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.