Simple Recipes (16 page)

I have lived in Vancouver all my life. I seldom pass through the old alleys and neighborhoods where I
grew up, but when I do my memory astonishes me. How can it be that this street is exactly the way I remember it? I look for
the passage of twenty years, find it only in the height of the trees. But the street itself is the same, the crosswalk and
stop sign, the broken pavement,
step on a crack, break your mother’s back,
the glass storefronts.

When I was twenty-one, the familiarity of this city comforted me. I was waitressing then, working odd jobs. Every night my
girlfriends and I stayed late at the bar, lighting cigarettes, throwing shots of vodka straight back. Men came and went; it
was nothing. Some nights, we dropped our clothes on the sand and swam in the ocean. Bitterly cold, it shocked us sober. Other
times, I drove along the coast, the sky blacked out. I’d park and watch the big green trees rolling back and forth in the
wind and the sight would make me fleetingly happy. Legs stretched out, I would lie back on the roof of my car and listen to
the sound of my clothes flapping.

It was around this time that I met Will. He lived in an apartment down the alley from me, and I used to sit on my back porch
watching him come and go. I liked his gray eyes, which seemed dignified on such a boyish face. He had a tall, stooped body
and thin, wavy hair. Will has a straightforward sort of face, an open book. It’s the face of an innocent, no secrets in it.
Everything laid out, plain and simple.

One day I saw him coming down the alley on his motorcycle, a beautifully beat-up old thing. I walked out into his path and
stood in front of him. I said I’d seen him coming and going, heard his motorcycle late at night when I couldn’t sleep.

He looked at me, confused and a little embarrassed.

“I just have this feeling,” I said, swaying back and forth on my feet, “that we are meant to be.”

He looked at me searchingly. A surprised smile. “Who am I to argue?” he said, when he finally spoke. That was good enough
for me.

That night, he brought me a helmet and fastened the straps under my chin. “Through this hoop and then back again, just like
a backpack. Put your feet there,” he nodded at two pedals, “and watch the pipe, it could melt your boots. It gets pretty hot.
You’ll find that sometimes I’ll put the brakes on and our heads will collide. Don’t worry, it doesn’t throw me off. You can
hold on here. Lean right back.”

We lunged forward. I held on to his waist. The wind knocked every thought from my head. On every straight piece of road, he
hit the accelerator and we seemed to lift.

At a stop light, he turned around, flipping up his visor. “I can’t breathe.”

“No,” I said. “Me neither.”

“I can’t breathe when you squeeze my stomach. Can
you hold me here?” He lifted my arms to his chest.

Oncoming cars drilled past us. We leaned into a curve, highway veering up. I held on for dear life. He turned around, mouthing,
“Okay?”

“Okay.”

The palms of my hands were flat overtop of his heart. I worried I would stop his breathing, give him a heart attack. Sometimes
I could see his face in the side mirror. The back of his body, his white shirt flapping in the wind, was touchingly vulnerable.
One wrong move and we’d be flying. Me, him, and the bike coming apart in the sky.

When we stopped I was out of breath. “More?” he asked.

I nodded.

“What does it feel like?”

“Like I can’t get enough of it.”

On the way back to the city, the moon was low and full, a bright orange round above the skyline. The mountains bloomed against
sky, one after the other like an abundance of shadows. I remember watching one silent tanker floating on the water. We sped
over the Lions Gate Bridge, a chain of lights. I grasped his chest, kept my eyes wide open, and thought,
Things should always come this easy.

That night I dreamed that I would never wake up. When I did, startled, exhilarated, Will was half on
top of me, one bare arm reaching across my stomach, still sleeping.

Some facts seem, at first, to explain a person. Will’s mother died of cancer when he was young. His father died not long after,
an electrical accident at the plant where he worked. When I first walked into Will’s apartment, I thought it was an elegy,
a place of grief. But no, Will said he just liked to keep things simple. The walls bare, the furniture nonexistent. Will slept
on a mat on the floor. The living room housed his books, stacked in pyramids. He taught art history at one of the nearby colleges.

I admired his restraint. To me, his apartment was the embodiment of his uncluttered life, exactly the kind of life I aspired
to — both feet planted, eyes on the future. The present tripped me up. I was forever sorting out my bearings. Will, on the
other hand, was tuned towards a distant point. It seemed to me, then, that the troubles of day-to-day life would never burden
him as they did ordinary people. Will was also fearless and I loved this in him. He jumped headlong into our relationship,
throwing caution to the wind.

The wedding was fast, the kind that’s over in half an hour and then you’re outside, pictures flashing, thinking,
What just happened?
but overcome by happiness the whole time. During the ceremony we couldn’t stop
laughing. Even saying our vows. Wills face was lit up like a kid’s and I started laughing so hard I had to bend over, holding
my stomach, A bit of hair was sticking up at the side of his head and I reached out to smooth it down. We were all laughing
inside the church and even my mom, hair full of gray now, couldn’t find a moment to cry.

We had rushed into marriage. I always joked it was the motorcycle that did it, swept me off my feet, and he would say, “I
know it.” I had no words to describe how exhausted I was that night when I walked into the alley in front of him. Afraid of
everything. I thought I’d give it one last go, talk to him. At that time, something in my life was eating away at me. I couldn’t
shake it. And there was Will, always on the move. I should just grab hold.

