The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories

“Everyone makes books.” 

In the first story, Liu structures the narrative like an informational essay that may be considered a bit meta, given that readers are reading a book and the tale is about bookmaking. The idea is that making books—setting down information in a way that others can reproduce and understand for later use—is a universal activity practiced across the universe in a multitude of ways. This narrative helps the reader consider the meaning of thought and the passing down of wisdom through generations, and how it is necessary for a species to grow and evolve. He uses the quote above twice, once at the beginning of the story and once at the end, to stress its importance. He bookends it, using the statement like the covers of a book. 

“Pockets of sentience glow in the cold, deep void of the universe like bubbles in a vast, dark sea. Tumbling, shifting, joining and breaking, they leave behind spiraling phosphorescent trails, each as unique as a signature, as they push and rise toward an unseen surface.” 

An example of Liu’s poetic language, this paragraph from the end of first story in the collection explains that sentience is not separable from bookmaking; every species that has intelligence of some kind must have a way of passing it down against the tide of time. Writing (a term used loosely here) is a way that life forms can leave their marks, both for later generations and for other species who are coming across them for the first time.

“I think you are ready for a state change.” 

In this tale, ice queen Rina finds her old roommate, Amy, admirable, because she doesn’t live a life governed by fear. Rina is cautious with her ice-cube soul; Amy is not careful with her cigarette soul. Amy’s soul is “smoked” and moves to the cigarette box, making Amy feel freer. She suggests in this statement, delivered in a letter at the end of the story, that Rina is ready for a state change too. Death, too, is a state change, but Rina and Amy’s long-term fate is ambiguous. Amy here seems to suggest that change is necessary, even though it involves risk. 

“‘But that’s just business. It’s not the same thing as evil.’” 

When Jenny explains some of the drawbacks of giving Tilly, the AI, so much unadulterated access to their minds and preferences, this statement Is Sai’s reply. The quote suggests that Capitalism is still the main agenda in the future, even in a world in which the computers are controlling humans. 

“‘A terrible thing had been done to me, but I could also be terrible.’” 

Fugitive Yan shows her friend Liang that a rich man has forced her to become partially chrome. At first, she is a victim, but she relates to Liang that she realized her victimization had given her strength and she is able to overpower her tormentor. Yan’s situation mirrors the adaptability of the Chinese in the story; at first, the culture struggles under Westernization and the magic succumbs. Later, the culture is able to make magic using the tools of Westernization (railroads and modern trading) and rise again. 

“‘When there is such a large gap of years between two friends, we Chinese call it wang nien chih chiao, a friendship that forgets the years. It’s destiny that brings us together. I hope you will always think of me and Teddy as your friends.’”

Mr. Kan says this quote to Lilly early on in their relationship when he has already proven himself Lilly’s friend by rescuing her from the water buffalo and giving her a bit of magic to help ward off bullies. Mr. Kan speaks of destiny, and his words foreshadow his death at the hands of Lilly’s father. 

“‘The character for ‘mob’ is formed from the character for ‘nobility’ on one side and the character for ‘sheep’ on the other. So that’s what a mob is, a herd of sheep that turns into a pack of wolves because they believe themselves to be serving a noble cause.’” 

Mr. Kan teaches Lilly about the Chinese language and about his own history, along with hers, through Chinese characters. In this passage, he describes an incident when he was in Taiwan after he deserted the Communist army, involving a Taiwanese mob protesting the arrival of the new wave of immigrants from the Chinese mainland. The mob, which Mr. Kan clearly thinks of as “sheep,” attacked everyone who spoke Mandarin Chinese. A Taiwanese couple tries to hide Mr. Kan, but the mob burns their store down and kills the couple; Mr. Kan takes the couple’s child with him to raise. 

“Perhaps it is the dream of every parent to keep their child in that brief period between helpless dependence and separate selfhood, when the parent is seen as perfect, faultless. It is a dream of control and mastery disguised as love, the dream that Lear had about Cordelia.”

