“Paper Menagerie” Student Presentations

Student Presentations on “Paper Menagerie” by Ken Liu

Presentation 1: Carmina Andrade

“Paper Menagerie” is a breathtaking story, filled with heart aching moments and the exploration of a bond between a mother and son, specifically one that doesn’t belong in society. It is hard to summarize such a complex story that takes various leaps and bounds through time, but to my knowledge, this is what happened. A young boy named Jack discovers his mother has a talent for making origami come to life. At first, he is thrilled by this but later othering and frequent microaggressions because of his race cause him to want to fit in, abandoning his paper animal friends and ignoring his mother. His mother makes efforts to please him by learning English and acting more “American”, but it is in vain: they do not speak for the rest of his childhood. A few years later, his mother lays dying at the hospital and he can only think about his work life. She says he can leave but begs for him to open the box of paper origami he stuffed in the attic every year, on Qingming, a Chinese festival celebrating the dead. He leaves and she dies as he is flying over Nevada. Two years later, he suddenly remembers his mother and encounters his favorite paper animal, named Lahou, as his girlfriend Susan had put the paper animals around the apartment as decoration. Lahou unfolds himself, revealing a letter in Chinese written on his back side. Jack realizes it is Qingming and reads the letter with the help of a young woman that speaks Chinese. She writes about her difficult life and despite everything, the love she still felt for her son. At the very end, Jack writes ai, the Chinese word for love, all over the letter, and goes home, holding Lahou tenderly.

The story draws the reader in with its unwillingness to hold back on difficult topics such as race, love, and alienation. Being the daughter of two immigrants, I could really relate to this story as Jack struggles with his identity and feeling like he is less because of his Chinese heritage, going as far to shut out his mother in his quest to become truly “American”. The theme of this story… it’s quite hard to limit to just one overarching word, most of the time stories cover a variety of topics, ones on the surface and others deep below. However, I chose to focus on the idea of fitting in, which seems so important to Jack.

What makes him an outsider is introduced early on in the story, having a Chinese mother that speaks little to no English. Even on the first page, we are hinted at that Jack’s mother isn’t the ordinary “American” stereotype, with her not speaking English and doing many “odd” actions, like:

For years, Mom carefully sliced open the wrappings around Christmas gifts and saved them on top of the fridge in a thick stack.

He has many interactions as a young child plagued with racism or mere ignorance that propel him to cut ties with his mother. the first one was a microaggression done by his neighbors. The next harmful interaction mentioned is with a boy his age, who destroys his origami, as well as his love for his mother. The boy makes him feel ashamed of his heritage, calling the stunning origami “stupid cheap Chinese garbage.” After this incident and the racist bullying that follows, the boy withdrawals from his mother. He demands that she speak English and that they not eat Chinese food, abandoning his Chinese roots, never again playing with the origami.

After the incident, the mother tries to appease her son, though it is clear she does not want to let go of the one thing that connects her back to her homeland:

If Mom spoke to me in Chinese, I refused to answer her. After a while, she tried to use more English. But her accent and broken sentences embarrassed me. I tried to correct her. Eventually, she stopped speaking altogether if I were around.

Later on, we find out about her tragic life: how she was orphaned at 10, basically kidnapped into enslavement until she was 16, and married a stranger at a very young age. It makes sense that she, living in a foreign place feeling like she doesn’t belong, wants to hold on to a fragment of simpler times:

“If I say ‘love,’ I feel here.” She pointed to her lips. ‘If I say ‘ai,‘ I feel here.’ She put her hand over her heart.

When his mother lays dying, it is clear Jack still feels little for her. He blames her for feeling left out of a racist society, for feeling like his mother’s birthplace has anything to do with his self- worth, when in reality diversity is what makes our country beautiful. This is not mentioned in the work but is clear to me, especially since it is something that happens quite often in immigrant families. Her mother shows her love for him in her last words, stating he can go back to work and for him to not worry about her, expressing one last wish that Jack doesn’t seem too intent on fulfilling. He leaves and boards a plane, the future more important to him than the present, the American Dream perhaps still looming over him after all this time, and his mother dies as he flies over Nevada.

After her death, everything kind of falls apart. She seemed to be what held the family together, despite her not belonging. It was almost as if the only bond Jack and his dad had was that they shared a family member in common. And after Jack’s mother’s passing, he helps move his dad into a smaller place, symbolizing that he has lost the last tie connecting him back to his childhood. Jack is a different person entirely as an adult, compared to his child self, maybe hardened by the world that refused to accept him, and he appears to go through the motions of life without really enjoying it.

(I wanted to further explore the idea of the paper origami; it is as if they represent he and his mother’s relationship. They were created by her to show her love for him and forgotten when their bond deteriorated, or rather when Jack began to feel different and like he didn’t belong, so he took it out on his mother. It is only when Jack reads his mother’s letter and finally understands that he clings tight to the paper animals. They are an extension of her, best evidenced by the line

She breathed into them so that they shared her breath, and thus moved with her life. This was her magic.

Jack holds on to whatever is left of his mother, her love left behind in the folds of the origami. This isn’t really related to the theme though.)

