38 pages • 1-hour read
The Empress of Salt and Fortune
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Chapters 1-4Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 1 Summary
Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of death.
Cleric Chih and their talking hoopoe, Almost Brilliant, approach Lake Scarlet, a former residence of the recently deceased Empress In-Yo. In the wake of In-Yo’s death, significant locations from her life have been “declassified,” allowing clerics like Chih to explore them and record any history of her reign that they might learn in the process. From a wooded area overlooking the lake, Chih and Scarlet observe a palanquin carrying In-Yo’s ghost down the main road toward the capital, where her daughter will soon be crowned the new empress.
When they arrive at the shores of the lake, they encounter an old woman, who tells them to look out at the water. Underneath the night sky, the lake has a bright red, bioluminescent glow. After a couple minutes, the dazzling light fades, and the old woman introduces herself as Rabbit. Rabbit tells Chih and Almost Brilliant that she was acquainted with the empress and her entourage while they were exiled at the house on Lake Scarlet (humorously named “Thriving Fortune”) because Rabbit’s father supplied them with supplies on a weekly basis for the duration of their stay. Chih tells Rabbit that they would be honored if Rabbit would be willing to share any stories about the empress to be recorded. Rabbit politely rejects this request, telling Chih that they will need to hurry if they want to get to the capital in time for the coronation.
Chapter 2 Summary
The next morning, Chih begins recording an inventory of the items kept in Thriving Fortune’s storage rooms. They find a sealskin tunic embellished with intricately carved toggles made of a material that Chih does not recognize. Rabbit offers them breakfast and tells them that the toggle is made from a tooth. She then offers to relate to Chih what Empress In-Yo told her about the tunic.
At this point, the novella switches to Rabbit’s narration. Rabbit reveals that she was sent as a tribute to the royal palace as a young child, along with other gifts, so that tax collectors might be forgiving to her county. She spent years as a servant in the palace, scrubbing the floors and never looking upward. By the time she was 10, she was promoted to a “servant of inner house” and was required to clean the personal quarters of the royal women. The new empress to-be, a princess from the north, was arriving at the palace, and the servants were lined up to welcome her. Despite not being allowed to look at the princess under threat of punishment, Rabbit quickly glanced up at In-Yo as she passed. In-Yo wore the sealskin dress, made from the pelt of the animal her brother killed on his first hunt, and its toggles were made from the same seal’s teeth. Even though In-Yo brought one of the largest dowries in Anh’s history with her, her dress still marked her as an outsider to the ladies at court and invited derision. As a result, In-Yo never wore the traditional clothes of her homeland again. Rabbit concludes her story by asking Chi if they understand.
Chih responds that they are not sure they understand but that the story has been listened to and recorded. Rabbit wonders if Chih is content to record history without understanding it. At night, Chih dreams of a seal hunter waiting patiently for a seal to ascend to the surface of the water for air, only to happily leave his hunt behind at the sound of an unspecified call.
Chapter 3 Summary
Chih continues to record their inventory the next day, this time finding a mahogany cup inlaid with silver, five dice, and a game board corresponding to the dice. Rabbit and Chih begin to play a game, called Moon Lady Ship, and Chih asks Rabbit what Empress In-Yo’s style of play was.
After In-Yo’s arrival in Anh, Rabbit recounts, people were fearful of her because “the women of the north were all thought to be witches and sorceresses” (31). It quickly became clear, however, that In-Yo was merely sad and lonely. Besides In-Yo, the emperor had dozens of secondary wives, including Kaofan, the daughter of a noble family who was highly influential at court and loved to play Moon Lady Ship. One day, In-Yo walked in on Kaofan’s game in the Chrysanthemum Room and asked what was being played—Rabbit believes that this is the first time most people had heard her speak. When Kaofan explained the rules and dealt In-Yo in, the empress offered up jade buttons to add to the prize pot. In-Yo proved to be highly successful at the game, eventually winning a mountain of bejeweled buttons, and she offered to give the prize pot back to Kaofan if Kaofan would tell her where she got the game set. Rabbit wonders what In-Yo understood about Kaofan then—whether she could tell that Kaofan despised and feared her—and then asks Chih once again if they understand.
Chih does not yet understand but thinks that they are getting closer to understanding. Rabbit smiles and calls Chih clever.
Chapter 4 Summary
As Chih’s inventory continues, they find bags of lychee and hazelnuts, as well as a golden mammoth figurine encrusted with rubies, enamel, and iron. Almost Brilliant discovers Chih eating the lychee and inspecting the figurine. When Chih brings Rabbit the figurine, Rabbit is moved to see it, having thought that it was lost for many years. She shows Chih a maker’s mark on one of the mammoth’s feet, signaling that it was made by the artisan Yan Lian, who later became a nun.
