Simple Recipes (21 page)

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 my 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.

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.

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

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.