A Long and Speaking Silence

A Long and Speaking Silence is the seventh novella in Nghi Vo's Hugo Award-winning Singing Hills Cycle, and it doubles as a prequel: it follows Cleric Chih on their very first trip as a newly appointed cleric, well before the adventures chronicled in earlier books. The town of Luntien is preparing to receive visitors for the start of the rainy season, but a steady arrival of Muyese refugees is not welcomed by the townspeople.

As always in this series, Chih's task is to collect stories, in this case the names and histories of the refugees, in case any of them can be reunited with relatives elsewhere. The novella uses that small, quiet act of record-keeping to examine displacement, the treatment of refugees in unfamiliar places, and the role stories play in preserving identity and culture. Like the rest of the series, it is self-contained and works as an entry point despite its high position number.