The Paper Menagerie by Ken Liu

The Paper Menagerie Reviews

• 
  Sofia

  The Paper Menagerie is devastating. Keep a box of tissues handy.
  
  
  It's the story of a mother and her son. She made paper animals for him and breathed life into them, and they became his friends. For a while, mother and son delighted in this magic together. But after an incident with a bully, the son Jack changes his mind. He doesn't want to be half Chinese and half American anymore. He wants to be all American. He doesn't want his eyes or his hair or his language or his little paper friends. He doesn't even want his mother.
  
  

  You know what the Chinese think is the saddest feeling in the world? It's for a child to finally grow the desire to take care of his parents, only to realize that they were long gone.

  
  
  
  The Paper Menagerie is about how there is always something about us we want to run away from until we grow up and learn to love it--but by then it's too late. Jack is cruel to his mother, forcing her to abandon her language and cuisine and zhezhi until she is just a shell of herself. And yet his mother still cares about him. She makes sure he stays healthy as he begins to lose himself in being American.
  
  

  Sometimes, when I came home and saw her tiny body busily moving about in the kitchen, singing a song in Chinese to herself, it was hard for me to believe that she gave birth to me. We had nothing in common. She might as well be from the moon. I would hurry on to my room, where I could continue my all-American pursuit of happiness.

  
  
  
  It is just so, so sad. The impact is astonishing. Every sentence carries weight. It's quietly and intimately emotional, and contains situations everyone can relate to in some way.
  
  

  Mom finally stopped making the animals when I was in high school. By then her English was much better, but I was already at that age when I wasn't interested in what she had to say whatever language she used.

  
  
  
  This short story is about being torn between Western and Eastern cultures and not knowing how to find a balance that you're comfortable with. It's about acceptance, love, and how we often push it away. Jack was born and raised in America, and he constantly feels pressured to pick one or the other culture. It seems very common to me for children to feel the overwhelming need to have to choose. It might make sense to us now that it's possible to live in harmony with all parts of yourself without having to deny some, but I remember vividly wanting to pick and choose parts of myself as a child. I believe I wanted blond hair and blue eyes. I wasn't able to appreciate my different heritages without having a very strong preference for one. And I would swing from one to another with startling quickness. I got whiplash. I was a confused child. Every multiracial person knows what I'm talking about.
  
  

  If Mom spoke to me in Chinese, I refused to answer her. After a while, she tried to use more English. But her accent and broken sentences embarrassed me. I tried to correct her. Eventually, she stopped speaking altogether if I were around.

  
  
  
  Jack never tried to understand his mother. He only tried to push her away. And he succeeded.
  
  
  The Paper Menagerie is the best short story I have ever read. The only thing I didn't like about it was the random infodumpy letter at the end that took me out of the story a bit. It was kind of melodramatic.
  
  
  4.5 stars
  
  
  
  

  ✰ Asian readathon ✰
  
  Book 1:
  Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress: ★☆☆☆☆
  Book 2: Jade City (currently reading)
  Book 3: The Paper Menagerie: ★★★★★
• 
  Maureen

  This is the title story from the collection, it’s beautifully written and so moving! Here’s the link if you want to read it
  https://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&am...
• 
  Angela M

  A beautiful and sad short story which I found very moving. Thanks to my GR friend Esther for bringing it to my attention. I discovered this story is part of the collection by the same title. Now I want to read the collection.
  
  Here’s a link to the story.
  
  
  https://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&am...
• 
  Vaishali

  "Are you as devastated as I am?" - LeVar Burton
  
  Haven't cried this much in a while. A story full of unbelievable loss, so universal in immigrants who enter a seemingly callous America. Made me google zhezhi (Chinese origami), Hebei province, and Sigulu village. Like probably every reader, I so want to believe the magic is real.
  
  .
• 
  * A Reader Obsessed *

  4.5 Stars
  
  Holy hell. That hurt.
  
  In a scant 30ish pages, this will make you re-evaluate every broken, estranged relationship currently in your life and how you want to go about it - for better or for worse.
  