I’m not sure what exactly propels Jack to change his mindset, his opinion about his mother. Rereading the page when Jack encounters Lahou, it is filled with a kind of nostalgia, a throbbing yearning for something he’ll never get back. Perhaps time does heal, or rather change our way of thinking. Either way, he connects with the paper animals in a way he hadn’t in years. I wonder if the fact that it was Qingming had anything to do with it. Perhaps he was fulfilling his mother’s dying wish subconsciously. And, he is an adult now, with a vastly different perspective on life than his child and teenage self, and it may cause him to reconsider things. Anyways, he reads the letter that his mother has sent him, and he truly has an epiphany. Jack was never able to step into his mother’s shoes, which is something that many people struggle with. Sometimes the feeling of otherness is just too much to handle, that people turn a blind eye to anyone else’s plights and struggles, assuming they will never be as difficult as theirs’. This is exactly what happened to Jack. After reading the letter, perhaps words will never be enough to describe how he feels… But in the end, he did what he never could, show his love for his mother. He walks home, Lahou at his side. Perhaps his mother isn’t dead yet, or maybe his love, unspoken but still alive, for her is what keeps the paper menagerie alive.

And I ponder, is it enough that Jack has finally understood, despite his mother being dead and it being too late? I wonder if the sorrow and regret will consume him. I think that even if it’s too late, we should always try to fix our mistakes, at least for us.

In conclusion, what made the story so compelling to read is how accurate and painfully true it was to the human experience, being part of a marginalized group in the United States. A lot of the time fiction is written, worlds are created that are so vastly different from ours, but at the end we can’t escape some things. The magical realism that was blended in throughout the work heightened the struggles of Jack and his mother, and overall, the theme made the story one of the most thought- provoking stories I have ever read.

I think some techniques I can use or imitate in my own writing is trying to make the characters human and beautifully flawed as much as possible. I can work on doing that, but I also think being able to characterize your characters well also comes with life experience. Still, I will try to adopt Liu’s technique of exploring the human self with equal parts melancholy and hopefulness, and above all truth. In my opinion, writers have the obligation to be true to themselves and other people in general, no matter the genre they are writing. To be human is to feel, as cliché as that may sound, and Liu did a great job with that. I am also really impressed by how quickly he is able to show us glimpses into the other character’s “souls”, even using a first- person point of view. He was excellent at portraying human relationships.

Another technique I can use from Liu’s writing is along the same lines, world- building. He did such a phenomenal job of creating a realistic world, while also acknowledging that same aspects of the world were different than ours. In just a few short paragraphs, he established a complex family, and narrated in a realistic way, changing his style as the character grew up. His pages are full of vivid emotions too, ranging from childhood wonder to heart wrenching regret. As I’ve talked about earlier, he doesn’t shy away from difficult topics and approaches the human experience in a truthful and honest way, as difficult as the truth may be. He doesn’t water down anything, but also doesn’t overdramatize. Liu understands the pain of being human and does justice exploring it.

Discussion questions:

1. How did the paper menagerie add to the theme or the plot of the story? Did it contribute or was it more for show?
2. How does Liu make the reader feel involved in the relationships of the characters?

Presentation 2: Hazel Britton-Dansby

What “happened” in this story? What are the major events that make up the plot line?

This short story is about the life of a young boy. We get to see him grow up for a young child to his early adulthood. His mother is Chinese and his father is American. His father met his mother through a catalog, where she was sold from Hong Kong when she was a teenager. They soon got married and had Jack. When he was little he loved his home and his mother. Jack’s mother would make him small origami animals that she would breathe life into, and they became real. They would move all around the house and play with Kan. He soon started school, and everybody treated him differently. Because he had certain features that were Chinese, the other children at school began to cast him out. After a while he wanted to be like everybody else. He wanted to eat American food, so his mom learned to cook like he wanted. He wanted Star Wars action figures like other boys had, instead of his mother’s origami animals. And he refused to respond to his mother unless she spoke to him in English, but she knew very little English. Jack’s mother’s English greatly improved, but her heavy accent was still too embarrassing to him, so he didn’t speak to her at all. Years later we learn that his mother is dying of cancer. He stays with her for a short period of time, but then flies back to school. She dies on his trip back. Years later he found one of the origami animals she made him, his favorite which was a little tiger. The tiger jumps into his lap and then unfolds into its original form of a piece of wrapping paper. On the blank side Jack sees his mother’s writing, but it is in Chinese so he can’t read it. He takes it to someone who can translate it for him and it’s the story of his mother and how she grew up. She explains her childhood, how her parents were gone, how she was sold to his father, and why it hurt so much when he was ashamed of her. He realized how much pain he had put his mother through. He refolded the paper that was once his best friend, and they walked home together. 

What makes the story compelling or interesting to read? What did we feel? Why did we feel it?

Point of view

What makes the story so interesting to read is the thoughts and feelings we see/hear from the protagonist. The entire story is told from their point of view, and he gets to fully understand their thoughts. I get to understand the struggles of them not fitting in because they’re different, and them being ashamed of their own mother. It makes it incredibly interesting to read because I have never felt like they did, but they did such a good job describing it I could feel it. It made me feel sad, because they no longer appreciated their own mother. But I didn’t just feel bad for the mm, I felt bad for Jack. He wasn’t being accepted by his peers because he was different, which is really hard. But what drew me into the story the most was the end. Throughout the story we had only been getting the thoughts and opinions of Jack, but in the letter that his mother left him, I finally got to understand what she was feeling. And it almost made me cry, she was going through so much pain from being rejected by her son. And the writer choosing to not let us feel that pain until the end, made it so much more powerful for me to read.

 Son, I know that you do not like your Chinese eyes, which are my eyes. I know that you do not like your Chinese hair, which is my hair. But can you understand how much joy your very existence brought to me?

