CBR Bingo: Steal – One of the characters, Ha Beili won’t stop stealing things. In her defense, she doesn’t have anything or a job so obtaining necessities through standard means isn’t really available to her.
This entry in the Singing Hills Cycle is one of the few, if not the only one, that has sufficient context clues to place it in the timeline of Cleric Chih’s adventures with some amount of confidence. Chih has only recently become a full cleric, and this is one of their first jobs alone. Their relationship with Almost Brilliant is still new and they aren’t yet the team that they become in later adventures. The Cleric Chih in this book is young and naive, but eager.
The story itself deals with the idea of home – getting separated from home, finding your way back home, building a home where you are, and specifically what it means to build a home when you have been displaced.
Cleric Chih has found themselves in a tough financial spot. Their purse has been stolen and their next pay packet hasn’t arrived from Signing Hills yet. They have started working at a local restaurant during festival season at a time when the village they are in is also experiencing the arrival of refugees. Through different villagers we see the variety of attitudes towards migrants that show up in the real world, from willing compassion to distain and violence. In the course of a conversation, Almost Brilliant suggests that if there were fewer refugees that maybe the village would be able to handle it better. This is the passage that follows:
“They are too many, Chih thought, and then their stomach flopped, because no. There could be too little food, too little water, too little money, too little kindness, too little sense; there were never too many people.”
This is especially poignant in light of the other event in the village at the time – the festival. There are visitors that flock into the village for an annual festival, and yet somehow they are not too many even though it is likely that the festival goers vastly outnumber the refugees. Just the refugees are too many in the eyes of the villagers. Certainly a topical message.
