Identity crisis is always an issue faced by the immigirant population in any country. This is more evident in the immigrants’ second generation. The creative space offered in countries like US and UK have allowed them to express their problem and explore the nuances of the crisis. This story is one among them and it is surprisingly in the ISC curiculam of my daughter. I just shared my blog’s space to record her observations about this story.
Her observations…
The story, “The Paper Menagerie” written by Ken Liu is both a work of fantasy and a portrait of a Chinese immigrant mother’s relationship with her American son. The story revolves around the themes of racism, identity crisis, family love, estrangement, culture of art and commercialism.
There are different categories in which a story can be written like Folktales, Legends, Myths, Fairy tales, short stories, Epics, Historical fiction, Fantasy novels, Science fiction books, Crime-fiction novels, Autobiographies, Narrative poems, Descriptive narratives, Viewpoint narratives, Historical narratives.
I consider this story as a descriptive-narration given by the boy named Jack to the readers. The story starts with Jack’s memory about his childhood that how close he was with is mother then and how much he used to like the paper menagerie made by his mother, especially, the tiger which is referred to as ‘Laohu’ by him which means tiger in Chinese. The author fantasises the act of the tiger growling and its tail being twitched in order to make the readers understand that it was just a child’s memory and the animals didn’t actually move. Jack’s mother breathed into the paper animals to give life to it as it is a part of making this art come alive into reality.
The author depicts the act of racism in two scenarios. First scenario, when Jack was ten years old the family moved to a new house across the town. The neighbourhood women came to welcome them. While the ladies were talking among themselves, one said
“He seems like a normal enough man. Why did he do that? Something about mixing never seems right. The child looks unfinished. Slanty eyes, white face. A little monster.”
This shows how people can be defined based on their looks and mere appearance which is also referred to being a racist or favouring racism or having prejudices.
When one among them asked the boy’s name he replied “Jack”, they commented “That doesn’t sound very Chinesey.”
It depicts how much these ladies were into racism that even criticizing a child for not looking like an American doesn’t appear to them as an offense.
Second scenario is about one of the neighbourhood boys named Mark, who used to play with Jack. One day, when he bought a Star Wars action figures, Obi-Wan Kenobi toy to home. Jack thought it didn’t look that good when compared to the real Obi-Wan Kenobi. This made Mark furious and asked Jack to show his toys. He did not have anything except his paper menagerie. But the toys were old and worn out. Mark viewed the skin of Laohu carefully and noticed the Christmas wrapping pattern.
He said “That doesn’t look like a tiger at all. Your Mom makes toys for you from trash?”, which shows the chauvinistic character inside him.
Until then Jack did not see Laohu as a trash but after hearing Mark saying this, he thought that he was nothing but just a piece of paper. Mark punched Jack hardly as he broke the head of the toy.
Mark said that it’s very costly, rare collection and it costs more than what your dad paid for your mom.
This dialogue from Mark infuriated Jack that he hit him with his tiger, Mark grabbed that tiger and crushed it and said
“Here is your stupid cheap Chinese garbage.”
From Mark’s dialogue we can understand that he wasn’t a child with good values.
Jack felt that this is not going to end here, because Mark was popular in school and he doesn’t want to think about the consequences he could face in school for beating him. This is the turning point of the story were the boy who was very affectionate towards his mother starts to degrade their relationship for the fact that she could not speak in English.
When he comes from school, he hesitates to reply his mother’s questions. While eating dinner he asks his father whether he has a chink face or not, the father says
“No. You don’t.” When his mother asked his father what does chink mean in Chinese he ferociously replied “Speak English”. The mother asked “What happen?”. The fact that his mother was unable to speak proper English made him even more angry that he pushed his chopsticks down and said “We should eat American food”. Jack’s father said that many American families do eat Chinese food but he wasn’t convinced and said “We aren’t other families. Other families don’t have moms who don’t belong”.
From this statement we could clearly see how the boy’s nature have transformed. The perplexed mother asked whether the food is not good and asked Jack whether he has fever as he was behaving in a very different manner. He said “Speak English” soon his father also said the same. Jack’s mother dropped her hands to her side looking at Jack’s father and said
“If I say ‘love’, I feel here.” Pointing her lips. “If I say ‘ai’, I feel here.” Pointing her heart which shows us the state of the mother being helpless.
Jack asked for real toys and ignored the paper menagerie. His father had got him the Star Wars collection in which he gave the Obi-Wan Kenobi to Mark which indicates us how much Jack was offended by Mark. He packed his paper menagerie in large shoe box and kept in the attic but his mom kept arranging in his room which he again kept in the attic.
When his mother spoke in Chinese he ignored. When his mother began to hug him like those American mothers in television, he refused and commented her movements were ridiculous, exaggerated, uncertain and graceless. From then she started to mime to Jack whenever she wanted him to know something which seems pathetic for a relationship between a son and a mother.