These sentences were also incredibly powerful because Jack had brought up how he looked nothing like his mother. How they had nothing in common and were nothing alike.

it was hard for me to believe that she gave birth to me. We had nothing in common

And I think when he read that, it was the first time that he realized they were a lot more alike than he thought. His point of view changed completely. 

Here are the parts of the story that most affected me and that I thought showed the story and the characters point of view/ change in point of view best:

I didn’t know this at the time, but Mom’s kind was special. She breathed into them so that they shared her breath, and thus moved with her life. This was her magic.

When I first read the first page I thought it was very sweet. But those moments were so much more powerful by the end. In the beginning of the story he praised his mother, she meant so much to him. She is the one that cheered him up when he was upset. But nearing the end, he wanted nothing to do with her. He wanted her to change so that he could fit it. He lost his respect and love for his mother. 

“That doesn’t sound very Chinesey.”

I think when the woman said that to Jack, the idea of him not fitting in started to make its way into his head. 

If Mom spoke to me in Chinese, I refused to answer her. After a while, she tried to use more English. But her accent and broken sentences embarrassed me.

He was embarrassed of her for something she couldn’t change, it represented her background and childhood, but it was so much of an embarrassment he wouldn’t talk to her. 

Now I had someone to talk to. I would teach you my language, and we could together remake a small piece of everything that I loved and lost.

We only get to hear the thoughts and feelings of the mom through the letter she wrote to Jack, which is not a lot but the writer managed to express so much emotion through so little writing. And this sentence. It shows that even though the mother wasn’t necessarily proud of her background, she wanted to be able to connect with someone. And when she had Jack, she thought she would finally get someone who she could share that part of her with. Which is why it hurt her so much when he shut that part of her and himself out. 

Following the creases, I refolded the paper back into Laohu. I cradled him in the crook of my arm, and as he purred, we began the walk home.

The last line of the story represents how much Jack changed just from hearing his mother’s point of view. He took back the origami animal that he had cast aside because he wanted toys that made him fit in. But he recreated what his mother made for him, and they walked home together. I think that Laohu is almost like a piece of his mother. And by him refolding him, and restoring his life, it’s him once again accepting his mother back into his life, even though she is gone. 

What can you find to imitate or use in your own writing?

The point of view of this story is 1st person. I write similarly in my short stories where it is mostly the protagonist’s thoughts, which is why I think I was so drawn to that aspect of the story. But like I mentioned in my previous paragraph, my favorite part is when we got to hear the thoughts of the mother through her letter. And when I write my short stories I always only incorporate the main character’s point of view, and nobody else. And I think I could really grow in my writing by showing more than just one person’s thoughts and feelings, because I feel that readers can understand the story better when it is not all one character’s thoughts. Especially in my most recent short story that I wrote for the class, it would have been interesting for me to add the father of my main character thoughts. And in “Paper Menagerie” the ending made me feel so much more than if I had never gotten to hear what the mother was feeling. So I believe that incorporating more than one character’s point of view, my writing could greatly improve. There was not a lot of description or detail in the story, but I could very easily imagine all the little paper animals. And I think having such a small little object like origami animals, that a reader can so vividly imagine with so few words is very impressive. It may be because the story was so focused around such a specific object, that it helped the reader imagine. So I could also learn how to make my stories come to life by using such specific imagery. 

Discussion Questions

My biggest question is probably did Jack start making friends after he tried to fit in more and changed everything about himself?

Did Jack’s way of living change more after the letter to his mother? Did he start celebrating where his mother came from? 

If so what did Jack start doing differently? 

Also at the end the tiger came back to life, so is Jack capable of the magic too? Or was that just the last bit of his mother’s magic? 

Why was the dads point of view barely included?

Presentation 3: Natalia Alarcon-Castro

In the story, a boy learns about his mom being sold to his father, it seems at first very casual and to him, it’s strange but doesn’t think often about it in a way most people would. He forms a bond with his mother through origami that can speak, but he meets a boy who shows off toys and tells him his toys are made of trash. He becomes ashamed of his Chinese heritage and of his mother. He begins to forbid her to speak Chinese, and then to speak altogether. As he grows, his mother falls ill and then tragically dies of cancer. He begins to reminisce and goes back home. He opens his favorite origami toy, and his mother has written him a note. It is about her sad life and how his father buys her, and how his birth brought her so much joy and meaning. However, her note morphs into pain as she describes her perspective of the period where the narrator doesn’t talk to her anymore. It is painful for both the narrator and the reader. The narrator goes to fulfil his mother’s last wish at the Chinese tradition of the dead at the end of the story.

This story was enjoyable to read because it had so much emotion and you could understand the mother while reading the story. Anyone could feel the emotion excluding from the words on the pages. The writer makes his story so that you can imagine what the mother went through, and the way events are presented make it very emotional overall. Certain events are relatable in such an extraordinary way from the mundane moments like crying and having a parent console you, to the painful ones of being bullied at school and wanting to change yourself because of this. The way the author took a simple event that happens to almost everyone to a whole new level is so interesting and definitely adds many layers of emotion and depth to the story. There were so many twists and turns in the story that would seem abrupt in the summary but don’t in the story itself. The story really makes you think about how good one’s life is, it causes you to think more about others and what they go through. The story really causes one to be moved and personally, it made me cry. When an author gets to the point where they write a story and it makes you cry, it really says a lot about the level of writing they’ve reached. It is absolutely critical to address the fact that the sensory details in the story added so much more to the story. You could imagine sitting in the kitchen while watching a young boy wail inconsolably. “One of my earliest memories starts with me sobbing.” You could see the paper being folded. “She set the paper down, plain side facing up, and began to fold it. I stopped crying and watched her, curious.” Another thing that I really liked about the story was that you got to see more than one character’s point of view, and if you couldn’t see some characters points of view directly, you could read their feelings through their actions. Going off of this, I really liked how you could see the mother’s point of view and her story, and though the story was very tragic and sad, it taught a very good lesson that many people could learn from.

