The Empress of Salt and Fortune

Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of death and gender discrimination.

The Empress of Salt and Fortune follows a storytelling structure in which the embedded narrative (Rabbit’s account of In-Yo’s rise to power) is gradually unlocked in the novella’s present timeline. Vo establishes Rabbit’s initial reticence to tell Chih about In-Yo at the beginning of the novella when Chih has not yet explored Thriving Fortune. For example, upon meeting Chih, Rabbit describes the court ladies dismissively, telling them, “[I]t was I who told them to hire my father to come up every week with supplies from the main road. They never knew to tip them, or perhaps they thought their cosmopolitan beauty was tip enough. Pah!” (18). Here, Rabbit intentionally gives the impression (to both Chih and the readers) that she was merely an acquaintance of In-Yo and her attendants, belying the true depth of her friendship with the empress and laying the groundwork for Vo’s embedded narrative.

The artifacts that Chih finds serve as bridges between the past and present timelines—a structural device that allows Vo to reveal the story slowly over the course of the narrative. Although Rabbit attempts to maintain a shroud of mystery regarding her friendship with In-Yo, the artifacts that Chih uncovers trigger emotional responses for Rabbit, prompting her to tell the stories associated with those emotions.