Simple Recipes

by Madeleine Thien

  Acclaim for Madeleine Thien’s

  simple recipes

  “Simple Recipes introduces a writer of precocious poise…. The austere grace and polished assurance of Thien’s prose are remarkable…. She has a way with the small, quiet image that sums up an inexpressible ache…. Her stories are peopled by fractured families; her characters are suffused with a kind of bewildered longing for domestic harmony…. The trajectories of Thien’s stories are unpredictable; though her characters dream of following simple recipes, they are themselves undeniably original creations.”

  — Janice P. Nimura, New York Times Book Review

  “A sense of longing, and then of rupture, characterizes these delicate stories from a thrillingly gifted new writer. I hope we will hear a great deal more from Madeleine Thien.”

  — Anita Shreve, author of The Pilot’s Wife and Sea Glass

  “Excellent and wrenching…. Thien’s first collection exhibits a very Alice Munro—like combination of delicacy and gravity…. In graceful counterbalance to the restraint of her prose, Thien’s portraits of these painful, guilt-ridden, love-drenched relationships are remarkably rich.”

  — Donna Rifkind, Baltimore Sun

  “A fine collection…. Thien shows a rare, measured, and perceptive understanding…. Families, we are often told, are the basic building block of society. Rarely is the subject treated with the wisdom and open-eyed compassion that Thien displays here.”

  — Martin Wallace, National Post

  “The stoic Canadian women who narrate Thien’s graceful stories of working-class families gone awry have a way of quietly bringing the reader face to face with astonishing moments of parental cruelty, neglect, or, worst of all, indifference. It’s as if these women have no reason not to be heartbreakingly low-key about childhoods spent in foster care, dealing with flaky moms, or warding off sexual abuse…. Her delicate prose turns out to be surprisingly resilient, holding these weighty familial betrayals aloft as if it were a luminous safety net.”

  — Mark Rozzo, Los Angeles Times

  “A dazzling debut…. The young women in Simple Recipes find their homes shaken by cultural and generational differences…. A reminder that home is not always necessarily where the heart is.”

  — Megan O’Grady and Valerie Steiker, Vogue

  “At 27, this promising young writer demonstrates a knack for characterization that makes the buzz surrounding her spare, rhapsodic prose understandable — and well deserved.”

  — Mimi Kriegsman, Time Out New York

  “A polished, remarkable debut…. Thien’s stories unfold with the complexity of life, rather than the predictability of fiction…. A tour de force of storytelling.”

  — Robert J. Wiersema, Vancouver Sun

  “Richly layered stories…. A lovely, composed sorrowfulness pervades Thien’s delicate yet powerful debut. Her characters, each struggling with a burden of love, fear, and guilt, revisit their pasts looking for clues that might free their present selves.”

  — Sarah Gianelli, Portland Oregonian

  “Thien’s wistful stories are universal explorations of family and yearning…. Their strength lies in the way she captures the distorted perspective of childhood and the confusion that accompanies the coming of age.”

  — Robert Weibezahl, Bookpage

  “Powerful…. A graceful debut collection…. The simplicity of Thien’s narration belies the complexity of her themes. She is a writer to watch.”

  — Publishers Weekly

  “A deft and mesmerizing feat…. Thien writes clearly and sparingly about all the muddy complexities of human connection; her words are so perfect and transparent that everything behind them is visible. They are like the whisper that stills a busy room.”

  — Jeanie MacFarlane, Toronto Star

  “In finely crafted, crystal-clear prose, Thien demonstrates what it is to face loss…. We come away with a wiser understanding of ‘the human condition.’ Could more be asked of an author?”

  — Bill Robinson, MostlyFiction.com

  “Thien’s writing is sparse and clean and often works on many levels. When she describes a father’s ritual of washing and cooking rice you know there is a life lesson there. These stories are heartbreaking.”

  — Ginny Merdes, Seattle Post-Intelligencer

  “Seven spare, eloquent tales of family ties that fray but don’t break…. Rich in detail, with memory serving to acknowledge complexity and to preserve what would otherwise be lost…. Truthful and suffused with quiet ache: a welcome collection.”

  — Kirkus Reviews

  “Thien joins the proud Canadian tradition led by Alice Munro, mining the territory of family dynamics and legacies with bold awareness and poetic delicacy. Parents and children, men and women, move toward and away from one another as they weather the various dysfunctions and heartbreaks of life, and then slowly, over time, turn guilt or anger into understanding, even acceptance…. These wise and richly wrought stories are a gem of a read.”

  —Beth Taylor, Providence Journal

  Copyright

  Copyright © 2001 by Madeleine Thien

  Reading group guide copyright © 2003 by Madeleine Thien and Little, Brown and Company (Inc.)

  Little, Brown and Company (Inc.)

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review.

  The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

  The epigraph on page vii is taken from Water Memory by Roo Borson (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart Ltd.). Copyright © 1996 by Roo Borson. Reprinted by permission of the publisher. The conversation with Madeleine Thien reprinted in the reading group guide first appeared at www.FictionAddiction.net, copyright © 2002.

