The Empress of Salt and Fortune

“Accuracy above all things. You will never remember the great if you do not remember the small.”

This teaching of the clerics at Singing Hills puts forward an egalitarian ideal in terms of Power Dynamics in the Recording of History, prioritizing the history of all peoples. Chih carries this philosophy with them throughout their time at Thriving Fortune, and it informs their belief in the importance of Rabbit’s perspective.

“History will say that she was an ugly woman, but that is not true. She had a foreigner’s beauty, like a language we do not know how to read […] Her two long braids hung over her shoulders as black as ink, and her face was as flat as a dish and almost perfectly round. Pearl-faced, they call it where she came from, but piggish is what they called it here.”

Here, Vo makes use of contrast, juxtaposing the descriptors “pearl-faced” and “piggish” to illustrate the cultural subjectivity of beauty standards and the xenophobia that can arise when people fail to recognize that subjectivity. Similarly, the simile likening beauty to language emphasizes the ignorance of the people of Anh who dismiss In-Yo as ugly.

“Do you understand?”

Rabbit asks this question at the end of several of her stories, and it thus becomes a rhythmic refrain that underpins the book’s storytelling structure. In asking it, she indicates that there are things going on beneath the surface of her story and encourages both Chih and the readers to try their best to perceive it. Her style of narration therefore has a highly interactive quality that evokes oral storytelling.

“Until she was banished south to live with the gravestone cutters and charcoal burners, she was more empress than the empress, and she loved to play Moon Lady Ship. One day, in the Chrysanthemum Room, where all the paper screens are filigreed with pale orange chrysanthemum petals, they were playing just as we played now, and Kaofan sat with one sleeve off her shoulder like a dealer in the water and flower district.”

Kaofan’s social grip over the court of Anh is one of the prime examples of Feminine Political Agency Within a Patriarchal System offered over the course of the book. Her confident, charismatic demeanor, and the influence it gains her, is a form of soft power that she can wield to achieve a status equivalent to that of the actual empress.

“I still cannot tell what she saw when she looked at the most beautiful of all the emperor’s wives. I wonder if she looked ahead to when Kaofan would end her life covered in charcoal and grit, or whether she saw the contempt that Kaofan had for her, and yes, even then, some of the fear as well.”

Momentarily, Rabbit imagines that In-Yo has the abilities of the fortune-tellers she so loves, peering into Kaofan’s dark future. In addition, Rabbit reveals her own perceptivity by identifying the fear that underlies Kaofan’s (and the other ladies’) xenophobic treatment of In-Yo. The empress’s tactful navigation of charged interactions with other court ladies, like Kaofan, is one of the key ways in which she exercises her female political agency in a patriarchal system.

“Those who bear children hold the keys to life and death, and their ill wishes are to be feared.”

Throughout the text, Vo draws a connection between the notions of feminine rage and motherhood. This saying foreshadows the events of Rabbit’s own pregnancy, when her vendetta against the Minister of the Left ultimately results in his death.

“They teach us to look out of the corners of our eyes when we are very young in the north. Less movement to startle the things we hunt or to attract the attention of those who would hunt us.”

In-Yo is a very guarded character, offering very little personal information about herself to Rabbit (and, by extension, Chih and the readers). Here, however, she offers a glimpse into her childhood, as well as an origin story for how she came to be so guarded. Thus, readers can see that In-Yo began cultivating the skills she would need to successfully usurp the throne of Anh as a small child, learning to make herself as inconspicuous as possible.

“‘It is trash,’ she said shortly, ‘but if you want to understand people who have gone, that’s what you look at, isn’t it? Their offal. Their leavings.’”

This statement summarizes Salt and Fortune’s thematic interest in Objects as Sources of Personal and Cultural History. It also reflects the philosophy of real-world archaeologists and art historians, who study mundane objects to discover histories that were not deemed important enough under the power structures of the time to enter into the written record.

“Gently, slightly nervously, Chih rested their hand on the woman’s shoulder. They were faintly surprised to find Rabbit to be truly flesh and blood, and not the cold, misty dampness of a revenant.”

