A Long and Speaking Silence by Nghi Vo

A Long and Speaking Silence, the seventh in Nghi Vo‘s Singing Hills cycle, takes Cleric Chih back to one of their first assignments as a chronicler, a gatherer of stories. On their way to the riverside city of Luntien a moment of inattention led to their being relieved of their purse and stipend, so as the story begins they are spending most of their time waiting tables in a restaurant. Dropped dishes, forgotten orders and a feeling of being underfoot both in the kitchen and among the other servers have them not feeling great about themselves or their job. The spring festival is coming soon, and more people are arriving in Lutien each day, so pressure at the restaurant is rising. All of that keeps Chih away from what they think of as their real task, collecting stories from people in the city that they can take back to the archives at the abbey in the Singing Hills.

Vo’s story has a tight focus, in both time and space. She keeps Chih in the center of everything, and the whole novella takes place in the week leading up to the spring festival. It’s not quite Aristotelian unity, but it’s close enough to move the novella along quickly and for the locations to become familiar. There is the restaurant, the family that runs it, and a couple of other fellow staff members. Then while collecting some data about river heights, Chih becomes involved in an incident where refugees on boats headed upriver overcome the harbormaster’s guards and head for a temple that is obligated to take in refugees. They are grateful for Chih’s assistance, though representatives of the city are less keen. Chih learns that there is war among the islands to the south of Lutien, and although the city is the tenth harbor up the river from the sea, still people come. Officially, Lutien welcomes the unfortunate, but in practice many would prefer to send the island people further inland, especially with festival visitors temporarily swelling the local population.

Life among the displaced people is not easy either. They have lost most everything that they had, and prospects of return are slim. They are grieving, many families are incomplete with the fate of others either unknown or known all too well. They are also packed onto the temple grounds because the rest of the city does not particularly want them there. Nor are they entirely easy to get along with. They are clannish and, understandably, trying to hold on to as much of the social structure of their old lives as possible in the new place. But Chih establishes a rapport when it emerges that some of the refugees are looking for relatives who fled in the same direction earlier. Chih can note down names and relationships, and send the information onward to both other cities and to Singing Hills, where there are more records. It is a slender reed for the refugees to grasp, but they have no other prospects of finding their kin. Chih writes down as much as possible, sometimes uncovering a rich vein of history, sometimes unintentionally revealing how few people escaped the scourge of war.

Lest readers think Chih is entirely high-minded, they also make friends among the staff at the restaurant, and become entangled in the troubles of a young woman from a refugee family. Tensions between town and refugees run high, made worse by the usual chaos of the festival. Accusations against the new arrivals will sound familiar: stealing, stirring up trouble, taking up scarce resources. Some of them are even true.

The story in the novella does not resolve any of the big questions, and only some of the smaller ones. Cleric Chih gets better about not dropping dishes. They get better at the art of collecting stories without pushing, though that will be a lifelong study. They make connections to the history of their own order, though their hoopoe bird is careful to warn that they do not know for sure. The stories speak, and sometimes so do the silences.

Although it is the seventh in the series, because A Long and Speaking Silence takes place early in Chih’s career, it is a decent entry point to someone new to Singing Hills.