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Summary
Themes
and Colors
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in The Paper Menagerie, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Racism and Identity
Familial Love and Estrangement
Language and Translation
Art vs. Consumer Items
Summary
Analysis
One day, as a young child, Jack won’t stop crying. In response, his mother begins making him a tiger out of wrapping paper left over from Christmas. Interested, Jack stops crying. When his mother finishes the tiger, she breathes into it, which brings the paper tiger to life. Jack tries to touch the tiger. It leaps on his finger and roars at him, which makes him laugh. In Chinese, his mother explains that what she has just done is origami.
In making Jack a tiger out of leftover Christmas paper, Jack’s mother is repurposing something mass-produced and disposable into something special and irreplaceable. Moreover, the fact that the paper tiger comes to life introduces a magical realist element to the story and literalizes the idea that art is alive, whereas consumer items (like the wrapping paper) are lifeless. From this interaction, it's clear that Jack and his mother are close, and that their Chinese culture (which they share through language and through traditions like origami) is something that brings Jack joy at this stage in his life.
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Jack’s father first saw his mother in a catalog from an “introduction service.” As a teenager, Jack learns the details from his father, who is trying to get him to speak to his mother again. Jack’s parents exchanged letters through the introduction service. When Jack’s father traveled to Hong Kong to meet her, however, he learned the introduction service had been writing her letters for her, because she spoke almost no English. To communicate with her, he hired a woman to translate between them. Jack’s mother and father spoke to each other through the translator. Afterward, Jack’s father traveled back to the U.S. and arranged for Jack’s mother to immigrate. The next year, Jack was born.
The fact that Jack’s parents used an “introduction” (match-making) service suggests that they both longed to connect with another person, to the point that they were willing to overcome geographical and linguistic hurdles to do so. This passage reveals that Jack is no longer speaking to his mother when he’s a teenager—whereas language (and, by extension, their Chinese culture) connected them during Jack’s childhood, this part of their relationship has since been cut off, though it’s not clear why. In contrast to Jack, who refuses to speak to his mother, Jack’s father was so interested in speaking with her when they first met that he hired a translator to overcome the language barrier. That Jack’s mother and father did eventually marry suggests that it's possible for determined people to overcome linguistic and cultural differences to connect with one another.
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Back in Jack’s childhood, after making Jack the tiger, his mother makes more origami animals for him. The origami water buffalo, which “want[s] to wallow, like a real buffalo,” leaps into some soy sauce and damages his legs. Laohu—the origami tiger—is damaged when a bird he is stalking in the backyard fights back. Jack puts his origami shark in water, but it unfolds back into “a wet piece of paper,” so his mother folds him another shark, this one made of tinfoil and able to swim in water.
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Jack’s family moves when he is 10 years old. Two female neighbors visit them. While the neighbors are visiting, Jack’s father leaves to deal with some bills. While his father is gone, Jack overhears the neighbors sharing racist gossip about his family. One woman questions why his father married his mother in the first place, while the other says that racial “mixing” makes Jack look like a “monster.” Then the two women come into the living room where Jack is reading. One asks him his name; when he tells her, she says the name Jack “doesn’t sound very Chinesey.” Then Jack’s mother enters the room, and the four of them wait in silence until Jack’s father returns.
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A boy named Mark visits Jack’s house. He brings an Obi-Wan Kenobi action figure. Jack isn’t impressed by the action figure, so Mark asks to see his toys. Jack shows him the origami tiger Laohu. At first, Jack introduces Laohu to Mark in Chinese, but then he uses English. Seeing that Laohu is made of wrapping paper, Mark calls him “trash.” Laohu jumps on Mark’s action figure and breaks it. When Jack laughs, Mark hits him, complaining that the toy cost a lot of money: “It probably cost more than what your dad paid for your mom!” Laohu attacks Mark, who rips Laohu in two and leaves. Jack tries to repair Laohu.
For two weeks at school, Mark bullies Jack. When Jack comes home, his mother asks him a question in Chinese, but he ignores her. When he, his father, and his mother are having dinner, Jack asks whether he has a “chink face.” His father, who realizes Jack is being bullied because he’s half Chinese, says no. In Chinese, his mother asks about the racial slur “chink.” Jack demands that she speak English and that the family start eating “American food.” Twice more his mother asks him questions in Chinese, and twice more he demands she speak English.
Jack’s father takes Jack’s side in the argument, insisting that his mother speak English so that Jack can assimilate. Jack’s mother tries to explain that when she says the Chinese word for love, she feels it in her heart, whereas when she says the English word for love, she only feels it on her lips. Jack’s father reminds her that she’s in the U.S. She deflates, “like the water buffalo when Laohu used to pounce on him and squeeze the air of life out of him.” Jack demands new toys.
