The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories

In “A Brief History of the Trans-Pacific Tunnel,” Liu creates a fictional history of Japan in which the country built a Trans-Pacific tunnel, ending the Great Depression. Protagonist, Charlie, worked on the tunnel as a young man, and the story alternates between Charlie’s present, flashbacks from his time digging in the tunnel, and fictional excerpts from books that explain the history of the Trans-Pacific Tunnel. In this timeline, the tunnel is “the greatest engineering feat ever conceived by Man” (352) and drove other technological advances. The tunnel’s construction took 10 years with work from seven million men, and America was so thankful that it allowed Japan to build as many battleships as the US and Britain.

Charlie meets a waitress, Betty, in a noodle shop in 1961. He asks to see her later. They are in Midpoint City, so named because it is in the middle of the route for the Trans-Pacific Tunnel, a pneumatic tube-based travel system that connects Asia and North America below the sea floor. It has stops in Shanghai, Tokyo, and Seattle, allowing 120 mile-per-hour travel. People can get from Shanghai to Seattle in two days.

Charlie grew up in Formosa, and a Japanese man recruited him to work on the tunnel when he was 17. In the present day, Charlie and Betty walk through Friendship Square in Midpoint City. They’ve been dating for a month. He points out a bronze plaque in the square with his name on it in Japanese: Takumi Hayashi. She wants to know more about working on the Tunnel. Charlie says that the work was difficult and dangerous and hot, but the pay was good. Some men went crazy, though.

Betty tells Charlie that her son is riding buses with Negros. In this era, black and white people are segregated but working toward civil rights. Betty is proud of her son for working toward integration, but Charlie doesn’t understand the need to speak out. Still, being with Betty is unlocking something inside him, and memories are returning.

When Charlie was working on the tunnel, he found he couldn’t relate to his family above-ground and decided to stay underground and work at a station city: “I did not feel I was home until I was back at Midpoint Station, the warmth and the noise of the heart of the Earth around me, a safe shell” (358). He tells Betty that Labor costs rose after the economy recovered, so political prisoners took the place of work crews. They didn’t last long, and officials reported their deaths as escape attempts. Once, a tunnel was starting to flood, and they had to collapse the side tunnels to make sure the main tunnel was unaffected. This decision killed the repair crews they sent in, though many tried to get out. Charlie is responsible for one of the deaths, and he still dreams of that man’s face.

Charlie erases his name from the bronze plaque using a hammer to put three interlinked ovals and a chain in its place. These represent the shackles that bound the prisoners: “There is beauty and wonder here, and also horror and death” (362). He tells himself, “Make the secret a bit harder to keep. That counts for something” (362).