The Paper Menagerie Review

This weeks book is The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories by Ken Lui.  It's a collection of short stories, mostly sci-fi but with some fantasy magical realism, about Chinese or Chinese American experiences.

The titular story "The Paper Menagerie" is the story of a biracial young man learning about his Chinese mother's past after he has rejected everything Chinese.  His mother used to make him paper animals that come to life, which may have been his boyhood imagination and may have been magic, but either way the animals no longer move.  It also includes the line, "Son, I know that you do not like your Chinese eyes, which are my eyes. I know that you do not like your Chinese hair, which is my hair,"...and I'm crying again.  It was simple and brutal and so so true and lovely.  It's no wonder this story won the Nebula, the Hugo, and the World Fantasy Award.  But then it's also interesting that within the collection, it comes right after "The Regular," a sci-fi novella cybernetic enhanced private eye who has artificially removed her emotions tries to solve the murder of a prostitute in Chinatown.

"The Man Who Ended History: a Documentary" was another of my favorites.  The basis of this story is that if you have a powerful enough telescope that will let you see activity on another planet, you would actually be looking back in time due to the time it takes light or the images of what's happening to travel.  If we sent a telescope that travels faster than light way out into space and looked back at the earth, we could look at history.  (This part is true.)  It then posits that there is a sister particle to those photons sent out into space, particles that stay here where they were created and which we can observe without going into space or moving faster than light.  The problem is (and this part is based on real science too), once you look at a particle, it "collapses its wave function" which basically means that once observed, it ceases to exist.  Therefore in this story, by viewing parts of history, you destroy them so no one else can ever observe them.  Can you hear my particle-physicist heart fluttering?  But then Liu takes it further.  The main character and time traveler wants to send people back to witness the atrocities of a Japanese concentration camp in occupied China, setting off a conversation about who owns history, about taking responsibility for past crimes vs moving on since so few of the actual perpetrators are still alive, which is a powerful and complicated topic when dealing with this period of history especially.



I also very much enjoyed "State Change," where people's souls are physical objects that can be used up, like cigarettes or coffee grounds or an ice cube.   And "Simulacrum" about a man who invents a way to make holographic copies of people that think for themselves in ways that person would think, about his strained relationship with his daughter, and how he's stuck in the past.  And "Good Hunting" about a girl who can turn into a fox and how the coming of the railroad is sucking away the magic.  It turns from a fantasy with magical creatures and ghosts, what seems like it's going to be a typical "technology hurts nature" story, into a steam punk story about adapting and thriving.

It was a powerful collection.  Liu boldly talks about dark eras in Chinese history, shares honestly about the immigrant experience, and beautifully uses science-fiction elements.

***

Next week: The Coldest Girl in Cold Town, YA vampires by Holly Black.