The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories

by Ken Liu

Sovereignty,” “jurisdiction,” and similar words have always been mere conveniences to allow people to evade responsibility or to sever inconvenient bonds.

Because of our limited capacity for empathy for mass suffering, I think there’s a risk that his approach would result in sentimentality and only selective memory.

The core of Wei’s belief is that without real memory, there can be no real reconciliation. Without real memory, the individual persons of each nation have not been able to empathize with and remember and experience the suffering of the victims.

The fact that we can never have complete, perfect knowledge does not absolve us of the moral duty to judge and to take a stand against evil.

Eyewitness accounts have an immediacy and reality that compels belief, and we think they can convey a truth greater than any fiction.

That we accept our own frailties and subjectivity does not free us to abdicate the moral responsibility to tell the truth, even if, and especially if, “truth” is not singular but a set of shared experiences and shared understandings that together make up our humanity.

There are no monsters. The monster is us.

The truth is not delicate and it does not suffer from denial—the truth only dies when true stories are untold.