‘Stitched to Skin Like Family Is’ is a dark story of family, loss and vengeance. It’s told by a young Chinese woman travelling through recession-poor Illinois in 1931, searching for her missing brother, Yongjun.
She pays her way with a needle and thread as she travels, repairing the clothes of strangers. Each piece of clothing she touches gives up a memory to her, telling her about the person who wore it.
This story is filled with violence, poverty, racism and anger, yet the strongest emotions are the ones that bind a family together. It’s told in a low-key way that throbs with restrained anger. It’s firmly grounded in reality with a dash of magic that, in the way the best magic does, shapes emotion into a metaphor and then gives the metaphor teeth.
It’s a story that delivered a lot of power in just 4,517 words.
You can read it for free HERE
‘Stitched to Skin Like Family’ left me hungry for more of Nghi Vo’s work, so I’ve picked up ‘The Empress of Salt and Fortune‘ (2020), the first novella in The Singing Hills Cycle.
Nghi Vo became a writer because while there were alternatives, none of them suited her as well as a lifetime of endless research combined with simply making things up.
She is the author of Siren Queen, The Chosen and the Beautiful, and The Singing Hills Cycle, including The Empress of Salt and Fortune, When the Tiger Came Down the Mountain, and Into the Riverlands.
Mike Finn's Fiction 
I read this when I was going through Hugo nominees, and it made such an impression on me compared to the other short stories. (Not that they were bad, but this one punches well above its weight). Like you, I now have the author on my “look for more by…” list. I hope we enjoy them!
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I’ve read the first of The Singing Hills Cycle – ‘The EMptress of Salt and Fortune’. I’m impressed. Nghi Vo has such a powerful way of telling stories.
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