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.
Chapters 46-48Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 46 Summary
Minli and Dragon take flight toward Minli’s village, enjoying the ride and waving to their friends in the Village of Moon Rain as they fly overhead. They also fly over the buffalo boy’s home, and in the air, they pass an orange dragon. This is the first time Dragon has ever seen another dragon, and Dragon makes a point to find her again later. Minli thinks the orange dragon feels familiar—what she doesn’t realize is the dragon is Aunt Jin, the aunt of the goldfish who told Minli “The Story of the Dragon Gate," who finally made it to the gate and has been turned into a dragon. Minli’s anticipation grows as they approach Fruitless Mountain, but when they near her village, Dragon begins to act in a peculiar way. He tells Minli he wishes to stay there, sensing that the mountain may actually be his home. He lets Minli keep the stone ball she removed from his head, and she walks the rest of the way to her village. When she finally arrives at her hut in the middle of the night, her parents are sleeping, and the goldfish tells her not to wake them. Minli sees her home in a new light, and it looks more beautiful than ever. She crawls into her bed and falls asleep.
Chapter 47 Summary
In the morning, Ma and Ba reunite with Minli. They’re overjoyed at seeing their daughter again, and they prepare a celebratory breakfast. Minli's stone ball from Dragon turns pearlescent, and Ma and Ba identify it as a dragon’s pearl. The pearl renders Minli’s family extraordinarily wealthy. Outside, the villagers clamor at their own newfound wealth: Fruitless Mountain has turned green, and the Jade River now runs clear. Minli realizes Dragon is Jade Dragon’s child, and his return to Fruitless Mountain has reunited him with his mother, resolving “The Story of Fruitless Mountain.” Minli’s family celebrates their good fortune, and more importantly, they celebrate Minli’s safe return.
Chapter 48 Summary
Years later, the goldfish man makes his trek back to Minli’s village. He looks up and sees Dragon in the sky with his mate, the orange dragon. The goldfish man remembers Minli’s village as it was when he last visited: an impoverished and dreary place. Now, the black mountain is green, and the village is full of big, colorful houses instead of huts. According to a rumor he’s heard, Minli and her parents brought a dragon pearl to the king of the City of Bright Moonlight. The king, in turn, rewarded the family’s village with seeds and tools for planting, bringing about new farming possibilities and a long season of prosperity. The goldfish man sells every last one of his goldfish to the children in the town, who can now afford them. He then makes his way to Minli’s new house, where Ma warmly greets him, and Ba invites him in to listen to Ba’s nightly retelling of Minli’s tale. The goldfish man glimpses Minli, sitting alone in the back courtyard, staring up dreamily at the mountain and the moon.
Chapters 46-48 Analysis
According to Vogel’s model, this section contains the “Return with the Elixir” portion of Minli’s journey. She returns to her former world with new insight. This is evident in the first minute when she walks through the door at home and her formerly humble hut now looks beautiful to her. Even though her goal changed, Minli doesn’t come back from her quest empty-handed. She brings both literal and figurative gifts back to her family and village. The literal gift is the dragon’s pearl from Dragon, which starts as a stone and turns into a pearl when Minli reunites with her family. This magical metamorphosis of the pearl seems to occur because of the family’s loving reunion, which points at Minli’s other metaphorical gift: the lesson of thankfulness. By leaving on her quest, she’s taught herself, and also her mother, the lesson of gratitude. In returning, she’s made togetherness possible again. Ma, too, completes her journey of change, no longer weighed down by her problems or envy: “Ma sighed. But it was a sigh of joy, a sound of happiness that floated like a butterfly in the air” (270).
The “Return with the Elixir” step in the quest also holds resolution for the hero’s allies. Dragon finally finds his home, and he meets his first dragon—the orange dragon—and goes on to become her companion. The orange dragon is the reincarnation of the goldfish who first helped Minli at the beginning of her quest, and who reached Dragon Gate to become a dragon, which represents a resolution for her story, too. Furthermore, Minli presumes when she sees that Fruitless Mountain has grown green and fruitful that Dragon is one of Jade Dragon’s children. This is the resolution of Jade Dragon's story, the very first story Ba tells Minli in Chapter 1.
Chapter 48 jumps forward in time, and the omniscient narrator zooms in on the goldfish man instead of Minli so that Minli’s story—the one the reader has followed until now—becomes a story the goldfish man has only heard secondhand. It’s the kind of magical and mysterious story Ba might have told Minli once up on a time, which continues the pattern of impossible stories being possible. This chapter also reveals that Minli’s journey didn’t end on the day she returned back home, but continued on as Minli traveled back to the City of Bright Moonlight to give the dragon’s pearl back to the kingdom, employing the lesson the king taught her about borrowing. The king rewarded Minli with the farming tools to make her village prosperous, which was the ultimate goal of her initial quest. Minli was therefore doubly rewarded at the end of her story with the gift of gratitude and also the gift of prosperity, rendering her decision on Never-Ending Mountain a true passing of her hero’s test.
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