The Empress of Salt and Fortune
38 pages • 1-hour read
Nghi VoThe Empress of Salt and Fortune
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Chapters 5-8Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 5 Summary
Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of death, physical abuse, and gender discrimination.
While continuing their work on the inventory, Chih discovers a birch bark scroll wrapped around a piece of dark hair and a feather. Rabbit angrily snatches the scroll out of their hands. When Chih replies that they thought the scroll was trash, Rabbit retorts that trash can reveal more than other objects about the past.
Rabbit’s story continues. In-Yo gave birth to a son named Kau-tan, whom palace officials quickly separated her from. Wrought with grief from the forcible separation and the physical exhaustion from giving birth, In-Yo asked Rabbit to stay with her in bed and told stories about her childhood in the West. After a few days like this, the birch scroll arrived with a message from the emperor. The hair, dark and long, belonged to In-Yo’s mother and indicated her death. The feather, from a jacana bird, indicated that In-Yo was to be sent into exile. After giving birth to an heir, the emperor saw no need for In-Yo anymore.
Chih says that they think they understand this story. Noticing Rabbit’s continued anger, Chih tells Rabbit that the scroll is trash and that trash should be burned. Later that night, they burn the scroll. Rabbit dreams of a northern woman with long dark hair waiting for her daughter to return home.
Chapter 6 Summary
Rabbit brings Chih a green leaf that has been preserved in wax for many years. She tells Chih that In-Yo asked her to bring it with them as they departed the palace for exile. Rabbit remembers that In-Yo was weak during the journey; she had been forcibly sterilized by palace doctors to prevent the possibility of another heir challenging Kau-tan and was recovering from the surgery. When In-Yo learned that she was to be exiled in the West, she asked Rabbit to come with her so that Rabbit could be at home again. Despite traveling westward, however, Rabbit remembers watching In-Yo keep her gaze trained to the north.
Chapter 7 Summary
Chih catalogs a cabinet of spices that contains boxes of cumin, coriander, and black salt. Rabbit asks Chih if they ever played a game called “eagle-eye” as a child and tells them that one of the boxes in the cabinet is not like the others. Then, Rabbit’s story continues.
Rabbit and In-Yo lived at Thriving Fortune for four years, during which time the palace regularly sent envoys of court ladies, escorted by the unfriendly Minister of the Left, to spy on them. These women knew that they would be rewarded for reporting any missteps made by In-Yo, rendering Thriving Fortune a gilded cage for the empress. In the fourth year of their exile, an accessory wife named Kazu arrived in one of these envoys. Kazu was an accessory wife who had been selected for her beauty, but since she came from a lower-class background, she was not well suited to palace life. One day, Kazu taught Rabbit how to play a dice game called Lo-Ha, which doubled as a fortune-telling game. In-Yo walked in on them playing the game, and when she learned of its fortune-telling aspect, she asked Kazu to give her the names of good fortune-tellers from the capital.
Each year, In-Yo’s family in the north sent a box of white salt to Thriving Fortune. In the fourth year, when Kazu arrived and In-Yo learned Lo-Ha, however, the box that arrived was filled with black salt. In the present, Chih inspects the box of black salt more closely and realizes that it is merely white salt mixed with iron. They suspect that the iron, which calls to mind “swords and shields, and the bells that hang from the mammoths’ bridles” (57), is code for something else. Rabbit tells them that they understand.
Chapter 8 Summary
Chih finds that Thriving Fortune’s back room is filled to the brim with astrological charts. Almost Brilliant questions whether they will be able to catalog all the charts in time to make it to the capital for the coronation. Chih knows that In-Yo classified Thriving Fortune prior to ascending the throne for a reason (although they have not yet ascertained what that reason is) and insists that they stay and catalog all the charts as efficiently as possible. As they read the star charts, Rabbit enters the room and asks if Chih has uncovered the charts’ secret yet. Chih looks closer and realizes that the charts have been subtly altered, with stars either missing or altered in some way, and realizes that this is another one of In-Yo’s codes. Rabbit flinches at one of the signatures on the charts, the name “Lucky.”
Rabbit’s story continues. Kazu was sent back to the palace, despite her desire to stay with In-Yo and Rabbit. When the Minister of the Left arrived to collect Kazu, In-Yo harshly requested that she never return to Thriving Fortune. Neither In-Yo nor Rabbit ever saw Kazu again. Nevertheless, Kazu’s fortune-tellers did begin arriving at Thriving Fortune, and In-Yo made them the center of her plan to create a covert information network and overthrow the emperor. Three fortune-tellers were particularly important to In-Yo: Zhang Phuong, an older man whose son was killed by imperial guards, Wantai Mai, an actress and con-woman who painted her eyelids to look like a fox, and finally, Sukai, who signed his charts “Lucky” and whose given name was Bucket.
