Paper Cutouts: Readings and Misreadings （也斯的剪紙：誤讀與閱讀）
Although this novel is short, it was not an easy novel to analyze. In today’s presentation, I will share how my thoughts about this novel developed.
Unable to understand this novel initially, I turned to the postscript for guidance. In the postscript, he makes a few important points about the novel.
The Postscript
In the postscript, the author tells us what inspired him to write were ‘illusions’ he saw in Hong Kong in the mid-70s (Ye’Si, 173). And yet, as he thought about these problems, the ideas in his books changed. As he observed Hong Kong society, he noticed how simply people thought about social events, as if everything was just a matter of right and wrong or good and bad. And yet, how can things be so simple? He believes that neither reality, nor literature, can be interpreted in such a simple manner.
He goes on to comment on the state of language in Hong Kong. Reminiscing a talk by Günter Grass (Ye’Si 175), who expressed worry over Hong Kong’s declining standards of Chinese because of Cantonese and English influence, Ye’Si believes that Hong Kong’s Chinese shouldn’t be purified. Instead of idealizing a rhetorically and grammatically perfect language, he believes that language should be tailored to suit our own thoughts, as they are projections of ourselves that we put forward (Ye’Si 175). If we conform our language to those standards, we will not be able to express ourselves fully, and will therefore confuse others.
And yet, he suspects this medium of communication. Can we really represent ourselves with words? (Ye’Si 177) One can believe in something with absolute certainty, and yet do the words you speak really represent what you think? Do these signs really signify reality, and can they really completely express what we see? Even if we do, does it mean the receiving end immediately gets it?
Moreover, people are complicated. After we assert something about them, they might do something that will overturn our previous assertions of them completely. Meaning shifts. Therefore, words and meaning are fragile.
Using the story of Narcissus, he wraps up his postscript. Like Narcissus, characters in the story fall in love with particular representations, which are not representative of the person as a whole. Concluding, he says ‘Paper Cutouts’ is not just a love story, but a story about seeing.
A Cultural Reading
Since he cited Hong Kong society as his initial inspiration, I tried to interpret this novel culturally.
Through the fantastic worlds of the two girls, he seems to have set up the dilemma. Being invited to Kiu’s home, he is confused by the rooms with unconventional bright colors, fake doors, cups that seem to have liquid but doesn’t have liquid in them, hallways that are actually the reflection of a hallway in a mirror, windows that seem to blend in with the wall. Faced with the contraptions, the narrator claims that ‘this room makes me feel like I am in a foreign country’ (Ye’Si 5). The author seems to be indirectly alluding to Hong Kong, in the mid-70s, where rapid development has spurred the flourishing of new buildings, neon lights, and the urban scene. On the other hand, walking through the traditional arts and antique-filled streets of Sheung Wan in search of Yiu, he finds her in a swing by a busy street filled with cars, swinging dangerously back and forth between the new and old worlds. (Ye’Si 19) Seeing her at the border of these two worlds, he empathizes with the pain of change Yiu experiences.
This reading seems plausible. Both characters are artists. Working for the happiness of their inner life, their occupation allows them to represent Hong Kong people’s inner lives, which culture reflects. As both of them having suffer from psychological ailments, their inner struggles seem to represent the pain and confusion Hong Kong is experiencing. Kiu loves drawing and talking to her birds while Yiu falls in love with an illusionary man and imagines that she was pregnant.
Moreover, the author barely describes the physical appearances nor the background of the characters. We can only infer what the character is like through their actions or words. Using single characters for their names, the characters in the book seem to be reduced to concepts represented by simple symbols, which the author may use to illustrate his themes.
Since the names of Yiu and Kiu rhyme, they are not physically distinguished from each other, and have similar personalities and habits, I thought Kiu and Yiu are meant to be read as different sides of the same person. Perhaps, Yiu, who is associated with tradition, is the past of Kiu, who is related to the modern world. Perhaps he is suggesting that Yiu is the past of Kiu, in terms of Hong Kong’s cultural development.
And yet, the cultural reading is problematic.
Perhaps the story does critique the vanishing of traditional heritage and modernization. And yet, the narrator is able to empathize with Yiu, who represents modernization. He defends her innocence when his coworkers accuse her of being promiscuous (Ye’Si 128).