  Hachette Book Group

  237 Park Avenue

  New York, NY 10017

  Visit our website at www.HachetteBookGroup.com

  First eBook Edition: October 2009

  ISBN: 978-0-316-08713-1

  This book is for my family, with love.

  A house is a simple construct.

  The builders die, but it goes on.

  And still every childhood matters,

  like mint grown in the shade,

  all translation is painstaking,

  and has no natural melody.

  The world may be old,

  but even then it was old,

  without end or beginning.

  — Roo Borson,

  from “Milk”

  Contents

  Acclaim for Madeleine Thien’s

  Copyright

  Simple Recipes

  Four Days from Oregon

  Alchemy

  Dispatch

  House

  Bullet Train

  A Map of the City

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  About the Author

  A Reading Group Guide

  Questions and Topics for Discussion

  Simple Recipes

  There is a simple recipe for making rice. My father taught it to me when I was a child. Back then, I used to sit up on the kitchen counter watching him, how he sifted the grains in his hands, sure and quick, removing pieces of dirt or sand, tiny imperfections. He swirled his hands through the water and it turned cloudy. When he scrubbed the grains clean, the sound was as big as a field of insects. Over and over, my father rinsed the rice, drained the water, then filled the pot again.

  The instructions are simple. Once the washing is done, you measure the water this way — by resting the tip of yo
ur index finger on the surface of the rice. The water should reach the bend of your first knuckle. My father did not need instructions or measuring cups. He closed his eyes and felt for the waterline.

  Sometimes I still dream my father, his bare feet flat against the floor, standing in the middle of the kitchen. He wears old buttoned shirts and faded sweatpants drawn at the waist. Surrounded by the gloss of the kitchen counters, the sharp angles of the stove, the fridge, the shiny sink, he looks out of place. This memory of him is so strong, sometimes it stuns me, the detail with which I can see it.

  Every night before dinner, my father would perform this ritual — rinsing and draining, then setting the pot in the cooker. When I was older, he passed this task on to me but I never did it with the same care. I went through the motions, splashing the water around, jabbing my finger down to measure the water level. Some nights the rice was a mushy gruel. I worried that I could not do so simple a task right. “Sorry,” I would say to the table, my voice soft and embarrassed. In answer, my father would keep eating, pushing the rice into his mouth as if he never expected anything different, as if he noticed no difference between what he did so well and I so poorly. He would eat every last mouthful, his chopsticks walking quickly across the plate. Then he would rise, whistling, and clear the table, every motion so clean and sure, I would be convinced by him that all was well in the world.

  My father is standing in the middle of the kitchen. In his right hand he holds a plastic bag filled with water. Caught inside the bag is a live fish.

  The fish is barely breathing, though its mouth opens and closes. I reach up and touch it through the plastic bag, trailing my fingers along the gills, the soft, muscled body, pushing my finger overtop the eyeball. The fish looks straight at me, flopping sluggishly from side to side.

  My father fills the kitchen sink. In one swift motion he overturns the bag and the fish comes sailing out with the water. It curls and jumps. We watch it closely, me on my tiptoes, chin propped up on the counter. The fish is the length of my arm from wrist to elbow. It floats in place, brushing up against the sides of the sink.

  I keep watch over the fish while my father begins the preparations for dinner. The fish folds its body, trying to turn or swim, the water nudging overtop. Though I ripple tiny circles around it with my fingers, the fish stays still, bobbing side to side in the cold water.

  For many hours at a time, it was just the two of us. While my mother worked and my older brother played outside, my father and I sat on the couch, flipping channels. He loved cooking shows. We watched Wok with Yan, my father passing judgement on Yan’s methods. I was enthralled when Yan transformed orange peels into swans. My father sniffed. “I can do that,” he said. “You don’t have to be a genius to do that.” He placed a sprig of green onion in water and showed me how it bloomed like a flower. “I know many tricks like this,” he said. “Much more than Yan.”

  Still, my father made careful notes when Yan demonstrated Peking Duck. He chuckled heartily at Yan’s punning. “Take a wok on the wild side!” Yan said, pointing his spatula at the camera.

  “Ha ha!” my father laughed, his shoulders shaking. “Wok on the wild side!”

  In the mornings, my father took me to school. At three o’clock, when we came home again, I would rattle off everything I learned that day. “The brachiosaurus,” I informed him, “eats only soft vegetables.”

  My father nodded. “That is like me. Let me see your forehead.” We stopped and faced each other in the road. “You have a high forehead,” he said, leaning down to take a closer look. “All smart people do.”

  I walked proudly, stretching my legs to match his steps. I was overjoyed when my feet kept time with his, right, then left, then right, and we walked like a single unit. My father was the man of tricks, who sat for an hour mining a watermelon with a circular spoon, who carved the rind into a castle.

  My father was born in Malaysia and he and my mother immigrated to Canada several years before I was born, first settling in Montreal, then finally in Vancouver. While I was born into the persistence of the Vancouver rain, my father was born in the wash of a monsoon country. When I was young, my parents tried to teach me their language but it never came easily to me. My father ran his thumb gently over my mouth, his face kind, as if trying to see what it was that made me different.

