The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories

It’s 1961 and Lilly Dyer and her family have moved to Taiwan after living in Texas, and she is having trouble fitting in at the school for American military children. Bringing an Asian lunch to school, the girls make fun of her for her smelly meal, saying she will have a “smelly gook baby” (75).

Lilly wants to get out of the house. She sees a water buffalo and, having always wanted to be a cowgirl, she leaps on its back. Kan Chen-hua and his grandson, Ch’en Chia-feng, or Teddy, rescue her. Mr. Kan teaches calligraphy but adds that he does some magic. He is a literomancer: he tells fortunes based on the characters in people’s names and characters that they choose. So, he does this for Lilly, explaining the context of the word “gook.” He also gives her a mirror to ward off the girls who are teasing her.

That night, Lilly reads some papers her father dropped. The following day, Lilly uses the mirror when the girls make fun of her, and they run when they see scary, ugly faces in it.

Her friendship with Teddy and Mr. Kan continues. Teddy tells her he’d like to play for the Red Sox someday, and Lilly finds that idea ridiculous, but encourages him. She likes the Yankees better anyway. When Teddy describes the American girl he’s going to marry, he says she will be blonde, or red-haired, like Lilly. Lilly asks about the signs on houses, which Teddy says read, “Beware of Communist bandit spies” (91).

Lilly wants to do more literomancy and asks Mr. Kan about the word “thalassocracy,” which she saw on her father’s papers. He divines form the letters that she was destined to come to Taiwan: “Ha-ha! It was fate that we should be friends!” (93). Mr. Kan tells Lilly how he took Teddy in when officials killed his parents for memorializing “228,” the date of a revolt in China that killed many citizens.

That night, Lilly asks her father what “thalossacracy” means. He tells her, it means a country that rules using its naval force, and she says she thinks Mr. Kan’s explanation was better. Mr. Kan had told her fortune via the word, as he hadn’t known it’s meaning, but Lilly doesn’t tell her father this. She reveals some of what she talked about with him, particularly that they don’t discuss the number “228,” which rouses her father’s suspicions that Mr. Kan may be a Communist spy.

The following day, Lilly’s father has Mr. Kan arrested, interrogated and tortured. When the men get no information from him, they bring in Teddy. Teddy tries to grab a gun, and one of the men kills him in the ensuing conflict. Mr. Kan cries and begs his interrogators to kill him, so they do.

Lilly’s dad tells her they are moving back to Texas. Lilly thinks about Mr. Kan, and wishes she knew more about his magic. Mr. Kan speaks to her in her mind, telling her she is destined to become a literomancer. Her father tells her that she’ll understand the sacrifices “they’ve made” someday, and marvels at the thought of seeing a Chinese boy playing at Yankee Stadium. Lilly thinks of Teddy, and she says she doesn’t like the Yankees anymore.