When Sukai arrived at Thriving Fortune for the first time, he immediately began flirting with Rabbit. While she swept the porch, he tried to impress her with juggling but made a mess when he showered peony petals over her at the end of his act. She got angry at him for this, but In-Yo made him help Rabbit clean up, and he began to make her laugh with his jokes.
When Rabbit is finished telling this story, Chih is absent, and only Almost Brilliant is listening to the story. Almost Brilliant promises to remember and pass down the story of Sukai.
Chapters 5-8 Analysis
Vo’s narrative formula—the discovery of an object leading to revelatory information, which then motivates Chih to discover more objects—mirrors the scholarly work of art historians and archaeologists in the real world and provides the book with its basic storytelling structure, highlighting the text’s thematic exploration of Objects as Sources of Personal and Cultural History. For example, in Chapter 5, Chih finds the birch bark scroll. Though visually unassuming, it triggers the strongest emotional response from Rabbit and marks a turning point in Chih and Rabbit’s relationship. By the time she finishes telling Chih about In-Yo’s banishment by the cruel emperor, “Rabbit [is] still, almost shaking with an emotion that ha[s] lived underground for a long time” (46). The fact that Chih listens to Rabbit’s story and bears witness to the emotions she carries creates a new sense of solidarity between them, marked by their decision to burn the scroll. From this point on, the old woman seems to trust Chih’s intentions in recording the history of Thriving Fortune.
Throughout the novel, Vo returns to the idea of things being more than they appear. The very act of searching through the forgotten archives and undercovering the artifacts’ stories implies the inherent significance of the hidden, disregarded, and overlooked—just like Rabbit, In-Yo, and Chih themselves. As Rabbit’s asserts, “[I]f you want to understand people who have gone, that’s what you look at, isn’t it? Their offal. Their leavings” (43-44). At Thriving Fortune, In-Yo transforms from a meek princess into a cunning and bold political strategist. Rabbit describes her use of fortune-tellers as an underground network for espionage with delight, asking Chih, “It is perfect, is it not? Who thinks that the village fortune-teller will have perfect sources? There are so many jokes about them making up the placement and the movement of the stars already” (63). In-Yo’s clever use of codes requires allyship with the fortune-tellers who, like her, have been continuously underestimated and demeaned by high society in Anh.
In-Yo’s cunning and sharp political ambition emphasize the text’s thematic engagement with Feminine Political Agency Within a Patriarchal System. Vo emphasizes that the reason why the fortune-tellers make such a perfect underground network for sending coded messages is that they are dismissed within their society as a distinctly feminine preoccupation, unworthy of notice. In-Yo admonishes Kazu, saying, “Fortune-tellers have the ears of the gods. They tell us about the world we cannot see” (54). Vo uses In-Yo words as subtext here, complimenting the fortune-tellers’ ears and insights even as In-Yo utilizes them to listen and observe the goings-on in Anh as her spies. In this sense, In-Yo not only deals in codes but speaks in them as well.
In-Yo’s character transformation is marked by the deep trauma of her separation from her child and subsequent involuntary sterilization at the hands of the emperor—traumas underscored by Anh’s colonial conquest of her home and her political marriage. The gendered violence aimed at her body coupled with the colonial violence aimed at her family simmers beneath the surface of everything she does. For example, Rabbit remembers that on the road to Thriving Fortune, she kept “her face turned not west towards death, nor east towards civilization, but north” (48), in the direction of her birthplace. Later, the arrival of the box of black salt provides evidence of her continued correspondence with home, as well as her secret plans to wage war against Anh.
As Rabbit reveals increasingly intimate information about In-Yo, Chih moves closer to the heart of In-Yo’s story, underscoring the Power Dynamics in the Recording of History. For example, as Chih enters the storage room, they encounter “stacks of star charts filed into glass-fronted cabinets, indexed with a dab of dye in one corner and kept as carefully as the great scrolls of the abbey in Singing Hills” (59). Unlike the other objects that Chih has uncovered, which have revealed only fragmentary pieces of In-Yo’s story, this trove of star charts contains a wealth of information providing Chih with a breakthrough in their investigation. Their success is evident in Rabbit’s satisfied modification of her favorite refrain: “Yes. You do understand” (57).
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