The judge once told me that there was a class at Yale called the Paper Cutter Cults of Indochina. It was taught by a leathery strip of a man who called his Cambodian maid his wife when he thought he could get away with it, and the only time the class was ever full was when he presented the section on paper wives of the Lac Dragon Kings. Depending on the lecture, paper cutting was effigy magic, ancestor worship, and another sign of the barbarity of the region, where paper was given the same accord as human life, given rights, given property.
