire and considers his story, that life should be measured above all by the light we can shine on those around us.

“I bit my lip. The turbulent events of our history had not just ripped people apart, they’d imprinted on them a sense of guilt about things over which they had no control.”

Upon hearing Hải apologize for not having made sure Minh met up with the rest of the family after the purge, Hương achieves a realization she has been working toward the entire novel. She has witnessed practically every one of her family members shouldering unnecessary guilt from uncontrollable circumstances. Here at last she recognizes that this tendency is yet another evil of war. Still, it is wisdom she will struggle to apply herself when the truth about Tâm’s grandfather emerges soon thereafter.

“Try to forgive and forget, Ngọc […]. If you bear grudges, you’re the one who’ll have to bear the burden of sorrow.”

As Ngọc seethes at one of the women who persecuted her family during the Land Reform, Diệu Lan replies with wisdom she has struggled to internalize. Moments later, she will succeed in this endeavor when she encounters the butcher-woman. Though her surprise meeting with Wicked Ghost will present an even greater test, the resolution of that conflict indicates that she might have managed to forgive even him.