When I was in the 5th grade, I read the book Sadako and The Thousand Paper Cranes, by Eleanor Coerr. The book is the story of a Japanese girl living in Hiroshima who falls sick with leukemia, the “atom bomb disease.” She recalls a legend that says if a sick person folds one thousand paper origami cranes, the gods will grant that person’s wish and make them healthy again. This book touched me so much, and I was only 12. I remember how hard I cried–harder, I think, than I’d ever cried over a book–and how much it inspired me to study more history and learn about the Holocaust. Sadako’s brave struggle with her illness inspired her classmates, and after her death they campaigned to build the Children’s Peace Statue in Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park in honor of Sadako and the other children who were victims of the Hiroshima bombing.
I’ve had a soft spot for origami ever since. I remember after I read the book and started doing the project I was assigned to do, I decided that for the required artistic part of the project I would fold 1000 cranes, too. I had a crush on a boy named Phillip, who apparently returned said crush because he helped me fold cranes during any free time we had–reading hour, recess, after school. He moved away that summer and I never saw him again, but he was the last boy to be truly nice to me between 5th and 7th grade.
When we went to the Dallas City Arts Fest a few weekends ago, I was walking through the Trammell Crow Asian Art Museum when my breath caught. There was a long glassed-in hallway that led from one room of the exhibit to another, and hanging in the spill of sunlight were hundreds, maybe even thousands, of paper cranes in all colors and sizes. It made me think immediately of Sadako and the legend of the paper cranes. I was very glad I had my camera.
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