Reclaiming the Past, Queering the Present: Nghi Vo’s Speculative Fiction as a Space of Narrative Hospitality

Nghi Vo’s Singing Hill Series follows the character of Chih, a monk that has been entrusted with the task of collecting and preserving stories that either have never been recorded before or that have been deliberately excluded from the canon because they contradict national, hegemonic and cis-heteropatriarchal discourses. Throughout the course of the saga, Chih learns and writes down stories that have been neglected, erased and forgotten, and we, as readers, see how these acts of narrative preservation help to build a present in which those that have been casted as “other,” and in particular, racialized sapphic women, are able to find and recognize themselves. My argument is that the speculative elements of the novellas help to question what is thought of as normal, as possible and as real, and thus, allow for the texts to be read as spaces of narrative hospitality where sapphic women can not only reclaim their (her)stories but can also build a home and a community through them.