《手中纸，心中爱》英文原文（转）
2012-11-09 20:13阅读：
The Paper Menagerie
by Ken Liu
One of my earliest memories starts with me sobbing. I refused to be
soothed no matter what Mom and Dad tried.
Dad gave up and left the bedroom, but Mom took me into the kitchen
and sat me down at the breakfast table.
“Kan, kan,” she said, as she pulled a sheet of wrapping paper from
on top of the fridge. For years, Mom carefully sliced open the
wrappings around Christmas gifts and saved them on top of the
fridge in a thick stack.
She set the paper down, plain side facing up, and began to fold it.
I stopped crying and watched her, curious.
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.
“Kan,” she said. “Laohu.” She put her hands down on the table and
let go.
A little paper tiger stood on the table, the size of two fists pl
aced together. The skin of the tiger was the pattern on the
wrapping paper, white background with red candy canes and green
Christmas trees.
I reached out to Mom’s creation. Its tail twitched, and it pounced
playfully at my finger. “Rawrr-sa,” it growled, the sound somewhere
between a cat and rustling newspapers.
I laughed, startled, and stroked its back with an index finger. The
paper tiger vibrated under my finger, purring.
“Zhe jiao zhezhi,” Mom said. This is called origami.
I didn’t know this at the time, but Mom’s kind was special. She
breathed into them so that they shared her breath, and thus moved
with her life. This was her magic.
#
Dad had picked Mom out of a catalog.
One time, when I was in high school, I asked Dad about the details.
He was trying to get me to speak to Mom again.
He had signed up for the introduction service back in the spring of
1973. Flipping through the pages steadily, he had spent no more
than a few seconds on each page until he saw the picture of
Mom.
I’ve never seen this picture. Dad described it: Mom was sitting in
a chair, her side to the camera, wearing a tight green silk
cheongsam. Her head was turned to the camera so that her long black
hair was draped artfully over her chest and shoulder. She looked
out at him with the eyes of a calm child.
“That was the last page of the catalog I saw,” he said.
The catalog said she was eighteen, loved to dance, and spoke good
English because she was from Hong Kong. None of these facts turned
out to be true.
He wrote to her, and the company passed their messages back and
forth. Finally, he flew to Hong Kong to meet her.
“The people at the company had been writing her responses. She
didn’t know any English other than ‘hello’ and ‘goodbye.’”
What kind of woman puts herself into a catalog so that she can be
bought? The high school me thought I knew so much about everything.
Contempt felt good, like wine.
Instead of storming into the office to demand his money back, he
paid a waitress at the hotel restaurant to translate for
them.
“She would look at me, her eyes halfway between scared and hopeful,
while I spoke. And when the girl began translating what I said,
she’d start to smile slowly.”
He flew back to Connecticut and began to apply for the papers for
her to come to him. I was born a year later, in the Year of the
Tiger.
#
At my request, Mom also made a goat, a deer, and a water buffalo
out of wrapping paper. They would run around the living room while
Laohu chased after them, growling. When he caught them he would
press down until the air went out of them and they became just
flat, folded-up pieces of paper. I would then have to blow into
them to re-inflate them so they could run around some more.
Sometimes, the animals got into trouble. Once, the water buffalo
jumped into a dish of soy sauce on the table at dinner. (He wanted
to wallow, like a real water buffalo.) I picked him out quickly but
the capillary action had already pulled the dark liquid high up
into his legs. The sauce-softened legs would not hold him up, and
he collapsed onto the table. I dried him out in the sun, but his
legs became crooked after that, and he ran around with a limp. Mom
eventually wrapped his legs in saran wrap so that he could wallow
to his heart’s content (just not in soy sauce).
Also, Laohu liked to pounce at sparrows when he and I played in the
backyard. But one time, a cornered bird struck back in desperation
and tore his ear. He whimpered and winced as I held him and Mom
patched his ear together with tape. He avoided birds after
that.
And then one day, I saw a TV documentary about sharks and asked Mom
for one of my own. She made the shark, but he flapped about on the
table unhappily. I filled the sink with water, and put him in. He
swam around and around happily. However, after a while he became
soggy and translucent, and slowly sank to the bottom, the folds
coming undone. I reached in to rescue him, and all I ended up with
was a wet piece of paper.
Laohu put his front paws together at the edge of the sink and
rested his head on them. Ears drooping, he made a low growl in his
throat that made me feel guilty.
