Reviewing Ken Liu's The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories (February 2024)

 

Ken Liu, translator of Liu Cixin's Three-Body Problem and editor of two collections of Chinese science fiction stories, Invisible Planets and Broken Stars, is a highly acclaimed author of science fiction and fantasy in his own right. Included in The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories are 15 stories, 14 of which have previously been published. The short fiction, 'The Paper Menagerie,' won the Hugo, Nebula and World Fantasy awards.

 

Liu's stories conjure a fantasy universe of alternate histories and possible futures where contemporary physics informs ancient myths as a new language expressing humanity's unceasing compulsion to know and create. His speculations on God and beyond make accessible the dimensions of fantasy, myth, science fiction and philosophy to those who are not privileged by the academy, professional guilds or fortune. His writings are egalitarian in this respect. While they reflect a broad and deep understanding of many Earth disciplines, he is, first and foremost, a consummate storyteller.

 

The rest of this review will focus on selected stories in this anthology with an eye toward his virtuosic use of literary devices—most notably the embedded narrative—keen understanding and appreciation of subject matter ranging from Chinese history and mythology to relativity and quantum physics.

 

#

 

'Good Hunting' blends Chinese mythology, cyborgs, romance, and a sense of social justice. However, it is romantic fantasy sans the biological imperative as it surveys the ancient and modern mythologies of the human race. It is Liu's singularly best work of steam punk science fiction in this volume.

 

The romance between a hulijing (or Huli Jing, a fox spirit that can shapeshift to a beautiful young woman) and the son and apprentice to a demon hunter is set against the backdrop of the early industrial revolution, i.e., the age of steam. As the story unfolds, the traditions of pre-industrial China are dying away. The magic of Chinese mythology is gradually disappearing coincident with British colonization and the introduction of Western technology. The 'new' magic of the steam engine era replaces the 'old' magic.'

 

With the inevitable arrival of the modern age and the end of the age of the old magic, “There’s only one thing we can do: learn to survive.” There is no longer a place for fox spirits and demon hunters.

#

 

The setting of 'The Literomancer' is Taiwan, formerly Formosa, late in the Chinese civil war between the Communists and Nationalists. It is a cross-cultural story centred around the young daughter (Lilly) of an American intelligence operative and a mysterious and reclusive elderly Chinese man (Kan) who teaches children calligraphy and tells stories from the Chinese characters, which he says possess "deep magic" and can be interpreted to "tell what’s bothering people and what lies in their past and future." Ironically, there is a betrayal between the two friends that sets the stage for a surprising and sobering ending.

 

Liu is at his best in weaving the historical and apocryphal into a compelling (e.g., page-turning) story where the reader is teased along with hints dropped along the way that foreshadow something important.

 

#

'The Paper Menagerie' is very loosely linked to Tennessee William's 'Glass Menagerie' and it is interesting to note the similarities and the even more significant divergences. In Liu's story, the protagonist, a young boy with an American father and a Chinese mother (whose English is very poor), is conflicted between two incompatible worlds and traditions. It is essentially a story—an origami fantasy—exploring the tension between acculturation and assimilation, where betrayal, guilt and remorse figure prominently

 

#

 

'An Advanced Readers' Picture Book of Comparative Cognition' is the only story in this collection that has not been previously published. It is hybridized fantasy-philosophical science fiction. It is eminently readable hard science fiction incorporating two parallel narratives in which two ages-old philosophical ideas—eternal recurrence and immortality are projected far into humanity's future. The following opening is the father speaking to his daughter in a one-sided dialogue.

 

My darling, my child, my connoisseur of sesquipedalian words and convoluted ideas and meandering sentences and baroque images, while the sun is asleep and the moon somnambulant, while the stars bathe us in their glow from eons ago and light-years away, while you are comfortably nestled in your blankets and I am hunched over in my chair by your bed, while we are warm and safe and still for the moment in this bubble of incandescent light cast by the pearl held up by the mermaid lamp, you and I, on this planet spinning and hurtling through the frigid darkness of space at dozens of miles per second, let’s read.

 

#

 

In 'The Waves,' Liu displays his mastery of the 'story within a story,' where ancient Earth stories are being re-told in a distant future to a human species that has evolved beyond any physical form we can imagine and during a period of extensive space colonization.

 

Maggie, likely the last organic human being in the universe is telling her great-great-great . . . granddaughter stories of Earth's beginning. stories of the beginning.

