Better for it to exist than for it to be perfect and only in your mind

Accuracy above all things. You will never remember the great if you do not remember the small.

The Empress of Salt and Fortune, by Nghi Vo, is a beautiful piece of storytelling as old woman Rabbit reveals incidents from her lived past as companion to the empress. Her fairytale-like anecdotes fall on the ears of Chih, a cleric, who is traveling to the Dragon Court of the new Empress of Wheat and Flood, but she stops at the site of the former empress's exile to catalogue whatever knowledge lingers there.

Chih, whose abbey is an archive, has with her Almost Brilliant, a neixin, a talking bird-like creature who commits to memory what she cannot manage to document on paper.

"The abbey at Singing Hills would say that if a record cannot be perfect, it should at least be present. Better for it to exist than for it to be perfect and only in your mind."  

It's a deceptively gentle and intimate story even while set against a backdrop of warring factions and empirical goings-on, depicting a world where women are property, vessels, with daily struggles as epic in scope as any insurrection. "Angry mothers raise daughters fierce enough to fight wolves."

"Do you understand?" grandmother asks Chih after every tale, as there is secret knowledge, lessons to be learned.

*****

I write this as I'm reeling from a gutted heart. It's not broken, but it's been ripped open, rubbed raw, laid bare. I know now more clearly than ever the importance of present over perfect. Finally, I begin to understand some things. I have so much more still to learn. I must remember the small to remember the great.