Mom made a new shark for me, this time out of tin foil. The shark
lived happily in a large goldfish bowl. Laohu and I liked to sit
next to the bowl to watch the tin foil shark chasing the goldfish,
Laohu sticking his face up against the bowl on the other side so
that I saw his eyes, magnified to the size of coffee cups, staring
at me from across the bowl.
#
When I was ten, we moved to a new house across town. Two of the
women neighbors came by to welcome us. Dad served them drinks and
then apologized for having to run off to the utility company to
straighten out the prior owner’s bills. “Make yourselves at home.
My wife doesn’t speak much English, so don’t think she’s being rude
for not talking to you.”
While I read in the dining room, Mom unpacked in the kitchen. The
neighbors conversed in the living room, not trying to be
particularly quiet.
“He see***ike a normal enough man. Why did he do that?”
“Something about the mixing never seems right. The child looks
unfinished. Slanty eyes, white face. A little monster.”
“Do you think he can speak English?”
The women hushed. After a while they came into the dining
room.
“Hello there! What’s your name?”
“Jack,” I said.
“That doesn’t sound very Chinesey.”
Mom came into the dining room then. She smiled at the women. The
three of them stood in a triangle around me, smiling and nodding at
each other, with nothing to say, until Dad came back.
#
Mark, one of the neighborhood boys, came over with his Star Wars
action figures. Obi-Wan Kenobi’s lightsaber lit up and he could
swing his arms and say, in a tinny voice, “Use the Force!” I didn’t
think the figure looked much like the real Obi-Wan at all.
Together, we watched him repeat this performance five times on the
coffee table. “Can he do anything else?” I asked.
Mark was annoyed by my question. “Look at all the details,” he
said.
I looked at the details. I wasn’t sure what I was supposed to
say.
Mark was disappointed by my response. “Show me your toys.”
I didn’t have any toys except my paper menagerie. I brought Laohu
out from my bedroom. By then he was very worn, patched all over
with tape and glue, evidence of the years of repairs Mom and I had
done on him. He was no longer as nimble and sure-footed as before.
I sat him down on the coffee table. I could hear the skittering
steps of the other animals behind in the hallway, timidly peeking
into the living room.
“Xiao laohu,” I said, and stopped. I switched to English. “This is
Tiger.” Cautiously, Laohu strode up and purred at Mark, sniffing
his hands.
Mark examined the Christmas-wrap pattern of Laohu’s skin. “That
doesn’t look like a tiger at all. Your Mom makes toys for you from
trash?”
I had never thought of Laohu as trash. But looking at him now, he
was really just a piece of wrapping paper.
Mark pushed Obi-Wan’s head again. The lightsaber flashed; he moved
his arms up and down. “Use the Force!”
Laohu turned and pounced, knocking the plastic figure off the
table. It hit the floor and broke, and Obi-Wan’s head rolled under
the couch. “Rawwww,” Laohu laughed. I joined him.
Mark punched me, hard. “This was very expensive! You can’t even
find it in the stores now. It probably cost more than what your dad
paid for your mom!”
I stumbled and fell to the floor. Laohu growled and leapt at Mark’s
face.
Mark screamed, more out of fear and surprise than pain. Laohu was
only made of paper, after all.
Mark grabbed Laohu and his snarl was choked off as Mark crumpled
him in his hand and tore him in half. He balled up the two pieces
of paper and threw them at me. “Here’s your stupid cheap Chinese
garbage.”
After Mark left, I spent a long time trying, without success, to
tape together the pieces, smooth out the paper, and follow the
creases to refold Laohu. Slowly, the other animals came into the
living room and gathered around us, me and the torn wrapping paper
that used to be Laohu.
#
My fight with Mark didn’t end there. Mark was popular at school. I
never want to think again about the two weeks that followed.
I came home that Friday at the end of the two weeks. “Xuexiao hao
ma?” Mom asked. I said nothing and went to the bathroom. I looked
into the mirror. I look nothing like her, nothing.
At dinner I asked Dad, “Do I have a chink face?”
Dad put down his chopsticks. Even though I had never told him what
happened in school, he seemed to understand. He closed his eyes and
rubbed the bridge of his nose. “No, you don’t.”
Mom looked at Dad, not understanding. She looked back at me. “Sha
jiao chink?”
“English,” I said. “Speak English.”
She tried. “What happen?”
I pushed the chopsticks and the bowl before me away: stir-fried
green peppers with five-spice beef. “We should eat American
food.”
Dad tried to reason. “A lot of families cook Chinese
sometimes.”
