The Empress of Salt and Fortune

Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of death, physical abuse, and substance use.

“There was no road there during the day, but obviously at night, things were different. The road ran as broad as a barge through the trees, and ranged on either side were faded ghosts, the former guardians of Lake Scarlet. Even a few months ago, Chih knew, the ghosts would have fallen on any living thing that crossed their path, tearing them to pieces and then crying because they were still so hungry.”

This description of the ghosts voraciously eating alludes to hungry ghosts, departed souls in the Buddhist tradition who experience insatiable hunger and thirst in the afterlife. Their hunger is directly tied to emotional needs; unhappiness, or crimes motivated by unhappiness, in life is thought to cause one to become a hungry ghost after passing away. Vo’s adoption of this mythology and use of it early in the text helps to establish the book’s Asian roots very quickly.

“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.