  Brutally devastating in the choices you can’t unmake and the lost chance you’ll never get back.
• 
  Dennis

  Oh wow! What an amazing story. It almost made me cry. Yes, me. I kid you not.
  
  It’s about a young man that was born to an American father and a Chinese mother, and how the relationship between Jack and his mother deteriorated because of her ancestry and how said ancestry affected Jack’s life, especially when he was a young boy.
  
  A story about love and loss, about family and about acceptance. It touches on so many themes that are of great importance. The racism and prejudices made me extremely angry. And Jack’s mother is such a kind soul, you can’t help but love her. But unfortunately Jack is not able to do so. It was all so very sad and tragic.
  
  Extremely moving. All the stars.
  
  Apparently this was the first work of fiction to win the Hugo, the Nebula, AND the World Fantasy Award. Well deserved!
  
  You can read it here:
  https://io9.gizmodo.com/read-ken-lius...
  
  Thank you,
  Cathy, for making me aware of this story. Frankly, it would have been a tragedy to miss out on this one.
  
  Here’s a short summary I wrote for my English classes:
  
  The Paper Menagerie is a short story written by Chinese born American author Ken Liu.
  
  It's the first work of fiction to win all three major SF/F awards. The Hugo, The Nebula and the World Fantasy Award.
  
  And while there is a fantastical element, it's mainly a story about love and loss, about family and about acceptance.
  
  The story is set in Connecticut and told by a young man who was born to an American father and a Chinese mother.
  
  It opens with the narrator telling us how his mother used to fold zhezhi figures for him when he was a little kid. Zhezhi is the Chinese version of Origami. She made them whenever Jack was sad. And she literally breathed life into them. They became his playmates.
  
  As he grows older though he learns that his father had bought his mother from a catalogue. He bought her, brought her to America, where they got married, and a year after that Jack was born.
  
  Unfortunately the neighbours know about this as well and they look down on Jack's mother. There's a lot of chatter, even directly in front of Jack and his mother. Though she does not understand, because she doesn't speak English. She's always just nice and kind to everyone.
  
  Jack's friends also know the story and he gets bullied not only because of that but also because he looks different.
  
  Jack becomes ever more sad and angry. And he directs his anger towards his mother and rejects all her advances to show her love to him. There's one especially heartbreaking scene when she tries to tell him in Chinese how much he means to her and he keeps shouting at her to speak English. To which she answers in broken English that when she says "love" it comes from her lips, but when she says "ài" it comes from her heart.
  
  As time goes by the two become more and more estranged from each other and when Jack is in high school he doesn't talk to her anymore. And then a couple of years later Jack's mother becomes seriously ill and dies. And with her the zhezhi figures die as well. And that's when Jack discovers that she wrote little letters to him on the inside of the paper figures. They tell the story of her childhood and how she ended up in that catalogue. And also how much she always loved him, even though he couldn't love her back.
  
  It's a very moving story, because the author does a very good job of showing what a kind soul Jack's mother was and how unjust and unneccessary it was that Jack developed this strong negative feelings towards her.
  
  
• 
  Eon ♒Windrunner♒

  Completely mesmerizing and deeply affecting, I never dreamt that such an incredibly powerful story could be told in a mere handful of pages.
  
  Free to read
  here
  
• 
  Carolyn Walsh

  Lovely heart-aching story.
  
  https://io9.gizmodo.com/5958919/read-...
• 
  Trish

  
  
  I have seen this title before. It's a short story included in a collection I have seen around in the past, but I've never read anything by this author before. However, it is the first fiction story to win the Hugo, the Nebula, AND the World Fantasy Award so it had to be good. This and today's recommendation made me pick it up finally.
  
  The story is that of a young man, the son of an American father and a Chinese mother. It's the story of a son getting estranged from his own mother simply because of the different culture she came from. It's not that the mother didn't love her son or that her way of loving him was strange - on the contrary, she's a sweetheart. Which makes the story all the more sad and tragic.
  