Throughout the text, there are several suggestions that Rabbit might be a ghost, this being one of them. Chih themself seems to have some sense that this might be the case, as evidenced by their “surprise” upon touching Rabbit. At the very end of the book, continuing this thread, they are unsurprised to find Rabbit missing.

“She was weak. So weak after what the doctors had done to her to prevent there ever being another heir to contest the rule of the first. But when she could, she rode with the curtains of her palanquin open, her face turned not west towards death or east towards civilization, but instead to the north.”

In-Yo’s involuntarily sterilization is a deeply traumatic event that Rabbit seems unable (or unwilling) to discuss in detail. In the wake of that trauma, however, In-Yo is more tied to her homeland than ever, where her own mother has recently been killed. The simultaneous loss of her mother and her prospect of becoming a mother again renders her an even more lonely figure than she was before.

“He saw it as a sign of her uncouth slovenliness. I knew it to be a sign of her contempt.”

Once again, Rabbit has insights into the inner workings of In-Yo’s mind that other people from Anh do not. The progression in verbs from “saw” to “know” serves to discredit the Minister of Left, who interprets the world (and In-Yo) in a highly superficial manner compared to Rabbit.

“All I know is that that year, the year that Kazu came to live with us, the year that we learned Lo-Han, and taroco, and all the others, the north finally sent their exiled princess a box of black salt instead of white. Do you understand?”

Rabbit uses a deceptive turn of phrase at the beginning of this quote since she very likely knows more than she is letting on. At the end of the quote, she returns to her comfortable refrain, “Do you understand?” to ask whether Chih has also begun to understand the story on a deeper level. Thus, without Rabbit saying anything explicitly, the coincidental concurrence of learning Lo-Han and receiving the black salt is revealed to not be coincidental at all.

“If Chih did not finish their work here, they knew with the slow patience of seven hundred years’ worth of records at the abbey that it would be finished someday. But I think it needs to be finished now. Soon.”

Chih’s determined belief in the importance of their own work renders them a hero in the fight against unfair power dynamics in the recording of history. There are very few moments in the text written from their first-person perspective, and this brief insight into their thoughts has a dramatic effect as a result.

“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.”

Jokes made about fortune-tellers mirror the jokes made about In-Yo, underscoring the misogyny inherent to both. For this reason and others, In-Yo is aligned with fortune-tellers symbolically as an underestimated figure who nevertheless has extraordinary control over her future and the future of others. Her use of fortune-tellers as spies is therefore very fitting, as Rabbit’s delighted tone suggests.

“One night, In-Yo and I became very drunk, and we talked about all the ways that Kazu might have escaped. She might have stolen away on a ship that went across the sea, or perhaps she was picked up by a passing god in disguise who could not resist her delighted laugh and her terrible luck at card games. Perhaps she had fallen in love with some intrepid maid or stableboy, and they had run off together, seeking fame and fortune on the frontier. It didn’t matter of course. Whether she escaped or died, In-Yo and I never saw her again.”

In their uninhibited drunken state, Rabbit and In-Yo allow themselves to indulge in a fantasy that they, being highly pragmatic, ordinarily would not entertain. They clearly feel a sense of sorrow over Kazu’s disappearance, despite In-Yo’s cold dismissal of her, perhaps because Kazu is emblematic of vulnerable women throughout their society. By imagining a happier ending to her story, In-Yo and Rabbit can imagine happy futures for themselves.

“The first name that his mother gave him was after the fashion of their people, designed to make him invisible in the eyes of malevolent spirits. It was Bucket, and there was something truthful to it. He moved like a bucket on a rope, always on the verge of spilling all its water, tottering back and forth, faster than he intended to go.”

The simile, in which Rabbit uses Sukai’s own birth name to describe his character, underscores the symbolic weight of names in Anh’s culture; Sukai has multiple names, and all of them correspond to an aspect of his character. Sukai’s lack of control over his own life is just one of the many ways in which Vo contrasts him with In-Yo, who exercises control over her own destiny.

“Of course Thriving Fortune was haunted; most places in Anh were. […] Ghosts were part and parcel of life in Anh, more worrisome than rats, less worrisome than the warrior locusts that swarmed out every twelve years. Chih did not fear ghosts, but they thought […] they might be afraid of becoming one in this lonely compound on the shores of Lake Scarlet.”

