When Paper Tigers Come to Life

Review of Ken Liu’s The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories (2016)

Apr 04, 2025

Ken Liu’s The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories (2016) is a short stories collection that folds your heart into an origami crane and lets it fly, only for you to realise too late that it was always meant to crumble.

These stories move between speculative fiction, history, and raw emotional truth, bound together by Liu’s obsession with memory, language, and the weight of cultural inheritance.

All good stories are about the choices we make under pressure.

But Liu's stories go further, examining the pressure points between cultures, between generations, and between human and artificial consciousness. His background as a programmer and lawyer infuses these stories with unusual technical precision.

The title story, The Paper Menagerie, was the first work to win the Hugo, Nebula, and World Fantasy awards, making Ken Liu a household name in literary and sci-fi circles

Magic, Memory, and the Weight of Love

In the title story, a boy, born to an white American father and a Chinese mother, resents his immigrant mother, embarrassed by her broken English, her otherness. But she folds him paper animals that come to life—a fragile, beautiful magic that he eventually outgrows, discarding her culture along with it. By the time he realises what he’s lost, it’s too late. It’s a story about the cruelty of assimilation, the small betrayals of childhood, and the regrets that come too late.

“The animals will stop moving when I stop breathing. But if I write to you with all my heart, I’ll leave a little of myself behind on this paper, in these words. Then, if you think of me on Qingming, when the spirits of the departed are allowed to visit their families, you’ll make the parts of myself I leave behind come alive too. The creatures I made for you will again leap and run and pounce, and maybe you’ll get to see these words then.”

Liu isn’t a one-note writer. He swings effortlessly between genres.

The Man Who Ended History is a mind-bending thought experiment wrapped in a historical gut punch, exploring Unit 731’s war crimes and who gets to own history.

Armenians, Jews, Tibetans, Native Americans, Indians, the Kikuyu, the descendants of slaves in the New World—victim groups around the world lined up and demanded use of the machine, some out of fear that their history might be erased by the groups in power, others wishing to use their history for present political gain. As well, the countries who initially advocated access to the machine hesitated when the implications became clear: Did the French wish to relive the depravity of their own people under Vichy France? Did the Chinese want to re-experience the self-inflicted horrors of the Cultural Revolution? Did the British want to see the genocides that lay behind their Empire?
With remarkable alacrity, democracies and dictatorships around the world signed the Comprehensive Time Travel Moratorium while they wrangled over the minutiae of the rules for how to divide up jurisdiction of the past. Everyone, it seemed, preferred not to have to deal with the past just yet.

Good Hunting starts as a folk tale about Chinese shape-shifters and ends up a steampunk meditation on colonialism and lost magic.

Working from her idea, I had designed the delicate folds in the chrome skin and the intricate joints in the metal skeleton. I had put together every hinge, assembled every gear, soldered every wire, welded every seam, oiled every actuator. I had taken her apart and put her back together.
Yet, it was a marvel to see everything working. In front of my eyes, she folded and unfolded like a silvery origami construction, until finally, a chrome fox as beautiful and deadly as the oldest legends stood before me.

State Change gives you a world where souls are literal objects—a woman carries hers as an ice cube, terrified that one warm day will end her.

“All my life I thought my soul was in those cigarettes, and I never even thought about the box. I never paid any attention to that paper shell of quiet, that enclosed bit of emptiness. An empty box is a home for lost spiders you want to carry outside. It holds loose change, buttons that have fallen off, needles and thread. It works tolerably well for lipstick, eye pencil, and a bit of blush. It is open to whatever you’d like to put in it. And that is how I feel: open, careless, adaptable. Yes, life is now truly just an experiment. What can I do next? Anything. But to get here, I first had to smoke my cigarettes. What happened to me was a state change. When my soul turned from a box of cigarettes to a box, I grew up.”

Mono No Aware delivers a quiet, haunting take on space travel and identity, where survival means remembering where you came from.

“That feeling in your heart: it’s called mono no aware. It is a sense of the transience of all things in life. The sun, the dandelion, the cicada, the Hammer, and all of us: we are all subject to the equations of James Clerk Maxwell, and we are all ephemeral patterns destined to eventually fade, whether in a second or an eon.”

Every story has a core of longing. Longing for a homeland that no longer exists, for a mother’s love you didn’t appreciate, for a past that refuses to let go.

Where Liu shines

Liu’s prose is elegant but never showy. He doesn’t waste words. He wields them like a knife—precise, sharp, and lethal.

Liu's signature move is the seamless fusion of science and technology with ancient mythology.

She lifted her head to the moon and howled: it was a howl made by steam passing through brass piping, and yet it reminded me of that wild howl long ago, when I first heard the call of a hulijing.
Then she crouched to the floor. Gears grinding, pistons pumping, curved metal plates sliding over each other—the noises grew louder as she began to transform.

The laws of conservation still apply in his story about origami spaceships, grounding his flights of fancy in physical reality.

Liu doesn't shy away from political themes, but he approaches them obliquely.

“One of the most vexing problems created by the violent and unstable process by which states expand and contract over time is this: As control over a territory shifts between sovereigns over time, which sovereign should have jurisdiction over that territory’s past?”

His stories about Chinese history, particularly *The Literomancer* challenge Western perspectives without becoming polemical.

“That was when I began to understand another kind of magic. 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.”

Himself a translator of Chinese science fiction, Liu makes translation a recurring theme. "The meaning stays, but the music changes," one character observes about language, and you realize Liu is talking about more than just words.

“Who can say if the thoughts you have in your mind as you read these words are the same thoughts I had in my mind as I typed them? We are different, you and I, and the qualia of our consciousnesses are as divergent as two stars at the ends of the universe.
And yet, whatever has been lost in translation in the long journey of my thoughts through the maze of civilization to your mind, I think you do understand me, and you think you do understand me. Our minds managed to touch, if but briefly and imperfectly.
Does that thought not make the universe seem just a bit kinder, a bit brighter, a bit warmer and more human?
We live for such miracles.”

His stories often function as cultural translations, making Chinese concepts accessible to Western readers without diluting their essence.

What might disappoint you

Liu’s stories lean philosophical, sometimes melancholic. Some readers might find a few stories too cerebral or emotionally heavy. The blend of genres means you might not love every story equally.

A few stories suffer from predictable endings, and some can feel like they’re delivering a thesis rather than letting you draw your own conclusions. Liu is at his best when he lets the emotions do the heavy lifting, but occasionally, his need to explain a theme flattens the impact.

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.

The Verdict:

Despite its few weaker moments, this collection demonstrates what's possible when a writer combines technical expertise, cultural insight, and raw storytelling talent.

Liu isn’t interested in grand, sweeping epics. He’s interested in the quiet devastations—cultural erasure, familial love left unspoken, the weight of history pressing down on the present. Even his most didactic moments are still compelling—because he’s not just telling stories, he’s interrogating them.

And when you turn the last page, you sit there, staring into space, trying to recover. It’s a book about the things we abandon and the things that refuse to abandon us.

Minakhi Reads

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