51 pages • 1 hour read
Madeleine ThienSimple Recipes
Fiction | Short Story Collection | Adult | Published in 2001A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Part 1, Stories 1-4Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 1, Story 1 Summary: “Simple Recipes”
The narrator begins the story discussing the simple way to make rice, taught to her by her father when she was a child. Back then, she would sit on the counter watching his meticulous, almost ritualistic way of cleaning and sorting the rice. There are many instructions to follow and even now that she is older, she still dreams about her father in his bare feet, making rice in the kitchen. When she tries to make it herself, she lacks her father’s artistic, almost balletic technique, messing the kitchen, spilling water. One day he brings a near-dying fish home and puts it in the sink under the water. He plugs the sink so it doesn’t drain, and the fish can stay alive.
While her mother and her brother, who were born in Malaysia, play outside, she and her father watch cooking shows. Her father is also native to Malaysia. Though her brother is born in Malaysia, he soon forgets the language. As he nears puberty, he stays away from the house, kicking his soccer ball around.
The central action of the story takes place the evening of the fish. The narrator’s father keeps the fish in the sink and then drains the water. The fish is on its side in distress, it’s “mouth open, its body heaving” (8). At one point the fish leaps and hits the sink. The narrator watches her father take hold of the fish and kill it with the flat end of the cleaver. He then cleans the fish with his usual thoroughness.
Meanwhile, her brother saunters into the house. He is dirty from playing soccer. As he walks past their father, his face is anxious. Father continues cooking, heating the wok, caring for the rice, and frying the fish. Then he steams cauliflower. The narrator begins to prepare the feast for dinner, spooning rice onto plates, while her mother seasons the fish with garlic. She remembers when her mother talked to her about guilt. This guilt, she tells her daughter, is something she holds in her hands, while her daughter’s guilt is different. Her mother teaches her to concentrate on her bad thoughts and soon they will go away. The daughter is grateful for the lesson she learns; that her thoughts have power, that she “could make appear what had never existed” (12).
The fish is served, but the brother doesn’t want it. The tension between son and father is a felt thing. The brother is forced to eat the fish but when he puts it in his mouth, he immediately spits it back up. The father is furious. He sends his son to his room, following him with a bamboo pole. He beats his son over and over with the bamboo pole while the daughter listens outside her brother’s bedroom. Later, she and her mother go into the son’s room to comfort him. He cries with grief. At one point, the daughter feels her father’s presence by the door but doesn’t turn around.
After the mother has comforted the son, she walks downstairs and comforts her husband, speaking to him in his language. At that moment, the father seems to calm down. The tension of his act is released.
When she is older, the daughter reflects on her father. She remembers when her father gave her a rice cooker—but she never uses it. She realizes she has seen her father’s anger and his pain. She has a difficult time reconciling her love with the emotions and ways of her father, and the beating he cruelly took out on her brother.
Part 1, Story 2 Summary: “Four Days from Oregon”
The narrator in this story is the youngest sibling of three sisters. When the central action of the story takes place, the narrator is six years old. At the same time, as an adult she looks back on the events that took place when she was six.
She knows her mother is unhappy. Her father goes to work every day and her mother idles around the house. She leaves the family once but returns in a few days. When her mother is angry, she throws things. Her father calls her mother “crazy,” but the narrator can tell he loves her in spite of her moods and her angry behavior.
One day a man named Tom shows up. He brings the girls badminton rackets and a container full of birdies. The girls hit the birdies until all but one is gone. The last one, they take to the storage area beneath the porch and plant it in a cinder block, then cover the block in mud and let it bake in the sun. They can hear their mother in the house with Tom, laughing shyly and giggling. Later their father comes home and shows them a picture he has found of their town from a hundred years ago. The narrator tells him she can’t imagine the town without cars and buses. Her father sighs and tells her it’s inevitable. “It’s progress you see,” he says, “it comes whether you welcome it or not” (27). Later he looks at a photograph that he keeps in his pocket, and then tells the narrator he can see the old country, where he’s from. He looks out and their yard falls away and he can see the fields where they grew coffee, rice, and tea when he was a child.
One day, her mother, wearing a white dress, grabs the three girls, who are playing outside, and brings them upstairs to her bedroom. They know their father is coming home soon. When he arrives, he is raging. He knows about Tom, because as the narrator reveals later, she has told him about her mother’s lover. He pounds the door behind which his wife and children cower. He screams about how he has put up with her craziness. Then Tom arrives and the scene is chaotic and dramatic. The father finally tells her to go if that’s what she wants. Irene grabs the three girls and Tom takes them away in his car.