Rabbit continues her story. Eventually, In-Yo became pregnant, and during her pregnancy, she developed a penchant for fortune-tellers. Rabbit remembers that one day, she was escorting a mystic out of the palace when a messenger arrived to bring In-Yo a gift from the emperor. It was a golden amulet, and although In-Yo thanked the messenger, she seemed displeased with the gift. She turned to Rabbit and asked her if she would like to wear the amulet, but Rabbit reluctantly replied that she didn’t like chains around her neck. In-Yo agreed and asked Rabbit about the finest artist she knew. Rabbit gave In-Yo Yan Lian’s name.
Yan Lian arrived at the palace and agreed to create a new piece of art out of the golden amulet but stipulated that her work would come at a cost. In-Yo brought Yan Lian to her bedchambers, and Rabbit overheard a sexual encounter between the two. After the artisan left, Rabbit brought In-Yo her bathwater, and the two women struck up a friendship. Two weeks later, the golden mammoth figurine arrived at the palace.
Rabbit tells Chih that they will either understand this story, or they will not.
Chapters 1-4 Analysis
The Empress of Salt and Fortune relies on a gradual reveal of information dictated by Rabbit and recorded by Chih, introducing the novel’s thematic engagement with Power Dynamics in the Recording of History. Through the dual-timeline structure, Vo reveals both the starting point (the oppression of the emperor’s patriarchal regime) and the end point (Empress In-Yo’s rise to power and her daughter’s upcoming coronation) but initially keeps most of the details of this arc intentionally obscured. She also utilizes a show-don’t-tell strategy in her world building, giving brief glimpses of the supernatural elements of Anh, like the procession of ghosts at the very beginning of the novella, implying the otherworldly nature of the story’s universe without explicitly describing it.
Within the world of the story, Vo imbues Rabbit with full narrative authority—Rabbit decides when and how information is given to Chih to record. Her initial reticence to tell Chih the true extent of her relationship with the empress or provide additional information evidences her narrative power. Vo uses the motif of artifacts to curate Rabbit’s account of the empress’s successful coup piece by piece, emphasizing the text’s thematic interest in Objects as Sources of Personal and Cultural History. This device requires Chih to read between the lines and extract the full story over the course of the narrative. Rabbit’s preferred refrain at the end of each of her stories—“Do you understand?” (26)—taunts Chih (and, by extension, the reader), who has not yet been given enough information to understand, hinting at reveals to come.
Using the limited third-person perspective, Vo positions Chih as an analog for the readers, learning details of the story as the readers do. Rabbit’s appearance at Thriving Fortune catches Chih and Almost Brilliant off guard since they thought that the house was abandoned. For example, when they first hear Rabbit, Chih exclaims, “Don’t tell me it’s looters already?” (12). At the end of Rabbit’s first story, Chih observes, “For a single faraway moment, she looked like something other than a simple servant woman, but it was there and gone so fast that Chih could not say for sure what it was” (26). Introducing Rabbit into the narrative as someone enigmatic, underestimated, and nearly invisible allows Vo to gradually reveal her importance, agency, and political impact on Anh’s history, underscoring Feminine Political Agency Within a Patriarchal System as a key theme in the novella.
In these early chapters, Vo creates an air of mystery around Empress In-Yo, whose rise to power represents the central engine driving the plot forward. Rabbit describes In-Yo’s eerie presence in the palace, telling Chih, “The new empress was like a ghost. At first, we were afraid of her […] Then, they discovered her secret, that she was only a heartbroken and lonely girl” (31). In contrast to her haunting, vulnerable appearance, In-Yo’s prowess at Kaofan’s dice game reveals an underlying cunning and toughness that none of the other ladies at court expect from her. By the end of the encounter, Rabbit understands that In-Yo has gained the upper hand. In the present, she muses, “[W]hen I look back, I still cannot tell what she saw when she looked at the most beautiful of all the emperor’s wives. I wonder […] whether she saw the contempt Kaofan had for her, and yes, even then, some of the fear as well” (33). The emphasis that Rabbit places on this brief exchange between the empress and Kaofan characterizes In-Yo as a burgeoning political force even in her earliest days at the palace.
Throughout the novella, Vo strikes a balance between mystery and clarity, holding back some plot details for later reveals while foregrounding the central themes. Male characters are notably absent from the plot, and the ones that do appear are discussed primarily in relation to the central female and nonbinary characters. Rabbit only mentions In-Yo’s male relatives, for example, to contextualize the broader oppression of In-Yo’s people. As Rabbit recalls, “Her brother and uncle, whose names are now only spoken in the mortuary halls of Ingrusk, were killed just a year before, at the battle of Ko-anam Fords” (25). Vo’s decision to center the perspectives of a formerly enslaved woman and a nonbinary cleric in a story about a patriarchal society that oppresses marginalized identities makes it clear that the book adheres to an intersectional feminist lens.
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