Ghosts are an underlying, but often unseen, presence throughout Salt and Fortune, haunting the text itself as well as the setting. The association between loneliness and ghosts harkens back to the idea of hungry ghosts, as well as other East Asian folkloric ghosts, whose profound emotional pain is often what caused them to become ghosts in the first place.

“In-Yo belonged to Anh, but Thriving Fortune only belonged to us.”

Issues of place, belonging, and identity, are explored in various ways throughout Salt and Fortune. Here, Rabbit asserts that In-Yo belongs to Anh, even though, in her heart, In-Yo belongs to her homeland in the north. The word “belong” takes on its darkest meaning; In-Yo “belongs” to Anh regardless of her will, like an inanimate possession. In the second part of the sentence, however, belonging shifts toward a more positive meaning, as Rabbit and In-Yo take dominion over Thriving Fortune as their safe haven.

“I didn’t say that you can also find beauty in it, a kind of peace even in something that was at first so very unsettling. I’d cried the first time I saw the luminescence of the lake. Now most nights, I slept on the porch, bathed in its red glow. If it was a monster of some kind, it was a monster that watched over me, and, at the very least, it had not devoured me yet.”

Vo connects Rabbit’s fondness for Lake Scarlett to her love for In-Yo—both potentially harmful forces who have chosen not to harm her. Her description of the lake as a “monster” recalls Vo’s description of In-Yo as “terrible in the old meaning of the word: awe-inspiring, grand, monstrous and more than a little deadly” (“Revealing The Empress of Salt and Fortune an Publishing in the Age of Diaspora Fantasy.” Reactor, 7 Aug. 2019).

“Rabbit sighed, and Chih thought of the fairies that could do anything, if only they were asked with exactly the right words. Rabbit sat down on the beach, and after a moment, Chih sat down with them. During the day, the waters were translucent flint green, as beautiful and unremarkable as any other lake. It took nightfall to show the truth.”

Layered metaphors work in tandem here to suggest that Rabbit is an unreliable narrator. Fairy-like figures appear throughout the various folklores of Asia (though the word “fairy” itself does not have direct translation in many, if any, Asian languages), and Vo references these various folkloric entities when likening Rabbit to a fairy. The idea that Rabbit requires specific prompting to give Chih the information they want contributes to an overarching subtext that Rabbit is purposefully withholding some part of herself from view. Furthermore, the lake, with its secretive red glow, mirrors this suggestion that Rabbit has some form of hidden nature that Chih and the readers cannot access.

“When I stay up at night, sometimes I think she must have reckoned the cost cheap…I suppose it should have cost her my regard and my love as well.”

By revealing her late-night thoughts, Rabbit makes herself more vulnerable than usual, providing insight into the more fraught aspects of her relationship with In-Yo. Through her use of the verb “cost,” Rabbit criticizes the highly transactional nature of In-Yo’s social behavior, which is unavoidably entangled with the cutthroat politics of Anh.

“Angry mothers raise daughters fierce enough to fight wolves.”

Mai shares this saying with Rabbit upon the revelation of her pregnancy. The saying contributes to a theme of strong mother-daughter relationships that can be seen throughout the book, especially between In-Yo and her mother. Both Rabbit and In-Yo’s mother have suffered at the hands of the Empire; In-Yo’s mother loses her sons and is eventually killed herself, and Rabbit loses Sukai. Subsequently, both mothers’ daughters go on to become empresses of Anh.

“That’s something I think peasants understand better than nobles. For them, the way down matters, whether you are skewered by a dozen guardsmen or thrown in a silk sack to drown or allowed to remove your robe and walk down the shores of the lake before you gut yourself. Peasants understand that dead is dead.”

Though In-Yo and Rabbit have a very close bond, there are some key differences between the two, most notably their social classes. Despite her affinity for and loyalty to In-Yo, Rabbit is highly aware of this difference, as she demonstrates here. The graphically violent language juxtaposes with Rabbit’s utter indifference about the death itself, and this contrast reveals Rabbit’s inability to emotionally engage with the circumstances surrounding Sukai’s murder.