#228 The Paper Menagerie- Ken Liu
The Paper Menagerie won the 2013 Nebula Awards for the
year’s best Science Fiction or fantasy. This falls in the latter category. Since
this is not a genre I read a lot of, it’s always a special treat to find such creativity
and heart somewhere I don’t usually look.
Jack is the son of a Chinese mother and a white American
father. They live in Connecticut. Growing up, whenever Jack got sad, his mother
made him origami animals out of used Christmas wrapping paper. They came alive
and became his companions. “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.”
As he got older, as with most children imagination fades and the need to fit in becomes paramount, especially with a bi-racial child.
What used to make you unique and individual, are things that teenagers start to
resent in themselves. Jack resented his mother’s foreignness, her language, her
looks, her entire being. He couldn’t see
that he was just like her; and he couldn’t see that those things were his
mothers only connection to her past and her culture. Rejecting them, meant that
Jack was rejecting her. But children are sell-centered and sometimes it’s too
late to see such things.
His mother died very young and made Jack promise that he
would take out his collection of origami animals once a year on Qingming and
think of her. When she died, “The paper
animals did not move. Perhaps whatever magic had animated them stopped when Mom
died. Or perhaps I had only imagined that these paper constructions were once
alive. The memory of children could not be trusted.”
On Qingming, the animals came alive, as did his connection
to his mother and his Chinese heritage. This is a fantastic story, and although
it has a tinge of fantasy elements, this is no niche work of fiction. It’s
truly remarkable.
“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.”
Notable Passage: “Contempt felt good, like wine.”
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