A Long and Speaking Silence
Nghi Vo
When Chih was a young cleric
A Long and Speaking Silence is the seventh book in Nghi Vo's Singing Hills Cycle. It is probably the first of the series in chronological order.
Chih is a very young cleric. In fact, we are told near the beginning "Chih had finished their novitiate ten months earlier." They are sill a teenager, a little uncomfortable being addressed as a cleric. More than that, they are not entirely comfortable with their role as a mere recorder of stories and histories. They are in the river town Luntien, far from home, home being the Singing Hills Monastery. They are destitute, their purse having been cut when they disembarked. They are waiting table at a restaurant so as not to starve.
Luntien is a town under strain, because of a large influx of Muyese refugees, fleeing from a natural disaster. Luntien is not treating the refugees with grace or generosity. Chih does the little they can to help them out. Aside from trying to help the refugees with food, Chih and their neixin Almost Brilliant attempt to record names and family relationships of the refugees, with the hope of finding relatives who can take them in.
Chih finds it difficult -- nearly impossible, actually -- to maintain the detachment of a cleric. Besides that, they haven't yet established the comfort with Almost Brilliant that characterizes the earlier (but later in time) novellas of the series. Almost Brilliant is more of an authority figure to Chih than the friend and coworker she will become.
I enjoyed this. The story has more of a bite than the previous novellas. Chih struggles to figure out what the right thing to do is, and then to do it. They struggle with self-doubt.