Moreover, characterizing their worlds as ‘illusions’, he doesn’t take their cultures seriously. While cultures contain intangible values, they underlie ways of life, and are not just exotic and brightly color sounds and images. The author uses magical realism to describe Kiu’s room. His experience there is also described as surreal. He also uses magical realism to describe Yiu’s world. When they were in Wa’s home, the paper cutouts come alive (Ye’Si 53). The paper cutouts are only beautiful images to him. Although they are beautiful, he doesn’t understand what they mean (Ye’Si 51). When he hears she and her sister sing Cantonese opera, he feels as if he had gone back to a world of the past (Ye’Si 61), and that Yiu and her sister has the noble characteristics of Cantonese opera characters, which are antiquated and incompatible with contemporary values. Although he is able to venture into these ‘illusions’, he remains an outside observer. To him, these illusions are only attractive sounds and images, as he denies their values.
Secondly, both are disconnected from other people and live in a world of fantasy. For one, the narrator and his coworkers are not of same background and class as Kiu. Moreover, Yiu herself feels uncomfortable in her setting, among her family. There are many different classes, backgrounds, and groups of people in Hong Kong. Apart from the narrator, Kiu, Yiu, and his coworkers, there are the Indian reporter and the boss of Kiu, who is a foreigner. Kiu and Yiu cannot represent a dominant culture, as Hong Kong culture is diverse.
Moreover, although Kiu and Yiu have many similarities and seem to be doppelgangers, they are fundamentally different people from different backgrounds. Yiu represents the local, who is resistant to change, while Kiu represents the westernized in Hong Kong, who are uninformed about Chinese culture, despite they grew up locally. As shown from Yiu’s shelf, which contains old Russian novels, works of Shen Congwen, old Chinese poems, Comedies from the Mountain Window (山窗小品), The Song of Youth (青春之歌), we can see that she is highly influenced by Chinese culture. On the other hand, Kiu is inferred to be westernized. Suggesting that while Kiu can ‘understand the lyrics of Janis Ian, thinking that she can understand old Chinese poems is too much of an exaggeration’ (Ye’Si 9), we can see that Kiu is unfamiliar with Chinese culture. In the book, her coworkers have guessed that she is French or Japanese, suggesting that she may be of mixed heritage. As the westernized are usually of higher class in Hong Kong, Yiu and Kiu are too different in terms of class and background for one to develop into the other.
A Political Reading
The author suggested in the postscript that it is important to understand the different opinions in society. Since there is no clear good or bad between the values of Kiu and Yiu, I tried to interpret it as an attempt to understand the perspective of the pro-China and pro-Hong Kong political camps in Hong Kong.
Before Mao died and the Gang of Four collapsed in 1976, there had been both pro-Hong Kong and pro-China factions in Hong Kong. Yet, after the collapse, political opinion in Hong Kong after 1976 has become much more Hong-Kong-centric. Perhaps the author wants us to meditate upon the perspective of those who lean politically towards China. With the abundance of cultural artifacts in the book, I thought he tried to help us empathize with them through understanding their cultural alignment.
And yet, is there a ‘Hong Kong identity’? There are many different opinions and groups in Hong Kong. If Kiu is the symbol of Hong Kong culture, then Hong Kong’s culture would have been a that of someone mixed-blood, unversed about her roots, her cultural artifacts mere products of commercialism. This is too much of a generalization, as locals with a more ‘Chinese’ background can identify with Hong Kong culturally, but not China, especially since the first generation of Hong Kong born Chinese is starting to thrive in Hong Kong in the 70s.
Moreover, can Chinese culture be represented by mere paper cutouts? In the book, the narrator reminisces on a time when he went to interview a paper cutout artist because of the revival of the trend of Chinese traditional arts in Hong Kong. As he says, ‘At that time, on our friend’s bookshelves, pirated books about Chinese paintings and Dun Wang are added to Camus’ The Stranger, copies of ‘The Collection of Fish-Eyes’ (《魚目集》 卞之琳) pirated in Hong Kong’ (Ye’Si 45). The revival of Chinese traditional arts doesn't reflect the willingness to understand Chinese culture holistically - instead, it reflects the preferences of Hong Kong people, therefore of Hong Kong culture. As shown from the quote, the traditional arts are just another item to add to the collection of books from different parts of the world. As the narrator again speaks about his friends, ‘My artist friends…naively thought that they could find the essence of Chinese culture in these cluttered artifacts’ (Ye’Si 46).