Within this narrative, Anna wonders if her father has manipulated her simulacrum to be more naïve, helpless, and devoted. She knows this imitation is not her, but feels violated, as if a part of herself has been taken away in order to feed his fantasies about the daughter she should have been. In this way, she thinks, he can avoid the reality of how he caused the divide between them and comfort himself with this other little girl. He is changing history and reshaping a memory, two prominent themes in the collection.

“Sometimes you help a friend even when you disapprove of their decisions. It’s complicated.” 

Ruth Law, the hard-bitten PI, has a tech friend, Gail, who helps her with her different bionic enhancements. Gail disapproves, but nevertheless helps her friend by suggesting the different enhancements Ruth has gotten. 

“It has always been the regular state of things. There is no clarity, no relief. At the end of all rationality, there is simply the need to decide and the faith to live through, to endure.” 

Here, Ruth contemplates the use of her Regulator, and admits that the device runs contrary to nature. The “regular state of things,” involves emotion and chaos “at the end of all rationality.” In this story, Liu turns the concept of “regular” on its head by creating a universe where having constant emotional control is the new normal. 

“‘If I say ‘love,’ I feel here.’ She pointed to her lips. ‘If I say ‘ai,’ I feel here.’ She put her hand over her heart.” 

Jack’s mother attempts to explain to her husband and her son why she continues to speak in Chinese when both expect her to speak English. She explains that when she speaks in a language that’s not her own, she cannot feel the emotion the way she does in Chinese. Her husband supports Jack in berating her, though, saying, “I’ve been too easy on you. Jack needs to fit in”. This is one of the defining incidents in Jack’s fragmenting relationship with his mother. His successful assimilation into American culture is more important to him than his mother’s love, which feels meaningless to him when she is so far removed from his culture. Later, when she writes to him on one of the paper animals, she says she is doing it in Chinese because “I have to write with all my heart” 

“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. But can you understand how much joy your very existence brought to me? And can you understand how it felt when you stopped talking to me and won’t let me talk to you in Chinese? I felt I was losing everything all over again.” 

Jack’s mother explains that, in looking at her son, she reconnects with her Chinese culture. This, she explains, is why his assimilation into American culture has separated them from each other. She still wants to connect with her identity, while Jack wants to bury it. 

“Time’s arrow is the loss of fidelity in compression. A sketch, not a photograph. A memory is a re-creation, precious because it is both more and less than the original.” 

In this quote, Liu points out that memory, one of his motifs, is not faithful to reality. It is more, because your emotions influence what you remember, and it is less, because it consists of patterns and impressions, not the full experience. The father, speaking here, reminds the daughter of the first time she tasted chocolate. He remembers certain aspects of that day only because the memory is compressed, “integrated into sparking jewels to be embedded into the limited space of our minds”, distilled, reduced.

“All parents make choices for their children. Almost always they think it’s for the best.” 

This quote is a description of Thereals, who took steps to ensure that their children would only die when the universe did. The phrase also mirrors the story, in which the two parents make a choice for their daughter, who stays behind with her father while her mother goes on an outer space mission from which she will not return within their lifetimes. 

“‘How can we teach our children the value of sacrifice, the meaning of heroism, of beginning afresh? We’ll barely be human.’” 

Maggie and her husband, João, discuss whether or not they should become immortal. João is against it, saying that the mission was always meant to allow their children to settle a new planet, and if they don’t die, their ideas will remain old and stale. It’s significant that João says they’ll barely be human as immortals, as it foreshadows what happens to Maggie in the end of the story: She no longer has an organic, human body and is an entity of light. 

“Even the immortals have regrets, she thought.” 

When immortal Maggie’s eternally 10-year-old son, Bobby, becomes a machine, Maggie involuntarily recoils from him. She notes that she is as “unnatural” as he is, and says the above quote. The idea that immortals have regrets that they must live with for all eternity is chilling, but it also means that the immortals have all of eternity to mend their relationships, as do Maggie and Bobby by the end of the story.

“A person must rise above his selfish needs so that all of us can live in harmony. The individual is small and powerless, but bound tightly together, as a whole, the Japanese nation is invincible.” 

