“The Paper Menagerie” Review

I make students cry. It's NOT on purpose. "Make students cry" has never once shown up on my daily to-do list. But it happens. And it happens because of stories like this one.

Ken Liu's story, "The Paper Menagerie," is a wonder. It's youthful and grown-up at the same time. It's poignant. After my students are done crying, they tell me to teach it again next year.

"The Paper Menagerie" is a story of Jack, the biracial son of a white, American father, and a mother who has immigrated to the US from China. A mother who's still adapting to America and a son who has never known anything different bond over the mother's talent for zhezhi, Chinese paper folding. The mother makes Jack a collection of paper animals, the titular Paper Menagerie, to the boy's delight.

As he grows, his attachment to the animals (and his mother,) is tested.

I don't dare give away anything else about the plot for those who haven't read it. The language is so economical. Liu never overwrites a sentence when understatement or blunt efficiency will do. The paper animals are a beautiful central metaphor, maybe alive, maybe mundane that the whole story spins on (a la Calvin and Hobbes) and Jack feels real, conflicted, and complicated.

The story has so much to say about family and fitting in. If the subject matter is familiar, the execution is one of a kind.

While at its heart it's a story about the experience of immigrants and their children, it remains a story for anyone with strong connections to their parents. I think what most students find so haunting about the story is its insight into the invisible cruelties that we inflict on one another, and the love we couldn't recognize or appreciate in the moment. Jack is molded and folded by his environment just as clearly as any of his paper animals, and the marks his family leaves on him are as crisp as a crease in a page.

This is a rare, single short story review, because I haven’t gotten my hands on the rest of the collection in which it is found. But the story itself is worthy of its own post: it won Nebula, Hugo, and World Fantasy awards. If you haven't read it yet, I can't recommend it highly enough. Five paper tigers out of five.