When the speaker, Jack, abandons his mother and his Chinese culture to assimilate to American culture, he loses both his mother and her magic, only to regain it at the end of the story.Īnother major theme in the collection is the future of technology and its potential for both good and bad. In “The Paper Menagerie,” for example, the origami animals that the speaker’s mother creates for him come to life. Magical realism appears in several of the stories as well. The first of these functions as a faux nonfiction account of alien species, and the second is a book composed by a mother astronaut who leaves her husband and daughter for a century-long journey into space. In stories like “The Bookmaking Habits of Select Species” and “An Advanced Readers’ Picture Book of Comparative Cognition,” Liu details the unique storytelling, story recording, and cognitive abilities of different alien species. In his stories, he references Chinese and Japanese games, language, folklore, and history and covers themes of memory, the implications of advanced technologies, and immigrant experiences in America. Through these narratives, which often switch back from past to present or from story to book excerpts or legends, Liu invokes several diverse worlds with many Asian protagonists.
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