The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories

The ancient Chinese game of Go shows up in several stories from The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories. The game consists of a board separated into a grid, with white and black stones, all identical, for two players who attempt to surround the other players’ stones in order to win. The game can take a long time, as it only ends when both players run out of moves, then count up their territory. Go becomes an apt allegory, however, in “Mono No Aware.” As a child, one of Hiroto’s classmates claims he doesn’t like Go, that it is boring because all the stones look the same and there are no heroes in the game. Here, Go represents Japanese culture, so when Hiroto sacrifices himself for the good of the ship, Hiroto hears his friends voice saying that there are heroes in Go. The implication is that there are heroes in Japanese culture.

In “All the Flavors,” Logan teaches Go to Lily using lotus and watermelon seeds. The seeds are representative of the cultural conversation Logan and Lily are having, finding common ground and learning about one another. Conversely, Guan Yu, the God of War in Logan’s story, learns that he has a taste for battle by playing Go.

Sacrifice figures largely in Ken Liu’s stories, suggesting that sacrifice is part of the human condition. Each of the characters that make sacrifices find it important to do so in pursuit of a greater cause—life, or truth, or their children, mostly. In “State Change,” Rina sacrifices her ice cube soul to “live” briefly with Jimmy. In “The Paper Menagerie,” Jack’s mom sacrifices some of her culture to make her son more comfortable.

In “An Advanced Readers’ Picture Book of Comparative Cognition,” the mother sacrifices her husband and daughter to go out to the stars, noting that love comes in many forms, and the husband sacrifices his wife for the good of the SETL (search for extra-terrestrial life) mission. In “The Waves,” João sacrifices himself, as do many of his children over the years, for the sake of human progress. In “Mono No Aware,” Hiroto sacrifices himself for the ship, and in “The Litigation Master and the Monkey King,” Tian sacrifices himself for the sake of the truth. Finally, in “The Man Who Ended History, A Documentary,” Evan Wei sacrifices history for the sake of bringing an injustice to light.