The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories

A comforting novella about comfort food, and immigration. If you're like me, you think the history of 19th Chinese-US immigration is fascinating and full of amazing stories. If you're still like me, you've unfortunately never found the time to investigate this more than superficially. What history books to read? What novels? The big questions.

If you're still being like me, you also ADORE ALL THE CHINATOWNS OF ALL THE CITIES. Boston, Philadelphia, Washington DC, the mighty San Francisco. These are marvelous neighborhoods to get lost in and, yes, food is a major, MAJOR factor here. I can remember every meal I've had in these places, how fundamentally happy they made me: finding the hole in the wall, ordering something I did't know much about, enjoying it. What a great culinary adventure! Big shout out to Gourmet Dumpling House of Boston, where my heart (and stomach) still remain, waiting for the rest of me to return.

Anyway. Ken Liu's novella (or is it a novelette?) features many of these familiar, comforting feelings: the discovery of amazing (real?) Chinese cooking, the excitement at the new tastes, the stories and the everything. This is all told with post-Civil War Idaho City as a backdrop, mostly through the eyes of a little (white) girl, Lily, befriending one of the local Chinese miners, Logan/Lao Guan, who introduces her to glorious stories (namely about Guan Yu, the Chinese god of war) and glorious food.

The story is fairy tale-esque, in the sense that characters are pretty black-and-white, with the Evil Bigots versus the Noble/Kind Immigrants. Lily is likewise your Standard Little Girl, who mostly goes through the story wide-eyed, in a constant state of WOW.

Which is fine. The context, the textures (THE FOOD), and the threading together of ancient China with pioneer ‘murca is charming and very readable. It was published in GigaNotoSaurus, a sci-fi/fantasy mag, but the speculative elements are very, very light touch.