For days they drive, camping on the beach. The girls are disturbed. The narrator describes her feelings: “We hated them so much it hurt” (33). The diary that her older sister keeps is filled with confusion and anger. They decide when they are 16, they will go home again. The narrator has fantasies of Tom bathing while she throws the electric radio in the tub. As the days wear on, the narrator notices that Tom is nothing like their father. He is handsome and strong. Their father’s face was sad and dark. But she notices they both look at her mother in the same way, with “mixed up sadness and love and strange devotion” (41).
Eventually they move to a beach town in Oregon. The tourists swarm in the summer and disappear in the winter. At one point, their mother promises they will go home the next day. But that never happens. The narrator begins to notice that Tom handles their mother differently. He talks to her. He listens to her. Their mother stops throwing dishes across the room. Things settle down and soon they are not sad to have left their father. One day they go on an outing with Tom. He takes pictures of them and pins them on the walls. Whenever their mother grows sad, she walks away but Tom follows her, something their father never did.
Over the years, they adjust. One day Tom takes a family photo that includes the three sisters and their mother. When he puts it on the wall, Helen, one of the narrator’s sisters, asks why he isn’t in the picture. He laughs, telling her that he’s “just the photographer” (49).
One night the oldest sister, who is 17, spends the night crying and talking to Tom about how her boyfriend started sleeping with someone else. Tom suggests she leave the small beach town and move on. She is confused at first. Does he want her to go? But he says he only wants her to be happy. He gives her 500 dollars, and she leaves. The other sister eventually leaves, too. But the narrator—the youngest daughter—stays. She becomes a tour guide in the town, while her mother and Tom own a sporting goods store. The narrator lives with her mom and Tom and one day realizes the past is in its right place.
Part 1, Story 3 Summary: “Alchemy”
Miriam and Paula are best friends in high school. Miriam has a crush on a boy named Jonah. One night Paula asks Miriam if she’s a virgin and Miriam answers yes. “Of course,” she says. Paula grows quiet. Miriam thinks about Jonah, the boy she likes. Sometimes, after they eat together with Paula’s parents, Miriam watches Paula vomit up the food later in the toilet.
Paula keeps asking Miriam to move in. Her argument to Miriam is that she stays there all the time anyway. Miriam admits she likes being at Paula’s house more than her own. At night, they sometimes go outside to the rabbit hutch. Paula’s mother keeps the rabbits because she uses them for her rabbit stew. Every once in a while, Miriam watches Paula’s mother break a rabbit’s neck, skin it, and drain its body of blood in the kitchen sink. When she makes her stew, the odor of the cooking meat is so strong you can smell it outside and down the street.
When Miriam starts to see Jonah, Paula seems to get mad. Miriam starts sleeping with Jonah, but Paula tells her she doesn’t want to hear any of the details. Paula asks Miriam to move in again, but this time, Miriam says she can’t. She says, “I have my own family, Paula” (65).
Paula soon grows more distressed and more desperate. She is losing weight. She dyes her hair, and one time when Miriam comes over, she is drinking. She gets really drunk and Miriam is alarmed. They go to the rabbit hutch and Paula is desperate that the rabbits run away and be free. But in an attempt to send a rabbit on its freedom march, she drops it, killing it. Miriam grabs the other rabbits and puts them in the cage again, telling Paula that it’s okay, there are plenty more rabbits.
That night, while she is asleep at Paula’s, Miriam thinks she hears a man’s voice. She has this idea, in her groggy half waking, that Paula leaves the bed and goes somewhere. But in the morning, Paula is there, clutching Miriam close. Meanwhile, Miriam has fallen in love with Jonah. But her devotion makes Jonah feel uncomfortable. They have been having sex, and Jonah is distressed that she seems to like it too much.
One day, Miriam goes over to Paula’s house and again, Paula is drunk. In veiled language, she reveals that her father is molesting her. Miriam is angry. She asks Paula, in an accusing tone, why she lets her father do that. Miriam, extremely upset, puts on her shoes and leaves. Then as she walks home, she accepts a ride from a strange man. She lets the man put his hand on her thigh. Then she lets the man kiss her. But in the end, the man takes her home. The next morning, Paula runs away.
Miriam and Jonah are always together but it’s clear that Jonah isn’t as involved emotionally with Miriam as she is with him. When they have sex, Miriam likes the way it takes her out of herself. “I held onto him and felt my mind, my heart and my body separating” (73). No one knows where Paula is. One day at school, Miriam is called into the counselor’s office. She tells the counselor that Paula’s father was sexually molesting her. Paula’s mother is in the room. When Miriam leaves, Paula’s mother follows her out and, in a rage, asks Miriam how she can say such a thing. Paula’s mother screams, “How can you do this? How dare you lie like that” (75). As Miriam walks away, she remembers how Paula would color her hair and how she stood at the store with all kinds of different colors in her hands. Miriam grows impatient, telling Paula that she wants to leave, that all the colors are all the same. Miriam realizes that changing hair color does nothing to change your life.
