“When the Tiger Came Down the Mountain” by Nghi Vo

This is the sequel to The Empress of Salt and Fortune which I talked about here. My sister bought me a copy for Christmas which was nice of her. It’s also a novella, so about 120 pages, and it is a sequel but the only continuity is that the main character, Chih, stays the same. Other than that the book can be seen as a standalone.

The story follows Chih, a scribe, as they head up the mountain with a mammoth guide. When they get to a waystation though, the pair are set on by a trio of tigers. The tigers can change shape between the animal and a female human form, I don’t remember if that was in the other book but that’s how it works here. The tigers want to eat them, but Chih stalls for time by telling a story of an ancient tiger and how this tiger fell in love and married a human scholar. The tigers periodically interrupt and tell their version of the events, as opposed to the human version. By the end two more mammoth guides find and save them from the tigers.

Similar to the first book, a lot of this story has to do with storytelling itself and what version of events get remembered. The tiger and human version of events differ greatly, even though they can end up at the same place in the end. The human version also paints the tigers in a very different light, as savage creatures while the tiger version emphasizes their power and strength. It is also brought up that to the tigers, this is a romantic story, while to the human it is not obvious what the tiger marriage customs are until the end.

One exchange that I found really interesting is that there’s one section where one of the tigers actually prefers the human version since it involves more poetry. This is despite the fact that another tiger protests that the human version is not true, and therefore should be abandoned. Chih admits that the human version obviously has its flaws and was told several hundred years after the events, but there is still some beauty to this version of the events that can be preferable.

A third one did come out, I don’t have a copy of it yet. But this is a fun little series about stories and history, I want to get my hands on it!