In Ken Liu’s short story, “Paper Menagerie,” the main character, Jack,  is shown to have a hard time in school due to being half Chinese, this makes him want to live a normal ‘American’ life. When Jack grows older, he sees the errors in his ways and accepts who he is.

After Laohu broke Mark’s Obi-Wan toy and got into a fight with Jack, he got bullied at school for the two following weeks. Jack began to hate Chinese culture and demands his mom be a ‘normal’ white American mom. After that, Jack began shunning his mom whenever she spoke to him in Chinese, and soon, his mom stopped speaking entirely whenever Jack was around. Through this we can see that Jack wants to pursue a full American life and doesn’t want to be associated with any other culture.

Two years after Jack’s mother dies of cancer, Jack remembers the origami shark his mom folded for him. This memory brought Laohu back to life. Laohu unfolds himself to reveal a letter written by Jack’s mother for him, the letter talks about his mom’s life story. After this, Jack realizes that his childhood was nothing compared to his mother’s, and he realizes how petty he was acting by excluding his mother from his life. There is a sense that after reading the letter, Jack begins to accept that he is half Chinese and half American.

The main character in the short story “On the Sidewalk Bleeding” written by Evan Hunter at first did not know that he was dying, but as the story progresses, he realizes that he is in fact dying and that there are many things which he hasn’t done yet in his life. At first, Andy, the main character did not know that he was dying, this was shown on paragraph 5, “He did not know he was dying.”  This piece of evidence proves that though he doesn’t know it, Andy is in fact, dying. He first thinks that he’s dying when the couple Freddie and Angela enter the alley in paragraph 46 Andy thinks: “I think maybe I’m dying,” Here, it can be shown that Andy begins to suspect that he’s dying. Another example is on paragraph 87, “He knew he was going to die now. That made him suddenly sad.” This piece of evidence proves that Andy knows he’s dying but is saddened because there’s still things that Andy hasn’t done in his life yet.