 

Maggie looked at her granddaughter, a miniature mechanical centaur, freshly made and gleaming, and also a being much older and wiser than she by most measures.

“So why have you put on this disguise to make me think of you as a child?”

“Because I want to hear your stories,” Athena said. “The ancient stories.”

 

As Maggie and the human entities from 61 Virginis e head out in search of a new planet to settle, the fears of ancient ancestors are revived.

 

While they flew, they huddled together against the cold emptiness that was space. Intelligence, complexity, life, computation—everything seemed so small and insignificant against the great and eternal void. They felt the longing of distant black holes and the majestic glow of exploding novas. And they pulled closer to each other, seeking comfort in their common humanity.

As they flew on, half dreaming, half awake, Maggie told the colonists stories, weaving her radio waves among the constellation of colonists like strands of spider silk.

 

#

 

'All the Flavors' is another alternate history, and it too is told using an embedded narrative—a story that Logan (Lao Guan) tells of the ancient Chinese God of War, Guan Yu, his namesake. This time the setting is late 19th century America and the construction of the transcontinental railroad is in progress with the enormous labour effort of Chinese immigrants. In this apocryphal account of a community in Idaho, there is the expected tension and occasional unprovoked (as we are told) violence between the townspeople and—here is the first important break with 'real' history—the Chinese workers who escaped from indentured servitude on the railroad.

 

In the following extended quote, a lot of (bad) water has passed under the bridge, but this is the occasion of the Chinese New Year, for which the Chinese workers—all men because these were not families—spare no expense or effort.

 

The activity of the Chinamen stirred up all kinds of excitement in the rest of Idaho City.

“Everybody gets a red packet filled with money and sweets,” the children whispered to one another. “All you have to do is to show up at their door and wish them to come into their fortune in the new year.”

“Jack Seaver has been raving about the cooking of the Chinamen for months now,” the women said to one another in the shops and streets. “Here’s our only chance to try it out. They say the Chinamen will serve anyone who comes to their door with pork dumplings that combine all the flavors in the world.”

“Are you going to be at the Chinamen’s when they celebrate their New Year?” the men asked one another. “They say that the heathens will put on a parade to honor their ancestors, with lots of loud music and colorful costumes. At the end, they’ll even serve up a feast such as never before seen in all of Boise Basin.”

This scene stands in sharp contrast to the San Francisco of the day—this being the second important aspect of the alternate history. This speaks to something quite fundamental for Liu—survival through adaptation but never relinquishment of being Chinese.

#

 

'A Brief History of the Trans-Pacific Tunnel' is an alternate history of the end of World War II in the Pacific. It comes complete with multiple well-drafted documentary-style narrative anchors that describe a world where Japan and the U.S. cooperate to build a tunnel under the Pacific Ocean from Asia to North America—a massive Keynesian intervention to end the Depression.

 

From A Brief History of the Trans-Pacific Tunnel, published by the TPT Transit Authority, 1960:

Osachi Hamaguchi, prime minister of Japan during the Great Depression, claimed that Emperor Hirohito was inspired by the American effort to build the Panama Canal to conceive of the Trans-Pacific Tunnel. “America has knit together two oceans,” the Emperor supposedly said. “Now let us chain together two continents.” President Hoover, trained as an engineer, enthusiastically promoted and backed the project as an antidote to the global economic contraction.

The Tunnel is, without a doubt, the greatest engineering project ever conceived by Man. Its sheer scale makes the Great Pyramids and the Great Wall of China seem like mere toys, and many critics at the time described it as hubristic lunacy, a modern Tower of Babel.

 

Of the parallel narratives, the more emotionally engaging storyline is that of Charlie (a Formosan Chinese as opposed to a Chinese mainlander) who seeks atonement for cruel and inhumane deeds committed and/or concealed as a supervisor of slave labourers recruited to do the heavy lifting of the tunnel's construction. Early in the story, the distance that he still has to cover to achieve internal peace is revealed by his inability to fathom why Betty's son would be riding busses in the U.S. South. "This seems very foolish: to make statements that no one wants to hear, to speak when it is better to be quiet. What difference will a few boys riding a bus make?"

