Ghent University Faculty of Arts and Philosophy

At Home in Memory Lane: A Formal and Thematic Analysis of Madeleine Thien’s Simple Recipes

Supervisor: Prof. Dr. Gert Buelens Paper submitted in partial Co-Supervisor: Dr. Sofie De Smyter fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of “Master in de Taal- en Letterkunde – afstudeerrichting Engels” by Silke Lenaerts Table of Contents

1. PREFACE AND EXPRESSION OF GRATITUDE 3

2. INTRODUCTION 3

3. THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK 6 3.1. IMMIGRATION AND NARRATIVE MEMORY 6 3.2. SPATIALITY AND ‘HOME’ 8 3.3. MEMORABILIA AND THE VISUAL 10

4. DISCUSSION 10 4.1. SIMPLE RECIPES 10 4.2. FOUR DAYS FROM OREGON 15 4.3. ALCHEMY 20 4.4. DISPATCH 25 4.5. HOUSE 35 4.6. BULLET TRAIN 42 4.7. A MAP OF THE CITY 47

5. CONCLUSION 56

Word count: 27 103 words

2 1. Preface and expression of gratitude With an interest in everything related to cultural exchange and globalisation, I was eagerly looking for a topic that explored this interest as well as one that would challenge me intellectually. Although I initially had never heard of Madeleine Thien, Simple Recipes immediately spoke to me because of its main themes. I find it interesting to see how cultural identity is reflected in literature and in what way characters are influenced by it. En plus, when I found out that Thien had studied at SFU, where my Canadian friends from my Erasmus exchange in Sweden are currently studying, I considered it must be fate.

Having been an exchange student a few times myself, I am keen on investigating how cultures where older traditions are preserved, like those of most Asian countries, can cause conflict with other cultures, like those of more urban, modern societies such as Canada. I find that this makes countries that pride themselves on multiculturalism, such as Australia and Canada, notably interesting, especially considering they are also relatively young nations. Their literature has therefore often not received as much attention even up until today, or has received recognition relatively late.

I was thus more than happy to give the literature of Madeleine Thien its much-deserved attention and over the course of the year that I have been writing this thesis, I have grown to appreciate the author in an entirely new fashion. Her layering of meaning and the way she exploits the short story form are nothing short of brilliant.

Nevertheless, this thesis is as much the result of the support of a few people I would like to mention. First and foremost, my supervisor and co-supervisor, Prof. Dr. Gert Buelens and Dr. Sofie De Smyter respectively, whose continuous, quick and elaborate feedback have taught me to think self-critically and analytically. Thank you for the interesting discussions and active support throughout the writing process. Secondly, thank you to Prof. Dr. Hilde Staels for her helpful lectures on English Canadian literature and sparking my interest. Lastly, I would like to thank my immediate family, friends and classmates for their uninterrupted cheering on.

2. Introduction In this thesis I will be discussing Simple Recipes, a short story collection by Madeleine Thien from a formal and thematic point of view. It was her first short story collection before she published two successful novels, Certainty (2006) and Dogs at the Perimeter (2011). Since then, the

3 Canadian writer has been granted a number of prestigious awards and has been shortlisted an equal amount of times. What her works all have in common, and what is considered the strength of Thien’s writing is her recurrent thematic use of ‘home’. She herself once said she thinks of “home as a verb, something we keep recreating” (Goodreads). This is exactly what she does in each short story that adds up to the as yet largely unexplored collection Simple Recipes. What makes the collection’s approach to the theme of home interesting is its twofold focus. The first type of stories I have singled out are what I will refer to as migrant short stories, namely “Simple Recipes” and “A Map of the City”, respectively the first and final story of the collection. Both stories focus on the complex interrelation between identity and memory that results from the process of (im)migration. The second type zooms in on some sort of child trauma or broken family, namely “Four Days From Oregon”, “Alchemy”, “House” and “Bullet Train”, because they exemplify how the concept of ‘home’ is not always self-evident, especially considering the traumas they represent.

