By Ken Liu
The following is an excerpt of Ken Liu’s short science fiction story, which won the 2012 Hugo, Nebula, and World Fantasy Award for Best Short Story.
At my request, Mom also made a goat, a deer, and a water buffalo out
of wrapping paper. They would run around the living room while Laohu
chased after them, growling. When he caught them he would press down
until the air went out of them and they became just flat, folded-up pieces
of paper. I would then have to blow into them to re-inflate them so they
could run around some more.
Sometimes, the animals got into trouble. Once, the water buffalo
jumped into a dish of soy sauce on the table at dinner. (He wanted to
wallow, like a real water buffalo.) I picked him out quickly but the
capillary action had already pulled the dark liquid high up into his legs.
The sauce-softened legs would not hold him up, and he collapsed onto the
table. I dried him out in the sun, but his legs became crooked after that,
and he ran around with a limp. Mom eventually wrapped his legs in saran
wrap so that he could wallow to his heart’s content (just not in soy sauce).
Also, Laohu liked to pounce at sparrows when he and I played in the
backyard. But one time, a cornered bird struck back in desperation and
tore his ear. He whimpered and winced as I held him and Mom patched his
ear together with tape. He avoided birds after that.
And then one day, I saw a TV documentary about sharks and asked
Mom for one of my own. She made the shark, but he flapped about on the
table unhappily. I filled the sink with water, and put him in. He swam
around and around happily. However, after a while he became soggy and
translucent, and slowly sank to the bottom, the folds coming undone. I
reached in to rescue him, and all I ended up with was a wet piece of paper.
Laohu put his front paws together at the edge of the sink and rested
his head on them. Ears drooping, he made a low growl in his throat that
made me feel guilty.
Mom made a new shark for me, this time out of tinfoil. The shark
lived happily in a large goldfish bowl. Laohu and I liked to sit next to the
bowl to watch the tinfoil shark chasing the goldfish, Laohu sticking his face up against the bowl on the other side so that I saw his eyes, magnified
to the size of coffee cups, staring at me from across the bowl.
When I was ten, we moved to a new house across town. Two of the
women neighbors came by to welcome us. Dad served them drinks and
then apologized for having to run off to the utility company to straighten
out the prior owner’s bills.
“Make yourselves at home. My wife doesn’t
speak much English, so don’t think she’s being rude for not talking to
you.”
While I read in the dining room, Mom unpacked in the kitchen. The
neighbors conversed in the living room, not trying to be particularly quiet.
“He seems like a normal enough man. Why did he do that?”
“Something about the mixing never seems right. The child looks
unfinished. Slanty eyes, white face. A little monster.”
“Do you think he can speak English?”
The women hushed. After a while they came into the dining room.
“Hello there! What’s your name?”
“Jack,” I said.
“That doesn’t sound very Chinesey.”
Mom came into the dining room then. She smiled at the women. The
three of them stood in a triangle around me, smiling and nodding at each
other, with nothing to say, until Dad came back.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Ken Liu (http://kenliu.name/) is an author and translator of speculative fiction, as well as a lawyer and programmer. A winner of the Nebula, Hugo, and World Fantasy Awards, he has been published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Asimov’s, Analog, Clarkesworld, Lightspeed, and Strange Horizons, among other places. He’s also the translator for the Hugo-winning novel, The Three-Body Problem, by Liu Cixin, which is the first novel to win the award in translation.
Ken’s debut novel, The Grace of Kings, the first in a silkpunk epic fantasy series, was published by Saga Press in April 2015. Saga will also publish a collection of his short stories, The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories, in March 2016. He lives with his family near Boston, Massachusetts.
To read all of The Paper Menagerie, follow this link.