My father was not present at our wedding. He called in the early morning, his voice weak and sorry. “A cold,” he said, “has
knocked me down.”

It did not surprise me, my father’s last-minute decision. At that time, he was living alone. When he left my mother, some
years earlier, he had stepped away into a different kind of life, one where family obligations no longer weighed so heavily.
In some ways, by leaving, he gave my mother and me our
freedom. We moved on with our lives while he remained in the background, the one we had never understood. Who took his own
failures so much to heart, he could no longer see past them, and obliged them by leaving.

My father rarely tried to contact me. I believed, then, that he had chosen his own circumstances and imposed solitude on himself.
In some ways, this came as a relief to me. When Will and I married, I was twenty-one years old and I didn’t want to take my
eyes off the future.

Years ago, it was a different story. My parents and I would drive across the city, going nowhere in particular, all of us
bundled into the Buick. Through downtown and Chinatown — those narrow streets flooded with people — then out to the suburbs.
On the highway, we caught glimpses of ocean, blue and sudden.

I was the only one of us born in Canada, and so I prided myself on knowing Vancouver better than my parents did — the streets,
Rupert, Renfrew, Nanaimo, Victoria. Ticking them off as we passed each set of lights,
go, go, go. Stop.

But nothing in Vancouver had the ring of Irian Jaya, where my parents lived in the first years of their marriage. In 1963,
the country was annexed by Indonesia. They outlawed the Papuan flag, named the territory Irian Jaya, and flooded their own
people onto
the island. My parents, Chinese-Indonesians, arrived during this wave and lived there through the 1960s. “There were no roads,”
my father said, on one of our long Sunday drives. “Nothing.”

My mother nodded her head. “The aborigines came into Jayapura looking for work. It was a rough town. Like a frontier. And
the fighting. Do you remember the stories?” She shivered, one hand floating down to rest on my father’s knee.

“People thrown from helicopters. The Indonesian army threw resistance fighters into their own valleys. There were many rumors.”

Despite the violence and the political tension, my parents missed Indonesia. It came out in small ways, their English interrupted
by a word of Chinese, a word of Indonesian. The exotic exclamations at the end of their sentences,
ah yah!,
or calling me to dinner,
makan, makan.
My mother told me that
irian,
a Biak word, means “place of the volcano” and that
jaya,
an Indonesian word, means “success.” But those were the only Indonesian words I learned. At home, they spoke Indonesian and
Chinese only to each other, never to me. My mother would stand on the porch watching kids race their bikes up and down the
back lane, and say, out of the blue, “But isn’t it so much cleaner here?”

In 1969, the United Nations led a vote, the “Act of Free Choice,” to allow the Irianese to determine
their future. The Irianese voted to become part of Indonesia. “Rigged,” my mother told me, her eyes clouding. “And everyone
knew it.”

My parents said the resistance attacked the gold and copper mines. The Indonesian army, unable to penetrate the jungle, swept
through villages. They burned them to the ground and people disappeared. My parents decided it was time to leave. They gave
up their Indonesian citizenship for good.

“In Irian Jaya,” my father told me, “the road stops dead at the jungle. If you want to reach the next town, you must go by
boat or plane. You can’t just get in your car and drive there.” My father was suspicious of Canadian highways, the very ease
of crossing such a country.

Perhaps he drove to test them. On those Sunday drives, we piled into the car, my father losing us in side streets, winding
us along highways. In winter, the roads were icy with rain but we hurtled through the dark roads anyway, gutters of water
shooting sky-high.

On Sundays, the furniture store was closed. Month after month, the old sofas and chairs remained unsold, and my parents fell
further behind on their mortgage payments. All the savings they had brought with them from Indonesia seemed to trickle in
a thin river out the door, down the street, to some place from which we would never recover it. My family’s luck, if a family
could have luck, was running dry.
This was the high point, the three of us packed in the car, my mother’s voice wavering thin and high over the words on the
radio. We didn’t know how peaceful we were. Only years later, when my father lay in the Intensive Care Unit at Vancouver General
Hospital, a thick tube in his throat to carry his breathing, did it strike me just how much we had changed and how far away
that earlier time had gone.

There is my mother, the navigator, a map of the city unfurled on her lap. Me in the back seat, watching my father’s eyes as
they glance in the rear-view mirror, the way he searches for what might appear. Now, with the distance of time, I look back
at my parents differently — I try to re-read their gestures, the trajectory of these events. If I change the way shadow and
light play on them, will I find one more detail? Some small piece that I could not see before.

In the first years of my own marriage, I could not look beyond Will. Our day-to-day routine was calming to me. He brought
a certain contentment to my life, a settled happiness that I had not yet experienced.

When he read late at night, I fell asleep to the scratching of his pencil, the sound of a page turning. Sometimes he would
nudge me awake, show me a photograph. The spires of the Angkor Wat, or a rock
painting unearthed on the Tulare River. Will has an open heart, he can see the mystery in anything. When he tapped a photo
with his index finger, I allowed myself to move with him, swept up in one idea and then another, losing myself in Will’s generous
imagination. I opened myself up to it, letting this old history settle over my own small past.