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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 placed
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 zhèzhi,” 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 ‘good-bye.’”
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 tinfoil. The shark
lived happily in a large goldfish bowl. Laohu and I liked to sit next to the
bowl to watch the tinfoil 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 seems like 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.”

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