In this statement, we see the principles that Hiroto’s father is trying to instill in him. It isn’t just his words, but his parents’ actions, that influence Hiroto’s character and make it possible for him to sacrifice himself for the good of the ship later in the story. He tells his son that a people’s strength shows up in the face of disaster and that the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few (a familiar refrain from the classic “Star Trek” movie). There are several references in the story to a verse that says, “The fading sunlight holds infinite beauty/Though it is so close to the day’s end”, which accurately describes Hiroto’s feeling at death, perhaps because of the sacrifice he has made, and the one his parents made for him. 

“We are defined by the places we hold in the web of others’ lives.” 

At the end, Hiroto uses a phrase similar in tone to what his father has told him years ago, that “we are not defined by our individual loneliness, but by the web of relationships in which we’re enmeshed,”Hiroto says that his girlfriend, Mindy, calls him a hero for doing what he has done, yet he was just in the right place at the right time. He calls others heroes, too—Dr. Hamilton, for making the ship that saved everyone; Mindy, for helping him stay awake; his mother, for giving him up so he could survive; and his father, for showing him the right thing to do. All of their actions, woven together, make the task successful and help the human race survive.

“All life is an experiment.” 

Lao Guan, known to many of the Caucasians in his community as Logan, says he doesn’t know what will happen if he and the other Asian men run away and become outlaws. He adds, “But at the end of our lives we’d know that no man could do with our lives as he pleased except ourselves, and our triumphs and mistakes alike were our own” (334). He convinces his friends to strike out on their own. His quote here is a repetition of Amy’s sentiment from Story 1. 

“‘This is where I have finally found all the flavors of the world, all the sweetness and bitterness, all the whiskey and sorghum mead, all the excitement and agitation of a wilderness of untamed, beautiful men and women, all the peace and solitude of a barely settled land—in a word, the exhilarating lift to the spirit that is the taste of America.’” 

Liu draws the story’s title from Logan’s quote here. At the end of this story, Logan says that after he is free from custody, he will go home. Lily thinks he means China, but actually, he does not. He has learned to love the America, though his relationship with it has been rocky, because it includes “all the flavors”—good and bad, spicy and mild. This phrase refers to the people he has met, and the varied experiences he has had since coming ashore. It also references the food that has brought him and Lily, as well as the other inhabitants of the community, together. As he says, “Every place has a taste that’s new to it, and whiskey is the taste of America”. The quote may also refer to America’s reputation as a melting pot of multiple cultures. 

“Politics were for those who had too much to eat.”

Protagonist Charlie is explaining his background. He was born to a peasant family in Formosa (Taiwan), which never got involved in uprisings against Japan because they were generally left alone except at tax time. He liked the Japanese workers, who gave him candy and were educated and polite. Perhaps this attitude informs his later actions, when he goes to work as a digger and later a supervisor on the Trans-Pacific Tunnel. He is not portrayed as a man with an uncommon level of moral courage; actually, he is a very normal worker who views getting involved in political disputes as a luxury. Yet in the end, he does make a political statement, small as it is, to protest what he had to do in the tunnels to keep prisoner workers down. 

“We’re all just ordinary men—well, I’m an ordinary demon—faced with extraordinary choices. In those moments, sometimes heroic ideals demand that we become their avatars.” 

Tian Haoli ponders what to do after he has seen a forbidden book. He knows he is in danger after reading it, and so is the fugitive who carries the book. He tells the Monkey King that he is old and frightened, and the Monkey King says he must accept it: “Now that you know about that past, you’re no longer an innocent bystander. If you do not act, you’re complicit with the Emperor and his Blood Drops in this new act of violence, this deed of erasure”. The above quotation suggests that heroes have little choice, as “avatars,” they must be the face of the ideal. 

“The fact that we can never have complete, perfect knowledge does not absolve us of the moral duty to judge and to take a stand against evil.” 

In this faux documentary, Dr. Evan Wei is delivering a speech about war crimes. He says that every story about great atrocities has its deniers who wish to forget, silence, and erase. He notes that no story can encompass every part of the truth, but it doesn’t mean they are lies. He cites a moral duty to stand against evil, much like Tian felt in Story 14.