The Art of Seeing
Like the revival of the arts, the infatuation of Yiu to Tong is based on a selective and partial view of him. She falls in love with a man, as depicted in the magazine cutting she has, a paper cutout artist who does not exist. The man she images is skinny, wears a cheongsam and wears gold-rimmed glasses. With an erudite image, she seems to associate him with a sense of virtuousness, a quality that is also associated with the opera characters from the past. And yet, Wa, the paper cutout artist who they met in real life, doesn’t have those qualities. He is thickset and makes paper cutouts as a side job. His wife is in mainland, who is trying to immigrate to Hong Kong. As the narrator looks for him later in the book, he was acting for the television, dressed in the ‘ridiculous’ attire of shorts and the top of his costume (Ye’Si 119). He also looked tired. Yiu seems to have fallen in love with the essence of Wa, but not Wa himself, who is not idealized and has many personal problems.
On the other hand, Wong falls in love with the concepts Kiu embodies. Disillusioned by the cruelty of life, being laid off, he is infatuated with her innocence and purity. As he tries to unravel her world through looking at the picture books she reads, the narrator suggests that ‘those colors promised him hope, those exotic illusions is a way for him to escape reality’ (Ye’Si 100). According to the narrator, to him, she is only a ‘westernized illusion’ (Ye’Si 141). After reading his confession at the end, Yiu says that she is not the person he describes in his confession (Ye’Si 163).
In the confusion of deceptive representations, how can we make ourselves understood in the modern world? Perhaps - words would be able to convey the truth. And yet, the narrator of Kiu’s world is disillusioned by the ability of words to deceive. As he says, ‘school’s training has taught me to believe in words. And yet in a night of overtime…people’s knives can’t help but slash in between lines indiscriminately, add a slight tone of satire, and you can’t help but feel: words are probably a pretentious clown with a layer of powder on their face, and another, without a true self’ (Ye’Si 32). Once, just for the sake of filling the page in the editing room, they cut a paragraph off a random woman’s magazine (Ye’Si 30). In the office, Ma reads an article in a farcical way, altering the meaning of the words and disgusting the narrator (Ye’Si 32). Not to mention Wong’s poems. He confused and scared Kiu by leaving her anonymous snippets of poems to express his secret admiration. Only after listening to him in person was the narrator able to empathize with him and feel his pain (Ye’Si 104).
The deception with words is why the narrator eventually resigns to become a columnist. As he writes:
‘I carefully took out my writing paper and prepare to write the manuscript due tomorrow. There are paper shreds on the table, with redundant or mistaken words: ‘no one understands me, no one cares about me’ ‘life is a process of compromise’ ‘I’d rather keep a beautiful image, rather than spend time with people’ ‘one moment of beauty is forever’…black words on white paper, narrow nad small shreds, they look so familiar, like they are slangs or mottos, I really want to find out why I don’t feel comfortable, want to break away from other people’s trite conclusions, I look at these words, look at whether they can help me, but none of them suit me. I can only put them aside...when I concentrate, I have the chance to sweep aside empty concepts, concentrate and think about every event’s general appearance. Then things become clear.’ (Ye’Si 131)
Instead of using deceptive words, he prefers to think clearly before he writes. And yet, can carefully meditated words reveal the truth? Wong writes a letter to Kiu explaining himself and his love to her. And yet, being uncertain of what is right and what is appropriate, his words meander into brokenness and form themselves again, revealing the fragility of his words. The narrator feels the fragility of his words, but also feels the hope and confidence in it (Ye’Si 151). Although he doesn’t know whether what he rights really capture his feelings, he is honest - and this is the only hope in which truth can be conveyed.
By doubting words, perhaps the author is doubting his own words that constitute this novel as well. Perhaps there is no sociopolitical message in this book. Perhaps, as I have shown through my process of thinking about this book, this book is about reading carefully, and thinking about the apparent meanings, opposites and polarities we see in this world.
Paper Cutouts
Let’s come back to the metaphor of ‘paper cutouts’. As we can see in this cover, from far away, you may see a plant. But if you look closely, there are birds, butterflies, houses hidden in the plant. How come the vase is made out of two people, and why do the plants seem to sprout out of the people’s heads? Perhaps this is about how people think, how culture is grown out of our colorful thoughts. Look even more closely. It is even possible to find meaning in the negative image of the cutout - Why does there seem to be two people at the side of the vase?
We use scissors to make these beautiful paper cutouts. And yet, these scissors can be destructive too. It was used by Wong as a weapon to kill his boss, because he wanted to ‘defend’ Kiu. Yiu also attempted to harm the narrator with her scissors. Our opinions - metaphorically presented by scissors - is literally ‘double edged’.
