The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories

Young Jack is a bi-racial boy, the product of a Chinese mother and a Caucasian father. As the story opens, he is sobbing. His mother folds paper into an animal and then she blows into it. The paper tiger, named Laohu (the Mandarin word for “tiger”) comes to life, and Jack laughs. His mom explains, “This is called origami” (178).

Jack relates that his mother is a mail-order bride that his father picked from a catalog that lied about her abilities. At his request, though, his mom makes other paper animals that get into trouble and amuse them, including a shark out of tin foil so that it can swim in water. At age 10, he moves into a new house, where the neighbors come by to say hello. They make racist comments about Jack and his mother.

Mark, a neighborhood boy, comes over with Star Wars toys. Jack is not impressed, but his paper toys don’t impress Mark either. When Laohu pounces on Obi-Wan Kenobi, the action figure’s head falls off, and Mark punches Jack, telling him, “It probably cost more than what your dad paid for your mom!” (182). Laohu defends Jack, and Mark grabs him and tears him in half.

From this, Jack learns to disparage his mother’s culture, language, and food. His father buys him action figures, and he packs away the paper menagerie. The animals escape and return to their old places, until Jack squeezes the life out of them and puts them in the attic.

As Jack becomes a teenager, he remains uninterested in anything his mother has to say. Later, she gets cancer, but Jack is involved with the college recruiting season. He is relieved when his mother tells him not to worry about her, to do well in school. She asks him to focus on his life and just take out the box of animals on Qingming (the Chinese festival for the dead) and think about her. She says, “Haizi, mama ai ni” (“Child, mother loves you”), which are the last words he hears from her. She dies while he is flying back to school.

Jack’s girlfriend, Susan, finds the paper menagerie in the attic. Jack wonders if he imagined their movement: “The memory of children could not be trusted” (187). One day, he is switching channels and sees Laohu move. He asks his old friend how he has been, and the paper tiger unfolds itself into a letter. It turns out, that day is Qingming.

Jack goes downtown and has a woman translate the letter for him. The letter from his mother says she is afraid to talk to her son, but she will write, and the animals’ magic will come alive on Qingming if he thinks of her. She tells him of her sad story. She was an orphan at age 10 and was trafficked. Marriage to an American was her only way out. She was lonely in the US but found comfort in her son: “I was so happy when I looked into your face and saw shades of my mother, my father, and myself […] But there you were, and your face was proof that they were real” (191). She says she understands he does not like the Chinese parts of himself, but they brought her much joy until he shut her out. At that time, she felt that she lost it all again.

Jack writes the character “ai,” for love, with the woman’s help, and folds the letter back into Laohu. He and the tiger walk home.