Mountain Songs embodies the intersecting narratives of migration and how it shapes one’s identity.
Mountain songs (山歌) are integral to Hakka culture—Tegan Smyth’s maternal heritage—and have been a way to keep stories by unknown authors alive in an oral tradition. As Hakka’s prominence as a spoken language gives way to other more widely spoken dialects of Chinese, it is in careful records that the cultural practices and stories are captured so they can be seen by future generations.
This is true of the poems contained in Mountain Songs, which focuses on the accounts of different women in the writer’s family, whose existence and memories have only been passed down in anecdotes but never in writing. The movement of mountain songs sung across different terrain and milieu mirrors the movement of Hakka people themselves, a widely dispersed people, where migration is tied to the community’s experiences both within and outside China. The writer draws parallels to the migration of her grandparents, her mother and self to that of transnational migration globally and the social attitudes towards migrants and refugees.
The writer observes that we are all more alike than we are different as we all have our own Mountain Songs or stories of migration—whether it is our own journey or that taken by ancestors to a new place. She hopes that within this collection, you will find something that you can relate to or see a glimpse into a different way of life.
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