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.
(By the way, grab your copy of today’s agenda and webquest activity here).
The Text for this Lesson
If you’re hanging out with me this week at Camp Creative, you already know the story of “The Paper Menagerie” from our materials. It’s available in Ken Liu’s book, The Paper Menagerie and other Stories, as well as in full text from Gizmodo online and on Levar Burton’s podcast as an immersive audio experience (skip the built-in commercial in the middle that happens to contain one rogue swear word).
For our lesson requester this week, this short story will act as an introduction for Ji-Li Jiang’s memoir, Red Scarf Girl. If you’re not familiar with Red Scarf Girl, it’s a devastating account of what it was like to be a student from an educated family as the Cultural Revolution slowly unrolled across China.
Project your Agenda
Just as with every lesson, I suggest you have your agenda on the board as students come in. This will cut down on questions and help everyone keep to the plan and pacing you’re expecting.
Play the Audio
This lesson is meant to follow your reading of “The Paper Menagerie.” So as students come in to class, they should have already read it, either with you or on their own. And you might have already done some of the activities for it that are in The Lighthouse, and available this week during Camp Creative.
This lesson is going to be a busy one, so rather than start with a bellringer activity or attendance question, we’re going to jump into the first activity, which is listening to the audio version of ten minutes of the story, from 38:20-47:50. In this section, the main character of the story hears a letter from his mother read aloud – her story of losing her parents to the Cultural Revolution and everything that came afterwards.
If you have introduced sketchnoting to your students, you could invite them to sketchnote the mother’s life story as they listen.
Tap Prior Knowledge and Curiosity: Cultural Revolution
Once you’ve finished listening, take a few minutes and have students generate thoughts on these two prompts: What questions do you have after hearing this account? What do you know about the cultural revolution? You could have them write their ideas on two different boards in your classroom, chat with a partner and then volunteer their ideas, or just chat aloud together. The main thing is you are activating any prior knowledge they have and letting them think about what they’d like to know to help them understand what the mother is talking about in this part of the story.
Explore the Cultural Revolution
After a few minutes of brainstorming, move into research. For this activity, I wanted to share strong sources across different modalities, so I created a visual webquest inviting students to watch overview videos, hear an interview with a former Red Guard, and view propaganda posters and photos from the era of The Cultural Revolution. Building up this collection took a while. One of the big challenges was finding materials that shared information and made it clear how serious the events of this era were, without portraying imagery that was too disturbing. However, as with any classroom materials, you should check out the links to make sure you are OK with the content.
Once students have completed the webquest, they’ll land on the final activity in the corner of the slide, inviting them to script a short podcast to teach someone the basics of The Cultural Revolution.
Create a Podcast
Writing their scripts will be a short final activity, unless you want to build a full podcasting project (like the one below from The Lighthouse) in at this point. You could ask students to go deeper with a specific part of the Cultural Revolution, such as The Little Red Book, the Red Guards, or Mao Zedong and create an actual recorded podcast. If you do this, you will need a few more class periods to devote to research and podcast creation.
If you’re sticking with the short script-writing activity, give students a few more minutes to script and then invite them to share their scripts with a partner or two. They’ll get to see what others chose to focus on from the online resources, and reinforce their learning about The Cultural Revolution.
Finish with a Final Question
For the teacher requesting this lesson today, who will be moving into Red Scarf Girl, a memoir that goes much deeper with these topics, I suggest ending by having students write one final question about the Cultural Revolution on a post-it and pop it up on the wall to remain and return to once you move on into the memoir. I know the question on my mind after all this: How could this happen?
Teaching Takeaways
Whether or not you’re going to teach this exact lesson, you can get ideas for your next lesson here.
One of my favorites is the idea of a media choice board or webquest. If you want students to research a topic, you know there’s a lot of garbage out there. Help keep them on a strong path by providing them with the kinds of links that are worthy of their exploration. Building a little roadmap or choice board with a visual element makes it more fun – I used Canva to design this one.
Another of my favorite go-tos featured in this lesson is to invite students to sketchnote as they listen to something, whether it’s a podcast, a Ted Talk, a mini-lecture or a presentation from a classmate. You can sketchnote too, on the board, modeling ways to capture information and showing that it’s not about creating some kind of perfect art, but rather using critical thinking to choose and sort what’s important and represent it in a memorable way.
Finally, I like that this lesson features a podcast project in either a mini or a full version. Having students script a 90 second podcast with a purpose is more relevant to their lives than asking them to summarize what they learned in a paragraph. Either way, they’re synthesizing the research and sharing their takeaways, but a podcast script has a more obvious purpose and real-world feel.
