The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories

Ken Liu
Completed 7/25/2024, Reviewed 7/25/2024
4 stars

My introduction to Ken Liu was in the Nebula Awards Showcase 2013.  It featured the title story from this collection.  I absolutely loved it then and I loved it reading it again for this online book club selection.  In fact, I loved almost all the stories in this collection.  A few were boring, but still had beautiful prose.  The prose was a feature in every story.  It set the mood and enhanced the world-building.  Almost all the stories featured Asian characters struggling with identity.  Several of them were indictments of the treatment of the Chinese people by other peoples and countries.    In my usual manner with collections, I’ll mention a few of the stories here that I thought stood out from the others.

The Paper Menagerie was my favorite.  It’s so poignant.  It shows how a kid who is different, in this case, Chinese, tries to eschew everything about himself that is different in an effort to be like everyone else. This includes his mother, who used to make magical origami animals for him when he was very young.

The Literomancer – the daughter of an American operative in Taiwan befriends an old man and his sort of grandson.  The old man tells the future by analyzing the pictures of Chinese words.  The girl unknowingly tells her father about something the old man says which is sympathetic to the Communists which gets him in trouble. This one was very hard to read, but one of the indicting stories.

All the Flavors – Mixing history with myth, this story tells about the Chinese immigrants from the railroad days who settled in Idaho Territory.  Some of the whites are welcoming, most are not. However, one girl befriends several of them and begins to learn about their culture through stories and food.  

The stories in general are a little fantasy-ish or a little sci fi-ish, just enough to give them some flavor so that it’s not like a history lesson, but many of the stories are.  They give voices to a people who have been shut down for a long time.  It’s like Liu said, “I got a few awards for some of my stories.  Well here they are, plus a bunch that tell some uncomfortable truths about the recent history of the Chinese people.”  They may be uncomfortable, a few downright horrifying, but they are very well written and draw into the way they are told.

I give this book four stars out of five.  I didn’t care for the first and the last stories.  The first was hard to follow and the last was way too long.  I didn’t like the conceit of the last: a man figures out time travel and finds out the truth about Japanese torture of Chinese people pre WWII.   The story is told in a documentary format, which felt repetitive.  One of the stories completely eluded me.  Except for these three, the collection is marvelous.