Simple Recipes

by Madeleine Thien

“Is it too late?”

  She put both hands on my shoulders. I bent my head towards her until my forehead was resting against her chest. “You made it,” she said, very gently. “It’s okay.

  Her eyes were red and tired. She took my coat and then together we walked to Intensive Care. A doctor joined us and he started speaking very softly. Then we stepped behind a white curtain and I looked away, up to the ceiling. When I looked down, I could see the machine that monitored my fathers breathing. His heartbeat was amplified in the room, the sound like a slow dance, open and even, open and slow. There was a metal pole, silver hooks to hold an intravenous bag, A deep cut ran along his forehead, partially bandaged. They had fastened an oxygen mask to his mouth.

  Eyes closed, my father swiped clumsily at the mask, trying to dislodge it. His hand missed, then grazed it, moving the mask slightly to the left. He swiped once more, hitting the tube in his throat. I grabbed his hand and held on; it seemed very small and light. His eyes stayed shut.

  “It’s me,” I said. His hand felt loose and full of bones, not at all like what I remembered. My father opened his eyes and looked at me. He breathed my name. I wept, then. I couldn’t stop it.

  That minute, standing beside him, seemed to last forever. I was holding on to my father when the doctor came to re-adjust the mask. “He fell,” someone said.

  I nodded and then I pulled away. My father’s grip grew tighter. I brought my other hand to rest on his and I removed his hand, as gently as I could, until both hands were free. Behind me, someone lowered the blinds. A nurse came and unhooked an intravenous bag. I pushed through the curtain blindly. My mothers hands were on my shoulders. “Miriam.” she said, but I was already walking away down the wide hallway, through the double doors, walking until they let me go, through the maze ofhallways and staircases, following one colored line then another, as if to lose them. Past white walls and reception islands, nurses moving and laughing and watching. Will, I thought. If only Will were here. I felt my way outside, blind now, into the cold afternoon. The snow was dropping fast. I stood still, one ofmy arms reaching out to catch it, swimming in front of my eyes as if it had come loose.

  I remember my father had a calendar on the wall in his apartment. He used to cross each day off, one by one, as if counting towards an end point. For me the years were indistinguishable, unbordered pieces of time. But he was never blessed with such forgetfulness. Pills and alcohol, my mother told me. Until he lost consciousness and fell, cutting his forehead. He was on the floor eleven hours before someone found him. They had heard his voice calling from the apartment. The apartment manager unlocked the door. My father was dressed in a suit, like one worn for a wedding. The paramedics came. My father asked for his family, kept asking until he lost consciousness. Inside the apartment, the walls were bare. The calendar, the map folded up and put away. The balcony door ajar, letting the cold into the room.

  We stayed with him all night. Through the glass windows, I could see the snow falling. It wiped the landscape clean. It seemed that only we existed, my mother, my father, and me, as it had been on those long drives across the city, the miles we covered. The hospital staff walked in and out, passing through the periphery like figments of my imagination; only the three of us in the center.

  My father’s body was thin beneath the blankets. The skin on his neck fell in loose folds. Once, he used to be so careful, dyeing the gray from his hair. Now his hair had gone completely white, that coat of color disappeared.

  From time to time, he opened his eyes and regarded us as if from a great distance. Then my mother would take his hand, she would stroke his brow. It was the same as before, I thought. Where he was going, into another country or into another life, I could not follow. Yet when he opened his eyes I knew he was looking back for us. His eyes were no longer guarded and neither were ours. They said only the most essential words. No. Not like this. And the fear and doubt that I had hoarded and kept near, I finally saw them for what they were. Nothing at all The aftermath of memory.

  The intimacy of seeing his body in the bed, of listening to each private breath. His hands, loose and open. My mother beside me, one hand on the small of my back.

  Throughout that week, my father remained in critical condition. We kept a vigil, my mother rising and standing beside him, then I would take my turn. We kept our silence, as we always had, but this one was different. It was not filled with the unspoken. We simply existed in this tiny room, the lights dim. My father’s vital signs like handwriting, moving across a black screen.

  When the sun rose on the fourth day, my mother walked me to the hospital entrance. “You need to sleep,” she told me, touching my forehead. “This is the long haul.”

  Outside, she looked at the empty road. “He loves you,” she said. “He’s always had such dreams for you. I’m sorry.” She stopped, seeing my expression. “I’m not saying it to hurt you. I just want you to understand. You never could have disappointed him.” She looked away.

  I watched her turn back to the Emergency entrance, the doors parting to let her through. Then I walked through the parking lot, past the ambulances lined up and waiting.

  A thick fog had settled over the skyline. It wiped the sky clear of mountains and water. I walked along Broadway, past Main Street, where paper cups and newspapers littered the sidewalk. Past the sign that, years ago, my father told me was the tallest freestanding sign in the world. “There it is,” my father said proudly. “Bowmac. Biggest sign in the world.” He also showed me the narrowest building that still stands in Chinatown. My father, the tour guide who took me everywhere. He must have loved this city. Now it was coated with snow. A white-out, everything vanished, as if this were a game, as if I could bring it back from memory.

