Where The Mountain Meets The Moon
Where The Mountain Meets The Moon
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Grace Lin on Where The Mountain Meets The Moon
In her own words: quotes and insights from the author.Why she wrote it
A husband’s request, and a book she almost left unfinishedThe novel began as a private act of care. When Robert, her first husband, started another round of chemotherapy, he asked her for something specific: a fantasy he could disappear into during treatment. She wrote, and read him what she had written during hospital visits. He died before she could finish.
I began the book when he was ill and asked me to write a fantasy to help him imagine himself elsewhere. I finished the book after his death, and it helped me realize the important things in life.
She had also grown up with an absence on the bookshelf. As the only Asian girl in her upstate New York school, she had spent years trying to squeeze herself into European fairy tales, mentally recasting Snow White because the black hair was close enough. By the time she sat down to write, she knew exactly what she was making up for.
When I was younger I was very princessy. I always wanted to be blond-haired and blue-eyed. This was before Mulan, so I was very upset about all the Cinderellas. I always tried to imagine that maybe Snow White was Chinese since she had black hair. Where the Mountain Meets the Moon would be the kind of princessy, fairy tale kind of book that I could have clung to and said, ‘I could be this heroine.’
Her mother had quietly placed a stack of Chinese fairy tale books on the living room shelf when she was a child, knowing that handing them over directly would guarantee they’d be refused. Lin read them, judged them against the lush European editions she loved, and assumed they hadn’t made much of an impression. She was wrong. Traveling as an adult through Hong Kong, Taiwan, and China, half-remembered fragments kept surfacing, and she started filling in the gaps. What she found, returning to those stories as a writer, was that the failure had never been theirs.
Those stories are actually really, really beautiful stories. But the way they were written in that book, I think, didn’t do them justice and I felt like I wanted to try to give those stories justice. [paraphrased from audio]
That impulse, to render the stories with the visual and narrative care the European tales had always received, is the reason a novel aimed at middle-grade readers was printed with full-color illustrations throughout.
How she wrote it
Simple bones, wild embellishment, and a trip timed to the three-quarter markShe went to China when the manuscript was nearly three-quarters finished, a timing she had planned precisely. Going too early would have left her without a clear sense of what she needed to see; going later would have closed off changes. One excursion took her to a mountain village because Minli, the novel’s protagonist, would visit one, and the cold, the wind-burned villagers, the warmth of the welcome all went directly into the text.
The stories were a hybrid. A lot of them were based on traditional tales that I tweaked here and there, embellishing myths that were little more than a line.
New Year decorations across China feature two plump children in red called Da-A-Fu, but the only source she could locate gave a single sentence of backstory. She turned that sentence into two fully realized characters.
Before she wrote a word of Minli’s journey, she knew the constraint that would govern its end: the protagonist may ask the Old Man of the Moon only one question. That rule came from a Chinese folktale called “Olive Lake,” which she had found and transformed. Knowing the ending first let her build toward it without losing the way.
I knew the ending about the questions before I wrote the book. Where the Mountain Meets the Moon is very loosely based on a folktale called ‘Olive Lake,’ though I changed it quite a bit.
The novel weaves a series of embedded tales, each told by a different character, around Minli’s forward journey. Managing that structure without it collapsing into chaos required a discipline that ran counter to how complicated the finished book feels.
I purposely choose a very simple plot. With a straight-forward plot as the structure — as the bones — I can do so much around it. Because I keep this simple plot, I can go wild with all the other things. I can interlace it, I can play with it, I can move things around and change things! To me, that is the secret to having a complex, layered story.
Deciding which embedded stories earned their place was, by her own description, not a tidy process: she kept any story that could tie to at least two other threads in the larger plot, and cut everything else through what she called “a lot of obsessive thinking.”
A visit to a cloisonné factory in China settled what the interior illustrations would look like. Cloisonné is a centuries-old craft in which colored enamels are separated by thin metal wires to produce ornate, jewel-like images. She watched the artists move through its many stages and saw immediately that the aesthetic matched what the novel needed.
I found the many steps that the artists do to create cloisonné images fascinating. The intricate patterns, the ornate borders had a certain jewel-type richness that I felt fit the magical atmosphere I wanted to achieve in Where the Mountain Meets the Moon.
One of the novel’s most beloved scenes, in which a village sews Minli a coat from pieces cut from everyone’s sleeves, was drawn from a real Chinese tradition. Lin had encountered the Hundred Families Robe during her research and recognized that it belonged in the story.
In China, there’s a real Chinese tradition, it’s centuries old, where when a child has a special birthday, mothers would make a patchwork robe actually, with the fabric donated by friends and family. They called it the Hundred Families Robe, with the idea that it was the blessings from a hundred families that would protect the child that wore it.
The personal thread
What Robert left in the soul of the bookShe had worried about taking liberties with Chinese mythology, mixing and reimagining stories that were not strictly hers to alter, and the worry was enough to make her hesitate about publishing at all. Robert’s death ended the hesitation. She has said that after he died she started to take ownership of her art in a way she hadn’t before. The novel’s emotional center, the question of whether a life of hardship can still be a fortunate one, came directly from what she had lived through beside him.
At the beginning of Robert’s illness, there were many times I thought we were cursed with ill-fortune and I would wonder why our fate was so poor. But as he began to lose his fight for life, I realized how lucky and how truly fortunate I really was. And when Robert’s battle ended, his final gift to me was the soul of the book.
The red threads that run through the novel, connecting every character across time and distance, are its central image for fate. She has used that image to describe what the act of writing the book itself became for her. When she read this passage at the 2010 Newbery Honor luncheon, the grief behind the novel was no longer subtext.
To me, those red threads, those connections are the stories we share. Stories as fascinating as a harrowing rescue or as inane as trying to find a parking spot — they are how we share our lives.
shelfelf.wordpress.com, “Author Interview: Grace Lin | Shelf Elf: read, write, rave.”What she wants us to sit with
Stories as the threads that prove we are not aloneThe novel’s ending turns on a lesson Minli learns from the Old Man of the Moon: that the fortune she has been chasing was already hers. Lin has said that the book’s argument, that what we already have may be exactly enough, is not a conclusion she reached abstractly. It came from watching Robert lose his fight and recognizing, in the loss, what she had been given.
I wanted these books to show Asian kids that their heritage is something to treasure, and I want to show non-Asian kids how magical it is to read a book as a window to another culture.
The red threads connecting every character in the novel serve a purpose beyond plot: they are Lin’s argument for why stories matter at all. The thread imagery, borrowed from Chinese folklore, becomes in her hands a metaphor for the way shared narrative holds communities together, whether those communities are a family, a village, or a readership.
To me, those red threads, those connections are the stories we share. Stories as fascinating as a harrowing rescue or as inane as trying to find a parking spot — they are how we share our lives... the realization that we encapsulate our life, share our memories and connect with stories is what makes them invaluable.
shelfelf.wordpress.com, “Author Interview: Grace Lin | Shelf Elf: read, write, rave.”She also had a precise, specific reader in mind when she began: the child she had been, scanning shelves for a face like hers and finding nothing. The novel was built as a correction, not a general statement about diversity but a direct answer to one girl’s longing. The fuller version of that answer addresses two different children at once.
The reason why Where the Mountain Meets the Moon, even though it’s a novel, it has these full color illustrations in it, is because of my desire when I was younger for those Chinese fairy tale books to be just as beautifully illustrated as the European fairy tale books. [paraphrased from audio]