Simple Recipes

“While I was born into the persistence of Vancouver rain, my father was born in the wash of a monsoon country.”

The meaning of this quote is in the two words “persistent” and “wash.” The second-generation daughter is a constant force to be reckoned with. She is part of the culture that her parents adopted. Her life as a Canadian is resolved and tenacious. There is nothing ambiguous about it. Except for her father, a first- generation immigrant who, as the quote suggests, has shallow roots capable of being moved or swept away. The daughter’s identity is understood, certain, but the father’s is malleable and confused by the act of immigration.

“Even my father, the magician, who can make something beautiful out of nothing just stands and watches.”

The narrator acknowledges that her father can create an entire world out of a piece of fish and some rice. He is able to bring Malaysia into the house, through his cooking, like a magician. The implication is that he has special powers, and he can create something out of nothing. But one thing he can’t do is remove the fact that his son, who is first-generation like him, is adapting and changing to the new culture in ways that the father can’t accept or understand. Worse, this separation cannot be fixed. He can magically create his past by cooking a meal, but he can’t change the way things are between him and his son.

“Somewhere in my memory a fish in the sink is dying slowly.”

The theme of memory and the past is summed up in this quote that equates the history of her father’s immigrant experience to her attempt to understand it. The fish has come to symbolize the father’s home country. It is used throughout the story to show that immigration has many deaths. It’s not just what her father has left behind, but what he loses when his son rejects the language of his country, and the customs and habits of the father. The memory in this quote is the narrator’s memory. It suggests that the slow death of one’s origins after immigration doesn’t stop. Loss takes place on a continuum.

“It’s progress you see, and it comes whether you welcome it or not.”

This quote comes in the context of the father showing his daughter a picture of their town from its early days. Pictures often stand in place for language because the characters can’t explain their state of mind. In this moment, the father is comparing the progress of his new world—Canada—against the fields and the house where he grew up. In his mind, his history doesn’t ever extend past that, but in Canada time moves forward, things change, progress takes place. The ironic tone of this quote suggests that the father lives in both worlds; one that will never change, and one that will always be changing.

“We resisted at first, but the smell of her seeped into our noses and her hair swung around and wrapped us in a dark cave.”

No matter how much the daughters resist falling into their mother’s scheme to move them away from their father, they fail every time. In this moment, their mother tells the girls that she was either going to take them or leave them alone. The girls listen but refuse to acknowledge their mother. So, she grabs them and puts them in her lap. The cave is not considered here as a dark and foreboding place, but a safe environment, one that, in addition to her lap, represents the safety of the womb.

“Tom said, ‘That’s a whale,’ and pointed to where none of us could see.”

There are two aspects of this quote. The first is the whale, which, because no one can see it, is probably an invention by Tom, who will take the role of loving stepfather to the three girls. Whales are symbolic of compassion and strength. They are seen as gentle, and they communicate through song. Symbolically, Tom is pointing to the father he will be to the girls in some unknown future as time passes by. They just can’t see it yet. Secondly, the fact that he points to a place where no one can see indicates that he knows the girls are not yet ready to accept their new life, or his presence as anything other than dangerous and troubling. They are not prepared at this point in their journey to accept that what awaits them is compassion and stability.

“Tom slid the metal poles through the loops and the tent came down, the orange fabric floating like a parachute towards us.”

In this part of the story, the girls, their mother, and Tom are camping along the beach. The tent is a metaphor for the temporary home. The girls have been taken from the house they knew and are forced to live a life on hold in tents by the ocean. But the notable symbol in this quote is that of the parachute. A parachute is what allows you to jump from a plane and land safely. The mother has essentially taken the girls from a safe place and dropped them into a strange world where home is lost to them, and safety feels far away. But Tom brings the parachute to them. So not only is the author signifying the safety that the parachute brings, but also that Tom is the one who brings it. By folding the parachute over them, it is Tom who will become the one that holds the family and the new home together.

“Paula’s dad stood at the window, a glass of water in his hand. He took forever to drink it, staring straight at us through the glass, but we trusted the dark and willed ourselves invisible.”

In this passage, the father holds the glass and then takes what feels like “forever” (to the narrator) to drink it. The narrator captures how long and terrifying it can be when a person senses danger, even if the presence of danger doesn’t last very long. The father as monster won’t be hurried in his acts of emotional and physical terrorism. Also, the narrator, in trusting the dark and willing herself and her friend to be invisible, speaks to the horror of child sexual abuse. The abuser steals identity in such situations, and as Paula reveals, the best defense is invisibility. To trust in the dark is to acknowledge that there are secrets, and that it is behind the darkness of these secrets that one finds themselves hiding.

“Right then I wanted to tell Paula that there are some things you have to go through on your own. Some relationships withstand life, some are there for a moment, a stepping stone, and then you push away from them.”