What both types of short stories show is that Thien’s interpretation of ‘home’ is a double one. Home can be read in a metaphorical as well as a literal sense: it refers to places, as well as a sense of belonging. In the exploration of these different meanings of home, Shelly Mallet’s article “Understanding Home: A Critical Review of the Literature” will prove useful. In Thien’s collection, ‘home’ is a concept that becomes indistinct and blurred throughout traumatic events such as immigration, domestic abuse, gaps between the generations and heartbreak. The first meaning of ‘home’ is the most literal one, where it is seen as a physical space and place, a literal house or the possibility of movement away or towards this place, creating a dislocation between a house and the main character(s). The second meaning that I have mentioned introduces ‘home’ in a metaphorical sense, namely ‘home’ as a metaphor for the self or family life, where it represents a sense of being. This metaphorical meaning can on its own be interpreted in two ways as well: home can stand for the family unit, or it can represent the public community, which is especially relevant in the stories that deal with immigration. The short stories exploit either one of those two meanings of ‘home’ in their plot, and, as such, contribute a piece of meaning to the puzzle that is Thien’s Simple Recipes.

It is this double interpretation of ‘home’ that makes Thien stand out. As a second-generation Canadian migrant writer, she is of course not the first to deal with the topic of immigration and the problems it entails. Canada is the country of the so-called multicultural mosaic, and promotes maintaining one’s own cultural, ethnic identity while still taking part in the national

4 Canadian society rather than adopting one, monolithic Canadian identity. This multiculturalism has come about naturally with the settlement of both French and British migrants in indigenous territory, nowadays supplemented by a new stream of migration from all over the globe. It was not until the 1980s, however, that Canada also adopted a multiculturalist view politically and legally, inspiring much debate. Canada’s long history of immigration, has resulted in a country that consists consists of both an English-speaking part as well as a French-speaking part. Add to this the highly complex position of the First Nations and one gets a very hybrid picture of the nation. This complexity of the country ensured its need for a rather long period to establish itself as a nation. The concept of an English Canadian literature is thus a relatively young one, with the term asserting itself during the Canadian Lit Boom of the 1960s and 70s (Staels).

Already in the early days of the Canadian nation, ‘home’ and ‘belonging’, and ultimately also space, played a pivotal role in English Canadian Literature. The first literature described the colonial settlers as they made themselves a home on the rough terrain that was then Canada. Discussions of land ownership between the first settlers and the Aboriginal people made the topic of ‘home’ and ‘belonging’ a crucial one. Canada, the nation known to have “been shaped by immigration” (Löschnigg 11), an ongoing process, makes an interesting background to the short story collection. Its major cities like Toronto, Montréal and Vancouver breathe multiculturalism and one of those, Vancouver, is also the main setting of Simple Recipes. This center of cultural multitude is also where the author of this collection grew up and first experienced the difficulties of being both Canadian as well as a second-generation Asian immigrant. The struggle of identity and sense of displacement that comes along with this is a recurrent theme in Thien’s work as she often draws on personal experience (Madeleine Thien Homepage). She herself is “the daughter of Malaysian-Canadian immigrants” (“But, I Dream in Canadian” 1) and, within the Canadian literary tradition, can be placed somewhere in between the writings of Alice Munro, who perfected the form of the Canadian short story and who, much like Thien, uses space as a symbol for the exploration of larger themes in her writing, and Rawi Hage, who like Thien is an immigrant writer and dares to ponder in his writing over whether Canada’s construction of itself and its people as multicultural is a true representation. Hage uses descriptions, or characterizations even, of the city of Montréal to construct his characters and to critically portray a hybridized worldview (Staels), the same way Thien goes about describing Vancouver:

5 Thien aims at making the exotic ordinary; the ordinary tragic. She doesn’t celebrate a Canadian multicultural mosaic, nor rootless cosmopolitanism. (…) [S]he turns displacement into an ordinary family tragedy, developing an aesthetics of the everyday that is based on the limited, confused view point of an ordinary narrator-protagonist; on everyday objects that reflect a far-away reality; and on the narrator’s search for an adequate metaphor to encompass the complexity of her personal life in a global context. In depicting the protagonist’s process of piecing parts together and mapping out her own life, Thien contributes to redefining the changing map of Vancouver and of immigrant fiction (Lorre 8).