When I write a story, I have learned that I often don’t include many points of view, I generally focus more on the narrator and make the story primarily about them. The writer created the story in such a way that you could see two points of view and how those affected each other. I think that is something I could take and incorporate into my own writing. It’s a very interesting concept of how you make one character’s decisions and actions ultimately affect the other characters, especially in such a big way that it did in this story. For example, in this story the boy is very careless about his mother’s emotions and focuses on how he must change her for his own benefit.

Mom reached out to touch my forehead, feeling for my temperature. “Fashao la?”

I brushed her hand away. “I’m fine. Speak English!” I was shouting.

“Speak English to him,” Dad said to Mom. “You knew this was going to happen someday. What did you expect?”

He doesn’t realize how this affects her emotionally and how it eventually kills her. I think that the writer really relies on the notion of balance and how one thing affects the other. The writer really does a good job of also showing how smaller things also affect things in the long run. For example, the father doesn’t do much when the boy is crying. “Dad gave up and left the bedroom, but Mom took me into the kitchen and sat me down at the breakfast table.” If the father had taken responsibility for the child, maybe the origami would have never been introduced to him. This could have been a very good thing or a very bad thing in the story. Another seemingly small thing in the story that turned out to be big, was the other boy bullying the main character. His actions and words caused many changes in the boy’s life. To summarize, I think that I should include more points of views in my story and go more into depth in every decision the character makes to pull together my stories more effectively.

Presentation 4: Ash Anderson

1. Summary 

Paper Menagerie is the story of the relationship between a boy named Jack and his mother. The story opens with one of Jack’s earliest memories; sobbing. When he refuses to be consoled and his father has given up, her mother folds him an origami tiger out of wrapping paper named Laohu. She breathes life into the tiger and it starts playing with Jack. After this, Jack requests more and more paper animals, and they become his favorite toy. A couple of years later, the family moves and Jack meets another boy in the neighborhood named Mark who shows Jack a Star Wars action figure. When asked to see his toys, Jack shows Mark Laohu. Mark ridicules Laohu and Laohu breaks the action figure. This is a turning point in the story. After this, Jack decides he wants to be more American and lose touch with Chinese culture. He never speaks Chinese again, hides his paper menagerie, and loses complete touch with his mother until the day of her death. On her deathbed, Jack is implored by his mother to think of her on Qingming. Later in the story, we learn that Jack’s father had bought his mother from China, and later on, we learn she grew up in a village, but was forced to move to Hong Kong and then sold. This is told to him in a letter which Jack finds on Laohu, who his mother repaired, after her death on Qingming.  

• What Makes the Story Compelling 

One aspect I really enjoyed about the story is how Laohu symbolized Jack’s relationship with his mother. At the beginning of the story, Jack and his mother have a good relationship, and Lauhu is new and strong and playful. Then, later in the story, Laohu gets destroyed. Jack tries to fit Laohu back together and gives up. That’s also when he gives up on his mother and stops wanting to have a relationship with her. The one quote that really stuck out to me to show this is,

I had never thought of Laohu as trash. But looking at him now, he was really just a piece of wrapping paper.

Years later, after the mother has already died, Jack finds Laohu and he realizes that his mom had put Laohu back together after he had long since given up. Laohu unfolds and it is a letter from his mother. I think this is trying to show that his mother was always trying to rebuild the relationship between them even after everything Jack had done. Afterward, Laohu stays with him and he gains perspective and respect from his mother again. 

• Writing Imitation 

 I like the idea of having an underlying metaphor threaded through a story. Having an object or a person symbolizes another aspect of the story to me seems really interesting.  

I also liked the way the author included magic. It’s so subtle that it could almost be a metaphor, and I want to try doing something similar to that. 

Also, the way the author portrayed a relationship between two people who spoke different languages was really interesting. I’d like to tie in more than one language into a story sometime in the future, and this story would be a great reference point for that. 

• Discussion Questions: 
• What are your thoughts on the father figure of the story? Was he a good person? Was he kind or selfish? 
• Did Jack become a better person at the end of the story, or was he still selfish and rude? 

“The Era” Student Presentations

Student Presentations on “The Era” by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah

Presentation 1: Katie Engle

Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah’s “The Era” provides us with a unique take on what one might predict the future holds. This story kicks off with a boy named Ben sitting in his classroom, listening to his teacher insult all of his students. Of course, in this futuristic world it is an admired and sought-after trait. Ben is not the most admired kid in school and though he doesn’t believe so, the utter honesty going around is completely destroying his self-esteem and he has become reliant on Good to keep him happy and content. His parents find out about the extra Good he has been taking, and restrict him from having it, for they have realized how much he has become addicted to it. Ben met a kid named Leslie a while back and she invited him to come to a birthday party that her family had thrown him. He does not plan to go, for he is under the impression that he is better than her, but ends up going anyway, with the false hope that her family might have some extra Good they would give him. He has a good time with them until he realizes what a lack of Good they have, and leaves. At school, his former friends discover his rendezvous with Leslie and proceed to punch him in the eye. In the nurse’s office he was given the option of taking Good, but with the support of Leslie by his side, he manages to refuse.