Paula never returns. Miriam waits for Paula to write but she never does. She notices that Paula’s parents leave her window open as if they think Paula will one day crawl back through it.
Part 1, Story 4 Summary: “Dispatch”
One day, the narrator of this story finds a letter on the table. It is lying there with another letter, open, face up, as if she is meant to read it. The letter is from her husband. It’s addressed to a woman named Charlotte, who has died in a car crash. Next to it is another letter, her reply. In the letter to Charlotte, the narrator’s husband confesses that he loves her and is willing to leave his wife for her. Charlotte is furious. She writes back and tells him that he needs to pull himself together. She tells him their friendship is over.
That night, before her husband gets home from work, the wife leaves the house. She spends the night at an all-night diner, she rides the bus, she reads the paper from the day before, and she reads the paper from that morning. She returns and he’s gone to work. She falls asleep. Later she wakes to him in the bed beside her. He is ashen and upset. She tells him not to worry. She says, “We’ll work things out” (87).
The wife is writing a book about the glass fishing floats that used to wash up on shore by the hundreds. Now they are harder to find. But after she finds the letter, she can’t seem to work on the book. Instead, she watches the horrors taking place around the world: floods, war, plane wrecks. In one scene, she watches with horror as a flood threatens to destroy a woman’s life. The woman stands on her roof while, below, everything in her life is destroyed. As the narrator watches this, she thinks about her marriage. She knows her husband has never cheated on her. But in some ways, loving Charlotte silently and from afar is a worse act of infidelity.
The wife begins to have fantasies about Charlotte and how she died. She pictures her, and her two friends, Heather and Jean. They are middle-aged, taking a car trip from coast to coast. The wife imagines Charlotte. She thinks she would have liked to be like Charlotte, a farmer’s daughter, a schoolteacher, a bus driver. The wife thinks about Charlotte obsessively, while her husband does everything in his power not to show his grief. In the mornings he reads the paper and remains quiet. The narrator imagines the moment of the crash. Heather and Jean walk away, but Charlotte is sitting in the back, exactly where the car hit the tree and wrapped around it. When the narrator is not thinking about Charlotte or how she would like to be like Charlotte, she is watching the news, and writing a list of all the things that scare her: nuclear catastrophe, childbirth, war. At night, she and her husband lie in bed, wordlessly. To the narrator, they “lie motionless, as if in shock” (96).
One day, husband and wife go for a walk. For the first time, they get honest with each other. He says after he received Charlotte’s reply, telling him to get a hold of himself and cutting off their friendship, he wished she would just disappear. Then when the car crash killed her, he was devastated. These words hurt the wife, but she listens. He tells her he doesn’t think he can go on like this and she tells him much the same in return. Finally, they walk to the park and he squats down, puts his head in his hands. Then he talks nonstop, telling her the things that scare him. “He says he is afraid of being alone, afraid of making terrible mistakes” (98). He admits that he is ashamed of this fear. The wife realizes she is in the depth of his mourning, and that she will mourn with him.
She knows at that moment that the two of them will survive this. That they will walk back to the house together, though she will be forced out of his private grieving process. The two of them stand together in their small circle, while the grief of their marriage circles around them.
Part 1 Analysis
One of the distinguishing literary devices that the author uses to convey her narrative is to move back and forth in time and place. Using spatially significant locations and employing the use of memory that travels through various narrative time frames, is a literary technique that allows for a sense of wholeness to evolve in each story so that ideas of home, alienation, and identity can be explored. At the same time, however, memory, time-lapse, and spatial incongruities also create ambiguity for the characters and their relationship to time and place. Ambiguity is a hallmark of the author’s style and intention.
In the title story, the two children of the immigrant parents represent immigration and identification with home. One is first generation, and the other is second generation. It is important to note that the son was born in Indonesia while the daughter, the key character and narrator of the story, was born in Canada. This dichotomy symbolizes the parents’ own fractured identity as immigrants and creates a landscape that allows the author to show the trauma and damage that can come with immigration. Importantly, none of the characters are named. Without names, the author creates a deeply felt personal story that can also be viewed as universal to all immigrants. A fractured and difficult life is a given, she implies, for all immigrants.
