"The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories"

[fiefoe]

I highly respect Ken Liu's willingness to confront some really difficult historical periods in his stories, but that does lead to many terrible downers. Oftentimes in his universe magic is feeble and technology is unreliable.

• Who can say if the thoughts you have in your mind as you read these words are the same thoughts I had in my mind as I typed them? We are different, you and I, and the qualia of our consciousnesses are as divergent as two stars at the ends of the universe.
• And yet, whatever has been lost in translation in the long journey of my thoughts through the maze of civilization to your mind, I think you do understand me, and you think you do understand me. Our minds managed to touch, if but briefly and imperfectly.
• Does the thought not make the universe seem just a bit kinder, a bit brighter, a bit warmer and more human? <> We live for such miracles.

* THE BOOKMAKING HABITS OF SELECT SPECIES

• Yet every species has its unique way of passing on its wisdom through the ages, its way of making thoughts visible, tangible, frozen for a moment like a bulwark against the irresistible tide of time.
• To read a book inscribed this way, an Allatian places his nose into the groove and drags it through. The delicate proboscis vibrates in sympathy with the waveform of the groove, and a hollow chamber in the Allatian skull magnifies the sound. In this manner, the voice of the writer is re-created.
• Ironically, the most important and beautiful works of Allatian writers are rarely read, but are known only through interpretations made by scribes who attempt to reconstruct the original in new books after hearing the source read at special ceremonies... The Allatian scholars spend much of their time debating the relative authority of competing versions and inferring, based on the multiplicity of imperfect copies, the imagined voice of their antecedent, an ideal book uncorrupted by readers.
• This stone is the seat of the Quatzoli mind. The stone organ is filled with thousands, millions of intricate channels, forming a maze that divides the water into countless tiny, parallel flows that drip, trickle, wind around each other to represent simple values which, together, coalesce into streams of consciousness and emerge as currents of thought.
• Some of the more violent races of the universe, such as the Hesperoe, once delighted in extracting and collecting the stone brains of the Quatzoli. Still displayed in their museums and libraries, the stones—often labeled simply “ancient books”—no longer mean much to most visitors.
• Their philosophers justified their conquests and slaughter in the name of forward motion: War was the only way to animate the ideals embedded in the static text passed down through the ages, to ensure that they remained true, and to refine them for the future. An idea was worth keeping only if it led to victory.
• The Tull-Toks claim that everything in the universe can be read. Each star is a living text, where the massive convection currents of superheated gas tell an epic drama, with the starspots serving as punctuation, the coronal loops extended figures of speech, and the flares emphatic passages that ring true in the deep silence of cold space. Each planet contains a poem, written out in the bleak, jagged, staccato rhythm of bare rocky cores or the lyrical, lingering, rich rhymes—both masculine and feminine—of swirling gas giants.
• The Caru’ee make no effort at deciphering their acquisitions. They seek only to use the old books, now devoid of meaning, as a blank space upon which to construct their sophisticated, baroque cities. <> The incised lines on the vases and tablets were turned into thoroughfares whose walls were packed with honeycombed rooms that elaborate on the pre-existing outlines with fractal beauty. The fibers in the knotted ropes were teased apart, re-woven, and re-tied at the microscopic level, until each original knot had been turned into a Byzantine complex of thousands of smaller knots, each a kiosk suitable for a Caru’ee merchant just starting out or a warren of rooms for a young Caru’ee family.

* STATE CHANGE
__ She took out her candle, put it in that candleholder I made for her, and lit it at both ends. When she lit her soul like that she was at her most beautiful.
__ Millay chose to light her candle at both ends, and lived an incandescent life. When her candle ran out, she died sick, addicted, and much too young. But each day of her life she could decide, “Am I going to be brilliant today?”
Rina imagined her ice cube in the dark, cold cocoon of the freezer. Stay calm, she thought. Block it out. This is your life. This bit of almost-death.
__ All my life I thought my soul was in those cigarettes, and I never even thought about the box. I never paid any attention to that paper shell of quiet, that enclosed bit of emptiness.
What happened to me was a state change. When my soul turned from a box of cigarettes to a box, I grew up.