This story was not just about the futuristic world we might one day live in, it had much symbolism on the subject of depression nowadays as well. To Ben, Good is simply and escape from the tragedies and sadness’s of his life, just as we find little ways to distract ourselves from our problems and darkness’s. in the line

 I can feel the no-Good pressing on me. Pulling me down.

Despite the many grammar issues in this era, you can almost feel the pull of the sadness dragging him under. It represents, I believe, the weight of the realization that you can no longer hide from the sadness inside of you. He captured the heaviness of a sad heart and included particular details and actions such as the phrase

I focus on the ground because it doesn’t make me want to disappear as much.

The simple yet powerful way he wrote this made me step into ben’s shoes and feel what he was feeling. It made me experience the loneliness and brokenness that hung ben’s head. And I could honestly relate to this phrase because more times than one I have been told to stop looking at the ground simply because there was nothing worth looking at down there. And I often felt that looking at the ground became sort of a safe place for me, as I think it did for Ben in this moment.                                                          

I also feel like there was a hope in this story as well. Eventually, Ben finds a friend in Leslie, though I doubt he expected to, and I believe that this represented the light at the end of the tunnel. Or the calm at the end of the storm.

I can honestly say that I have learned a lot from this poem in the sense of writing techniques and using them in my own pieces. I loved the way he used a realistic situation to symbolize another realistic situation. That probably doesn’t make sense, but I realize now, that the cleverest ways to use symbolism in your poem is to use a very realistic situation and disguise your message or whatnot behind the words of your original story.

Discussion Questions:

-How do you think Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah manipulates the story to fit our stereotypical beliefs of bullies seeing the error of their ways and fulfill our thirst for it?

-Why do you think Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah included the punch that Ben received at the end and why do you think he justified it the way he did?

Presentation 2: Sofia Fontenot

Presentation: Use of Dialect in “The Era”

Techniques tracked:

– Yellow to represent how dialect is affected by the alternate setting

– Turquoise to represent how dialect doesn’t change among the Anti

The Era begins with a young boy at school lamenting the fact that he is not ‘optimized,’ like some other students, meaning they had their genes perfected at birth, and wishing for Good, an anti-depressant-like drug. At lunch, the boy witnesses a girl named Leslie get hit with a juice box from one of his classmates and offers to buy her lunch to play along with a joke with his classmates. She invites him to her house for his generosity and he is conflicted because her family is one that does not agree with the culture of optimization and Good. At home his family is upset by how much Good he takes and bans him from it, leading him to accept Leslie’s offer because she is the only one who will talk to him in his Good-free, depressed state. The boy goes to Leslie’s house, where they celebrate his birthday, but he grows angry and leaves because they have no Good. At school, the boy’s classmates refuse to talk to him because of his lethargy and the nurse takes pity on him and offers him some Good, but he refuses it despite wanting it because Leslie convinces him not to.

The Era does not take place in a time period or universe like ours; based on the description of the narrator’s history class, it takes place sometime in the far future. We are provided with exposition that explains what exactly happened to transform our world into theirs, but much more telling is the way Adjei-Brenyah uses the dialect, found in the narrator’s thoughts and the speech of those around him, to express the societal differences between our two universes.

We’re in HowItWas class.

Just with this second paragraph, we are introduced to the literal way many terms and labels are described because of their society’s affinity for the truth, like that ‘HowItWas’ is most likely the name they use for social studies.

The nurse, Ms. Higgins, is shaped like an old pear. Her body type is not attractive. She isn’t in a union and doesn’t have any kids because she’s ugly and works as a school nurse. Today her face looks tired plus more tired.

The dialect is embedded more subtly into the text as well- the narrator does not use a different vocabulary from ours, but the tone of his thoughts shows how his thinking is influenced by his surroundings: he views his world as a list of facts and does not understand the concept of having shame for unsavory opinions, because that would be considered ‘clouding the truth.’

“Come in,” Mother McStowe says, even though I’m already inside. She is a thin woman with a short haircut. There are folds of loose skin under her neck. I come in further. Everyone is looking at me.

“How was your walk over?” Leslie says. Her face is smiling.

“Bad,” I say. “This part of the section is worse than where my unit lives.”

“Well, I’m sorry to hear that,” Father McStowe says. “Let’s have some cake now that the man of the hour is here in one piece!”

The contrast between dialects is even more striking when the narrator is with the McStowes- part of the Anti and the closest to what we would consider to be ‘normal.’ The narrator notes Mother McStowe’s unnecessary welcome because he doesn’t understand the niceties used to soften an interaction- his society values pure candor over hurt feelings. He responds to Leslie’s greeting bluntly and impolitely, when we would consider such a question to be almost rhetorical.

She wants to smile, but she can’t, so with my head down, one hand warm, one hand cold, one eye bruising and the other looking at her I say, “Have you heard the one about the deaf man?”

At the end, the narrator has changed. The concept of making jokes is foreign to him because they are both an exaggeration of the truth and intended to invoke emotions, two things his society looks down upon. He attempts one anyway because Leslie and her family have struck something in him, and he cares for Leslie in a way he never has before that makes him want to do anything to help her feel better.

The tone and language of the characters gives the reader a sense of the attitudes and beliefs that their society influences them to have and provides implicit context without just using exposition. Adjei-Brenyah is also able to create a tension between the characters who are part of the Anti and don’t follow the normal dialect and the narrator by their interactions betraying their morals. Manipulating the thoughts and speech of characters to fit their environment is an incredibly effective technique that allows the reader to make their own implications about the fictional universe and doesn’t weigh them down with exposition-heavy descriptions.