Bibliography
Ye’Si. Paper Cut-outs. 2003. Reprint, Hong Kong : Oxford University Press (China) Limited, 2012.
Unable to understand this novel initially, I turned to the postscript for guidance. In the postscript, he makes a few important points about the novel.
The Postscript
In the postscript, the author tells us what inspired him to write were ‘illusions’ he saw in Hong Kong in the mid-70s (Ye’Si, 173). And yet, as he thought about these problems, the ideas in his books changed. As he observed Hong Kong society, he noticed how simply people thought about social events, as if everything was just a matter of right and wrong or good and bad. And yet, how can things be so simple? He believes that neither reality, nor literature, can be interpreted in such a simple manner.
He goes on to comment on the state of language in Hong Kong. Reminiscing a talk by Günter Grass (Ye’Si 175), who expressed worry over Hong Kong’s declining standards of Chinese because of Cantonese and English influence, Ye’Si believes that Hong Kong’s Chinese shouldn’t be purified. Instead of idealizing a rhetorically and grammatically perfect language, he believes that language should be tailored to suit our own thoughts, as they are projections of ourselves that we put forward (Ye’Si 175). If we conform our language to those standards, we will not be able to express ourselves fully, and will therefore confuse others.
And yet, he suspects this medium of communication. Can we really represent ourselves with words? (Ye’Si 177) One can believe in something with absolute certainty, and yet do the words you speak really represent what you think? Do these signs really signify reality, and can they really completely express what we see? Even if we do, does it mean the receiving end immediately gets it?
Moreover, people are complicated. After we assert something about them, they might do something that will overturn our previous assertions of them completely. Meaning shifts. Therefore, words and meaning are fragile.
Using the story of Narcissus, he wraps up his postscript. Like Narcissus, characters in the story fall in love with particular representations, which are not representative of the person as a whole. Concluding, he says ‘Paper Cutouts’ is not just a love story, but a story about seeing.
A Cultural Reading
Since he cited Hong Kong society as his initial inspiration, I tried to interpret this novel culturally.
Through the fantastic worlds of the two girls, he seems to have set up the dilemma. Being invited to Kiu’s home, he is confused by the rooms with unconventional bright colors, fake doors, cups that seem to have liquid but doesn’t have liquid in them, hallways that are actually the reflection of a hallway in a mirror, windows that seem to blend in with the wall. Faced with the contraptions, the narrator claims that ‘this room makes me feel like I am in a foreign country’ (Ye’Si 5). The author seems to be indirectly alluding to Hong Kong, in the mid-70s, where rapid development has spurred the flourishing of new buildings, neon lights, and the urban scene. On the other hand, walking through the traditional arts and antique-filled streets of Sheung Wan in search of Yiu, he finds her in a swing by a busy street filled with cars, swinging dangerously back and forth between the new and old worlds. (Ye’Si 19) Seeing her at the border of these two worlds, he empathizes with the pain of change Yiu experiences.
This reading seems plausible. Both characters are artists. Working for the happiness of their inner life, their occupation allows them to represent Hong Kong people’s inner lives, which culture reflects. As both of them having suffer from psychological ailments, their inner struggles seem to represent the pain and confusion Hong Kong is experiencing. Kiu loves drawing and talking to her birds while Yiu falls in love with an illusionary man and imagines that she was pregnant.
Moreover, the author barely describes the physical appearances nor the background of the characters. We can only infer what the character is like through their actions or words. Using single characters for their names, the characters in the book seem to be reduced to concepts represented by simple symbols, which the author may use to illustrate his themes.
Since the names of Yiu and Kiu rhyme, they are not physically distinguished from each other, and have similar personalities and habits, I thought Kiu and Yiu are meant to be read as different sides of the same person. Perhaps, Yiu, who is associated with tradition, is the past of Kiu, who is related to the modern world. Perhaps he is suggesting that Yiu is the past of Kiu, in terms of Hong Kong’s cultural development.
And yet, the cultural reading is problematic.
Perhaps the story does critique the vanishing of traditional heritage and modernization. And yet, the narrator is able to empathize with Yiu, who represents modernization. He defends her innocence when his coworkers accuse her of being promiscuous (Ye’Si 128).