* THE PERFECT MATCH

• It was a truism that what a man wouldn’t tell his best friend, he’d happily search for on Centillion.
• Four billion women on Earth, and  Tilly seemed to have found the perfect match for him. It was just like hitting the “I Trust You” button on Centillion search back in the early days
• Whenever you do a search, whenever you hear a news digest, it’s been curated by Centillion to fit what it thinks you want to hear. Someone upset by the news isn’t going to buy anything sold by the advertisers, so Centillion adjusts things to make it all okay.
• Collectively, the bits made up a digital copy of him, literally. Was there anything that was a part of him that wasn’t also up there in the cloud, curated by Tilly? Wouldn’t unleashing a virus on that be like suicide, like murder?.. The bits were his, but not him. He had a will that could not be captured in bits.
• “Back then, the government watched everything you did on the Network and made no secret of it. You had to learn how to keep the insanity at bay, to read between the lines, to speak without being overheard.”... “You grew up believing you were free, which made it even harder for you to see when you weren’t. You were like frogs in the pot being slowly boiled.”
• “I never really thought of you as my type,” she said.
  Sai’s heart sank like a stone.
  “But who thinks only in terms of ‘types’ except Tilly?” she said quickly, then smiled and pulled him closer.
• We long ago began to spread our minds into the electronic realm, and it is no longer possible to squeeze all of ourselves back into our brains.
  There’s no such thing as neutrally offering up information.

* GOOD HUNTING

• “You must save him,”  the merchant’s wife had said, bowing like a chicken pecking at rice.
• Her voice was like sweet, cold lotus paste, and I wanted to hear her talk forever.
• “She lures innocent scholars and draws on their life essence to feed her evil magic! Look how sick the merchant’s son is!” <> “He’s sick because that useless doctor gave him poison that was supposed to make him forget about my mother. My mother is the one who’s kept him alive with her nightly visits. And stop using the word lure. A man can fall in love with a hulijing just like he can with any human woman.”
• “Ever think that maybe the jumping corpses are also misunderstood?” she asked. “Like me and my mother?” <> She laughed as she saw my face. “Just kidding!”
• “The land has channels along rivers, hills, ancient roads that carry the energy of qi. It’s what gives the villages prosperity and maintains the rare animals and local spirits and household gods. Could you consider shifting the line of the tracks a little,
• As I let his body down, my heart numb, I thought that he was not unlike those he had hunted all his life: They were all sustained by an old magic that had left and would not return, and they did not know how to survive without it.
• I couldn’t remember any dreams. I had let myself become entranced by the movement of gears and levers, to let my mind grow to fit the gaps between the ceaseless clanging of metal on metal. It was a way to not have to think about my father, about a land that had lost so much.
• Her legs, what I could see of them, were made of shiny chrome. I bent down to look closer: the cylindrical joints at the knees were lathed with precision, the pneumatic actuators along the thighs moved in complete silence, the feet were exquisitely molded and shaped, the surfaces smooth and flowing. These were the most beautiful mechanical legs I had ever seen.
• I had let him do all this to me, to replace me part by part, mourning my loss all the while without understanding what I had gained. A terrible thing had been done to me, but I could also be terrible.
• She lifted her head to the moon and howled: it was a howl made by steam passing through brass piping, and yet it reminded me of that wild howl long ago, when I first heard the call of a hulijing. <> Then she crouched to the floor. Gears grinding, pistons pumping, curved metal plates sliding over each other—the noises grew louder as she began to transform... In front of my eyes, she folded and unfolded like a silvery origami construction, until finally, a chrome fox as beautiful and deadly as the oldest legends stood before me.