Discussion questions:

1. What do you think was the author’s purpose for including the scenes with the narrator’s family and home life?
2. How does the narrator’s clipped and factual way of thinking contribute to the overall tone of the story?

Presentation 3: Tobi Carr

Techniques Tracked:

-looking at looking/sight

-complexity

The Era: A Story with A Million Different Meanings

Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah’s The Era depicts a world where most things are allowed to be said if they’re considered truthful, even if they’re considered rude by our current societal norms; where happiness is primarily given through an injection of ‘Good’; where people are judged based on their ‘optimization’, a trait that their parents pick out at birth that acts as a sort of perfection. Our protagonist, Ben, wasn’t optimized at all, and thus, carries about a feeling of inadequacy throughout the story. Ben is seen to be codependent on ‘Good’; it gets so bad his parents end up restricting from getting any injections other than his regular morning one. After that, he is invited to his own birthday party by Leslie McStowe, the daughter of a family who doesn’t believe in their society’s optimization system. Her brother is a ‘shoelooker’ (someone who was un-optimized and looked down at their shoes in shame), and she commonly associates herself with shoelookers. (Ben and Leslie had ‘scanned high for compatibility’ on their ‘genetic compatibility tests’.) Ben decides to attend, and is shocked by everything he witnesses and is told by the McStowes; comedians, cake (which his mother says ‘makes people fat’), and the fact that their household lacks ‘Good’. It frustrates Ben so immensely he ends up leaving. The next day, he has grown more weary by the lack of ‘Good’, and the table he sits at with his friends demeans him and pushes him away for being associated with ‘shoelookers’. One of his friends, John, punches him to say he is ‘officially not welcome’ and he is dragged to the nurse’s office by Leslie. The nurse loads some ‘Good’ into the injector, and just as Ben is ready to receive it, Marlene comes and threatens to report the nurse for giving him any. She nearly does so anyway, but Ben rejects it, and the last line of the story is Ben repeating a joke he didn’t understand that the McStowes had told him during his birthday party.

I’ll admit – It took a few reads for this story to make sense to me. However, once you start making sense of it, it is almost impossible to look away from. Almost everything about the culture of the society this story features can be interpreted as a mockery of so many different generations. There’s the ‘honesty’ culture, for one, which can be examined as either a take on the recent emergence of ‘cancel culture’ or the Boomer mentality of ‘facts over feelings’. The injection of ‘Good’, can either be based on how Gen Z/Millenials don’t ‘pick themselves up by their bootstraps’ anymore and are ‘getting free handouts’ or how some Boomers believe all it will take for, say, the economy to be better is an injection of ‘Good’. The ‘optimization’ factor, in my opinion, is this story’s version of white supremacy and the ‘rightness’ of Aryan genes, and how certain ideals will weave themselves through generations. (Given that the past era and its problems is one of the only things, according to Ben, discussed in ‘HowItWas’, or history class, I believe the optimization to have not occurred recently in their society.)

Samantha is “unoptimal.” That’s the official name for people like her, whose optimization screwed up and made their bodies horrible. I don’t have any gene corrections. I wasn’t optimized at all. I am not optimal or ideal. But I’m also not unoptimal, so I wasn’t going to look like Samantha, which is good. It’s not all good though, since no opti-select means no chance of being perfect either. I don’t care. I’m true. I’m proud, still. Looking over, being nosy ’cause sometimes I do that, I see Samantha log into her class pad: I would have been pretty/beautiful.

This, to me, relates to a familiar WOC experience of wishing to fit in the beauty standards imposed on you; an experience that must be even harder to go through, given how many optimized people exist in Samantha’s reality. However, this section, and this entire story, can be interpreted a million different ways; perhaps, instead of the white supremacy allegory I believe it to be, it is a dissection of women’s roles in society. There are only six ‘named’ (I am using that term flexibly) female characters in this entire story; Miss Higgins, Samantha, Leslie and Linda McStowe, Marlene, and Ben’s mom. Each of them are caregivers in their own way –Ben’s mom and Linda McStowe mothers, obviously, Miss Higgins a nurse, Marlene a teacher, Leslie caring for Ben and ‘lying’ to him, telling him It’s okay after he is punched by his ‘friends’ – save for Samantha. She is the most explicitly made fun of in the entire story. (While Leslie ends up being hit by a stray drink box, Samantha is made fun of twice in the story, even by Mr. Harper, their ‘HowItWas’ teacher.) To be a woman and not be conventionally attractive nor a caregiver would make you ‘open for ridicule’ in our current society, not to mention in a society of perfection.

How many different ways this story can be interpreted is what makes it so compelling. There are a million different layers, each of them just as complex as the last if you were to peel one off.

The theme of sight throughout the story is also something that stuck with me. ‘Shoelookers’, for example, named as such for how they look at their shoes in shame because of their ‘un-optimization.’ Marlene chastises Ben for the way he acts, because he is a ‘periphery reflection of [her] person’. So many of the conflicts in this story are rooted in sight; or rather, perception. Optimization, the most obvious; this society depends on their ability to judge and perceive what they believe to be ‘perfect’ to continue their optimization practices.

Every theme in this story is so distinct from the other, and yet they lend to each other so perfectly. For example, my point about women’s roles in society lends to the perhaps Aryan perfection this society is striving for; Ben even addresses his family as a ‘unit’ in one line. Ben only perceives those things I’ve mentioned as perfect because that is the agenda that’s been pushed to him, probably since before he was born.  This story, despite using simple word choice, manages to get so many points across. It is an amazing model for every short story – every sentence is necessary; there are about a million different meanings of the same sentence without it feeling confusing. Everytime I re-read this story, I rediscover something I hadn’t before, and I can only hope someone can feel that way reading my work.

