I was immediately struck by a powerful sense of recognition. And yet it wormed into her every time she bit her tongue, every time she didn’t know a word or the precise connotations of a phrase. Teixcalaan was made to instill the longing, not to satisfactorily resolve it, she knew that. It made her jealous in a way she recognized as childish: the dumb longing of a noncitizen to be acknowledged as a citizen. She could follow about half of the allusions and quotations that slipped in and out of their speech. In the scene, the protagonist Mahit Dzmare, ambassador from the (tenuously) independent Lsel station to the empire of Teixcalaan, is introduced by her cultural liaison to a crowd of Teixcalaanli literati during an imperial banquet: There is a scene near the beginning of A Memory Called Empire that I remember reading with so much clarity.
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