  My brother was born in Malaysia but when he immigrated with my parents to Canada the language left him. Or he forgot it, or he refused it, which is also common, and this made my father angry. “How can a child forget a language?” he would ask my mother. “It is because the child is lazy. Because the child chooses not to remember.” When he was twelve years old, my brother stayed away in the afternoons. He drummed the soccer ball up and down the back alley, returning home only at dinner time. During the day, my mother worked as a sales clerk at the Woodward’s store downtown, in the building with the red revolving W on top.

  In our house, the ceilings were yellowed with grease. Even the air was heavy with it. I remember that I loved the weight of it, the air that was dense with the smell of countless meals cooked in a tiny kitchen, all those good smells jostling for space.

  The fish in the sink is dying slowly. It has a glossy sheen to it, as if its skin is made of shining minerals. I want to prod it with both hands, its body tense against the pressure of my fingers. If I hold it tightly, I imagine I will be able to feel its fluttering heart. Instead, I lock eyes with the fish. You’re feeling verrrry sleepy, I tell it. You’re getting verrrry tired.

  Beside me, my father chops green onions quickly. He uses a cleaver that he says is older than I am by many years. The blade of the knife rolls forward and backward, loops of green onion gathering in a pyramid beside my father’s wrist. When he is done, he rolls his sleeve back from his right hand, reaches in through the water, and pulls the plug.

  The fish in the sink floats and we watch it in silence. The water level falls beneath its gills, beneath its belly. It drains and leaves the sink dry. The fish is lying on its side, mouth open and its body heaving. It leaps sideways and hits the sink. Then up again. It curls and snaps, lunging for its own tail. The fish sails into the air, dropping hard. It twitches violently.

  My father reaches in with his bare hands. He lifts the fish out by the tail and lays it gently on the counter. While holding it steady with one hand, he hits the head with the flat of the cleaver. The fish falls still, and he begins to clean it.

  In my apartment, I keep the walls scrubbed clean. I open the windows and turn the fan on whenever I prepare a meal. My father bought me a rice cooker when I first moved into my own apartment, but I use it so rarely it stays in the back of the cupboard, the cord wrapped neatly around its belly. I have no longing for the meals themselves, but I miss the way we sat down together, our bodies leaning hungrily forward while my father, the magician, unveiled plate after plate. We laughed and ate, white steam fogging my mother’s glasses until she had to take them off and lay them on the table. Eyes closed, she would eat, crunchy vegetables gripped in her chopsticks, the most vivid green.

  My brother comes into the kitchen and his body is covered with dirt. He leaves a thin trail of it behind as he walks. The soccer ball, muddy from outside, is encircled in one arm. Brushing past my father, his face is tense.

  Beside me, my mother sprinkles garlic onto the fish. She lets me slide one hand underneath the fish’s head, cradling it, then bending it backwards so that she can fill the fish’s insides with ginger. Very carefully, I turn the fish over. It is firm and slippery, and beaded with tiny, sharp scales.

  At the stove, my father picks up an old teapot. It is full of oil and he pours the oil into the wok. It falls in a thin ribbon. After a moment, when the oil begins crackling, he lifts the fish up and drops it down into the wok. He adds water and the smoke billows up. The sound of the fish frying is like tires on gravel, a sound so loud it drowns out all other noises. Then my father steps out from the smoke. “Spoon out the rice,” he says as he lifts me down from the
counter.

  My brother comes back into the room, his hands muddy and his knees the color of dusty brick. His soccer shorts flutter against the backs of his legs. Sitting down, he makes an angry face. My father ignores him.

  Inside the cooker, the rice is flat like a pie. I push the spoon in, turning the rice over, and the steam shoots up in a hot mist and condenses on my skin. While my father moves his arms delicately over the stove, I begin dishing the rice out: first for my father, then my mother, then my brother, then myself. Behind me the fish is cooking quickly. In a crockery pot, my father steams cauliflower, stirring it round and round.

  My brother kicks at a table leg.

  “What’s the matter?” my father asks.

  He is quiet for a moment, then he says, “Why do we have to eat fish?”

  “You don’t like it?”

  My brother crosses his arms against his chest. I see the dirt lining his arms, dark and hardened. I imagine chipping it off his body with a small spoon.

  “I don’t like the eyeball there. It looks sick.”

  My mother tuts. Her nametag is still clipped to her blouse. It says Woodward’s, and then, Sales Clerk. “Enough,” she says, hanging her purse on the back of the chair. “Go wash your hands and get ready for supper.”

  My brother glares, just for a moment. Then he begins picking at the dirt on his arms. I bring plates of rice to the table. The dirt flies off his skin, speckling the tablecloth. “Stop it,” I say crossly.

  “Stop it,” he says, mimicking me.

  “Hey!” My father hits his spoon against the counter. It pings, high-pitched. He points at my brother. “No fighting in this house.”

  My brother looks at the floor, mumbles something, and then shuffles away from the table. As he moves farther away, he begins to stamp his feet.