Food and stories open up deeper stories about people and their culture
Nghi Vo writes wonderfully about food; I said as much when I reviewed the previous volume of the Singing Hills cycle, A Mouthful of Dust. There, food was held in contrast with famine, in a book about lack and loss, haunted by memories of absence and hunger. The vivid descriptions of dishes and their effect on human senses, feelings and memories was critical to offer a contrast to their absence, to make clear what that ravaging hunger was taking away. Food is still critical in the next book, A Long and Speaking Silence, but in a very different way; here, it's a way into culture.
In contrast to the previous entries in the series, A Long and Speaking Silence is a prequel of sorts. Cleric Chih, of the Singing Hills Abbey, whose job it is to collect stories for the archive they preserve, is only newly minted in their role. They have been sent out with a specific duty, to collect information from the harbormaster at Luntien, but have been thrown off their task by the theft of their coin purse. As they wait for their stipend to be sent from the abbey, they have found work waiting tables in a local restaurant during the festival rush. Around this necessary work, they still try to practice their trade, asking questions to collect the stories of those around them. But they struggle: they have yet to develop the people skills needed to ask the right questions, to understand when to push and when to fall silent, and so are suffering something of a crisis of confidence as they make mistakes, bolstered by the self-assuredness and competence of their neixin companion Almost Brilliant. As they work to collect the stories of Luntien, they find themself embroiled in tensions between the townsfolk and the newly arrived refugees, fleeing disaster in their native islands and reflecting on the forced movement of people, both in their own history and in the history of their abbey.
Because of this focus on displacement, on people uprooted from their homes unwilling and without time to prepare, it makes sense that the story keeps circling around the parts of culture we keep, and the parts we lose or change as time marches on. Food, this thing Vo has consistently written so well, is the perfect window into this fraught set of musings. The world she has created in which Chih lives is a complex one, full of different peoples, culture that is grounded in its specific place, and this can be reflected, using the established foundations of the series and her deft hand at dialogue, in cooking and eating practices. There is a particularly lovely scene in which a cook gives Chih a dumpling and asks them to identify what's in it. As they work through ingredients, they linger on what's missing ("it's not supposed to be crayfish. It's supposed to be this kind of bony fish that we don't have here") and what's there ("we're the only ones who use the wood ear mushrooms around here"). This gets you regional specificity, what grows where, and imports, and bans and trades and relationships. It gets you family memories too, the recipe handed down from the mother who fled the other region where the mushrooms grow. It gets you what some groups eat and others don't, cooking styles and preferences ("they were still trying to get used to the sharp flavours - the kingdom of Feiyu used some kind of spice that opened their sinuses up and made their nose sting"). It gets you so much of just people.
And it sits perfectly alongside the core of the whole series, the telling of stories. Both a ways to craft cultural differences, and to show how people are the same as much as they aren't, and both are things transmitted generation to generation, even after displacement and strife. They are core parts of human experience. Chih's time in Luntien has them seesawing between the two, bouncing the resonances of the one off the other to put the pieces together of a puzzle they didn't even know was there to solve.
They can also help with wider worldbuilding, the landscape and the culture working together to reinforce a sense of place. Vo often casually imbues her geographical features with personhood - the rivers and the mountains have their names and behaviours dropped in dialogue - and even alone, that does a lot of work for implying depth of culture. If the river has a personality, if it has stories, it shows that there were people to tell them, after all. But then, sometimes, the stories are represented whole within the novella, and in their telling show the culture of the teller, and give a sense of location too, like the tale given to Cleric Chih in this volume of the formation of the island from which one of the refugees has come. Up until that point, there was no clear sense of where the island was, in relation to this place. By having the girl tell that story, Vo says "this is who these people think themselves to be" and "this is where they come from" all at once.
A Long and Speaking Silence also showcases some of the other things Vo has done so brilliantly throughout the series, many of which likewise bend towards the crafting of cultures that feel real without the need to overexplain. There are many moments - throughout the series, but I noticed them particularly here - in which a conversation or a misplaced word allows someone in dialogue (or Chih in their own thoughts) to make clear what the social norms are (and how they differ from place to place). There's nothing more immediately vivid as a piece of cultural worldbuilding than suddenly realising that x is impolite here, or that y is the norm. They're the foundational building blocks of communities, these shared norms, and it is rare to find them so well displayed as Vo does here. It's never heavily marked, never part of a long exposition, they're just flashes that pass by as conversation flows naturally, but the give shape to parts of the world, and imply the sort of depth that makes something feel truly lived in.
Which is particularly critical in writing, as she does here, about displaced people. Vo is obviously interested in their culture, in the trailing tendrils of it that make their way down to the next generations, but she is not blind to the dangers of it in the moment either. Luntien's people, right from the start of the story, are hostile to those who have come to their shores looking for shelter. "Too many" and "we're full" are frequent refrains, alongside assumptions of thievery and moral laxity in the newcomers. Over the course of the story, those tensions escalate, resulting in clashes in the street and physical violence, in which Chih finds themself overwhelmed but incensed on behalf of those who have come with so little, asking only for help. Its message is clearly tied to the world as it is now, but Vo also manages to loop it beautifully into more of the overarching thoughts of the series as a whole, and to Chih themself.
Which is nice, in this step into prequeldom, and into a story that definitely lingers on the lore of the abbey itself. It's not something that has been a key focus in most of the books so far - Chih is, after all, usually wandering on their duties - but by the point of the seventh book in a series, it is probably safe to assume the readers are invested enough to want a bit of backstory if it might be forthcoming (it's me, I'm the readers). This felt like the right time to deploy it. It didn't overshadow the contemporary plot, and indeed Vo did a great job in integrating what could have been quite disparate pieces into a seamless whole, the different parts resonating off each other and making something that feels significant between them.
I do, a little, miss the excitement of the earlier volumes, where each new one provided a new structural conceit to discover as you were reading. It made them unusual and special, especially if you are (as I am) the sort of reader who thrives on structural nonsense. But Vo has continued to build a world that I want to spend time reading, with a main character whose foibles and flaws make them compelling, sympathetic and intensely relatable, even as their job feels entirely fantastical. Even without the structural flair, these continue to be novellas that each feel like they have their own story to tell, and which use the world slowly being built to explore big themes in a relatively small space, with a deftness of touch that often eludes longer works.
In this case, it's displacement and loss, and home. Who knows what it will be next time. Vo crafts all of this through the tangible, bedding down broader, bigger themes into the mundane and the quotidian, and making it all feel incredibly real. That angle, that constant touchstone of the small as a way into the big, is what truly brings me back every time, and based on this entry, will absolutely keep on doing so going forward.
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The Math
Highlights: food that makes you want to explore the world, a deft hand on complex politics, a dumpling so good someone wants to marry it
Nerd Coefficient: 8/10
Reference: Nghi Vo, A Long and Speaking Silence, [Tordotcom, 2026].
POSTED BY: Roseanna Pendlebury, the humble servant of a very loud cat. @chloroformtea.bsky.social
