The Paper Menagerie Summary

“The Paper Menagerie” describes the relationship between a biracial Chinese American boy, Jack, and his Chinese immigrant mother. When the story begins, a young Jack is crying. To comfort him, his mother makes him an origami tiger and breathes life into it. Later, she makes Jack more magical paper animals to play with.

Once, when Jack is a teenager and is no longer speaking to his mother, he asks his father how he and Jack’s mother met. His father explains that they met in Hong Kong through an introduction service that matched American men with Asian women. Jack’s father saw Jack’s mother in a catalogue and then flew to Hong Kong to meet her. When he arrived, he learned that Jack’s mother spoke very little English, so he hired a translator to mediate between them. Afterward, Jack’s mother immigrated to the U.S. and married his father.

The story shifts back to when Jack is 10, after his family has just moved into a new neighborhood. Jack overhears two female neighbors exchanging racist gossip about his family, wondering why Jack’s father married his mother and criticizing Jack’s biracial looks. Later, a neighborhood boy named Mark comes over to Jack’s house with an Obi-Wan Kenobi action figure. Jack shows Mark his paper animals, and Jack calls them “trash.” When Jack’s paper tiger knocks over and breaks Mark’s action figure, Mark insults Jack’s mother and tears up his tiger. Mark begins a campaign of racist bullying against Jack at school. In response, Jack boxes up his paper animals and refuses to respond to his mother when she speaks to him in Chinese. Because Jack won’t respond to Chinese and criticizes his mother’s English, they slowly stop speaking to each other.

When Jack is in college, his mother is hospitalized with cancer. He flies home to visit her. In the hospital, she asks Jack, if she dies, to take out his paper animals and remember her each year on Qingming, the Chinese Festival for the Dead. After Jack leaves, his mother dies. Later, Jack comes home again, with his girlfriend Susan, to help his father move. While packing, Susan finds and rescues the box containing Jack’s paper animals. Jack notices the animals no longer contain the magic that allows them to move.

Two years later, on Qingming, Jack’s paper tiger comes to life again, approaches Jack, and reveals a letter hidden in his insides. The letter is from Jack’s mother, written in Chinese. Jack, who cannot read Chinese, travels downtown and finds a Chinese tourist to read the letter for him. The letter tells Jack the story of his mother’s life: she was born to a poor Chinese family in the 1950s. Her mother taught her how to fold and animate paper animals, but when she was 10, both her parents died in the Chinese Cultural Revolution. Human traffickers found her and sold her as a domestic slave in Hong Kong. When she was 16, to escape the family that had bought her, she signed up for the introduction service that set her up with Jack’s father. At first, after immigrating to America, she felt extremely lonely, but when Jack was born, she felt happy, like her family had been returned to her. She ends the letter by asking Jack why he won’t speak to her anymore. Jack asks the Chinese tourist to help him write the Chinese character for ai, meaning love, over and over on the letter. Then he folds the letter back into a tiger and goes home.