Moreover, characterizing their worlds as ‘illusions’, he doesn’t take their cultures seriously. While cultures contain intangible values, they underlie ways of life, and are not just exotic and brightly color sounds and images. The author uses magical realism to describe Kiu’s room. His experience there is also described as surreal. He also uses magical realism to describe Yiu’s world. When they were in Wa’s home, the paper cutouts come alive (Ye’Si 53). The paper cutouts are only beautiful images to him. Although they are beautiful, he doesn’t understand what they mean (Ye’Si 51). When he hears she and her sister sing Cantonese opera, he feels as if he had gone back to a world of the past (Ye’Si 61), and that Yiu and her sister has the noble characteristics of Cantonese opera characters, which are antiquated and incompatible with contemporary values. Although he is able to venture into these ‘illusions’, he remains an outside observer. To him, these illusions are only attractive sounds and images, as he denies their values.
Secondly, both are disconnected from other people and live in a world of fantasy. For one, the narrator and his coworkers are not of same background and class as Kiu. Moreover, Yiu herself feels uncomfortable in her setting, among her family. There are many different classes, backgrounds, and groups of people in Hong Kong. Apart from the narrator, Kiu, Yiu, and his coworkers, there are the Indian reporter and the boss of Kiu, who is a foreigner. Kiu and Yiu cannot represent a dominant culture, as Hong Kong culture is diverse.
Moreover, although Kiu and Yiu have many similarities and seem to be doppelgangers, they are fundamentally different people from different backgrounds. Yiu represents the local, who is resistant to change, while Kiu represents the westernized in Hong Kong, who are uninformed about Chinese culture, despite they grew up locally. As shown from Yiu’s shelf, which contains old Russian novels, works of Shen Congwen, old Chinese poems, Comedies from the Mountain Window (山窗小品), The Song of Youth (青春之歌), we can see that she is highly influenced by Chinese culture. On the other hand, Kiu is inferred to be westernized. Suggesting that while Kiu can ‘understand the lyrics of Janis Ian, thinking that she can understand old Chinese poems is too much of an exaggeration’ (Ye’Si 9), we can see that Kiu is unfamiliar with Chinese culture. In the book, her coworkers have guessed that she is French or Japanese, suggesting that she may be of mixed heritage. As the westernized are usually of higher class in Hong Kong, Yiu and Kiu are too different in terms of class and background for one to develop into the other.
A Political Reading
The author suggested in the postscript that it is important to understand the different opinions in society. Since there is no clear good or bad between the values of Kiu and Yiu, I tried to interpret it as an attempt to understand the perspective of the pro-China and pro-Hong Kong political camps in Hong Kong.
Before Mao died and the Gang of Four collapsed in 1976, there had been both pro-Hong Kong and pro-China factions in Hong Kong. Yet, after the collapse, political opinion in Hong Kong after 1976 has become much more Hong-Kong-centric. Perhaps the author wants us to meditate upon the perspective of those who lean politically towards China. With the abundance of cultural artifacts in the book, I thought he tried to help us empathize with them through understanding their cultural alignment.
And yet, is there a ‘Hong Kong identity’? There are many different opinions and groups in Hong Kong. If Kiu is the symbol of Hong Kong culture, then Hong Kong’s culture would have been a that of someone mixed-blood, unversed about her roots, her cultural artifacts mere products of commercialism. This is too much of a generalization, as locals with a more ‘Chinese’ background can identify with Hong Kong culturally, but not China, especially since the first generation of Hong Kong born Chinese is starting to thrive in Hong Kong in the 70s.
Moreover, can Chinese culture be represented by mere paper cutouts? In the book, the narrator reminisces on a time when he went to interview a paper cutout artist because of the revival of the trend of Chinese traditional arts in Hong Kong. As he says, ‘At that time, on our friend’s bookshelves, pirated books about Chinese paintings and Dun Wang are added to Camus’ The Stranger, copies of ‘The Collection of Fish-Eyes’ (《魚目集》 卞之琳) pirated in Hong Kong’ (Ye’Si 45). The revival of Chinese traditional arts doesn't reflect the willingness to understand Chinese culture holistically - instead, it reflects the preferences of Hong Kong people, therefore of Hong Kong culture. As shown from the quote, the traditional arts are just another item to add to the collection of books from different parts of the world. As the narrator again speaks about his friends, ‘My artist friends…naively thought that they could find the essence of Chinese culture in these cluttered artifacts’ (Ye’Si 46).
