Simple Recipes (2 page)

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.

Shaking her head, my mother takes her jacket off. It slides from her shoulders. She says something to my father in the language
I can’t understand. He
merely shrugs his shoulders. And then he replies, and I think his words are so familiar, as if they are words I should know,
as if maybe I did know them once but then I forgot them. The language that they speak is full of soft vowels, words running
together so that I can’t make out the gaps where they pause for breath.

My mother told me once about guilt. Her own guilt she held in the palm of her hands, like an offering. But your guilt is different,
she said. You do not need to hold on to it. Imagine this, she said, her hands running along my forehead, then up into my hair.
Imagine, she said. Picture it, and what do you see?

A bruise on the skin, wide and black.

A bruise, she said. Concentrate on it. Right now, it’s a bruise. But if you concentrate, you can shrink it, compress it to
the size of a pinpoint. And then, if you want to, if you see it, you can blow it off your body like a speck of dirt.

She moved her hands along my forehead.

I tried to picture what she said. I pictured blowing it away like so much nothing, just these little pieces that didn’t mean
anything, this complicity that I could magically walk away from. She made me believe in the strength of my own thoughts, as
if I could make appear what had never existed. Or turn it around. Flip
it over so many times you just lose sight of it, you lose the tail end and the whole thing disappears into smoke.

My father pushes at the fish with the edge of his spoon. Underneath, the meat is white and the juice runs down along the side.
He lifts a piece and lowers it carefully onto my plate.

Once more, his spoon breaks skin. Gingerly, my father lifts another piece and moves it towards my brother.

“I don’t want it,” my brother says.

My father’s hand wavers. “Try it,” he says, smiling. “Take a wok on the wild side.”

“No.”

My father sighs and places the piece on my mother’s plate. We eat in silence, scraping our spoons across the dishes. My parents
use chopsticks, lifting their bowls and motioning the food into their mouths. The smell of food fills the room.

Savoring each mouthful, my father eats slowly, head tuned to the flavors in his mouth. My mother takes her glasses off, the
lenses fogged, and lays them on the table. She eats with her head bowed down, as if in prayer.

Lifting a stem of cauliflower to his lips, my brother sighs deeply. He chews, and then his face
changes. I have a sudden picture of him drowning, his hair waving like grass. He coughs, spitting the mouthful back onto his
plate. Another cough. He reaches for his throat, choking.

My father slams his chopsticks down on the table. In a single movement, he reaches across, grabbing my brother by the shoulder.
“I have tried,” he is saying. “I don’t know what kind of son you are. To be so ungrateful,” His other hand sweeps by me and
bruises into my brother’s face.

My mother flinches. My brother’s face is red and his mouth is open. His eyes are wet.

Still coughing, he grabs a fork, tines aimed at my father, and then in an unthinking moment, he heaves it at him. It strikes
my father in the chest and drops.

“I hate you! You’re just an asshole, you’re just a fucking asshole chink!” My brother holds his plate in his hands. He smashes
it down and his food scatters across the table. He is coughing and spitting. “I wish you weren’t my father! I wish you were
dead.”

My father’s hand falls again. This time pounding downwards. I close my eyes. All I can hear is someone screaming. There is
a loud voice. I stand awkwardly, my hands covering my eyes.

“Go to your room,” my father says, his voice shaking.

And I think he is talking to me so I remove my hands.

But he is looking at my brother. And my brother is looking at him, his small chest heaving.

A few minutes later, my mother begins clearing the table, face weary as she scrapes the dishes one by one over the garbage.

I move away from my chair, past my mother, onto the carpet, and up the stairs.

Outside my brother’s bedroom, I crouch against the wall. When I step forward and look, I see my father holding the bamboo
pole between his hands. The pole is smooth. The long grains, fine as hair, are pulled together, at intervals, jointed. My
brother is lying on the floor, as if thrown down and dragged there. My father raises the pole into the air.

I want to cry out. I want to move into the room between them, but I can’t.

It is like a tree falling, beginning to move, a slow arc through the air.

The bamboo drops silently. It rips the skin on my brother’s back. I cannot hear any sound. A line of blood edges quickly across
his body.

The pole rises and again comes down. I am afraid of bones breaking.

My father lifts his arms once more.