*THE LITEROMANCER

• “The Chinese invented writing as an aid to divination, so Chinese characters always had a deep magic to them.
• Interrogations of ChiCom prisoners suggest that this program of harassment and terror, combined with the threat of an ROC invasion of the mainland, has pushed the ChiCom to further intensify internal repression and tighten domestic control. The ChiCom have increased military spending, and this likely has shifted scarce resources away from economic development
• At the same time, there is no question that the ChiCom would step up their efforts to infiltrate Taiwan and establish a network of agents and sympathizers within Taiwan. ChiCom propaganda and psywar techniques are not as sophisticated as ours, but appear to have been effective (at least in the past), especially among the native Taiwanese, by exploiting conflicts between the native-born penshengjen and the Nationalist waishengjen.
• “Magic words are often misunderstood. When those girls and you all thought ‘gook’ was a magic word, it held a kind of power. But it was an empty magic based on ignorance.
• thalassocracy -- “Ah, I’ve got it! The way you’ve written the r, it looks like a bird flying. So, Lilly, this means that you are the lass with a lasso who was destined to fly across the sea and come to China. Ha-ha! It was fate that we should be friends!”
• how can you speak of ‘Japan’ or ‘China’ wanting, believing, accepting anything? It is all just empty words, myths. But these myths have powerful magic, and they require sacrifices. They require the slaughter of men like sheep.
• It’s formed from the character for ‘sheep,’ which you know, on top, and the character for ‘I,’ on the bottom. A man holds up a sheep for sacrifice, and he thinks he has truth, justice, and the magic that will save the world. It’s funny, isn’t it?
• the Communists really were bandits. They would take the land from the landlords and distribute it to the landless peasants, and this made them very popular. They couldn’t care less about the fiction of laws and property rights.
• “The character for ‘mob’ is formed from the character for ‘nobility’ on one side and the character for ‘sheep’ on the other. So that’s what a mob is, a herd of sheep that turns into a pack of wolves because they believe themselves to be serving a noble cause.
• “The penshengjen rebellion began on February 28, 1947, and lasted for months. Because some of the rebels were led by Communists, the Nationalists were especially brutal... “In those killings a new kind of magic was born. Now, no one is allowed to talk about the 228 Massacre. The number 228 is taboo.

* SIMULACRUM

• He was a good father, she thought. She knew that he loved me. She did not want to make me an additional casualty of a broken promise that was only made to her.
• Photography, videography, holography . . . the progression of such “reality-capturing” technology has been a proliferation of ways to lie about reality, to shape and distort it, to manipulate and fantasize.
• I wanted to keep the memory of my mother by myself for a while before letting the computer’s extrapolations confuse real memories with made-up ones.
• When my father kept those simulacra of his women around, he maintained a connection to them, to the man he was when he had been with them, and thus committed a continuing emotional betrayal that was far worse than a momentary physical indiscretion. A pornographic image is a pure visual fantasy, but a simulacrum captures a state of mind, a dream. But whose dream?   
• Perhaps it is the dream of every parent to keep their child in that brief period between helpless dependence and separate selfhood, when the parent is seen as perfect, faultless. It is a dream of control and mastery disguised as love, the dream that Lear had about Cordelia.
• But you have let that one moment, when he was at his weakest, overwhelm the entirety of your life together. You have compressed him, the whole of his life, into that one frozen afternoon, that sliver of him that was most flawed. In your mind, you traced that captured image again and again, until the person was erased by the stencil.

* THE REGULAR

• The whole point of the Regulator is to make police work under pressure more regular, less dependent on hunches, emotional impulses, appeals to hidden prejudice.
• He’s just using these people as research tools, a human flesh-powered, crowdsourced search engine. It’s almost funny how people are so willing to give perfect strangers over the Internet information, would even compete with each other to do it
• the only thing the Party feared was public anger, which always threatened to boil out of control. If a revolution were to come to China, Dagger quipped, it would be triggered by mistresses, not speeches.
• Wireless signals can go through walls, so it’s certainly possible that this adapter has captured the movements of people in neighboring apartments. It’s a privacy nightmare, and I’m sure the company doesn’t publicize that.”
• She despises the raw state of her mind. Without the Regulator, she feels weak, confused, angry.
• Finally, he speaks. “What is it?”  The voice is restrained, but laced with exhausted, desiccated pain.
• The man is almost at the door. Carrie’s cries are now incoherent sobs. <> It has always been the regular state of things. There is no clarity, no relief. At the end of all rationality, there is simply the need to decide and the faith to live through, to endure.
• A deep pain floods through her like forgiveness, like hard rain after a long drought. She does not know if she will be granted relief, but she experiences this moment fully, and she’s thankful.

