The Paper Menagerie

“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 Ts’ai Lun, a Chinese court official around 105 CE in China. While paper was initially used for writing and documentation, it eventually became a medium for art.

Early forms of paper in Southeast Asia such as daluang in Java and saa paper in Thailand (mulberry bark), were crafted from tree bark and other natural fibers. These materials were used for religious texts, administrative records, and other artistic expression. Buddhist manuscripts in Myanmar, Cambodia, and Thailand were often inscribed on palm leaves or handmade paper, while Javanese and Balinese communities developed unique paper-based script traditions. This tradition was particularly notable in Javanese and Balinese literary culture, where ancient texts such as Babad Tanah Jawi and Serat Centhini were recorded on handmade materials before the arrival of European-imported paper in the colonial period.
 
This versatility and the way that paper can hold both the history and emotions is not just merely political, but it is also universally personal. This sense was 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’. Here, we read how the protagonist’s mother breathes life into the paper origami that she created. Creating 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, 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, the pleats 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 became a repository of our lived experiences; 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 mother left a handwritten letter to the protagonist, inscribed in Chinese characters, the moment carries a painful irony—there is something so poignant about how the protagonist kind of have to asked around to read his own mother’s handwriting. In this quiet moment, the loss of language as a severance from one's origins, a rupture in the continuum of memory and identity. The letter, written on something as delicate and impermanent as paper, embodies the fragility of heritage—how easily it can be forgotten, misplaced, or rendered unreadable by time and distance.
 
Yet, paper also serves as an archive of what lingers. It holds ink, absorbs meaning, and carries the weight of histories too easily erased. The protagonist’s struggle to understand his mother’s words mirrors a broader, universal tension—how many of us have found ourselves unable to decipher the languages of our ancestors, estranged from the very histories that formed us? This disconnection is not merely linguistic but broadens to the existential, speaking to the erasure that can occur when cultures are marginalized, displaced, or forcibly assimilated. And yet, within this act of reading—of searching for understanding—there remains the possibility of reconnection. The act of translation, both literal and metaphorical, becomes an effort to recover lost narratives, to bridge the space between past and present.  Perhaps this is why paper has remained a favored medium for both resistance and remembrance: in its quiet unassuming nature, it bears witness, absorbs longing, and, like the letter left behind, waits to be read, understood, and remembered.