“She turned the paper over and folded it again. She pleated, packed, tucked, rolled, and twisted until the paper disappeared between her cupped hands. Then she lifted the folded- up paper packet to her mouth and blew into it like a balloon....
Mom’s breath was special. She breathed into her paper animals so that they shared her breath, and thus moved with her life.”
The Paper Menagerie – Ken Liu
When we think about paper, there is an inherent simplicity and raw tactility that defines the medium. It possesses a fluidity—in a sense like how water can fit into different parts of a vessel. Yet, when folded multiple times, it takes on a rigidity, almost stone-like in quality. Universally, the paper as a medium has been around for centuries. The first known paper artwork in the world is attributed to Chinese papermaking, which began during the Han Dynasty (202 BCE–220 CE). Paper, as we know it today, was invented by Cai Lun around 105 CE in China. While paper was initially used for writing and documentation, it eventually became a medium for art.
This versatility and emotional resonance of paper as a medium—captured in a short story by Ken Liu—the Paper Menagerie. As the title suggested ‘menagerie’ here indicates of ‘strange or diverse collection of people or things’. We read how the protagonist’s mother breathes life into the paper origami that she created. Creating different little origamis—a menagerie of paper origamis that accompany the protagonist’s coming of age and different walk paths. As the story unfolds, the protagonist learns of his mother’s harrowing past—sold from Hong Kong to marry his father in the United States—and grapples with the sense of displacement he feels as a child of two worlds. The origami figures, delicate yet enduring, become an anchor for both memory and emotion, bridging the protagonist’s fractured sense of identity and his relationship with his mother.
Paper had become such a crucial part in the story, the nooks, pleated and the crannies on the paper mapped out an entire memory and the emotional weight that we created. We associated paper with something that is quite mundane, it is almost become part of our everyday life; receipts when we buy something at the grocery store, flyers from the nearby warteg, scribbles on our office post-it notes. Despite its ubiquity, we often overlook its presence and the ways in which it quietly anchors our lives, recording fragments of our routines and interactions.
When the protagonist’s mother left a handwritten letter to him, written in Chinese characters— there is something so poignant about how the protagonist kind of have to asked around to read his own mother’s handwriting. This points out to another reflection: have we, too, become disconnected from our origins, our anchors? Paper, as both a medium and a metaphor, reminds us of the fluid, transient, and yet deeply resonant nature of our vernacular memories.