Paper Inventions

These days the trend is to go paperless. Still, paper is a marvelous (and need it be said, Chinese) invention, which in turn continues to spark creativity around the world. Here are three books that pay tribute, in different ways, to paper arts.

Stefan Czernecki's Paper Lanterns is concerned with the transmission of cultural knowledge from one generation to the next. Old Chen, the finest paper lantern craftsman in China, has two less than ideal apprentices. Entranced by the beauty and magic of the lanterns, Little Mouse accepts a lower status job cleaning after Master and apprentices. But, in doing so, he carefully observes and learns the craft. When the Lantern Festival arrives, naturally, Little Mouse succeeds Old Chen. Much about the book seems so promising—the allure of a beautiful craft, the rivalry and triumph of the modest—but Paper Lanterns does not burn so brightly. Text and illustrations seem flat and, well, caricatured. Unimportant to the plot, the cartoonish portrait of Mao, at once jubilant and eerie, captures the book's superficial feel.


Marguerite Davol's The Paper Dragon features characters, elements, and vignettes drawn from Chinese history, culture, and literature, but altered and combined in unexpected ways. The story's main character is an artist named Mi Fei. Apart from talent, however, Davol's Mi shares little in common with his rather snobbish and eccentric namesake. Good-natured, courageous, and clever, Mi is popular among his neighbors who seek him to confront the dragon Sui Jen. Like Mi Fei, Sui Jen would be unrecognizable to a typical Chinese reader who connotes dragons with water and benevolence. When Mi pleads with Sui Jen to cease scorching the tea bushes and other destructive actions, Sui Jen responds with three challenges in the form of riddles involving paper. Mi calls upon his artistic background and painterly talent to save his fellow villagers. In this test of wits, we are on Mi's side and share his goodwill by accepting Davol's Asian fusion approach. But she pushes us with the lesson of love, which reads like a sermon to children masquerading as a message from the ostensibly Chinese, and therefore Confucian Mi Fei. If you are willing to go with the intercultural patchwork, however, you will get the added pleasure of Robert Sabuda's illustrations. Each double page-spread extends to form long horizontal compositions of richly colored and finely executed papercuts. They are dramatic and dazzling.

Monica Chang's retelling, Story of the Chinese Zodiac, makes it into this trio because of Arthur Lee's illustrations, which are nothing less that a papery tour-de-force. You could probably retell your own version of the race among animals in which the rat outfoxes the cat with a fib and outpaces his competitors with a lift from the ox and thus claims first place among the twelve finishers. After all, you've rehearsed the tale every February (and the occasional January). But, I promise, you will see the race through new eyes because Lee has taken techniques of origami and kirigami to the next level in designs that are fresh and alive. These paper animals jump off the page and into our world. Some of you may also appreciate the bilingual edition in English and traditional Chinese.

Stefan Czernecki
Paper Lanterns
Charlesbridge, 2001

Marguerite W. Davol (author) and Robert Sabuda (illustrator)
The Paper Dragon
Simon and Schuster, 1997

Monica Chang (author), Arthur Lee (illustrator), and Rick Charette (English translation)
Story of the Chinese Zodiac
Yuan-liou,1994

(this cover is to the English/Spanish edition, but the illustration is the same)