Discussion Questions:

1. Are there any parallels you spot between Ben’s world and our current one?
2. Why do you think the writer chose to use a simplistic style rather than describing the world we’ve been thrust in?

Presentation 4: Gnat Butler

Summary:

Ben, a school boy, lives in a future society where honesty is valued above all else. Every morning, he and his classmates are given an injection of Good, a drug that makes them happy and calm. Unlike his other classmates, some of whom are genetically modified before birth to be smarter, more beautiful, and stronger, he is ordinary.

His sister is one of these modified people; she is older than him and wildly ambitious. She treats him cruelly, and the completely honest nature of their society means that Ben hears comments from his family often about how he was a mistake and not meant to be born.

These cruel words wear Ben down over time, and he experiences violent thoughts. Thoughts of wanting his sister to drown, of wanting to kill his teacher. His solution is to go to the nurse and take more Good. For a while, it works. He feels calm and good. Then, he gets riled up again. He takes more Good. Over time, he consumes much more Good than he’s supposed to, and he builds such a tolerance for it it barely effects him.

His parents realize the severity of the situation eventually and restrict his Good injections to only once a day. This makes him moody and angry, both things reviled in his society. He talks to a girl in his class named Leslie after an encounter in their school lunch room, and she invited him to her house for a celebration of his birthday.

Ben shows up at her house, in a bad mood from Good withdrawls. They celebrate his birthday with cake, something he’s never had before. He talks to Leslie’s family and discovers they’re a group of traditionalists; people who live life in a way that is reminiscent of the times before Good and the wars. They offer for him to come back, and experience life without Good with them for a few days a week. He is intrested upon seeing this different way of life, but leaves the house angrily because they can’t offer him any Good.

In the end scene of the book, he get’s into a fight with one of his old friends. His old friends don’t like anymore because he’s moody and emotional. He goes to the infirmary after being injured, where he sees Leslie again. He makes a joke when he talks to her, a call back to when he was at her family’s house. It’s both a way of apologizing for being so rude to her the night before, but also a way of reaching out and giving her the opportunity to become his friend.

Presentation:

One element of the story that specifically stood out to me was the writing style. Throughout the story, very simple words are used. It was jarring at first, as the tone felt very different than what I usually read.

The story appears to take place in a futuristic setting, where “Being emotional isn’t prideful, and being truthful, prideful, and intelligent are the best things.” THe characters, even the teachers in the story, are blunt and honest. They say things like “Samantha is ugly”, and everyone agrees. Their society is simple; grains and meat taste like grains and meat, an ugly person is ugly, a smart person in smart. They don’t lie and because of that have no need for elaborate word play when speaking.

This use of simple language also helps the reader understand the various elements of the story. The chemical known to us only as Good makes people feel good. The Big Quick War was a war that had large effects and was over quickly. New concepts are introduced in simple terms, just like familiar concepts are, making the story’s explanations feel smoother and more natural.

The main character of the story, Ben, is also the narrator. He’s described as unintelligent—stupid, even—and he is. The simple writing style helps the reader picture his character more clearly; he doesn’t use big words when he talks or when he thinks. Had the author been more eloquent in his descriptions, it would’ve been more difficult to picture Ben actually being the one narrating.

I rarely change my style when writing, but I believe that this technique of using simple language could really help bring some of my story ideas to life. It helps capture the atmosphere of the story, and the difference in style helps the reader to establish that it takes place in a completely different setting than the modern day.

Discussion questions:

How did the Good drug effect Ben while he was still taking it versus when he went off of it?

Do you think that the McStowe families motives in inviting Ben to their home were genuine?

Do you think that honesty is the most valuable of virtues? Why or why not?

“The Bats” Student Presentations

Student presentations on “The Bats” by Chitra Divakaruni:

Presentation 1: Nadia Gonzales

In “The Bats,” the story opens with a little girl sleeping next to her crying mother. It turns out that the little girl’s father was abusive toward her mother which would explain why her mother would have bruises. After a while, her mother decides it’s time that they go stay with family elsewhere. The little girl and her mother sneak out while the the father is asleep and take a bus to the countryside (where the mother grew up). There, they stay for long time and the little girl has the time of her life with her Grandpa-Uncle (the mother’s uncle). The little girl went fishing with Grandpa-Uncle once and they caught a fish that had a ring inside of its stomach. Grandpa-Uncle told the little girl to keep the ring safe because it had to with folktale, and she did. She took care of it as best as she could and kept it in hidden spots in her room. She wished with it and hoped with it. One day, the mother gets a letter from the father asking for them to come back home and promising that he’ll never hurt them again. No matter how much the little girl doesn’t want to leave this paradise behind, they go back to the father, Grandpa-Uncle and fishing and all things great are now gone. Over time, they end up always running away and coming back to the father. On one particular occasion, the little girl and her mother return home but the ring is nowhere to be found.

The story was interesting because of the main character’s point of view and her naivety. The way her character is written is very well developed. This story is told from the little girl’s perspective and how she sees things, what she thinks and doesn’t think. I feel sorry for the little girl, I feel like I wanted to step in and give her and her mother the life that they deserve. The mother’s crying and the little girl’s pain when leaving a place that made her feel such joy stung me in my heart. If my mother were to cry like the little girl’s mother, I’d begin crying too (at least now at 15 years old). Something about seeing a mother in pain is just unbearable to me. Mothers are strong for us, they fight for us. But they’re human too. The humanity of the story really gets me going. How real it is and how easily I step into the little girl’s world based on her character traits and her perspective is amazing. One of the saddest points is that the little girl didn’t quite understand the pain her mother was bearing because of how young she is. 