“We are not other families.” I looked at him. Other families don’t
have moms who don’t belong.
He looked away. And then he put a hand on Mom’s shoulder. “I’ll get
you a cookbook.”
Mom turned to me. “Bu haochi?”
“English,” I said, raising my voice. “Speak English.”
Mom reached out to touch my forehead, feeling for my temperature.
“Fashao la?”
I brushed her hand away. “I’m fine. Speak English!” I was
shouting.
“Speak English to him,” Dad said to Mom. “You knew this was going
to happen some day. What did you expect?”
Mom dropped her hands to her side. She sat, looking from Dad to me,
and back to Dad again. She tried to speak, stopped, and tried
again, and stopped again.
“You have to,” Dad said. “I’ve been too easy on you. Jack needs to
fit in.”
Mom looked at him. “If I say ‘love,’ I feel here.” She pointed to
her lips. “If I say ‘ai,‘ I feel here.” She put her hand over her
heart.
Dad shook his head. “You are in America.”
Mom hunched down in her seat, looking like the water buffalo when
Laohu used to pounce on him and squeeze the air of life out of
him.
“And I want some real toys.”
#
Dad bought me a full set of Star Wars action figures. I gave the
Obi-Wan Kenobi to Mark.
I packed the paper menagerie in a large shoebox and put it under
the bed.
The next morning, the animals had escaped and took over their old
favorite spots in my room. I caught them all and put them back into
the shoebox, taping the lid shut. But the animals made so much
noise in the box that I finally shoved it into the corner of the
attic as far away from my room as possible.
If Mom spoke to me in Chinese, I refused to answer her. After a
while, she tried to use more English. But her accent and broken
sentences embarrassed me. I tried to correct her. Eventually, she
stopped speaking altogether if I were around.
Mom began to mime things if she needed to let me know something.
She tried to hug me the way she saw American mothers did 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.
Mom learned to cook American style. I played video games and
studied French.
Every once in a while, I would see her at the kitchen table
studying the plain side of a sheet of wrapping paper. Later a new
paper animal would appear on my nightstand and try to cuddle up to
me. I caught them, squeezed them until the air went out of them,
and then stuffed them away in the box in the attic.
Mom finally stopped making the animals when I was in high school.
By then her English was much better, but I was already at that age
when I wasn’t interested in what she had to say whatever language
she used.
Sometimes, when I came home and saw her tiny body busily moving
about in the kitchen, singing a song in Chinese to herself, it was
hard for me to believe that she gave birth to me. We had nothing in
common. She might as well be from the moon. I would hurry on to my
room, where I could continue my all-American pursuit of
happiness.
#
Dad and I stood, one on each side of Mom, lying on the hospital
bed. She was not yet even forty, but she looked much older.
For years she had refused to go to the doctor for the pain inside
her that she said was no big deal. By the time an ambulance finally
carried her in, the cancer had spread far beyond the limits of
surgery.
My mind was not in the room. It was the middle of the on-campus
recruiting season, and I was focused on resumes, transcripts, and
strategically constructed interview schedules. I schemed about how
to lie to the corporate recruiters most effectively so that they’ll
offer to buy me. I understood intellectually that it was terrible
to think about this while your mother lay dying. But that
understanding didn’t mean I could change how I felt.
She was conscious. Dad held her left hand with both of his own. He
leaned down to kiss her forehead. He seemed weak and old in a way
that startled me. I realized that I knew almost as little about Dad
as I did about Mom.
Mom smiled at him. “I’m fine.”
She turned to me, still smiling. “I know you have to go back to
school.” Her voice was very weak and it was difficult to hear her
over the hum of the machines hooked up to her. “Go. Don’t worry
about me. This is not a big deal. Just do well in school.”
I reached out to touch her hand, because I thought that was what I
was supposed to do. I was relieved. I was already thinking about
the flight back, and the bright California sunshine.
She whispered something to Dad. He nodded and left the room.
“Jack, if—” she was caught up in a fit of coughing, and could not
speak for some time. “If I don’t make it, don’t be too sad and hurt
your health. Focus on your life. Just keep that box you have in the
attic with you, and every year, at Qingming, just take it out and
think about me. I’ll be with you always.”
Qingming was the Chinese Festival for the Dead. When I was very
young, Mom used to write a letter on Qingming to her dead parents
back in China, telling them the good news about the past year of
her life in America. She would read the letter out loud to me, and
if I made a comment about something, she would write it down in the
letter too. Then she would fold the letter into a paper crane, and
release it, facing west. We would then watch, as the crane flapped
its crisp wings on its long journey west, towards the Pacific,
towards China, towards the graves of Mom’s family.