After the narrator realized that she and Paula view the world of love and sex differently, the narrator begins to see the end of her friendship with Paula. Some experiences are not able to transcend differences between people. When she calls the relationship a stepping stone she means it in the sense that people begin to form their identity, their likes and dislikes and their values, through the acceptance or rejection of others. The fact that she wanted to tell Paula something she understands, but Paula does not, indicates that the narrator has a growing wisdom that she doesn’t share with her friend.

“She ran down the back stairs. I heard her say “Oh no,” in a flat voice. I didn’t look. I gathered the other four and put them back in the hutch.”

This quote caps a scene where Paula tries to free the rabbits that her mother raises and kills for stew. Symbolically, the rabbits represent Paula, who is trapped in a home of sexual abuse yet can’t leave. When Paula tries to force a rabbit to be free, the rabbit is either severely wounded or dead. As a foreshadowing moment, the quote shows that Paula has few good choices. If she stays, her spirit will die, but if she leaves, she will probably also die, just like the rabbit that represents her. The narrator hastily puts the remaining rabbits back in the cage, and when Paula tells her the rabbit slipped, the narrator tells her there are more and that she shouldn’t worry about it. The implication is that trauma and conflict are rampant, and multiply just like rabbits do. At the same time, the narrator is there to contain the damage. In part, that is her role in the friendship, though she eventually breaks the implied “contract” and tells the truth.

“He turned the radio on and let one hand drift over to rest on my thigh. I thought, everything has led to this. This is what it comes to.”

When the narrator inexplicably gets into the car with a stranger, the moment of truth arrives. And in many ways it is about truth because the narrator can’t make sense of what she has come to understand of Paula’s situation. In one sense, the narrator speaks of “everything” as a reference to the secrets, the pathology of incest, and the nature of her friendship with Paula. On the other hand, there is a prophetic quality to the moment, and the narrator tests out her theories about sex between men and women. She’s now had confirmation that women are always in danger, that sex is about power and abuse, that if you aren’t more powerful or more careful as a woman, you will be a victim. This moment shows how, conscious or not, women will always have to walk into situations that may eventually destroy them, and that often there is no way of telling that at first.

“She glared at me. I thought, if you could change your life with a shade of color, if it had ever been that easy, we would not be standing here in the first place.”

The narrator is wise beyond her years and knows certain evident truths about powerlessness and superficial ways girls make attempts to remove themselves from the pain of their lives. Women understand that no hair color, no makeup, nothing external will ever change the interior pain that comes with sexual abuse. The quote also brings to mind the symbolic aspect of the title. Alchemy, as a precursor to chemistry, concerns itself with the transformation of chemicals that appear fixed. Alchemy is related to medicine, to healing; the idea that there is some elixir that can change states of illness or unhappiness is absurd in the narrator’s mind. The narrator knows there is no readily available cure, not really, for the damage that has been done to her friend.

“You looked straight at him. Your husband’s heart was broken, and it wasn’t you who did it.”

What’s telling about this moment is the irony that exists in the quote. In most circumstances, a wife would not want to be the one who breaks her husband’s heart. But in this case, the narrator realizes that his broken heart isn’t for her, but for another woman. The implication is that the narrator would much rather prefer that his heart, filled with love for her, would have broken for her. The quote demonstrates that the wife wishes she were the one who broke her husband’s heart and not another woman.

“You know you think of your marriage far too much. You know, that given the chance, you will sit all day on your couch like this, watch what happens in another country.”

The narrator isn’t saying she might sit on the couch all day watching what happens elsewhere, but that she will. This emphasis on the certainty that she will spend the day watching what takes place in the world outside of her own small drama shows that she has found a way to stop thinking about her marriage. She acknowledges that she spends far too much time thinking about it, but when she watches the tragedy and grief of nameless people around the world, it both diminishes her own sorrow and takes away the compulsion to ruminate all day long on the shambles of her life.

“Still, he refuses to part with it—his private sorrow is not on display for you. It belongs to him.”

The sorrow of this moment is that the wife has the realization that her husband’s sorrow is his alone. It is not a sorrow for a loved one—her, the wife—to assuage, but one to witness. To recognize that she can have no part of it because it is completely his, separate from her, is a final insult. The power of this quote is how thoroughly it shows the wife’s aloneness and isolation. To have lived with someone all these years and see that during his most devastating moment, she is not part of it, and cannot comfort him, almost breaks her. It is the ultimate evidence of the downfall of this marriage; that she is alone within it.

“She [Kathleen] walks around the arc of water, prim and proper, stepping out onto the silent baking street. Lorraine goes straight through, the water speckling through her clothes and skin. She blinks in the coolness of it and keep on along the sidewalk.”

