384: A Lesson for "The Paper Menagerie"(and the Cultural Revolution)

The Spark Creativity Teacher Podcast | ELA

Ken Liu's short story, "The Paper Menagerie," is an easy and powerful add to your curriculum. Not only does it explore family relationships, The American Dream, and identity (themes you can easily connect to other texts as you build units), it introduces - briefly, painfully, powerfully - China's Cultural Revolution.

I'll admit I've never studied the history of communism in China with much depth until recently. In college, I took a Socialist-Realist literature course that kicked off a life-long interest in how people are influenced by propaganda for me. Later, I lived in Bulgaria after the fall of communism there and my interest only increased as I taught 1984 to students whose families had lived through Communism. I visited Memento Park in Budapest, home to dozens of Communist sculptures and a terrifying video exhibit about the way the government watched its citizens. I visited the Museum of Communism in Prague, which walks visitors through daily life under communism as well as showing its frightening extremes. I moved to Slovakia, where I listened to my son's best friend's father tell me how wonderful aspects of life under Communism had been years before in the very neighborhood where our family was living.

Yet despite my interest in learning about Communism and propaganda, it was Ken Liu who first made me pay attention to The Cultural Revolution. When his main character reads a letter from his mother about her life in China before she escaped to The United States as a bride in a catalogue, it woke me up dramatically. None of the other books I'd ever read throughout so many years of studying and then teaching English had ever really explored this huge event in world history. I thought of the story immediately when a teacher wrote in with her request for our new "Plan My Lesson" series, asking for a bridge to help her students prepare to read Red Scarf Girl, A Memoir of the Cultural Revolution.

Since then I've dipped into Red Scarf Girl (until I got so sad I had to take a break) and done a deep dive into The New York Times' exploration of The Cultural Revolution, including three particularly striking stories: one in which a small local museum remembering victims of the Cultural Revolution was wrapped in propaganda posters, one featuring memories of folks who were students in China during the Cultural Revolution (like the narrator of Red Scarf Girl), and one about current president of China's Xi Jinping's experience as a middle schooler during the Cultural Revolution. But knowing many classrooms wouldn't have access to The New York Times, I continued into resources on the BBC and Crash Course, the Asian Society and Getty Images, which I eventually built into today's curriculum.

Today, I'm going to walk you through a lesson on "The Paper Menagerie" that you can use on its own, or as a transition toward Red Scarf Girl. Our goal is to help students build some understanding of The Cultural Revolution at the same time that they explore related literature. To be honest, I really fell down the rabbit hole on this one, and could easily now spend a month building curriculum around how we know what is true, how propaganda wields influence, the cultural revolution, Ken Liu's short story, and Red Scarf Girl. And because the history surrounding these stories is so painful, and the repercussions so very real in our world, it's hard not to feel a tremendous responsibility for students to explore these questions and texts. But at the moment, we're talking about one short lesson period - probably about 38 minutes of available time. So let's focus on that, starting now.

Grab your copy of the agenda and webquest curriculum: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1HSG6g7-a1U_j5y1ceh7jMGA_Q3pJFn-hatKW2aRYolY/copy

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