  There were a few things I understood, like it being hard for a son to hear that his father had picked out his mother in a catalog but mostly I was disgusted with the people here and their prejudice and racism. It made me rage and also want to cry (from frustration as much as grief).
  Another topic (one of many) addressed in this story that I always find heartbreaking is how many children can no longer enjoy the little things in life. When I was little, I LOVED watching little rainbows sparking from a wind chime we had by the window or crafting with nuts and leaves (I still love all those things). I didn't need expensive plastic toys but created my own worlds to play in and yes, it is getting worse and worse, this loss of imagination in many a child because it is passed down from generation to generation. So a beautiful ornate origami tiger being called trash was horrible to me - not to mention what happened next.
  That being said, I also have one criticism about the mother: she obviously WANTED to leave the country and go with the American so not trying harder to learn and use the language of her new home right from the s tart, without her son basically forcing her, is not something I support but maybe that would have been better if people had been more welcoming and kind and helped her.
  At least the father did seem to have loved her, judging by his reaction to her death though that was a small comfort.
  
  Sheesh, there are so many more things about this story I want to talk about - that is how much this story makes you think and feel - although this is "just" a short story. I might need to have to get the entire collection after all.
  
  Seriously, this is fantastic, go and read it for free here:
  https://io9.gizmodo.com/read-ken-lius...
• 
  Maisha Farzana

  This 32 pages long short story managed destroy me. It's been 2 days already. But my tears haven't dried yet. "The Paper Menagerie" was beautiful & painful. Ken Liu is a genius. *Lemme go back to sobbing. Someone pass some tissues please*
• 
  Tanzila Tabassum Zisha (Annabel Lee)

  An incredibly sad story of an immigrant mother whose Americanised son start to ignore her out of his feelings of inferiority regarding his mixed race and Chinese roots.
  
  

  Mom began to mime things if she needed to let me know something. She tried to hug me the way she saw American mothers did on TV. I thought her movements exaggerated, uncertain, ridiculous, graceless. She saw that I was annoyed, and stopped.
• 
  Renegade ♥

  5 stars
  
  
  
  There is just so much to reflect upon within this sad, beautiful tale.
  
  It left my heart heavy and my mind full...
  
  This is a journey worth taking for many reasons. My hope is that you'll take some time to read this short story in order to experience it for yourself. It is a gift for which the price has been paid many times over by those who have lived it in some way, shape, or form.
  
  Life's journey comes with many lessons and there are few who live without some deeper heartache and/or regret...
  
  We are different and we are the same.
  
  I reached out to Mom's creation. Its tail twitched, and it pounced playfully at my finger. "Rawrr-sa," it growled, the sound somewhere between a cat and rustling newspapers.
  
  I laughed, startled, and stroked its back with an index finger. The paper tiger vibrated under my finger, purring.
  
  "Zhe jiao zhezhi," Mom said. This is called origami.
  
  I didn't know this at the time, but Mom's kind was special. She breathed into them so that they shared her breath, and thus moved with her life. This was her magic.
  
  
  
  Mom reached out to touch my forehead, feeling for my temperature. "Fashao la?"
  
  I brushed her hand away. "I'm fine. Speak English!" I was shouting.
  
  "Speak English to him," Dad said to Mom. "You knew this was going to happen some day. What did you expect?"
  
  Mom dropped her hands to her side. She sat, looking from Dad to me, and back to Dad again. She tried to speak, stopped, and tried again, and stopped again.
  
  "You have to," Dad said. "I've been too easy on you. Jack needs to fit in."
  
  Mom looked at him. "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.
  
  Dad shook his head. "You are in America."
  
  Mom hunched down in her seat, looking like the water buffalo when Laohu used to pounce on him and squeeze the air of life out of him.
  
  
  
  Every once in a while, I would see her at the kitchen table studying the plain side of a sheet of wrapping paper. Later a new paper animal would appear on my nightstand and try to cuddle up to me. I caught them, squeezed them until the air went out of them, and then stuffed them away in the box in the attic.
  