The author demonstrates the contrasts between the two sisters through their actions rather than through description. This is a prime example of how action can show readers the personality of the characters. Here the older sister, who appears to be the one who has it all together, is “prim and proper” as she opts not to get wet. There is no relief from the heat. She appears to be a person who profoundly needs to control the world around her by not upsetting it. Lorraine, on the other hand, couldn’t care less if she disturbs the “arc” of the water. She won’t let anything stop her. When she goes through the water, compared to her sister who goes around it, Lorraine metaphorically heals more quickly by not avoiding the reality. She is the one who will remain cool. She is the one who steadies the course and remains on the straight path.

“She watched her mother, and it might have been any day of the year, neither here nor there, a nothing picture.”

Lorraine remembers the moment her mother leaves and never returned. She watches her mother leave and thinks nothing of it. The “nothing picture” indicates the ordinariness of the moment. As she watches her mother leaving, Lorraine is described as being “camouflaged” in the grass, which denotes the idea of war; that she is hiding from the enemy. And yet, it’s so ordinary to Lorraine to watch her mother walk away wearing her coat and carrying her purse that she thinks nothing of it. The telling piece to this quote is that Lorraine remembers every detail—what her mother was wearing, how she held her purse, where she was hidden as she noted how pretty her mother’s hair was—all signifying that at that moment, Lorraine understood intuitively that something was different.

“It terrified Lorraine to wake up in the morning. She was used to finding her mother around the house, sometimes on the floor, right beside Lorraine’s bed.”

This quote shows how inextricably linked the girls’ mother is to the house that they steal away to visit one day. Her mother occupies the house so fully that she is often found sleeping—or more likely passed out—in various places around the house. She so inhabits the house that she uses any place at all in which to pass out. At the same time, the issue for the girls is how terrifying it is. They love and adore their mother as much as they fear and mourn her, even when she lives there. Lorraine doesn’t feel proud that her mother often chooses to pass out next to her bed, but the fact remains that she does. Her mother looks up to her youngest daughter and feels safe around her.

“Dad, smelling like the great outdoors and cabin sleeping would never fade. He’s always been a memory. But her mother, with her disheveled hair, was already slipping by.”

Since their father didn’t live with them most of the time, Lorraine understood that her father had never been the tangible adult in her life. He’d been the one she was used to remembering, a memory ever since she could remember. It was their mother who was the most visible in her life, the one she knew the best. The inference is that, in comparison to a father she really never grieved because he’d always been gone, the losing of her mother’s memory is a new grief, one that takes precedence. Moreover, Lorraine remembers her father’s pleasant smells, which is so different from the memory of what she sees in her mother’s disheveled hair, which is something symbolic of her alcoholism.

“Harold was nine years old and he felt like he was living his life on his tiptoes.”

Instead of long descriptions and exposition, the author briefly encapsulates Harold’s position in the family. Walking on tiptoes means trying to remain silent, to not be caught. In this case, the metaphor describes a little boy who wants to be invisible and not attract attention to himself. If he does, his father will notice and punish him. And around his sick mother, he tiptoes because any disturbance might make things worse. Harold is not safe in his home and must remain invisible.

“Her mom kept her arms tight around her and Josie couldn’t pry herself lose.”

This quote can be read both figuratively and literally. In the literal sense, Josie is not able to move until her mother lets go. In the figurative sense, it foreshadows the moment when that letting go will happen and Josie will be able to leave home. But the quote also shows the relationship between mother and daughter, both its tight bond and the potential for being suffocated. At the same time, while Josie wants to be free, this quote implies the deep, elemental bond between mother and daughter.

“In the years after I left home, I used to glimpse my parents in unexpected places. […] [but] during these sightings I never felt the urge to join them.”

These words, some of the very first in the story, foreshadow the story’s meaning and set up reader expectation about the relationship between the parents and the child. The quote indicates that the narrator has already left home, and she views her parents from afar, in places that are not within the home. Home is the central symbol of the story, so not seeing them in the place she knows them implies a strangeness about them, one that impacts her relationship with her parents. She wants to see them only from afar. She doesn’t want to interact. She does not say hello to them, but rather watches from a distance. The implication is that she can never not have them in her life entirely, but she would rather not interact because she has her own life now. They are familiar yet estranged.

“At home they spoke Indonesian and Chinese only to each other, never to me.”

This story mirrors the first story in the collection, “Simple Recipes.” Here, as in “Simple Recipes,” language divides family members. Language also indicates the differences between first and second generations. Home, therefore, is both delineated and divided by language. The daughter is both a part of her parents’ lives and not part of their lives by virtue of the language, which becomes a symbol for the way immigration can divide and separate family members from each other. This is similar the conflict in “Simple Recipes,” thus indicating the importance of language, immigration, and home as the themes of the collection.