Tegan Smyth

Mountain Songs embodies the intersecting narratives of migration and how it shapes one’s identity. Taking seven years to compile, the collection centres around identity and culture, navigating these elements as a mixed-race individual. Mountain songs or sango / (pinyin: shange) are rural songs sung in the Hakka language by Hakka people as a medium to court, communicate across large distances and recount oral histories.

They are integral to Hakka culture – my maternal heritage – and have been a way to keep stories by unknown authors alive. 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 my 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.

Mountain Songs explores the journey of first-generation Chinese immigrants to Australia, while also examining the perspective of second-generation children navigating a parent’s homeland. The collection also examines contemporary issues related to migration and how this has impacted perceptions of displaced peoples in both Australia and Hong Kong.

Mountain Songs received the 2022 Proverse Publishing Prize and is the recipient of a Hong Kong Arts Development Council (HKADC) grant.