Paper Menagerie
“The Paper Menagerie” by Ken Liu is a short story about a boy named Jack who struggles to reconcile his biracial identity, having a white father and a Chinese mother. Growing up, Jack played with a menagerie of colorful origami animals his mother would make for him. Magic unfolded before his eyes as lifeless paper transformed into lively, animated creatures: a charging rhino, a fluttering bird, a roaring tiger; the possibilities were endless.
However, one day after being teased for his Chinese heritage, Jack abandons his origami toys and tries to become more American to fit in with the rest of his classmates. He starts feeling ashamed of his mother’s Chinese culture and no longer sees the beauty in her origami.
The story paints a harsh picture of the reality for Asian immigrants who are met with the clashing of Eastern and Western traditions, and this cultural struggle felt relatable for many Asian Americans readers as well. Here’s what our members had to say in response to reading “The Paper Menagerie”:
Quotes from the story: “But then you were born! I was so happy when I looked into your face and saw shades of my mother, my father, and myself. I had lost my entire family, all of Sigulu, everything I ever knew and loved. But there you were, and your face was proof that they were real. I hadn’t made them up. Now I had someone to talk to. I would teach you my language, and we could together remake a small piece of everything that I loved and lost. When you said your first words to me, in Chinese that had the same accent as my mother and me, I cried for hours. When I made the first zhezhi animals for you, and you laughed, I felt there were no worries in the world.”
“Son, I know that you do not like your Chinese eyes, which are my eyes. I know that you do not like your Chinese hair, which is my hair. But can you understand how much joy your very existence brought to me? And can you understand how it felt when you stopped talking to me and won’t let me talk to you in Chinese? I felt I was losing everything all over again.”
P1: This story, and especially the cultural and lingual gap between the mother and son, really struck a chord with me. Although there are some big differences between the situation the narrator is in and my own childhood, given that both my parents are Chinese and that I grew up in neighborhoods with lots of other Chinese immigrant families, I think there were some common themes that I still identified with.
My parents shared a lot of their culture and language with me. Our family celebrated Chinese holidays together, ate Chinese food at home, and followed lots of Chinese norms (no shoes in the house!) My mother and father predominantly spoke to us kids in Chinese, and they sent us off to Chinese after-school where I learned to read and write in Chinese. But nevertheless, growing up in America and attending American public school, I developed differences in mindsets and values from my Chinese-born parents.
We often clashed over these differences; I resented how heavily they emphasized education and their insistence on making me take piano lessons. In our arguments, something that was often repeated by both sides was “you can’t understand me because you grew up in such a different situation”. So you can see, I really relate to the frustration that the narrator and his mother both express when faced with the challenges of communicating across such huge generational and cultural gaps.
But I also really relate to their desire to connect with each other despite these differences, and how those rare, successful glimpses into each others lives can be so heartwarming.
P2: The letter from the mother in The Paper Menagerie highlights the indirect love that Asian parents have a tendency to display. With the phenomenon of the Facebook group Subtle Asian Traits, many posts are students who have gone to college reflecting on the sacrifice their parents made when they were little. I recall someone posting about their father who would only eat the really burnt and crispy fries when they were younger, claiming that he preferred them, only to see the father throwing away those fries when the family was wealthier. Sacrifice is often a common theme among immigrant parents, and thus the expressions of love are also moments of sacrifice.
While parts of culture are displayed through a parent’s actions and expressions of love, the pain of others not understanding that action is present when the mother’s letter talks about her son shunning their Chinese heritage. Being misunderstood by her own child, the one family member she had left, leaving the mother alone in her world. Even among family members and friends, when an expression of love is understood and acknowledged, we feel warm; when shunned and rejected, we instead cower away. It’s why we sometimes feel we should fight for the check with one person, while we split the bill with others.
P3: The Paper Menagerie was a heartfelt short story that I really enjoyed reading. The message behind it resonated with me as it encapsulates the conflicts of growing up Asian in America as one’s native culture can feel out of place from having a mixed cultural identity. The story’s main issue focuses on the main character’s resentment towards his mother’s Asian heritage because he felt like it did not conform to the American way of life. I saw the paper tiger as a symbol for his mother’s love and deep rooted Chinese traditions, and I appreciated how the story ends on an uplifting message as the character rediscovers and is able to reconcile both his American and Chinese identity.
P4: I think there’s this trope called “Morality Pet” or “Dead Body in the Fridge” that can be invalidating or demeaning to characters who happen to be women or minorities. This practically flawless martyr of a character suffers a sad life and dies in order to make the main character learn a lesson in the story. I think the mom in The Paper Menagerie embodies that trope. I think that she had a particularly traumatizing and difficult life that became even more complicated when she moved to the United States, but we don’t know much about her besides her suffering.
She was around 19 when she started making origami for her son. That extremely young age is incomprehensible to me but it’s sadly common in reality. Also, this would probably make her husband much older than her when he married her at 16, which creeps me out a lot.
I know I’m focusing a lot on the mother character, but I think that making her the “Morality Pet” in the story isn’t doing her or a lot of Asian women a lot of justice.
As a critic, I come down really hard on this story. As your average bear and run-of-the-mill Asian college girl, I liked it. I enjoyed reading the story when my friend introduced it to me. As an ABC who has faced a lot of racism and had been conditioned since birth to believe that whiteness is the norm, I really relate to this piece.
I’m also a really big fan of how magic is seamlessly incorporated into the story through Chinese cultural traditions such as Qingming. Ken Liu’s great at magical realism and writing fantasy in his stories and I could feel every fold of the paper and see the paper animals leap around. Is it possible to hear paper? It felt nice.
I also recommend his other short stories. He wrote a steampunk adventure set in Hong Kong that featured a hulijing (fox woman) and a demon hunter-turned-railway-engineer. He also wrote another short story about a trickster lawyer who channeled the energy of the Monkey King and discovered a long-buried genocide in his village.
P5: Sitting alone in public, reading Ken Liu’s “Paper Menagerie” for the first time, I choked down the tears that I could feel welling up in my eyes. The story of a young boy trying to fit in to a society that doesn’t accept his Asian (Chinese) features is a very real representation of kids of color today; I lived through it, I struggled through it. I don’t always see eye to eye with my parents, but reading “Paper Menagerie” reminded me how grateful I am for their sacrifices and their support.
