The Blue Mountains of China

Steve Pitt is a Toronto-based freelance writer and an award-winning journalist. He has written many young adult and children's books, including Day of the Flying Fox: The True Story of World War II Pilot Charley Fox.

This book, first released in 1970, marked a new direction in Wiebe’s
style and complexity of plot. A Christian epic based on the real-life
travails of Wiebe’s ancestors and extended religious community, the
story begins with German Mennonites fleeing persecution in Stalin’s
Soviet Union. Many are killed or imprisoned. The survivors manage to
establish struggling colonies in Canada, Siberia, and Paraguay.

The beginning of the book reads like the story of any minority being
persecuted by a powerful and hostile state. Wiebe ends the book,
however, with a hard-nosed examination of what it actually means to be a
Christian. Six Mennonites end up jostling for sitting room on a wooden
cross lying in a ditch by the side of the Trans-Canada Highway. They
represent the full gamut of Christian experience, from persecution to
prosperity. These Mennonites, although related by blood and religion,
are completely ill at ease with each other. Wiebe highlights the failure
of Christians who seek to define themselves through ideology, isolation,
and materialism.

Wiebe’s characters are a mirror for many Canadians who today are
seeking identity through aggressive ethnic tribalism and/or economic
class.