Simple Recipes

Madeleine Thien is a Canadian writer whose work explores the trans-cultural world of Asian art, politics, and family life within Canada’s diasporic Asian Communities. She was born in 1974 to a Malaysian Chinese father and a Hong Kong Chinese mother. Thien studied contemporary dance but switched to creative writing as an undergraduate in college. She earned her MFA in writing from the University of British Columbia.

Thien’s collection of short stories, Simple Recipes (2001, Little Brown & Company) was named a notable book by the 2001 Kiriyama Pacific Rim Book Prize. The book also garnered the Emerging Writers Award from the Asian Canadian Writers Workshop. In 1991 she was a finalist for the Writer’s Trust of Canada RBC Bronwen Wallace Award for Emerging Writers. The short stories in Simple Recipes explore the conflicts within both intergenerational and intercultural relationships. Family relationships are often at the center of her work as are the themes of home and trauma. The collection received the praise of Nobel Prize Laureate Alice Munro, who said, “This is surely the debut of a splendid writer.”

Since publishing Simple Recipes, Thien has gone on to have a distinguished career in writing. Her critically acclaimed novel Do Not Say We Have Nothing won the 2016 Governor General’s Award for English-language fiction, the Scotiabank Giller Prize and the Edward Stanford Travel Writing award for fiction. In 2017 she won the Rathbones Folio Prize. Her books have been translated into 25 languages.

From 2010 to 2015, Thien was part of the International Faculty in the MFA program in Creative Writing at City University. She wrote about the program’s abrupt closure and Hong Kong’s crackdown on freedom of speech for The Guardian. Thien also objected to the way the University of British Columbia handled complaints against a professor in the Creative Writing program. Steven Galloway, the professor, was accused of sexual harassment and sexual assault. As a result of the debacle, Thien asked that her name be removed from all of UBC’s promotional materials. She currently teaches in the Brooklyn College MFA program.

Plot Summary

Simple Recipes contains eight short stories. The stories together express themes of home, family, immigration, broken love, and trauma. The stories also move back and forth in time and place, revealing the fractured and troubled lives the characters lead. Many of the stories contain immigrant characters of Asian descent; but at the same time, in some of the stories, the ethnicity of the character is left ambiguous.

In the title story, the narrator, looking back, reveals the moment when she realizes that her unconditional love for her father and brother will not last. Her father, who was born in Malaysia, struggles with his immigration to Canada as he shows his daughter how to cook rice. She is a young girl, and she is close to her father. Her brother is not close to anyone in the family. While the narrator was born in Vancouver, Canada, the brother was born in Malaysia. Though her parents try to teach the narrator their language, she is not able to learn it. But worse, at least to her father, the narrator’s brother once knew the language but has forgotten it.

The primary action of the story takes place as the narrator and her father spend many hours cooking. Her father is proud of her academics and teaches her how to make rice. Her brother is rarely around, choosing instead to play soccer. He only joins the family for dinner at the last minute. One night at dinner, her brother and father get into a terrible fight. The brother doesn’t want to eat the fish her father has cooked, and this upsets the father. Cooking is his father’s favorite pastime, and something of which he is proud. When his son refuses to eat the fish, the narrator’s father loses his temper and beats the boy. Later the narrator checks on her brother, who sits with their mother in his room sobbing. She knows that her unconditional love for her father and her brother will evaporate as she grows older.

In the second story, “Four Days from Oregon,” three sisters are forced to deal with their mother’s infidelity and betrayal. When the narrator discovers her mom has been having an affair, she lets the information slip “accidentally on purpose” to her father. Tom, her mother’s lover, drives up to the house, and a dramatic encounter ensues between the mother, Irene, the daughters, Tom, and Irene’s husband. Tom and Irene grab the three girls and drive away. They are leaving behind their home and a house with squeaky windows and doors, and shattered glass on the floor. The three sisters, their mother, and Tom get on the road, and they camp along the way. The girls decide they hate Tom. The girls just want to return to their father, but Irene is torn. Eventually, Irene decides to continue forward, marries Tom, and raises her three girls away from their father.

“Alchemy” is a story about friendship gone awry. The narrator, who like all the previous narrators, is not named, and her friend, Paula, are best friends. But soon the narrator falls in love—her first love. As the love grows and becomes complicated, the narrator starts to lose interest in being Paula’s friend. The narrator discovers that Paula is anorexic and drinks too much. Then she realizes that Paula is being sexually abused by her father. When Paula disappears, the narrator is called into the counselor’s office at school. Though she doesn’t come right out and say it, she alludes to the sexual abuse that Paula experienced with her father. When the narrator leaves the office, Paula’s mother is furious that she’s told the secret. The narrator waits for Paula to write her, but Paula never does.

A dead lover is at the epicenter of a strained marriage in the story “Dispatch.” A husband has held onto his love for a woman who died in a terrible car crash. One day the wife finds the letter the husband had written to the woman professing his love. The wife has a decision to make about the marriage. In the end, she chooses to stand beside her husband while he grieves.

“House” is a story about two sisters whose mother, an alcoholic, leaves them, and whose father, who doesn’t want to care for them, places them in foster care. One day, the two girls take a bus to the old neighborhood to visit the house where they grew up with their mother and generally absent father. This is how they celebrate their mother’s birthday, hoping that she will return home.

“Bullet Train,” the penultimate story in the collection, is unique for its multiple points of view. It is a story about the love between Harold and Thea (who is 10 years his junior). Before they meet, Thea has a daughter whose father is a helicopter pilot. The helicopter pilot led Thea to believe he would stay with her, but then never showed up for the ultrasound and never returns again. Thea’s daughter, Josephine, has mixed feelings about Harold and her mother being together. After she grows up, Josephine travels all over the world, but bypasses the chance for love by staying on the move, even though wanting love was the very reason for her disappearance from home.

The final story, “A Map of the City,” is a challenging story that defies traditional structure and issues of time in short fiction. At the same time there are instances in this story that mirror the first story of this collection, “Simple Recipes.” This is especially true as immigration and home become, once again, the primary themes of both stories, as does the way language divides the family members.

Miriam, the main character, is the daughter of a furniture store owner whose store does not do well. Her parents immigrated to Canada from Indonesia. Miriam admires her father for owning the furniture store, but as she grows older, she sees it as the failure it was. Her father eventually goes broke and returns to his home country only to come back again to Canada where he lives on welfare. Meanwhile, Miriam falls in love, but she has problems maintaining her love. Her husband returns home to his family’s farm. When Miriam sees the destitution of her father’s life and endures his choice to attempt suicide. She vows to try again at love and her husband returns.