 

#

 

'The Litigation Master and the Monkey King' is an apocryphal tale that explains how An Account of Ten Days at Yangzhou was smuggled out of China near the end of the Qing dynasty and how its record of the Yangzhou Massacre was preserved and used during the revolution that ended imperial Qing rule in China. While several of Liu's stories in this collection are intended to preserve the memory of past crimes, this particular story seems to be a nod of recognition to Liao Yiwu and his famous poem 'Massacre' about the Tiananmen Massacre of May 35th, 1989—the poem that got him imprisoned and led to the beginning of his written legacy, which some have said resembles that of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. This poem can be found in Liao's For a Song and One Hundred Songs : A Poet’s Journey Through a Chinese Prison.

 

In Liu's story, the litigation master, Tian Haoli, legal advocate in all but status, represents the spirit of dissent and resistance under the autocracy.

 

The scholars who sipped tea and the merchants who caressed their silver taels despised  Tian for daring to help the illiterate peasants draft complaints, devise legal strategies, and prepare for testimony and interrogation. After all, according to Confucius, neighbors should not sue neighbors. A conflict was nothing more than a misunderstanding that needed to be harmonized by a learned Confucian gentleman. But men like Tian Haoli dared to make the crafty peasants think that they could haul their superiors into court and could violate the proper hierarchies of respect! The Great Qing Code made it clear that champerty, maintenance, barratry, pettifoggery—whatever name you used to describe what Tian did—were

crimes.

 

Both Liao and Liu, have kept alive this nonconformist spirit in their writing so that the official histories do not completely erase the real stories of real people.

 

 

#

 

Liu credits Ted Chiang's 'Liking What You See: A Documentary' for inspiring his fictional account of the actual war crimes committed by the Japanese at Unit 731 in Manchuria during the 1930s and 1940s. 'The Man Who Ended History: A Documentary' is part philosophy of history and part apocryphal elaboration on Pingfang in Harbin, China where Japanese war crimes were perpetrated ostensibly in the name of science and for the sake of medical research to save Japanese soldiers injured in combat. It is clear, though the reference is not explicit, that Liu wants the world to remember the doctors of Pingfang in the same way we remember the cruel and criminal human experiments conducted under Josef Mengele's direction at Birkenau.

 

Shiro Yamagata:

I did not think that the work we did at Unit 731 was particularly strange. After 1941, I was assigned to northern China, first in Hebei Province and then in Shanxi Province. In army hospitals, we military doctors regularly scheduled surgery practice sessions with live Chinese subjects. The army would provide the subjects on the announced days. We practiced amputations, cutting out sections of intestines and suturing together the remaining sections, and removing various internal organs.

Often the practice surgeries were done without anesthesia to simulate battlefield conditions. Sometimes a doctor would shoot a prisoner in the stomach to simulate war wounds for us to practice on. After the surgeries, one of the officers would behead the Chinese subject or strangle him. Sometimes vivisections were also used as anatomy lessons for the younger trainees and to give them a thrill. It was important for the army to produce good surgeons quickly, so that we could help the soldiers.

 

The relative dearth of evidence from Pingfang in comparison to the monumental historical record of the Holocaust is attributable to the governments of the U.S. and Japan who covered up the atrocities for reasons of state and China being in the midst of civil war that resumed after World War II. It is here where Liu raises questions about how history is written, such as who has legal rights to the past, i.e., does state sovereignty trump global justice, and are the oral histories of individuals valid as scholarly history or is the purpose of curated history solely to document the achievements and failures of great men, nations and empires and their wars?

 

Liu's fictional account does make reference to real documentaries, but it is nevertheless complicated by the fact that there was an international cover-up—one that implicates the U.S. which wanted to preserve Japan's research and keep it out of the public domain. There are additional complications that Liu introduces. First, there is the notion of action at a distance (in time) by means of quantum entanglement, which as science fiction allows a sort of time travel for the story's characters. Even if such time travel were technologically feasible, would it provide authoritative evidence? Second, the Japanese physicist who introduces quantum entanglement as a means of facilitating the recovery of oral histories of Pingfang, discovers that her Japanese grandfather had been in a position of authority at the facility where the medical investigations were conducted. Just where does the legacy of blame end?

 

#

Liu's stories may be faulted for being a bit too defensive at times, but overall there is an integrity and honesty in his stories that renders them more than just Chinese 'victim stories.' They are human stories—and as stories of humanity, there is a mixture of good and evil . . . and ignorance throughout. His is an indictment of the species' history of doing evil with the glimmer of hope that facing the evil committed, the future may be different . . . in a better way.