It had been many years since I last did that with her.
“I don’t know anything about the Chinese calendar,” I said. “Just
rest, Mom. ”
“Just keep the box with you and open it once in a while. Just
open—” she began to cough again.
“It’s okay, Mom.” I stroked her arm awkwardly.
“Haizi, mama ai ni—” Her cough took over again. An image from years
ago flashed into my memory: Mom saying ai and then putting her hand
over her heart.
“Alright, Mom. Stop talking.”
Dad came back, and I said that I needed to get to the airport early
because I didn’t want to miss my flight.
She died when my plane was somewhere over Nevada.
#
Dad aged rapidly after Mom died. The house was too big for him and
had to be sold. My girlfriend Susan and I went to help him pack and
clean the place.
Susan found the shoebox in the attic. The paper menagerie, hidden
in the uninsulated darkness of the attic for so long, had become
brittle and the bright wrapping paper patterns had faded.
“I’ve never seen origami like this,” Susan said. “Your Mom was an
amazing artist.”
The paper animals did not move. Perhaps whatever magic had animated
them stopped when Mom died. Or perhaps I had only imagined that
these paper constructions were once alive. The memory of children
could not be trusted.
#
It was the first weekend in April, two years after Mom’s death.
Susan was out of town on one of her endless trips as a management
consultant and I was home, lazily flipping through the TV
channels.
I paused at a documentary about sharks. Suddenly I saw, in my mind,
Mom’s hands, as they folded and refolded tin foil to make a shark
for me, while Laohu and I watched.
A rustle. I looked up and saw that a ball of wrapping paper and
torn tape was on the floor next to the bookshelf. I walked over to
pick it up for the trash.
The ball of paper shifted, unfurled itself, and I saw that it was
Laohu, who I hadn’t thought about in a very long time. “Rawrr-sa.”
Mom must have put him back together after I had given up.
He was smaller than I remembered. Or maybe it was just that back
then my fists were smaller.
Susan had put the paper animals around our apartment as decoration.
She probably left Laohu in a pretty hidden corner because he looked
so shabby.
I sat down on the floor, and reached out a finger. Laohu’s tail
twitched, and he pounced playfully. I laughed, stroking his back.
Laohu purred under my hand.
“How’ve you been, old buddy?”
Laohu stopped playing. He got up, jumped with feline grace into my
lap, and proceeded to unfold himself.
In my lap was a square of creased wrapping paper, the plain side
up. It was filled with dense Chinese characters. I had never
learned to read Chinese, but I knew the characters for son, and
they were at the top, where you’d expect them in a letter addressed
to you, written in Mom’s awkward, childish handwriting.
I went to the computer to check the Internet. Today was
Qingming.
#
I took the letter with me downtown, where I knew the Chinese tour
buses stopped. I stopped every tourist, asking, “Nin hui du
zhongwen ma?” Can you read Chinese? I hadn’t spoken Chinese in so
long that I wasn’t sure if they understood.
A young woman agreed to help. We sat down on a bench together, and
she read the letter to me aloud. The language that I had tried to
forget for years came back, and I felt the words sinking into me,
through my skin, through my bones, until they squeezed tight around
my heart.
#
Son,
We haven’t talked in a long time. You are so angry when I try to
touch you that I’m afraid. And I think maybe this pain I feel all
the time now is something serious.
So I decided to write to you. I’m going to write in the paper
animals I made for you that you used to like so much.
The animals will stop moving when I stop breathing. But if I write
to you with all my heart, I’ll leave a little of myself behind on
this paper, in these words. Then, if you think of me on Qingming,
when the spirits of the departed are allowed to visit their
families, you’ll make the parts of myself I leave behind come alive
too. The creatures I made for you will again leap and run and
pounce, and maybe you’ll get to see these words then.
Because I have to write with all my heart, I need to write to you
in Chinese.
All this time I still haven’t told you the story of my life. When
you were little, I always thought I’d tell you the story when you
were older, so you could understand. But somehow that chance never
came up.
I was born in 1957, in Sigulu Village, Hebei Province. Your
grandparents were both from very poor peasant families with few
relatives. Only a few years after I was born, the Great Famines
struck China, during which thirty million people died. The first
memory I have was waking up to see my mother eating dirt so that
she could fill her belly and leave the last bit of flour for
me.