* THE PAPER MENAGERIE
__ For Chinese New Year my friends and I made red paper dragons. I’ll never forget the sight of all those little dragons zooming across the sky overhead, holding up strings of exploding firecrackers to scare away all the bad memories of the past year.  You would have loved it.
__ Having a relative in Hong Kong meant we were spies and enemies of the people, and we had to be struggled against in every way.

* AN ADVANCED READERS’ PICTURE BOOK OF COMPARATIVE COGNITION

• It has been argued that thinking is a form of compression.
• A lit forearm, laughter, food of the gods. Thus are our memories compressed, integrated into sparkling jewels to be embedded in the limited space of our minds. A scene is turned into a mnemonic, a conversation reduced to a single phrase, a day distilled to a fleeting feeling of joy. <> 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.
• When two Esoptrons encounter each other, they may merge temporarily, a tunnel forming between their membranes. This kissing union can last hours, days, or years, as their memories are awakened and exchanged with energy contributions from both members. The pleasurable ones are selectively duplicated in a process much like protein expression—the serpentine proteins unfold and dance mesmerizingly in the electric music of coding sequences as they’re first read and then re-expressed—while the unpleasant ones are diluted by being spread among the two bodies.
• But being the mirrors for each other’s souls has a cost: by the time they part from each other, the individuals in the mating pair have become indistinguishable. Before their merger, they each yearned for the other; as they part, they part from the self. The very quality that attracted them to each other is also, inevitably, destroyed in their union.
• Then we walked together under the dark velvet dome studded with crystalline stars like the inside of a geode
• Like tides, the Tick-Tock nuclear reactions operate in pulses. Cycle after cycle, each generation discovers the world anew. The ancients leave no wisdom for the future, and the young do not look to the past. They live for one season and one season alone. <> Yet, on the surface of the planet, in those etched, fantastic rock paintings, is a palimpsest of their rise and fall, the exhalations of empires.
• And so we read this, my darling, this book she wrote for you before she left, its ornate words and elaborate illustrations telling fairy tales that will grow as you grow, an apologia, a bundle of letters home, and a map of the uncharted waters of our souls. <> There are many ways to say I love you in this cold, dark, silent universe, as many as the twinkling stars.

* THE WAVES

• The Sea Foam had been designed for a precise population mix of adults and children. Supplies, energy, and thousands of other parameters were all tied to that mix. There was some margin of safety, but the ship could not support a population composed entirely of vigorous, immortal adults at the height of their caloric needs. <> “We could either die and let our children grow,” João said, “or we could live forever and keep them always as children.”
• “Death is essential to the growth of our species.” His voice was filled with faith, and she heard in it his hope that it was enough for both of them.
  “It’s a myth that we must die to retain our humanity.” Maggie looked at her husband, her heart in pain. There was a divide between them, as inexorable as the dilation of time.
  She spoke to him now inside his head. She imagined her thoughts, now transformed into photons, pushing against his brain, trying to illuminate the gap. We stop being human at the moment we give in to death.
• The cold mathematics of the ship’s enclosed ecosystem meant that when someone chose immortality, a child would have to remain a child until someone else on the ship decided to grow old and die, opening up a new slot for an adult. <> João chose to age and die. Maggie chose to stay young. They sat together as a family, and it felt a bit like a divorce.
• The fine pins on the alien face shifted, unveiling a smile. Bobby continued to translate. We left Earth long after your departure, but we were faster and passed you in transit centuries ago.   We’ve been waiting for you.
• Then she sculpted the mound until it resembled a man: arms akimbo, legs splayed, a round head with vague indentations and protrusions for eyes, nose, mouth.
  She looked at the sculpture of João for a while, caressed it, and left it to dry in the sun.
  Looking about herself, she saw blades of grass covered with bright silicon beads and black flowers that tried to absorb every bit of sunlight. She saw silver shapes darting through the brown water and golden shadows gliding through the indigo sky. She saw great scale-covered bodies lumbering and bellowing in the distance, and close by a great geyser erupted near the river, and rainbows appeared in the warm mist.
  She was all alone. There was no one to converse with her, no one to share all this beauty.