As suggested, Thien does more than describe a multicultural Canadian society by also emphasizing a non-cultural interpretation of home through her focus on the individual and private life of the family. She has mentioned herself that “I think I use family the way another writer might use society itself. The characters are on the outside looking in. And then these fractures also take root in the individual him/herself” (“On Making Fragments Whole” 4). Family is thus another way of looking at society and allows Thien to move from a micro to a macro perspective. What this thesis aims to explore, then, by looking at the ways this double interpretation of ‘home’ is given narrative shape on the level of form and content, is how memory and identity are constructed and employed in the face of such traumatic events as immigration, domestic abuse, generational misunderstanding, and heartbreak.

3. Theoretical framework Thien’s exploration of home in a literal as well as metaphorical sense asks for an approach that combines memory studies with studies of spatiality. I will explore this recurrent use of ‘home’ and how it operates in each story by analyzing the main themes and motifs as well as formal features with the help of a theoretical framework that is interwoven with the concept of home. To grasp their interconnectedness, I will look at each of the short stories individually and will work towards a concluding synthesis, and will do so by making use of insights related to the field of memory studies and spatiality.

3.1. Immigration and narrative memory As there is a number of short stories in Thien’s collection that deal with second-generation immigrant Canadians and focus on the complex nature of identity construction, the field of memory studies offers important perspectives. In the essay “On Making Fragments Whole”, Madeleine Thien herself discloses that memory is the key to her writing as it explores the

6 workings and nature of memory and its relation to identity building. What is especially interesting is the way this insight relates to immigration as the immigrant’s memories are scattered across different places and parts of the world. The acts of remembering or forgetting these places play a pivotal role as they are often related to the homeland. This is even more so the case for second-generation immigrants, who inherit certain memories, traditions and moral values from their parents, the first generation, but who also make their own memories in their (new) homeland, causing a “divide between children and parents” (Thien “On Making Fragments Whole” 4). This becomes especially visible in the migrant short stories of Simple Recipes, in which the sons or daughters of immigrants, the second generation, are contrasted with their parents, the first generation. Their discussions almost always revolve around those conflicting values.

A book that will be especially instrumental in the discussion of migration, identity and memory is Migration and Fiction: Narratives of Migration in Contemporary Canadian Literature by Maria and Martin Löschnigg. The study explores “aspects of migration from a literary perspective” (9) by offering both practical analyses of migrant fiction and explaining how literary techniques, e.g. narration and focalisation, can be used to typically represent this migrant experience. Several authors, including Birgit Neumann, a renowned author in the field of memory studies and literature, remark that identities are formed through narrating the self and the fact that memories, because they are inseparably linked to those narratives are part of the identity constructing process. Nicola King as well has made this connection between identity and narration and inevitably also memory. That the three concepts are closely linked is something that King explores in her book Memory, Narrative, Identity: Remembering the Self. In her introduction she specifically mentions the urgency for a discussion about these three concepts due to a changing, more globalized society. I will focus, however, on her discussions of memory and the way it is presented through textual means. King is very conscious of the fact that identity is “constructed by and through narrative” (2) and more specifically how a change in culture or environment can have a lasting influence on one’s perception of the self. It is thus no surprise that her interest was sparked by immigration, where the act of (im)migrating means a much clearer breach between past and present and where forgetting and remembering consequentially gain importance in the individual’s construction of identity (3). Last but not least, Nicola King discusses two distinct ways of imagining memory: first, as a series of photographs or visual images and second, as a form of language or narrative (25). These two representations, although both said to be problematic (25), are important to the

7 short stories I will be discussing as they link up to two recurrent themes in the (immigrant) short stories: (the failure of) visual imagery and language.