The Art of Seeing
Like the revival of the arts, the infatuation of Yiu to Tong is based on a selective and partial view of him. She falls in love with a man, as depicted in the magazine cutting she has, a paper cutout artist who does not exist. The man she images is skinny, wears a cheongsam and wears gold-rimmed glasses. With an erudite image, she seems to associate him with a sense of virtuousness, a quality that is also associated with the opera characters from the past. And yet, Wa, the paper cutout artist who they met in real life, doesn’t have those qualities. He is thickset and makes paper cutouts as a side job. His wife is in mainland, who is trying to immigrate to Hong Kong. As the narrator looks for him later in the book, he was acting for the television, dressed in the ‘ridiculous’ attire of shorts and the top of his costume (Ye’Si 119). He also looked tired. Yiu seems to have fallen in love with the essence of Wa, but not Wa himself, who is not idealized and has many personal problems.
On the other hand, Wong falls in love with the concepts Kiu embodies. Disillusioned by the cruelty of life, being laid off, he is infatuated with her innocence and purity. As he tries to unravel her world through looking at the picture books she reads, the narrator suggests that ‘those colors promised him hope, those exotic illusions is a way for him to escape reality’ (Ye’Si 100). According to the narrator, to him, she is only a ‘westernized illusion’ (Ye’Si 141). After reading his confession at the end, Yiu says that she is not the person he describes in his confession (Ye’Si 163).
In the confusion of deceptive representations, how can we make ourselves understood in the modern world? Perhaps - words would be able to convey the truth. And yet, the narrator of Kiu’s world is disillusioned by the ability of words to deceive. As he says, ‘school’s training has taught me to believe in words. And yet in a night of overtime…people’s knives can’t help but slash in between lines indiscriminately, add a slight tone of satire, and you can’t help but feel: words are probably a pretentious clown with a layer of powder on their face, and another, without a true self’ (Ye’Si 32). Once, just for the sake of filling the page in the editing room, they cut a paragraph off a random woman’s magazine (Ye’Si 30). In the office, Ma reads an article in a farcical way, altering the meaning of the words and disgusting the narrator (Ye’Si 32). Not to mention Wong’s poems. He confused and scared Kiu by leaving her anonymous snippets of poems to express his secret admiration. Only after listening to him in person was the narrator able to empathize with him and feel his pain (Ye’Si 104).
The deception with words is why the narrator eventually resigns to become a columnist. As he writes:
‘I carefully took out my writing paper and prepare to write the manuscript due tomorrow. There are paper shreds on the table, with redundant or mistaken words: ‘no one understands me, no one cares about me’ ‘life is a process of compromise’ ‘I’d rather keep a beautiful image, rather than spend time with people’ ‘one moment of beauty is forever’…black words on white paper, narrow nad small shreds, they look so familiar, like they are slangs or mottos, I really want to find out why I don’t feel comfortable, want to break away from other people’s trite conclusions, I look at these words, look at whether they can help me, but none of them suit me. I can only put them aside...when I concentrate, I have the chance to sweep aside empty concepts, concentrate and think about every event’s general appearance. Then things become clear.’ (Ye’Si 131)
Instead of using deceptive words, he prefers to think clearly before he writes. And yet, can carefully meditated words reveal the truth? Wong writes a letter to Kiu explaining himself and his love to her. And yet, being uncertain of what is right and what is appropriate, his words meander into brokenness and form themselves again, revealing the fragility of his words. The narrator feels the fragility of his words, but also feels the hope and confidence in it (Ye’Si 151). Although he doesn’t know whether what he rights really capture his feelings, he is honest - and this is the only hope in which truth can be conveyed.
By doubting words, perhaps the author is doubting his own words that constitute this novel as well. Perhaps there is no sociopolitical message in this book. Perhaps, as I have shown through my process of thinking about this book, this book is about reading carefully, and thinking about the apparent meanings, opposites and polarities we see in this world.
Paper Cutouts
Let’s come back to the metaphor of ‘paper cutouts’. As we can see in this cover, from far away, you may see a plant. But if you look closely, there are birds, butterflies, houses hidden in the plant. How come the vase is made out of two people, and why do the plants seem to sprout out of the people’s heads? Perhaps this is about how people think, how culture is grown out of our colorful thoughts. Look even more closely. It is even possible to find meaning in the negative image of the cutout - Why does there seem to be two people at the side of the vase?
We use scissors to make these beautiful paper cutouts. And yet, these scissors can be destructive too. It was used by Wong as a weapon to kill his boss, because he wanted to ‘defend’ Kiu. Yiu also attempted to harm the narrator with her scissors. Our opinions - metaphorically presented by scissors - is literally ‘double edged’.
Bibliography
Ye’Si. Paper Cut-outs. 2003. Reprint, Hong Kong : Oxford University Press (China) Limited, 2012.