“‘Grandpa!’ I knew about grandpas. Most of my friends in the third grade had them. They gave them presents on birthdays and took them to the big zoo in Alipore during vacations. ‘I didn’t know I had a grandpa!’

I was so excited I forgot to keep my voice down and Mother quickly put a hand over my mouth.

‘Shhh. It’s a secret, just for you and me. Why don’t we pack quickly, and I’ll tell you more about him once we’re on the train.’

‘A train!’ This was surely a magic day, I thought, as I tried to picture what traveling on a train would be like.”

In these lines, we see that the little girl is unaware of the things she’s going through by how she reacts to things. She doesn’t understand why they’re leaving or where they’re going. She just knows that they’ll be staying with a Grandpa she never knew she had, which is exciting to her. She just knows that it’ll be different, that it sounds fun. That’s a whole new level of pain right there. No child should ever have to learn to face such things that she does. The fact that she’s that young to be excited about these things and she doesn’t understand the reasons why they’re happening… that hurts. Her point of view allows us to see her character. 

From this next quote, we know that she’s kind of too young to understand what’s really going on.

“We tiptoed around and spoke in whispers. It was so exciting that I didn’t mind not having breakfast, or even having to leave all my toys behind.”

Point of view and character really go hand in hand for the main point that I’m trying to make here. I’m focusing on the things that her perspective allows us to see. The way she sees things makes her who she is in the story and also makes the story, you know? Though she’s unaware of what’s happening to her mother in the beginning or why they ran away, we knew. There’s a perfect balance, really.

The detail into the little girl’s perspective (for the overall plot of the story) is for sure something that I could use in my writing. The author added enough details to the story from the little girl’s naive perspective, so we knew what was really going on even though the little girl didn’t. The author told us the story from a perspective that didn’t know the story. The author told us things about the main character (like character traits) without being blunt about it. That’s something that I’ll have to explore and get better at on my own but it’s definitely something that I could try to imitate in my own writing.

Discussion questions:

1. How would the story change if they hadn’t gone back to the father?
2. Where in the story was there a connection between the bats and what was going on in the little girl’s life?

Presentation 2: Christopher Gee

The story begins with the narrator telling us about her mother’s crying, and how she wants to comfort her, but everytime the narrator does, she ends up eventually leaving, making her mom cry more. Then, one day, while getting ready for school, she notices a bruise on her mother’s face. She asks her about it but gets no explanation. She then goes into some exposition, talking about how her father is a foreman, how she doesn’t see him much, and how he’s always angry. A few days later, there’s an even bigger bruise on her mother, and she asks about it but gets no response. She then revealed that they were going to visit “grandpa”, who is actually her mom’s uncle. They have to be quiet, and her mother explains it’s because the trip is “a secret”. The narrator speculates that her mother must’ve saved up for a while, saying she can’t afford a train ticket. They arrive at the train station, but grandpa isn’t there, and her mother explains that her grandpa wasn’t expecting them. The narrator is excited to visit her grandpa-uncle, and when she does meet him, she’s overjoyed. The narrator discusses her activities with her grandpa and then he tells how bats were ruining his orchard, so he poisoned them. But the bats just kept coming back, expecting the poison to stop, not learning their lesson, until many days later when the bodies finally started to decrease. She also went fishing, and got a ring from a fish, which she kept dearly. Eventually the narrator and her mother move back in when their abusive father, and the narrator is given the ring. They are abused even more, and the narrator summarizes how her family continued to be abused, leave, and then come back, until eventually one night she left in such a hurry that she didn’t get her ring. When she came back, the ring was missing.

This story is extremely realistic and vivid, the dialogue reads naturally and the point of view from a child is explained perfectly. There is also not so subtle but enjoyable symbolism, in addition to intricate characters. To explain more about the symbolism, there is a part where the narrator talks about the bats not learning their lesson, always returning to the poison to be killed, although they eventually learn to stay away from the toxic mango trees. This represents two things, one, that the mother always returns to her abusive situation, and the second, that even bats know to stay away. One of the things that I love about the story is that the point of view in the story is a child’s, meaning a lot of information is left for us to solve. For example, in the first paragraph, the narrator explains how her mother was always crying, never saying why, and how she’d learn to drown it out by closing her eyes, pretending the dots that appeared when she shut her eyelids were stars. The dialogue, as I mentioned before, is incredibly naturfal, and the characters behave realistically. Take

“Don’t open it till you’re on the train,” he said in my ear. Then, straightening up, “the next time you’re here we’ll go swimming together.” “That’s right,” Mother said, smiling at me, “and you’ll be able to show Uncle how well you learned to swim.”

which perfectly portrays how caring parents talk to children. The actions with the breaks in sentences also help make the story’s dialogue feel that much more familiar.

One of the writing practices I’d like to borrow/imitate is the author’s ability to indirectly give the user information, like informing us that the father is abusive without it ever being expressed until the end of the story, using clues like her mother’s constant crying, and bruises. It is obvious that the father is abusive, but not direct and cliche. I also would like to imitate the author’s ability to write dialogue, although this is not unique to the author, I find I struggle with writing proper realistic dialogue.

Presentation 3: Nina Fowler

Presentation 4: James Garcia