  At home, I unlocked my apartment and turned all the lights on. The message light was flashing, a slow red like a heartbeat, a siren.

  My mother’s voice. “He’s resting comfortably. They say we might be through the worst.”

  I stood listening to the message play itself out. The tape ended. My warm, empty apartment with all the lights blazing, my sadness like another body beside me, making me unsure, making me weep. If I could lay it all out, every detail, every gesture, would I come to peace with it, and then myself?

  Will would say, look at it differently. Turn it all upside down. Say that we let each other go as a gesture of love.

  I called Will from a pay phone outside the hospital. Feeding quarters into the slot every few moments because I could not stop speaking.

  I told him that it used to be that I would wake thinking of my father, his life as it was then, him alone in his apartment, living from hand to mouth. I would think of him and yet I could not bring myself to go to him.

  I can see now how my father and I were the same. Waiting until the breaking point. Then, for him, pills and alcohol one night, an act that made all the words fall silent.

  “I’ll be home soon,” Will said.

  Even now I go back, holding the details up to my eyes, magnifying the tiny pieces to find the one that speaks volumes. In the end, this must only be for me, my selfish love. Packing and unpacking it, to see if something different comes to the surface. I want to know because there’s hope now, and I do not want to make the same mistakes again.

  When my father became conscious finally, he was frightened, “You must leave now.” he mumbled. “Hurry. Call the police.” A side effect, the doctor told me. The drugs were making him fearful. When I stood at his bedside, he grasped my hand, said, “Did you call the police?” and I said, “Yes.”

  Anything seemed possible. The walls were shifting, straight and curved like an Escher print. My father lost himself in wild imaginings that none of us were privy to. My father said, “There’s been a mistake.”

  “Yes,” I told him. “I’ll straighten it out.”

  He muttered in Indonesian, Apakah anda pasti? and I answered, “No, I am not certain at all.”

  In the nights that followed, I slept on a chair beside m
y father’s bed. I woke up to the night sky, its flood of stars, and remembered the three of us traversing the empty roads on our Sunday drives. Those tunnels and arteries. It used to be that we could lose ourselves in them, before we came to know the city well.

  Each morning, my mother arrived with a cup of coffee in one hand, the newspaper in the other. She took the chair that I vacated, and read to my father for a short while. Slowly, my father came back to the world, his eyes open and full. I watched, from outside the room, knowing this moment would pass. But I drank it in, to see them side by side.

  Last Sunday, I drove out to Hastings Street and the neighborhood where I grew up* I looked for the old store, but the glass storefronts had changed too much. I had thought that what was so vivid in my imagination would call out to me in real life, as if in verification. Will, in the passenger seat, said perhaps the building had been torn down long ago. To make way for something else, a different building, a new development. He was right, I knew, but still I thought I should recognize the place.

  We got out of the car and walked along the sidewalk. It was fall, and the leaves had come down. The branches were stark and lovely. Near to us, on the sidewalk, a little boy in a blue raincoat ran headlong through the crowd of people. We could not see where he was headed, only that his arms were stretched out to both sides, like an airplane. I thought that someone would eventually catch him, his feet swinging off the ground, and lift him high. They would give him an aerial view of this street, these stores, all the people crowding along. On the hill, the cars struggled up the incline, halting and nervous, and the streetlamps began to burn. The little boy disappeared ahead of us, into the crowd. I knew, then, that I would not find it. But still I walked in the direction he had gone, at home in this place, though every landmark had disappeared.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Some of these stories first appeared as follows: “Alchemy” in the Malahat Review; “Four Days from Oregon” in the Fiddlehead and 99: Best Canadian Stories; “House” in the Fiddlehead; and “Simple Recipes” in Event and The Journey Prize Anthology 10,

  I gratefully acknowledge the editors, especially Calvin Wharton, Ross Leckie, and Denise Ryan, who published these and other stories in earlier forms, and whose support has been invaluable.

  My deepest thanks to Rick Maddocks, for his patience and encouragement beyond all measure; and to Amanda Okopski and Dean Bakopoulos, for a friendship that has spanned many years and many countries. And to Willem, all my love.

  Thanks to the Department of Creative Writing at the University of British Columbia for their many kindnesses. I am indebted to Asya Muchnick at Little, Brown, and Marilyn Biderman and Kelly Hyatt at McClelland & Stewart, for their encouragement and unfailing commitment. And finally, to my editor at M&S, Ellen Seligman — all my gratitude and admiration.

  About the Author

  Madeleine Thien is the Canadian-born daughter of Malaysian-Chinese immigrants. She holds an MFA in creative writing from the University of British Columbia. Simple Recipes, her first book, was selected as a notable book by the Kiriyama Pacific Rim Prize in 2001. She is also the recipient of a City of Vancouver Award, a Canadian Authors Association Air Canada Award, and an Asian Canadian Writers Workshop Emerging Writer Award for fiction. She lives in Vancouver, British Columbia.

  simple

  recipes

  Stories by Madeleine Thien

  A Reading Group Guide

  A Conversation with the Author of Simple Recipes

  Madeleine Thien talks with Kathleen Walker of www.FictionAddiction.net

  Where does your inspiration originate?