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Because Jack refuses to answer his mother when she speaks Chinese and corrects her usage when she speaks English, she largely no longer speaks to him. For a while, she continues making him origami animals, but he puts them all in the box in the attic. Eventually, she stops making the animals too. Jack begins to feel that they have “nothing in common.”
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When Jack is in college, his mother is hospitalized with cancer. Jack and his father come to visit her, but Jack’s thoughts remain preoccupied by the corporate recruiters he was meeting back on campus. Jack’s mother asks Jack, in the event that she dies, to take out his box of origami animals each year on Qingming, “the Chinese Festival for the Dead.” Jack blows her off, but she insists.
When Jack tries to comfort his mother, she begins speaking Chinese, and he remembers the dinner when she explained to him and his father that she feels the Chinese word for love in her heart. Jack tells her to be quiet. While he’s flying back to college, she dies.
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After his mother’s death, Jack’s father decides to sell their house. Jack and his girlfriend Susan fly home to help him prepare for the sale. While cleaning out the attic, Susan finds the box full of the origami animals that Jack’s mother made for him. She declares that Jack’s mother was an “amazing artist.” Jack reflects that the animals don’t move anymore. He isn’t sure whether they’ve stopped moving because his mother died or because they never could and, as a child, he simply believed that they did.
Two years later, Jack sees sharks on TV and remembers his mother making an origami shark for him out of tinfoil. He hears a noise—it’s Laohu, moving around. Susan has put Jack’s origami animals throughout their shared apartment, and Jack realizes that his mother must have repaired Laohu after Mark destroyed him. After playing with Jack for a moment, Laohu “unfold[s] himself,” and Jack sees that his mother wrote a letter to him in Chinese on Laohu’s insides. Jack searches online and realizes that it’s Qingming, the day his mother asked him to use the origami animals to remember her.
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Jack, who can’t read Chinese, travels downtown and accosts Chinese tourists for help reading the letter. A young female tourist helps him. The letter begins with Jack’s mother acknowledging their estrangement. She writes that because of her illness, she has decided to communicate with him. She explains that when she dies, the origami animals she made for him will stop moving; however, Jack can reanimate them by thinking of her on Qingming. She also explains that she wrote to him in Chinese, even though he doesn’t speak it, because she wants “to write with all [her] heart.”
Jack’s mother writes him “the story of [her] life.” She was born in China to a poor family in the late 1950s. In her early childhood, the Great Famine killed 30 million Chinese people, but her family survived. When she was a child, her mother taught her how to fold and breathe life into paper animals. In 1966, during the Cultural Revolution, her family was declared “enemies of the people” and “struggled against.” Her mother committed suicide, and her father was kidnapped and never seen again. Jack’s mother, then 10 years old, ran away and tried to travel to Hong Kong, where her mother’s brother lived.
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On the way to Hong Kong, human traffickers found Jack’s mother. They brought her to Hong Kong and sold her as a domestic slave to the Chin family. The Chin family regularly beat her—for her own mistakes, for their sons’ mistakes, and for trying to learn English. Jack’s mother spent six years as a domestic slave. Then one day in the market, a woman told her that if she didn’t escape the Chin family, Mr. Chin would begin sexually abusing her. The woman suggested that Jack’s mother marry an American man to escape the Chins. That was why she ended up working with the introduction service that connected her with Jack’s father.
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Despite her gratitude to Jack’s father, Jack’s mother felt isolated in the U.S. because, as she says, “no one understood me, and I understood nothing.” After Jack was born, however, she felt that Jack connected her to the family and country she had lost. She loved teaching him to speak Chinese and to animate paper animals. Jack brought her closer to Jack’s father, and it also made her miss her own parents. She says, “You know what the Chinese think is the saddest feeling in the world? It’s for a child to finally grow the desire to take care of his parents, only to realize that they were long gone.”
Jack’s mother concludes the letter by acknowledging Jack’s racial self-hatred, his dislike of the Chinese features that he shares with her. She asks him to acknowledge how he hurt her when, after the happiness his birth brought her, he refused to speak with her or listen to her speaking to him in Chinese. She asks him why he has been behaving in this way.
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When the letter ends, Jack requests that the woman who translated it help him write the character for ai, the Chinese word for love. He writes the character for ai all over his mother’s letter. After that, the translator leaves. Jack folds his mother’s letter so that it becomes Laohu again and carries Laohu home.
