Crouching Tiger, Hidden Heritage: Reading the Miniature in Edmund De Waal’s The Hare with Amber Eyes and Ken Liu’s “The Paper Menagerie”

Abstract

Abstract:The symbolic importance of miniature artifacts within anglophone literary works is a scholarly question that requires no particular defense, and yet the same is not the case when it comes to those miniatures of an East Asian cultural provenance and premodern lineage. This essay comparatively examines Edmund de Waal’s memoir The Hare with Amber Eyes (2010) and Ken Liu’s short story “The Paper Menagerie” (2011), multi-award-winning works that each reveal how the motif of the East Asian miniature need not be incidental or “decorative.” As diasporic writers, de Waal and Liu take miniature artifacts as locus points in a quest, by author or protagonist, to retrace an ancestral culture and/or history (under their pens, objects are not merely objects, but are possessed of a recollective power for the subject who owns, cherishes, and “handles” them). After some opening remarks on how far—or whether at all—a universal reading of miniatures might have utility for humanities scholars, the author offers close readings of the motif of netsuke, in de Waal’s case, and origami figurines, in Liu’s, so as to illustrate the centrality of material artifacts in each writer’s narrative.