Things got better after that. Sigulu is famous for its zhezhi
papercraft, and my mother taught me how to make paper animals and
give them life. This was practical magic in the life of the
village. We made paper birds to chase grasshoppers away from the
fields, and paper tigers to keep away the mice. For Chinese New
Year my friends and I made red paper dragons. I’ll never forget the
sight of all those little dragons zooming across the sky overhead,
holding up strings of exploding firecrackers to scare away all the
bad memories of the past year. You would have loved it.
Then came the Cultural Revolution in 1966. Neighbor turned on
neighbor, and brother against brother. Someone remembered that my
mother’s brother, my uncle, had left for Hong Kong back in 1946,
and became a merchant there. Having a relative in Hong Kong meant
we were spies and enemies of the people, and we had to be struggled
against in every way. Your poor grandmother — she couldn’t take the
abuse and threw herself down a well. Then some boys with hunting
muskets dragged your grandfather away one day into the woods, and
he never came back.
There I was, a ten-year-old orphan. The only relative I had in the
world was my uncle in Hong Kong. I snuck away one night and climbed
onto a freight train going south.
Down in Guangdong Province a few days later, some men caught me
stealing food from a field. When they heard that I was trying to
get to Hong Kong, they laughed. “It’s your lucky day. Our trade is
to bring girls to Hong Kong.”
They hid me in the bottom of a truck along with other girls, and
smuggled us across the border.
We were taken to a basement and told to stand up and look healthy
and intelligent for the buyers. Families paid the warehouse a fee
and came by to look us over and select one of us to “adopt.”
The Chin family picked me to take care of their two boys. I got up
every morning at four to prepare breakfast. I fed and bathed the
boys. I shopped for food. I did the laundry and swept the floors. I
followed the boys around and did their bidding. At night I was
locked into a cupboard in the kitchen to sleep. If I was slow or
did anything wrong I was beaten. If the boys did anything wrong I
was beaten. If I was caught trying to learn English I was
beaten.
“Why do you want to learn English?” Mr. Chin asked. “You want to go
to the police? We’ll tell the police that you are a mainlander
illegally in Hong Kong. They’d love to have you in their
prison.”
Six years I lived like this. One day, an old woman who sold fish to
me in the morning market pulled me aside.
“I know girls like you. How old are you now, sixteen? One day, the
man who owns you will get drunk, and he’ll look at you and pull you
to him and you can’t stop him. The wife will find out, and then you
will think you really have gone to hell. You have to get out of
this life. I know someone who can help.”
She told me about American men who wanted Asian wives. If I can
cook, clean, and take care of my American husband, he’ll give me a
good life. It was the only hope I had. And that was how I got into
the catalog with all those lies and met your father. It is not a
very romantic story, but it is my story.
In the suburbs of Connecticut, I was lonely. Your father was kind
and gentle with me, and I was very grateful to him. But no one
understood me, and I understood nothing.
But then you were born! I was so happy when I looked into your face
and saw shades of my mother, my father, and myself. I had lost my
entire family, all of Sigulu, everything I ever knew and loved. But
there you were, and your face was proof that they were real. I
hadn’t made them up.
Now I had someone to talk to. I would teach you my language, and we
could together remake a small piece of everything that I loved and
lost. When you said your first words to me, in Chinese that had the
same accent as my mother and me, I cried for hours. When I made the
first zhezhi animals for you, and you laughed, I felt there were no
worries in the world.
You grew up a little, and now you could even help your father and I
talk to each other. I was really at home now. I finally found a
good life. I wished my parents could be here, so that I could cook
for them, and give them a good life too. But my parents were no
longer around. 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.
Son, I know that you do not like your Chinese eyes, which are my
eyes. I know that you do not like your Chinese hair, which is my
hair. But can you understand how much joy your very existence
brought to me? And can you understand how it felt when you stopped
talking to me and won’t let me talk to you in Chinese? I felt I was
losing everything all over again.
Why won’t you talk to me, son? The pain makes it hard to
write.
#
The young woman handed the paper back to me. I could not bear to
look into her face.
Without looking up, I asked for her help in tracing out the
character for ai on the paper below Mo***etter. I wrote the
character again and again on the paper, intertwining my pen strokes
with her words.
The young woman reached out and put a hand on my shoulder. Then she
got up and left, leaving me alone with my mother.
Following the creases, I refolded the paper back into Laohu. I
cradled him in the crook of my arm, and as he purred, we began the
walk home.
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