However, in order to fully understand what the migrant goes through and what he or she tries to bare witness to in his narrative, it is important to consider anthropological, sociological and psychological aspects of migration as well. With a focus on Canadian immigrants, there are a few authors that discuss the way migrating to a new country influences a person: Farha Shariff in “The Liminality of Culture”, Saphna Cheryn and Benoit Monin in “Where Are You Really From?” and Mirealla Stroink and Richard Lalonde in “Bicultural Identity Conflict”. What all these authors touch upon is the critical difference between first- and second- generation immigrants: their identity struggle is similar yet different in many ways. The identity struggle that they have in common is what Shariff has introduced as that of “the hyphenated Canadian”, which means the immigrant is never fully identified as Canadian by the culture he or she lives in, even though he himself may self-identify as such (69). Especially the second generation find themselves suspended between the culture of their parents, the first generation, and the culture of their new homeland, Canada: “they are never quite Asian enough nor are they quite white enough, they exist in a liminal space” (72). What links up to this is the term “identity denial” introduced by Cheryan and Monin, used to describe when “a core identity of theirs”, being the immigrants’, “is at best questioned, at worst denied” (717). This creates a contrast between the identity they attribute to themselves and the immigrant’s perceived identity, attributed to them by others, which can result in internal conflict. This is thoroughly discussed in Stroink and Lalonde’s article, where it is referred to as a ‘bicultural conflict’. What becomes clear from all these discussions is that both the internalised country of the old homeland as well as the culture of the new homeland are essential in the problematic construction of the immigrant’s identity. The event of migration has in this light often been discussed as a form of trauma, because the subjects are similarly dislocated and pulled into a situation that makes them feel uprooted.

3.2. Spatiality and ‘home’ The importance of place is vital, then, and the ‘spatial turn’ in the literary field has been an important one. In Spatiality, Robert T. Tally Jr. discusses the increased importance of space in literary studies. He states that within an increasingly global, mobile and fluid society, rather than finding linearity in the form of time, there may be similar patterns to be found in spatial terms. Tally raises special awareness for the immigrant, considering he or she is one of the

8 figures most affected by this changing interpretation of space. He emphasizes that “space is not merely a backdrop or setting for events, an empty container to be filled with actions or movements” (119) but rather “both a product and productive” (120), by which he acknowledges the influence of space on people and their identity construction. Additionally, he also introduces the term ‘polysensoriality’, by which he means that “space (…) may not be perceived by vision alone, but also by smell, or sounds” (142), which is something that frequently returns in the short stories by Thien to contrast different attitudes towards a certain space and hence also identity. Additionally, Sarah Wylie Krotz, in her article “Place and Memory: Rethinking the Literary Map of Canada”, links space to memory because she believes that space is endowed “with imaginative and mnemonic value” (135). Near the end of the article she stresses the importance of memory for the immigrant, who is forever burdened with the task of remembering an earlier place, an earlier ‘home’ as it were (146). Additionally, she expresses an interest in border crossing and in-between spaces, an element particularly interesting in the discussion of the second-generation immigrant who frequently finds himself hinged between two cultures. In her article, Krotz, much like Madeleine Thien does in her short story collection, ultimately synthesises identity, memory and migration in stating that “[t]he writers whose sense of place is crisscrossed with migrations, displacements, and dislocations, steeped in the remembered sensations of other places, have much to tell us about how we map not only our literature but also ourselves” (143).

