10 June 2021
The Paper Menagerie
The Paper Menagerie
And Other Stories
Ken Liu

Highlights

I never paid attention to that paper shell of quiet, that enclosed bit of emptiness. [25, State Change]
. . .
[W]e become ever more stuck in our existing beliefs and exaggerated in our inclinations. [39, The Perfect Match]
. . .
You grew up believing you were free, which made it even harder for you to see when you weren't. [42, The Perfect Match]
. . .
There's no such thing as neutrally offering up information. [47, The Perfect Match]
. . .
Without Tilly, you can't do your job, you can't remember your life, you can't even call your mother. We are now a race of cyborgs. We long ago began to spread our minds into the electronic realm, and it is no longer possible to squeeze all of ourselves back into our brains. The electronic copies of yourselves that you wanted to destroy are, in a literal sense actually you. [48, The Perfect Match]
. . .
Judging was the luxury of those who did not need to survive. [64, Good Hunting]
. . .
Magic words are often misunderstood. When those girls and you all thought 'gook' was a magic word, it held a kind of power. But it was an empty magic based on ignorance. Other words also hold magic and power, but they require reflection and thought. [92, The Literomancer]
. . .
Men spoke of the glory of Japan and the weakness of China, that Japan wants the best for Asia, and that China should accept what Japan wants and give up. But what do these words mean? How can 'Japan' want something? 'Japan' and 'China' do not exist. They are just words, fiction. An individual Japanese may be glorious, and an individual Chinese may want something, but how can you speak of 'Japan' or 'China' wanting, believing, accepting anything? It is all just empty words, myths. But these myths have powerful magic, and they require sacrifices. They require the slaughter of men like sheep. [96-97, The Literomancer]
. . .
You see, the Communists really were bandits. They would take the land from the landlords and distribute it to the landless peasants, and this made them very popular. They couldn't care less about the fiction of laws and property rights. Why should they? The rich and educated had made a mess of things, so why shouldn't the poor and illiterate have a chance at it? No one before the Communists had ever thought much of the lowly peasants, but when you have nothing, not even shoes for your feet, you are not afraid to die. The world had many more people who were poor and therefore fearless than people who were rich and afraid. I could see the logic of the Communists. [98, The Literomancer]
. . .
I'm sorry to have told you such a sad story, Lilly. But the Chinese have not had happy stories to tell for a long time. [100, The Literomancer]
. . .
People shape and stage the experiences of their lives for the camera, go on vacations with one eye glued tot he video camera. The desire to freeze reality is about avoiding reality. [116, Simulacrum]
. . .
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. [120, Simulacrum]
. . .
It's almost funny how people are so willing to give perfect strangers over the Internet information, would even compete with each other to do it, tho show how knowledgable they are. [140, The Regular]
. . .
Sometimes you help a friend even when you disapprove of their decisions. It's complicated. [165, The Regular]
. . .
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. [177, The Regular]
. . .
A deep pain floods through her like forgiveness, like hard rain after a long drought. She does not know if she will be granted relief, but she experiences this moment fully, and she's thankful. [177, The Regular]
. . .
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. [192, The Paper Menagerie]
. . .
A lit forearm, laughter, food of the gods. Thus are our memories compressed, integrated into sparkling jewels to be embedded in the limited space of our minds. A scene is turned into a mnemonic, a conversation reduced to a single phrase, a day distilled to a fleeting feeling of joy.

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. [195, An Advanced Readers' Picture Book of Comparative Cognition]
. . .
All parents make choices for their children. Almost always they think it's for the best. [204, An Advanced Readers' Picture Book of Comparative Cognition]
. . .
[M]ost of our thoughts and memories are destined to fade, to disappear, to be consumed by the very act of choosing and living. [206, An Advanced Readers' Picture Book of Comparative Cognition]
. . .
You wonder why there are so many stories about how people came to be? It's because all true stories have many tellings. [212, The Waves]
. . .
I'm not afraid to step out of the way when something new comes to take my place. [217, The Waves]
. . .
[N]ever let the past pick your life for you. [223, The Waves]
. . .
It is in the face of disasters that we show our strength as a people. Understand that we are not defined by our individual loneliness, but by the web of relationships in which we're enmeshed. A person must rise above his selfish needs so that all of us can live in harmony. [236, Mono no aware]
. . .
It's hard to hear the music behind the words when their meanings get in the way. [240, Mono no aware]
. . .
"There are a thousand ways of phrasing everything," Dad used to say, "each appropriate to an occasion." He taught me that our language is full of nuances and supple grace, each sentence a poem. The language folds in on itself, the unspoken words as meaningful as the unspoken, context within context, layer upon layer, like the steel in samurai swords. [240, Mono no aware]
. . .
Dad had said that some people preferred to believe that a disaster was unreal rather than accept that nothing could be done. [246, Mono no aware]
. . .
We plan, we debate, we shout at each other, we work throughout the night. [249, Mono no aware]
. . .
Yet it is the awareness of the closeness of death, of the beauty inherent in each moment, that allows us to endure. Mono no aware, my son, is an empathy with the universe. [250, Mono no aware]
. . .
I watch as the sail turns away, unveiling the stars in their full glory. The sun, so faint now, is only one star among many, neither rising nor setting. I am cast adrift among them, alone and also at one with them. [253, Mono no aware]
. . .
We are defined by the places we hold in the web of others' lives. [254, Mono no aware]
. . .
"That just means more Chinese will have to become Americans," said Jack.