  Mom finally stopped making the animals when I was in high school. By then her English was much better, but I was already at that age when I wasn't interested in what she had to say whatever language she used.
  
  
  
  The language that I had tried to forget for years came back, and I felt the words sinking into me, through my skin, through my bones, until they squeezed tight around my heart.
  
  
  
  Because I have to write with all my heart, I need to write to you in Chinese.
  
  ***
  
  For Chinese New Year my friends and I made red paper dragons. I'll never forget the sight of all those little dragons zooming across the sky overhead, holding up strings of exploding firecrackers to scare away all the bad memories of the past year.
  
  
  
  At night I was locked into a cupboard in the kitchen to sleep. If I was slow or did anything wrong I was beaten. If the boys did anything wrong I was beaten. If I was caught trying to learn English I was beaten.
  
  ***
  
  I was so happy when I looked into your face and saw shades of my mother, my father, and myself. I had lost my entire family, all of Sigulu, everything I ever knew and loved. But there you were, and your face was proof that they were real. I hadn't made them up.
  
  ***
  
  I felt I was losing everything all over again.
  
  
  
  It is not a very romantic story, but it is my story.
  
  
  
  Free story link:
  https://io9.gizmodo.com/read-ken-lius...
  
  Story narration (by LeVar Burton):
  https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/stit...
  
  Sometimes we are completely clueless as to the value of the most valuable things in our lives, until they're no longer accessible to us. -- LeVar Burton
  
  *** Thank you, Dennis. 💕
• 
  Sara

  A beautiful and heart wrenching short story, almost made me cry!
• 
  Meags

  Not typically in my pool of reading interests, I read this award-winning short story to complete a tricky reading challenge topic. It did the trick, but I’ll admit I’m confused over the buzz and the seemingly profound reactions. Clearly this just wasn’t the story for me.
• 
  Sina

  داستان کوتاه احساسات برانگیز خوبی بود:)
  اما چیزی که نمیفهمم اینه که چرا تو طبقه فانتزی و سای فایه:///
• 
  Di Maitland

  This story is 32 pages long and will leave your heart in pieces. I cried. A lot.
  

  "You know what the Chinese think is the saddest feeling in the world? It's for a child to finally grow the desire to take care of his parents, only to realise that they were long gone."

  
  Jack is the son an American man and a mail-order Hong Kong bride. In his youth, Jack delights in the origami animals that his mother makes for him, breathing her life into them so that they move. As he grows, however, he comes to dislike the things that make him different: his monolid eyes, his low-tech toys and his mother's insistence on speaking Chinese. The question is: will Jack realise what he's giving up before it's too late?
  

  'Mom looked at him. "If I say 'love,' I feel here." She pointed to her lips. "I I say 'ai,' I feel here.' She put her hand over her heart.'

  
  Ken Liu writes beautifully. Each sentence packs a punch, telling a story but alluding to so much more. At its heart, it's a story about difference and acceptance; about the difficulty of growing up a child of two cultures, and the difficulty of moving from one culture to another. There is no right way to manage that challenge; each must just muddle through as best as they can and hope that they're forgiven their mistakes. Unfortunately, sometimes that isn't possible.
  
  The subtle magic of the story is a nice touch. I liked that it doesn't really matter whether the magic is real or not. Instead, it represents childhood innocence and imagination, beauty and authenticity – all of which are in the eye of the beholder.
  
  Read this story. It'll take you 15 minutes and you can find it for free
  here. It'll be the best thing you do all day.
• 
  Tammie

  NOBODY TOUCH ME I AM NOT OKAY 😭😭😭😭
  
  (off to buy the anthology that includes this short story because I am now a Ken Liu stan)
• 
  TrippyBooks

  A heartbreaking story about a boy who wanted nothing to do with his Chinese heritage and his mother who desperately wanted to bond with him.
  
  Its a Short story everyone should read
  
  😭
• 
  Anete

  Skaisti par mātes un bērna sarežģīto mīlestību.
  
