Ken Liu, "The Paper Menagerie"

crying-adjacent sensations & the trouble with magic

“I dried him out in the sun, but his legs became crooked after that, and he ran around with a limp.”

Claims to have been moved to tears by a piece of literature, like claims to have laughed audibly at a text message, should be viewed skeptically. For every Bawling for the last ten pages or This book made me ugly-cry on the subway I silently substitute, Parts of this made me feel acutely sad.

This cynicism may in part reflect a quirk of my own constitution — I have never, in all my years of crushingly sad reading, shed a single book-induced tear. It isn’t that I’m heartless. There were pages toward the end of Remains of the Day during which my voice, had I tried to use it, would have been unsteady. I did stare off into the distance and play “Ashokan Farewell” on my computer speakers when Dumbledore died. But the wall between my heart and my tear ducts is high and formidable.

So Ken Liu’s short story “The Paper Menagerie” didn’t make me cry. But it did bring me closer to tears than any piece of writing has in a long time. Crying-adjacent sensations made significant incursions; the battlement guards were roused to attention.

Ken Liu is best known as the translator of The Three-Body Problem, but he would have made a significant contribution to literature — particularly with his powerful and quietly surreal short stories — if he’d never translated a word. “The Paper Menagerie” is the best thing he’s written.

It’s narrated by Jack, a Chinese-American man looking back with shame at his childhood relationship with his mother. She had, as far as his childhood self was concerned, one unforgivable flaw and one minor asset. The flaw: after emigrating from China, she never learned to speak English. The asset: she could make origami animals that, with a puff of her breath, came gently to life.

So this is a story about assimilation, and about undigested filial pain. But it is also a story about magic. And what makes the story work — what accounts, I’m convinced, for its preternatural emotional power — is how beautifully Liu calibrates that magic.

“A little paper tiger stood on the table, the size of two fists placed together… Its tail twitched, and it pounced playfully at my finger. ‘Rawrr-sa,’ it growled, the sound somewhere between a cat and rustling newspapers.”

The trouble with magic in fiction is that it threatens to dissolve the fundamental molecule of storytelling: intention and obstacle. A character wants something, but something is in the way. Calvin wants to enter the house peacefully but Hobbes insists on pouncing on him. Juliet wants to be with Romeo but her goddamn parents have other plans.

Introduce magic into this equation and the obstacle begins to waver (Can Calvin erect a forcefield? Can Juliet put her parents under a spell?). The reader’s interest in whether the protagonist will achieve her intention — that vital tank of fretful hope on which a reader’s engine runs — drains accordingly.

So a writer needs to manage her story’s magic carefully. The magic can act as an agent of unforeseen complication (Half Magic, The Midas Touch) or as an intensifier of existing societal tendencies (Frankenstein). It just can’t act as a pole vault. Look how beautifully Liu establishes the humble boundaries of the mother’s abilities.

“Once, the water buffalo jumped into a dish of soy sauce on the table at dinner. (He wanted to wallow, like a real water buffalo.) I picked him out quickly but the capillary action had already pulled the dark liquid high up into his legs. The sauce-softened legs would not hold him up, and he collapsed onto the table. I dried him out in the sun, but his legs became crooked after that, and he ran around with a limp.”

So: the mother’s magic is extraordinary (the water buffalo is real enough to run around, and particular enough to do so with a limp). But it is also defiantly ordinary (anyone who has ever made so much as a paper airplane is familiar with the particular sadness of damp origami). Her magic neither surmounts obstacles nor succumbs to them; it merely rumples.

It has, in other words, precisely the same uneasy status as those original magicians: our parents. They can reach everything on the shelves, they can make money come flying out of strange machines, they can force us to go to school  — and they get sick, they smell weird, and (we’ve heard rumors) they’re going to die.

Liu condenses this entire heartbreaking predicament into the mother’s peculiar gift and sends it out over narrative wires that strict realism, with its copious regulations, wouldn’t be able to carry. The surplus voltage hums in the story’s air, like the buzz that comes from certain electric towers. Side effects of exposure may include tremors in the tear ducts.