Food is a common symbol in immigrant stories. In “Simple Recipes,” cooking becomes a metaphor for the way the first and second generations view the world around them. The author illustrates the contrast between the first- and second-generation family members by describing the father as meticulous and careful in preparing the rice compared to the daughter who admits she goes “through the motions, splashing the water around” (4). Even the cooking tools demonstrate a difference. The father uses a rice cooker, but the rice cooker he gave to his daughter remains on a shelf, never used. Later, when the father and son fight at the table, the father slams his chopsticks down while the son picks up his fork and points it at the father. This moment in which different cultural utensils are used symbolically demonstrates the conflicts between the first generation and the second generation. Later on, when the father uses a bamboo pole to beat his son, the pole symbolizes the home country. Using it is like a final ironic act, literally beating the home country out of (and onto) the boy.
One of the most powerful symbolic scenes in the story revolves around the cooking of the fish, which the author carefully uses to symbolize the ordeal of the immigrant who is taken or leaves the home country. The “fish in the sink is dying slowly” (8), a metaphor for the father’s experience as an immigrant outside of his country. The dying fish is meant to represent the father’s country of origin, dying in his imagination and memory.
The fish metaphor continues as the family sits down to eat. The son refuses to eat the fish. He is symbolically rejecting not just his ancestral culture, but his immigrant father.
Finally, with respect to place and memory, the scene that takes place after the father beats his son encapsulates the author’s key literary device of using place and memory to convey her point. When his wife comes downstairs after comforting her son, she puts her arms around the father and speaks to him in a language the daughter finds “incomprehensible” (17). The wife keeps speaking to him in this language that the daughter perceives is taken from somewhere else. She uses the word “stolen” to describe this transference of the language to the new community. Only then does her father relax. At this moment he “remembers where he is” (170).
In this carefully constructed scene, the author uses memory (the moment the father remembers) and space because he remembers where he is. At the same time, it’s an ambiguous moment. Is the narrator referring to the father’s home country or to the new world? The use of spatial and time considerations creates the kind of ambiguity that immigrants themselves experience when they leave home for a new country.
In “Four Days from Oregon,” the narrator, whose name we never learn (though we do learn her sisters’ names, as well as the names of the mom and Tom but not the biological father), tells this story from the perspective of the daughter but looking back when she is an adult. The thematic content, one the author uses in many of her stories, centers around the idea of home and the trauma of the broken family. Again, the story travels through space and time which, in this story, heightens the sense of fear and trauma within the family split.
The author depicts the essence of home in the way the different houses appear. The house that the mother and the three daughters leave is broken down. The mother throws dishes when she is angry, and the daughters are forced to tiptoe around the glass. The screen door is squeaky, and the front window is broken. When the narrator buries the badminton “birdie” and allows it to dry out in the hot sun, she is symbolically watching the end of her life as she knows it and giving it a proper burial. The term “birdie” evokes the adage about birds flying away from home, and thus, entombing the badminton birdie is a metaphor for the daughter’s desire to keep her home together and her awareness that she can’t. Later, living in tents while they journey away symbolizes their homelessness. But when they are in their new home on the beach, the house is a nice house above the ocean. It’s a place where the daughter and her mother and Tom are able to read and be comfortable.
The theme of memory is also important in this story. For instance, when the narrator remembers her home with her father, the one thing she recalls with clarity is that she is the one who tells her father about Tom. So, the most significant memory she has is one filled with grief and guilt.
Another symbolic reference in this story has to do with photographs. For instance, girls’ father carries a photo in his pocket that he pulls out and looks at. When he looks at it, he is transported back to his home country. He says he can see everything about the land. Later when Tom takes the photo of the three girls and their mother, but leaves himself literally out of the picture, he admits that he’s not in the picture because his job is to be the photographer. Both of these moments play on the author’s general themes of home, memory, and family. In the first, the father’s photo triggers his memory and brings him home. In the second photo, the absence of Tom, who takes the picture, demonstrates that as a family unit he is an outsider. In some ways he doesn’t ever really belong to the family, despite the obvious love he has for the girls and their mother.
“Alchemy” makes a slight detour with its thematic content. This story is foregrounded with a friendship between two teens and is so unlike the other stories that, at first glance, it seems to be less about family dynamics. However, it is the family dynamics that come to haunt the friendship and eventually end it. Paula and the unnamed narrator are friends. Paula is being sexually abused by her father. But the revelation of that trauma is very slowly revealed.
Paula is afraid to sleep alone, and the narrator doesn’t like to sleep at her own house. It is not clear why she prefers to sleep at Paula’s, though later in the story when Paula pressures her to move in with her and her parents, the narrator reminds Paula that she has her own family.