When Jack was in high-school he completely stopped talking to his mother. He asked his father how he met his mother. The father explained him that he was signed up for the introduction service back in 1973. While he was flipping through the pages of the catalogue, he hardly spent only few seconds until he saw the picture of his mother. He said that he had never seen such a picture and described her portrait that
“She was sitting in a chair, her side to the camera, wearing a tight green silk cheongsam where her head was turned to the camera so that her long black hair was draped artfully over her chest and shoulder. She looked out to him with the eyes of a calm child.”
The father said that it was the last page he saw. The catalogue said she was eighteen, loved to dance and spoke good English as she was from Hong Kong. Therefore, he wrote to her and flew to Hong Kong to meet her. Then, he came to know that it was the company writing her responses she doesn’t know any English other than ‘hello’ and ‘good-bye’.
“What kind of woman puts herself into a catalogue so that she can be bought?” Jack thought, which shows us the hatred he has for his mother.
But his father hired a waitress in a restaurant to translate for them, she looked at him with both fear and hopefulness. Soon when the waitress began translating, she started to smile slowly. Then they got married and next year Jack was born.
After a while Jack’s mother was affected by cancer and both Jack and his father stood in the hospital. For years his mother has refused to go to the hospital for the pain inside her, by then the cancer had spread far beyond the limits of surgery where she could not be recovered. But even when his mother was laying in her death bed, it did not make much sense to Jack as he was just thinking about his campus interviews and focused on his resumes and transcripts. He even had a thought of telling a lie so that he could be recruited which he knew was not the right thing to do when your mother is lay dying. But this thought didn’t mean anything to him, as his mind was fully occupied with the thought of his flight to California.
Jack’s mother though laying in her death-bed was concerned about her son’s future and said “Go. Don’t worry about me. This is not a big deal. Just do well in school. Focus on your life. Just keep that box in the attic with you, and every year at Qingming just take it and think about me. I will always be with you.” Qingming was the Chinese Festival for Dead.
He said “I don’t know anything about the Chinese calendar. Just rest, Mom”. She said, “Just keep the box with you and open it once in a while” and began to cough again. “It’s okay, Mom.” Jack stroked her arm awkwardly.
This shows how hard-hearted person he was without having feelings for his mother.
Jack’s mother died when his flight was somewhere near Nevada and his father aged rapidly after his mother’s death. So, Jack and Susan, Jack’s girlfriend, helped Jack’s father to sell the house as it was too big for him. When they were cleaning the place, Susan found the shoebox hidden in the attic with the paper menagerie in it. It has become brittle and the bright wrapping paper has faded.
“I’ve never seen origami like this. Your mum was an amazing artist”
said Susan, that shows us even a third person could recognise his mother’s talent but Jack couldn’t recognise it.
The paper animals didn’t move because it was his mother’s breath which gave it life since she died it didn’t move.
After two years of his mother’s death, it was the first weekend of April when Jack was alone in his house since Susan was out of town on her trip as a management consultant. Jack was flipping through the TV channels, he paused at the documentary about sharks and remembered how is mother made him a shark when he asked for it. Then, he took the paper menagerie from his room which he hasn’t noticed since years.
He took Laohu in his hand and unwrapped it. Jack saw the dense Chinese characters of the word ‘Son’ which was the only word he ever knew in Chinese. He spotted this character on the top of the sheet were it usually written to address to the person whom you are writing to.
He searched in Internet and found that today was Qingming.
Therefore, he rushed into a Chinese bus and asked to help him read the letter, a woman among the crowd helped him. The letter contained the story of his mother. It stated the sufferings dealt by her when she was a child, like how a Great famine struck her family and how they had nothing to eat. She also mentioned about the Cultural Revolution in 1966 between China and Hong Kong which led her to lose her parents for having a relative in Hong Kong.
Therefore, she snuck into a train to reach her uncle in Hong Kong where she ended up stealing food and got into the trading company where they sell girls to rich families as servants. Jack’s mother was picked by the Chin family where she had to take of their sons and toil throughout the day in doing the household chores. When she attempted to learn English, she was beaten up and threatened that she could be held in prison. After six years of this life, she got into the catalogue were American men look for Asian wives and met his father.
She mentions us how much joy his (son) very existence has brought to her. But when Jack stopped talking to her, life became miserable for her. Therefore, she started to write in the paper menagerie she made for Jack.
After reading the letter, Jack was able to understand the pain which his mother had undergone through the years because of him not speaking with her. He asked the woman to help him trace the characters of “ai” which he wrote several times in the letter.
This shows us the boy has now understood the feelings of his mother and felt terribly bad for not speaking with her all through these years just because she couldn’t speak in English or she was Chinese.
This story expresses the themes of racial discrimination and the relationship between the mother and the son. Though we cannot say that all Americans are racists but still there is crowd which always supports racism. We cannot make a change in them until they realise it by themselves.
Next it is the relationship between the mother and the son, I consider that in order to have a healthy relationship of any form ‘communication’ is an instrument which strengthens the bond in a relationship. If Jack had spoken to his mother earlier, she wouldn’t have felt miserable while she was in death bed longing for her son’s love.
I personally felt that this story strongly conveys the love that parents have on us until their death no matter what comes or goes. Most importantly we should not be carried away by things easily and always think twice or analyse while making decision in any situation.
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