"Or lots more Americans will have to learn to be more Chinese," said Ah Yan. [319, All the Flavors: A Tale of Guan Yu, the Chinese God of War, in America]
. . .
Though the land here does not smell of home, the sky here is wider and higher than I have ever known. Every day I learn names for things I did not know existed and perform feats that I did not know that I could do. Why should we fear to rise as high as we can and make new names for ourselves? [334 All the Flavors: A Tale of Guan Yu, the Chinese God of War, in America]
. . .
You feel that lift in your heart? That lightness in your head? That is the taste of whiskey, the essence of America. We have been wrong to be drunk and asleep. We should be drunk and fighting. [334, All the Flavors: A Tale of Guan Yu, the Chinese God of War, in America]
. . .
Politics were for those who had too much to eat. [347, A Brief History of the Trans-Pacific Tunnel]
. . .
I don't know if it's going to make any difference, change anyone's mind. But it doesn't matter. It's good enough for me that he is speaking, that he is not silent. He's making the secret a little bit harder to keep, and that counts for something. [353, A Brief History of the Trans-Pacific Tunnel]
. . .
I consider Betty's words. It is the obsession of Americans to speak, to express opinions on things that they are ignorant about. They believe in drawing attention to things that other people may prefer to keep quiet, to ignore and forget.

But I can't dismiss the image Betty has put into my head: a boy stands in darkness and silence. He speaks; his words float up like a bubble. It explodes, and the world is a little brighter, and a little less stiflingly silent. [354, A Brief History of the Trans-Pacific Tunnel]
. . .
I didn't really feel sorry for her. I was too tired. [355, A Brief History of the Trans-Pacific Tunnel]
. . .
There are no heroes, Tian Haoli. Grand Secretary Shi was both courageous and cowardly, capable and foolish. Wang Xiuchu was both an opportunistic survivor and a man of greatness of spirit. I'm mostly selfish and vain, but sometimes even I surprise myself. 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. [380, The Litigation Master and the Monkey King]
. . .
Now that you know about that past, you're no longer an innocent bystander. [380, The Litigation Master and the Monkey King]
. . .
Yes, the brain takes the signals and makes a story out of them, but there's nothing illusory about it, whether in the past or now. [396, The Man Who Ended History: A Documentary]
. . .
He enjoys giving lectures, not because he likes hearing himself talk, but because he thinks he will learn something new each time he tries to explain. [396, The Man Who Ended History: A Documentary]
. . .
Evan made me proud to be Japanese, and so he made me love myself. That was how I knew I was really in love with him. [403, The Man Who Ended History: A Documentary]
. . .
[I]gnorance of history, a history that determined who he was in many ways, was a sin in itself. [405, The Man Who Ended History: A Documentary]
. . .
Without real memory, the individual persons of each nation have not been able to empathize with and remember and experience the suffering of the victims. An individualized story that each of us can tell ourselves about what happened is required before we can move beyond the trap of history. [429, The Man Who Ended History: A Documentary]
. . .
I want to focus on specifics, and acknowledgement of specifics, not empty platitudes. [431, The Man Who Ended History: A Documentary]
. . .
Yes, it is true that no nation, and no historian, can tell a story that completely encompasses every aspect of the truth. But it is not true that just because all narratives are constructed, that they are equally far from the truth. The Earth is neither a perfect sphere nor a flat disk, but the model of the sphere is much closer to the truth. Similarly, there are some narratives that are closer to the truth than others, and we must always try to tell a story that comes as close to the truth as is humanly possible.

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. [434, The Man Who Ended History: A Documentary]
. . .
But history has a way of mocking our expectations. [441, The Man Who Ended History: A Documentary]
. . .
There have been times when I wished Evan weren't Chinese, just as there have been times when I wished I weren't Japanese. But these are moments of passing weakness. I don't mean them. We are born into strong currents of history, and it is our lot to swim or sink, not to complain about our luck. [446, The Man Who Ended History: A Documentary]
. . .
In an extraordinary time, he faced extraordinary choices, and maybe some would say this means that we cannot judge him. But how can we really judge anyone except in the most extraordinary of circumstances? It's easy to be civilized and display a patina of orderliness in calm times, but your true character only emerges in darkness and under great pressure: is it a diamond or merely a lump of the blackest coal? [446-447, The Man Who Ended History: A Documentary]
. . .
The truth is not delicate and it does not suffer from denial — the truth only dies when true stories are untold. [447, The Man Who Ended History: A Documentary]