In keeping with the overall theme of home, this story is about how the refuge of home can be destroyed by the acts of the parents. Home, as also represented in the other stories of this collection, is a complicated notion. In the case of Paula, and to some extent, the narrator, home is not a safe place.
One of the ongoing motifs in this story is the presence of the rabbits that Paula’s mother breeds and kills for stew. The rabbits symbolically represent Paula who, like them, experiences inertia when it comes to leaving home. Paula tries to set the rabbits free, but they always return to their cage. “They feel safe here” (61). This implies that while home is, in fact, an unsafe place, whatever unknown exists beyond home seems even more frightening.
The cage is a clear metaphor for the caged way Paula lives with her abusive father. Paula’s mother breaks the rabbits’ necks to kill them. The killing of the rabbits by the mother functions as another metaphor since Paula’s mother does nothing to stop the sexual abuse by the father. It is this passive stance that feels to Paula like a betrayal equal to death.
When the narrator finally figures out what’s going on between Paula and the father, she spends less time with Paula, which triggers Paula’s panic. Paula begins to drink to excess, and her bulimia grows worse. Her vanishing body connotes two separate ideas. First, unable to stop her father, she seizes what little control she can, and this takes the form of managing her food in ways that create bulimia and anorexia. Secondly, bulimia is a purging. The more she purges the thinner she gets. She is simultaneously attempting to exorcise the abuse from her body as much as she is attempting to become invisible.
The narrator has her own issues with her autonomy. When she finds a boyfriend, she starts to believe that he can change the way she thinks. “He can change the way your mind forms words, changes sentences, imagines their capacity” (66). At one point she admits that she never knows what to say when she’s around him. Both girls feel out of control with men and sex. While Paula is being abused sexually, the narrator begins to lose herself, her sense of identity, and her power, as her boyfriend assumes more and more control of the relationship.
It takes Paula leaving for the narrator to tell the truth to a school official. Paula’s mom is outraged that the narrator would accuse her husband of such abuse. The narrator is afraid of not being believed. She admits, finally to herself, that she had always believed Paula about what was happening. Telling the truth is a last resort. The narrator knows it’s too late. But in the end, she references the number of times Paula colors her hair. She recalls when she argues with Paula about choosing which brand. Frustrated, she tells Paula they are all alike. At that moment, the narrator realizes you can’t change your life by changing the color of your hair.
The primary literary device in “Dispatch” is the use of the second-person pronoun “you,” which takes the place of a first-person narrator. Despite the different form, this story also takes on the various themes of home, loss, and grief. And like the other stories, time and place are important factors in the telling of the story.
The author’s use of “you” gives the wife distance from the story. This is a story that the narrator is standing apart from and looking in to. The fact that her husband reveals he has always been in love with Charlotte indicates, in conjunction with the use of the second person, that the narrator feels she is technically “the other woman,” despite being his wife. She is a character who watches the story unfold but isn’t really a participant in its unfolding. At one point the narrator even realizes that she isn’t in the story. “You are just a bystander…if this were a picture, you’d be a blur in the background” (94).
The use of memory underscores imagination as it relates to a past made up by the narrator. She imagines what it was like with the woman her husband loved. She imagines the woman’s road trip with her friends and her death in the car accident. So, while it seems like memory, it isn’t memory. It’s imagination. Meanwhile, the narrator becomes obsessed with real tragedies and disasters as she admits to fearing nuclear catastrophes and plane crashes. But at one point, she throws her marriage into the mix of possible disasters. This shows the significance she places on the possible loss of her marriage. But because it’s added to a list of disasters out of her control, she can’t relinquish her part, if any, in the downfall of her marriage. At the same time, the narrator thinks she could easily watch disasters on the TV all the time. One image in particular is of a woman standing on the rooftop of her house in a flood. The narrator knows it is not the woman’s fault. It is the fault of the rising waters. Yet she imagines what the woman would say if she would watch the narrator. “She would look at you with only the faintest expression of pity” (89). The narrator’s issue is a marriage, while the woman on the roof is looking at death.
In the end, the couple takes a walk. Near the end of the walk, when her husband crouches down, it evokes the sense of waiting or hiding from danger; the danger of their marriage ending as well as the danger of his grief. The narrator crouches in the grass with him. They are both, in some ways, hunted animals. But ultimately the husband looks for her in the dark, through the trees. The darkness and the trees are symbols for the obscurity of their marriage throughout the years. He wants to find her beyond these limitations. The narrator says they will carry on with their marriage not out of duty, but because they “have come this far together” (98).
