The Paper Menagerie Study Guide

Ken Liu was born in Lanzhou, China, and moved to the United States as a child. He graduated from Harvard College in 1998 and from Harvard Law School in 2004. His first published short story, “The Carthaginian Rose,” appeared in The Phobos Science Fiction Anthology Volume 1 – Empire of Dreams and Miracles (2002). He has published two books of short stories, The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories (2016) and The Hidden Girl and Other Stories (2020); three novels in his epic fantasy series the Dandelion Dynasty, The Grace of Kings (2015), The Wall of Storms (2016), and The Veiled Throne (2021); and one Star Wars tie-in collection, The Legends of Luke Skywalker (2017). Ken Liu is well regarded in the science fiction and fantasy writing community; among the many writing awards he has won, he received a Nebula Award, a Hugo Award, and a World Fantasy Award for his short story “The Paper Menagerie.” In addition to writing original fiction, Ken Liu is famous as a translator of Chinese science fiction, most notably Cixin Liu’s bestselling novel The Three-Body Problem, which was published in Chinese in 2008 and in English translation in 2014.

Ken Liu mentions two major events of twentieth-century Chinese history in “The Paper Menagerie,” the Great Famine and the Cultural Revolution. The Great Famine occurred in China between 1958 and 1962. The famine was man-made. Chairman Mao Zedong, the autocratic leader of the Chinese Communist Party, was enthusiastic about increasing crop yields. His subordinates, afraid to disappoint him, lied and inflated crop yield estimates. As a result, the amount of food taken from Chinese peasant farming communes for use in the cities was based on wildly inflated estimates of crop yields, and the peasants were left with not enough to eat. Most local officials were too afraid to reveal that the peasants were starving. Because the government covered up the deaths, the exact death-by-starvation count is not known, but some estimates suggest that more than 30 million people died during the famine. The Cultural Revolution occurred in China between 1966 and 1976. Chairman Mao Zedong inaugurated the Cultural Revolution to remove lingering capitalist and bourgeois tendencies from Communist China. During the subsequent purges, people accused of bourgeois or capitalist tendencies were abused, imprisoned, and sometimes executed.

Ken Liu is famous as a writer of science fiction and fantasy, influenced both by the SF/Fantasy tradition and by Chinese history and culture. His short story “The Paper Menagerie” is both a work of fantasy and a portrait of a Chinese immigrant mother’s relationship to her American son. Ken Liu’s Dandelion Dynasty novels, The Grace of Kings, The Wall of Storms, and The Veiled Throne, are likewise works of fantasy that draw on Chinese culture for inspiration. Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood among Ghosts is a famous autobiography about growing up Chinese American; like “The Paper Menagerie,” it uses Chinese history and folk culture to provide context for Chinese immigrant and Chinese American experiences. Cixin Liu’s Three-Body Problem trilogy, The Three Body Problem, The Dark Forest, and Death’s End, place science fiction tropes in the context of Chinese history and contemporary Chinese culture. Moreover, Ken Liu translated the Three-Body Problem trilogy from Chinese into English.