  
• 
  angie ♡

  cried for what felt like the entirety of this short story wtf. i’m so upset.
• 
  Sonja ✧･ﾟ｡★･ﾟ☾

  What a powerful story!!
• 
  Samuel

  Second time reading this. Such a moving and heart-breaking story. Brings me to tears.
• 
  samaa

  made me want to weep . 10/10
• 
  Barb H

  This lovely short story involves the recollections of a man who grew up in a loving home of a Chinese mother and an American father. He describes the wonderful creations of animals his mother frequently fashioned for him of origami. He was delighted and entranced by these figures for a long time. As the years progressed and he became more involved with his Caucasian peers, he confronted much bigotry and shunning. The results of these situations are clearly demonstrated in Ken Liu's sensitive rendering.
• 
  Verlkungen

  Did I cry reading this gorgeous short?
  
  You bet your ass I did!!
  
  It's truly amazing how such a short work of fiction can carry so much emotional heft. This truly is a perfect story - elegant, mesmerising, and insightful.
• 
  Adam

  As close to perfect as a short story can be. I think there are a few notable achievements for Liu’s piece of short fiction; you know, other than winning the triple crown of awards for speculative fiction (Hugo, Nebula, World Fantasy).
  
  The first achievement I would call emotional density. This is a short story, literally. It’s roughly 30 pages long and most readers will finish it in well under an hour. I cried the first time I read it, and I cried twice on the reread. For a story so small to pack such an enormous emotional wallop is a tremendous achievement.
  
  The second achievement I would call a transcendental message. The story is ostensibly about racism and assimilation. The protagonist is a bi-racial boy growing up in a very white part of the United States where he is bullied about his Chinese mother and heritage. His desire and attempts to fit in take on a ruthlessly selfish and satirical American Dream quality. That specific element to the story is relatively niche. And yet, the message here transcends that niche and I genuinely believe that anyone with a heart will connect and be crushed by this story. It ultimately becomes a story about the magic of childhood, about growing up, about peer pressure, about family, about hindsight, regret, grief, and about love.
  
  And I haven’t even written about the magical realism aspect of the story derived from the title. The story is full of life, just like the origami created by Jack’s mom. And just like life it carries with it painful lessons, but lessons that are worth learning.
  
• 
  Oliver

  I am rating this short story separately from the entire collection as I believe it really stands above most things I have read and deserves to be highlighted.
  
  The Paper Menagerie is one of the best stories I have ever come across. It is very rare for an author to pack this much emotion into a 15 page short story and Ken Liu truly deserves all the praise for making that happen. It absolutely shook me to my core and it was very difficult to pick anything else up for hours after as I just felt hollow inside. I'm not going to say that this will affect everyone as much as it did me but I believe it is worth a try nevertheless. It's short and as far as I know also available online so can't hurt to see what all the hype is about!
• 
  Peter

  While the concepts and writing were superb, I was once again left disappointed by the lacklustre plot and cliche characters. Ken really knows how to pull on those heartstrings and the way he incorporated the world's subtle magic into origami was really beautiful. However, I've seen this kind of story a million times and so I just ended up feeling uninterested towards the protagonist. So while I can understand the praise and awards this story has gotten, it just didn't do much for me beyond the well-crafted magical realism and deep characterization.
• 
  Haïfa

  Heartrending and powerful!
  Ken Liu packed a huge emotional punch in 20 pages.
  
  Available, for free,
  here.
• 
  Alla

  First I´m going to start with saying that I´ve not read many short stories in my life, very few to tell the truth so I´m no expert on them.
  I´ve also over the years noticed that books that I loved when I first started out reading and I gave 5 stars, are not 5 star "worthy" books for me anymore. I´m really picky on my 5 stars and I don´t hand them out as easily now as I did before.
  That being said, this story is an easy 5 star for me.
  It´s beautiful and magical but then also sad and heartbreaking.
  I´m not going to go into any details about it, I just recommend that you read it.