What becomes clear from these discussions of space in relation to identity and memory is that spatiality has become an increasingly complex concept and it should never be perceived as self-evident. Angela Aujla briefly touches upon this complexity in her article “Others in Their Own Land”, in which she discusses the different ways in which immigrants, more specifically South Asian Canadian women, are ‘othered’ by the dominant culture. One of those ways of ‘othering’ is the frequently asked question of “Where are you from?”, which “ challenge[s] not only temporally, but geographically, one’s places in the present” (43). Taiye Selasi further develops this argument in her 2014 TED talk “Don’t Ask Me Where I’m From, Ask Me Where I’m a Local”. According to her, rather than identifying with nationalities, which are human constructs and suggest “a fixed space in place and time”, she suggests the term ‘multilocal’, that promotes human, emotional experience and identifying with places where you ‘feel at home’ over politics. This is especially relevant to my discussion of situations where home indeed loses its fixedness in space and time because of a traumatic breach with family or homeland.

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3.3. Memorabiblia and the Visual Lastly, if we continue on the thought that (im)migration can be seen as a form of trauma, and characters often find themselves at a loss for words to explain, another aspect in the collection of short stories comes into play, namely visual images. We might assume that the traumatised subject, in this case the immigrant, finds it easier to communicate through images rather than spoken or written words. Language often fails in expressing trauma, which is a thought that is also tangible in Thien’s Simple Recipes. This failure of words and its replacement by images recurs many times, especially in the form of photographs or postcards. These objects then perform the role of memorabilia that trigger memories, as they also refer back to places, including home(s) and homeland(s) or lost senses of self before the trauma. Kaja Silverman briefly relates the photograph to the concept of family, which I have mentioned to be one of the manifold meanings of home. In her book The Treshold of the Visible World, she argues that the family is largely existent “in and through the group photograph and the photograph album, which confer upon it an actuality and a coherence which it would otherwise lack” (199). In other words, the photograph gives an idealised view of the family. In addition, Thien’s focus on seeing versus being blind in some stories constitutes a contrast that relates to remembering and forgetting that is crucial to memory studies.

All the aforementioned concepts, including memory, identity and spatiality, are thus tightly interwoven. One cannot be discussed without indirectly or directly implicating the other. It is with these three main concerns in mind that I will be closely analysing Madeleine Thien’s Simple Recipes and the way the use of narrative strategies is interconnected with these concepts with the help of the theories mentioned in this overview and with ‘home’ as the central premise.

4. Discussion

4.1. Simple Recipes “Simple Recipes” is the first of the seven short stories that make up the identically named short story collection. As it deals with the difficulties that arise between members of the first generation of immigrants and their children, the second generation, it is one that I have classified as belonging to the type of the migrant story. As the characters are never explicitly named, the story represents not just one family, but can be argued to rise above the level of the particular, representing the globally recognised issue of migration and what this means for

10 families and home(s) in general. The story describes a family consisting of a mother, a father and a son. It is told from a fourth person’s perspective, the fourth member of the family, whom we presume to be a daughter, considering Thien’s own background as a second- generation immigrant daughter. The story is thus told from an autodiegetic perspective. Every member of the family represents a different attitude towards immigration and the cultural obstacles that occur in the process.

The different generations have conflicting norms and values, creating generational misunderstanding. This conflict between the first and second generation is conceptualised through different themes. First of all, the theme of food appears to be prominent, a theme that can also be found in the title of this short story and is described by Maria and Martin Löschnigg as “one of the most relevant markers of any culture, and a distinctive element of immigrant communities” (13). The father finds himself to be both hesitant towards as well as interested in the culture he is newly engulfed in, namely Canadian culture, in itself a very complex structure of cultural relations. He has mixed emotions towards the more modern way of cooking: he watches Canadian cooking shows, which he finds very entertaining, but he also “pass[es] judgement on Yan’s methods” (Thien 6), which he seems to find too fast-paced, as they stand in contrast with his own slow, careful way of cooking. Yan is the embodiment of the exemplary Asian immigrant who has ‘made it’, considering he has his own cooking show on TV. The means of eating as well adds to this contrast between Asian traditions and the more modern, fast-moving society that is Canada. Whereas the father “slams his chopsticks down on the table”, his son “grabs a fork, tines aimed at [the] father” (Thien 14). Here, the tension between the two cultures, materialised through the objects of cutlery, results in a conflict between father and son, representing the first- and second-generation immigrants.