  It usually happens that I start with an image. In “House,” I had this idea of two girls sitting on the grass, waiting over the course of a day. People pass by them, but they just sit and wait.

  I wrote this story around this idea, trying to understand where this enormous patience might come from. After a while, I started to think that they believed that by staying still, by having faith, they could bring back some part of the past.

  Who are the greatest influences on your writing?

  Up until now, the greatest influences on my writing have been Alice Munro, Michael Ondaatje, and Michael Ignatieff. There’s something about the kind of stories they choose to tell and how they tell them — it reminds me that fiction can be transformative. It can change the way we view ourselves and the world around us. I’m also a great admirer of Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Chang-rae Lee, and Anne Michaels.

  In a number of your stories the main characters are children. Why?

  I think there was something about the way children interact with the world that I wanted to express. The children, or adolescents, are confronting the complexity of their experiences, trying to make sense of them. Despite their powerlessness, they are also trying to find a way to act with dignity, despite their young age.

  I remember, as a child, having a lot of time to think and to question, and to wonder and tease out the meaning in sometimes incomprehensible experiences. Maybe, as adults, we forget to do that sometimes. We think we already know how the world works.

  Why do you prefer working on short stories rather than a novel?

  At the time, short stories felt like the right form. Something small, but whole. There were thematic questions that recurred in my writing, and I wanted to put these in a form where there was tension, because that allowed for different ideas and possible answers to come to the surface.

  What do you want people to take away from your stories?

  That’s a good question and a hard one, too. For me, the characters in these stories experience some very difficult things. It’s how they incorporate those experiences into their lives, and into their sense of who they are as individuals, that is important to me. Somehow their experiences lead them to recognize the complexity of themselves and of other people.

  There’s a line that has stuck in my head from Susan Griffin’s A Chorus of Stones, “How much do we know or not know in those we love?” The characters are attempting to know and understand the experiences and the people around them as fully as they know themselves. Maybe this is impossible, but I think the attempt is necessary.

  The majority of your short stories in this book deal with the parent-child relationship. Does this come from your relationship with your parents?

  Maybe. I’m sure my relationship with my parents has influenced the book. Not in an autobiographical way exactly. More that I’m part of my parents, and also wholly separate from them, and that idea of simultaneous nearness and distance is something that interests me.

  Why did you choose “Simple Recipes” as the title piece?

  It sort of chose itself. It was the first story I wrote for this collection and I think a lot of the questions contained within it recur and are expanded in other stories. That story felt like a true starting point.

  The underlying theme in this work seems to be a longing for the impossible. Are there any reasons for this?

  Maybe that in order to change the world, you have to long for something better, something more equitable. This longing, this thinking about what we long for, might help steer us toward that kind of world.

  Where do you hope your writing takes you next?

  I’m working on a novel now that is set partly in British North Borneo during and after the Second World War. Memory and war have always fascinated me, and I hope with this book that I can say something true and meaningful for my generation and also the one that came before, who experienced that war and so many others.

  The complete text of this interview can be found at www.FictionAddiction.net. Reprinted with permission.

  Questions and Topics for Discussion

  1.Compare the relationships between the fathers and daughters depicted in the stories “Simple Recipes,” “Four Days from Oregon,” and “House.” How are they similar and how are they different in each story?

  2.In “Four Days from Oregon,” Irene chooses to take her three young daughters and leave he
r husband to begin a life with another man. How does the narrator’s view of this decision change over the course of the story? What do you think of Irene’s decision and the way she carries it out?

  3.The narrator of “Dispatch” does not leave her husband, even after receiving proof that he loves another woman. How do you account for her choice? How do you see their relationship evolving from the point that the story leaves off?

  4.In “Alchemy,” how does the narrator’s view of her own sexuality develop over the course ofthe story? How does her relationship with her friend Paula influence it?

  5.After Paula tells Miriam the truth about her father’s abuse, the narrator of “Alchemy” accepts a ride home from a stranger. She says, “I opened the passenger door and thought, this is what it all comes to” (page 71). What does she mean by this? Why does she take such a risk?

  6.What role do brothers and sisters play in one another’s lives in these stories? In “Simple Recipes,” “Four Days from Oregon,” and “House,” how do the choices of the adults in their lives affect the bonds between siblings?

  7.In “Bullet Train” we meet Harold and Thea both in their early lives and as adults. In what way does what we learn about their past inform the rest of the story?

  8. Harold and Thea in “Bullet Train” are one of the few happy couples in this collection. What distinguishes their relationship from many of the other relationships depicted in these stories?

  9. In “Bullet Train,” Harold doesn’t try to stop Josephine from running away, even though he thinks it’s going to break her mother’s heart (page 154). Why doesn’t he interfere? Is he right not to?