The Paper Menagerie: Style 1 key example

Structurally, the story is told in the first-person from the perspective of an older Jack who is reflecting on his childhood through his early 20s, jumping from one moment in his life to another. The final pages of the story are, for the most part, the translation of a long letter that Jack’s mother wrote to him before she died.

One notable stylistic choice that Liu makes in “The Paper Menagerie” is to include some words in Mandarin without translating them. While Liu will sometimes have Jack or his mother say a phrase in Mandarin and then have Jack the narrator translate it (such as translating Zhe jiao zhezhi to "This is called origami"), at other times he chooses not to translate a phrase, encouraging readers who don't speak Mandarin to use context clues or to translate the words themselves. This occurs in the following passage, when Jack’s mother first makes him an origami animal:

 “Kan,” she said, “laohu.” She put her hands down on the table and let go. A little paper tiger stood on the table, the size of two fists placed together.

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Here, Liu chooses not to translate the phrase Kan, laohu, which means “Look, a tiger.” While readers might be able to figure out the meaning of the words given that Jack's mother reveals a paper tiger just after saying them, some may need to look up a translation of the phrase. It is worth noting that, in an earlier edition of the story, Liu did translate this phrase (and others) from Mandarin to English. This signals that Liu either started to think of his story as being primarily for a Mandarin-speaking audience or that he wanted to teach his non-Mandarin-speaking readers something about the importance of doing some extra work themselves to bridge the linguistic divide.