* MONO NO AWARE
__ “Chess is a game of skirmishes,” I say. “The perspective of Go is bigger. It encompasses entire battles.”
“There are no heroes in Go,” Bobby says stubbornly.
__ The rumors turned out to be true. The shipbuilders had taken the money from the government but did not build ships that were strong enough or capable of what they promised. They kept up the charade until the very end.
__ “The fading sunlight holds infinite beauty / Though it is so close to the day’s end.”
I recited the lines to myself. Something in them moved me. I tried to put the feeling into words: “It is like a gentle kitten is licking the inside of my heart.”
__  The jagged edge of the hole flaps gently in space, propelled by solar wind and radiation pressure. While an individual photon is tiny, insignificant, without even mass, all of them together can propel a sail as big as the sky and push a thousand people along. <> The universe is wondrous.
We are defined by the places we hold in the web of others’ lives. <> I pull my gaze back from the Go board until the stones fuse into larger patterns of shifting life and pulsing breath. “Individual stones are not heroes, but all the stones together are heroic.”

* ALL THE FLAVORS
__ Then a chorus of other male voices answered, the slow, steady rhythm letting her know that it was a working men’s song, whose words and music came from the cycle of labored breath and heartbeat.
__ She was getting used to their accent, which she thought was like their music, brassy, percussive, and punctuated by a rhythm like the beating of a joyous heart.
__ I have to tell Dad about this later, she thought. He always told me that the Irish accent of his uncles and aunts reminded him of his favorite drinking songs.
__ Liu Bei, a man so full of charm that his earlobes reached his shoulders, was merely a peddler of straw shoes
It was evening again. Cao Cao called for a halt to the battle, pulling his troops back. Rivers of blood ran across the field, and hacked-off limbs and heads littered the ground like sea shells on the beach at low tide
__ “Why, Elsie,” Jack laughed uproariously. “I’ve heard of faint praise before, but I do believe this is the first time I’ve ever heard of faint damnation. The way you go on, I’d think you are a lover of the Chinese if I didn’t know better. You claim to be showing me their faults, but all you’ve said simply show that they are industrious, frugal, clever, happy with each other’s company, and willing to bear hardships.
__ Girls, fresh vegetables make your skin soft and smooth. Boys, fresh vegetables get rid of sailor’s lips!”
“How can we be less wise or less manly than a young girl, even if she was a daughter of the Martial Emperor?” said Lao Guan. “If you truly want to bring glory to your ancestors and your families, then you must first become Americans.”

* A BRIEF HISTORY OF THE TRANS-PACIFIC TUNNEL
__ The Tunnel is in principle a larger—gigantic—version of the pneumatic tubes or capsule lines familiar to all of us for delivering interoffice mail in modern buildings... Today, it is the chief means by which passengers and manufactured goods flow between Asia and America. More than 30% of global container shipping each year goes through the Tunnel.
__ Before the Western powers could decide on a plan to contain and encircle Japan’s “Peaceful Ascent,” however, the Great Depression struck. The brilliant Emperor Hirohito seized the opportunity and suggested to President Herbert Hoover his vision of the Trans-Pacific Tunnel as the solution to the worldwide economic crisis.
__ 4. The Tunnel ended up taking a lot of business away from surface shipping, and many Pacific ports went bust. The most famous example of this occurred in 1949, when Britain sold Hong Kong to Japan because it didn’t think the harbor city was all that important anymore.

