Previous
Mood
Definition of Setting
Setting is where and when a story or scene takes place. The where can be a real place like the city of New York, or it can be an imagined... read full definition
Setting is where and when a story or scene takes place. The where can be a real place like the city of New York, or... read full definition
Setting is where and when a story or scene takes place. The where can be a real place like the... read full definition
Setting
Explanation and Analysis:
“The Paper Menagerie” is set in the suburbs of Connecticut in the 1970s to 1990s. Though Liu does not make the time in which the story is set explicit, he notes that Jack’s father first saw a picture of Jack’s mother in an “introduction service” catalog (also known as a “mail-order bride” catalog) in 1973 and flew to Hong Kong to meet her shortly thereafter. The story takes place over the course of Jack’s life—from an infant through his early 20s—with some back-and-forth movement through time. The fact that Jack and his friend Mark play with Star Wars action figures hints that he is a child in the late 1970s, around the time the first set of movies came out.
That the story takes place in the Connecticut suburbs is significant. As Jack’s mother notes in her letter at the end of the story, living in the white-dominated suburbs was “lonely” for her, as she could not speak to anyone in her native tongue of Mandarin. This ethnic and linguistic divide comes across earlier in the story, too, when Jack, as an elementary schooler, decides to no longer speak Chinese with his mother, as seen in the following passage:
Mom began to mime things if she needed to let me know something. She tried to hug me the way she saw American mothers do on TV. I thought her movements exaggerated, uncertain, ridiculous, graceless. She saw that I was annoyed, and stopped.
“You shouldn’t treat your mother that way,” Dad said. But he couldn’t look me in the eyes as he said it. Deep in his heart, he must have realized that it was a mistake to have tried to take a Chinese peasant girl and expect her to fit in the suburbs of Connecticut.
Here, young Jack views his mother’s attempts to be like the Americans mothers she saw on television as “exaggerated, uncertain, ridiculous, graceless.” Though Jack’s father seems to stand up for his wife, he does so without looking Jack in the eyes. Jack speculates that this is because his father has some shame about the fact that he "tried to take a Chinese peasant girl and expect[ed] her to fit in the suburbs of Connecticut." Overall, the majority-white suburban setting of the story highlights the cultural divide between Jack’s mother and the other characters, explaining her sense of alienation and estrangement from her son.
Related Themes:
