This mesmerizing collection features many of Ken’s award-winning and award-finalist stories, including: “The Man Who Ended History: A Documentary” (Finalist for the Hugo, Nebula, and Theodore Sturgeon Awards), “Mono No Aware” (Hugo Award winner), “The Waves” (Nebula Award finalist), “The Bookmaking Habits of Select Species” (Nebula and Sturgeon Award finalists), “All the Flavors” (Nebula Award finalist), “The Litigation Master and the Monkey King” (Nebula Award finalist), and the most awarded story in the genre’s history, “The Paper Menagerie” (The only story to win the Hugo, Nebula, and World Fantasy awards).
Insightful and stunning stories that plumb the struggle against history and betrayal of relationships in pivotal moments, this collection showcases one of our greatest and original voices.
The Paper Menagerie revolves around Jack, the first-generation American son of a white American father and a Chinese immigrant mail-order bride mother. As a child, Jack is enchanted by his mother's magical ability to make origami paper animals come to life. These paper creatures play with him, comfort him, and become a vivid representation of the intimate bond he shares with his mother, as well as a link to his Chinese heritage.
However, as Jack grows older, he becomes more conscious of the differences between his family and the American families around him. Under the pressure of wanting to fit in, he begins to reject his Chinese heritage. He stops speaking Chinese and distances himself from his mother, ashamed of her accented English and traditional ways. The rift between them widens as the years go by.
As an adult, after his mother's death, Jack discovers a letter she wrote to him, but it's in Chinese. With help, he translates it and learns about his mother's tragic past during the Cultural Revolution in China, her journey to America, and her enduring love for him despite his rejection
Ken Liu is an award-winning author of speculative fiction. His books include the Dandelion Dynasty series (The Grace of Kings), The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories, The Hidden Girl and Other Stories, and the Star Wars tie-in novel, The Legends of Luke Skywalker. He frequently speaks at conferences and universities on topics like futurism, machine-augmented creativity, the mathematics of origami, and more. He lives near Boston with his family.
Every act of communication is a miracle of translation.
We are defined by the places we hold in the web of others’ lives.
You know what the Chinese think is the saddest feeling in the world? It's for a child to finally grow the desire to take care of his parents, only to realize that they were long gone. There are many ways to say I love you in this cold, dark, silent universe, as many as the twinkling stars.
We spend our entire lives trying to tell stories about ourselves—they’re the essence of memory. It is how we make living in this unfeeling, accidental universe tolerable.
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.
Time's arrow is the loss of fidelity in compression. A sketch, not a photograph. A memory is a re-creation, precious because it is both more and less than the original
There are a number of YouTube videos featuring interviews with Ken Liu.
You can find search results at this link