* THE LITIGATION MASTER AND THE MONKEY KING
__ “Oh Great, Glorious Magistrate, you who reflect the truth like a perfect mirror, you must read the contract yourself.”
__ For more than 250 years, An Account of Ten Days at Yangzhou was suppressed in China by the Manchu emperors... It wasn’t until the decade before the Revolution of 1911 that copies of the book were brought back from Japan and republished in China. The text played a small, but important, role in the fall of the Qing and the end of Imperial rule in China.

* THE MAN WHO ENDED HISTORY: A DOCUMENTARY

• In other words, it is as though we have found a way to place a telescope as far away from the Earth, and as far back in time, as we like... But for each moment in the past, we get only one chance to look.
• Citing principles of international law, Japan argues that China does not have the right to sponsor an expedition into World War Two–era Harbin because Harbin was then under the control of Manchukuo, a puppet regime of the Japanese Empire.
• the Japanese position is akin to Germany arguing that attempts to travel to Auschwitz-Birkenau between 1939 and 1945 should be subject to its approval—but for the fact that it is the People’s Republic of China, a Western pariah, which is now making the claim. And so you see how the present and the past will strangle each other to death.
• A paulownia is a pretty, deciduous tree, and in old Japan it was the custom to plant one when a baby girl was born and make a dresser out of the wood for her trousseau when she got married.
• What I’m going to say will make everyone hate me, but many people also died during the Three Years of Natural Disasters under the Chairman and then during the Cultural Revolution. The War is sad, but it is just one sadness among many for the Chinese. The bulk of China’s sorrow lies unmourned. That Dr. Wei is a stupid troublemaker. You can’t eat, drink, or wear memories.
• He became obsessed with the activities of Unit 731. It became his waking life and his nightmare. For him, his ignorance of those horrors was simultaneously a rebuke and a call to arms. He could not let the victims’ suffering be forgotten.
• Perhaps Evan should also have waited until they developed a way to record the past without erasing it in the process. But by then it may have been too late for the families of the victims, who would benefit from those memories the most. Evan was forever struggling with the competing claims between the past and the present.
• We performed those experiments to study the effects of frostbite and extreme temperatures on the human body. They were valuable. We learned that the best way to treat frostbite is to immerse the limb in warm water, not rubbing it. It probably saved many Japanese soldiers’ lives. We also observed the effects of gangrene and disease as the frozen limbs died on the prisoners.
• Some of them would keep on screaming for a long while during the vivisection. We used gags later because the screaming interfered with discussion during the vivisections.
• Even the family members of the victims understand that there is a communitarian aspect to history. The War of Resistance Against the Japanese Invasion is the founding story of modern China, much as the Holocaust is the founding story of Israel and the Revolution and the Civil War are the founding stories of America.
• And so the People’s Republic’s approach to historical memory created a series of connected problems. First, the leniency they showed the prisoners became the ground for denialists to later question the veracity of confessions by Japanese soldiers. Second, yoking patriotism to the memory of the War invited charges that any effort to remember was politically motivated. And lastly, individual victims of the atrocities became symbols, anonymized to serve the needs of the state.
• In contrast to Germany, which could rely on Nazism—distinct from the nation itself—to absorb the blame, it was impossible to acknowledge the atrocities committed by the Japanese during the War without implicating a sense that Japan itself was under attack. <> And so, across a narrow sea, China and Japan unwittingly converged on the same set of responses to the barbarities of World War Two
• Of course, drawing attention to the importance and primacy of eyewitness accounts unleashed a new danger. With a little money and the right equipment, anyone can eliminate the Bohm-Kirino particles from a desired era, in a specified place, and so erase those events from direct experience. Unwittingly, Evan had also invented the technology to end history forever, by denying us and future generations of that emotional experience of the past that he so cherished.
• In an extraordinary time, he faced extraordinary choices, and maybe some would say this means that we cannot judge him. But how can we really judge anyone except in the most extraordinary of circumstances? It’s easy to be civilized and display a patina of orderliness in calm times,