Another illustration of generational misunderstanding is the passing on of knowledge, in this case simple recipes and cooking skills. The father’s quiet, gentle way of treating the process of rice sifting and draining is contrasted with the daughter, who “went through the motions, splashing the water around” (Thien 4). The father wants to pass on his own rituals and traditions but they do not come across as well as he would have wished as his daughter, although trying, is unable to treat the rice with the same gentleness and serenity. The father- daughter relationship is characterised by a willingness to adapt to the Asian traditions and a forgiveness of possible failure. For example, the daughter tries to perform the ritual of rice making to the best of her abilities, but fails, as the rice becomes “a mushy gruel” (Thien 4).

11 The father’s response is characterised by acceptance of this failure because he realises that she puts in effort: “my father would keep eating, pushing the rice into his mouth as if he never expected anything different, as if he noticed not difference between what he did so well and I so poorly” (Thien 4). This relationship is then contrasted with the father-son relationship, which is characterised by defiance of any such traditions and aggression from both parties. Even as simple a question as “Why do we have to eat fish?” (Thien 11) holds more than a first glance would suggest. In its context, the question can easily be interpreted as suggesting “Why do we have to hold onto our old Asian traditions and identity?”. “We”, here represents the (second-generation) Asian immigrants and is contrasted with “them”, the Canadians. The “fish” then represents the traditions that come with an Asian identity. What this type of thinking demonstrates is “an “us” versus “them” dichotomy that ideologically sediments a notion of national identity that is clearly exclusionary” (Aujla 42). Later, the reader can perceive the son’s refusal to eat the fish. His father still tries to convince him by using one of the phrases he has learned from the Canadian cooking show he likes so much: “Take a wok on the wild side” (Thien 13). By doing so, he places himself in a position of accepting the new culture in order to constitute a connection with his son. His attempt fails, however, when the son, although he refused at first, tries the fish and spits it out again, and the whole situation ends in (physical) conflict.

Yet another example of the differences between the generations is illustrated by the houses that they live in: in the parental home “the ceilings were yellowed with grease” (Thien 7), whereas in the narrator’s home “the walls” are being kept “scrubbed clean” (Thien 9) and “the air was dense with the smell of countless meals cooked in a tiny kitchen” (Thien 8) is contrasted with the child who states: “I open the windows and turn the fan on whenever I prepare a meal” (Thien 9). By representing the two generations in two contrasting homes too, “the representation of space [becomes] a symbolic manifestation of individual or collective experiences” (Neumann 15). In this case the common experience of migration gets two different symbolic manifestations in space.

In addition to this literal interpretation of ‘home’, there is also the metaphorical sense of feeling at home. In this respect, the father and daughter are also different: she frequently, yet indirectly, describes her father in metaphorical terms, as “a fish out of the water”. She first describes him when “he looks out of place” (Thien 4), standing in the parental home’s kitchen. This thought is then taken further when they both watch a fish, fighting for his life in the sink:

12 “The fish in the sink is dying slowly” (Thien 8). It is this fish that is being prepared for dinner and which is ultimately the cause for the consequent conflict between father and son. This quote, however, can also be read as a metaphor for the immigrant, who, taken out of his familiar environment and placed into a foreign one, may feel like he is “dying slowly” (Thien 8).

A final item that requires attention is the language used throughout the story. This is especially relevant to memory studies, considering memories and identities are believed to be constructed through the use of language and narrative (Neumann 4). Choosing to speak or not choosing to speak a language is thus an essential part of self-identification. The son here wilfully chooses not to speak the Malaysian language that he learnt while he still lived in Malaysia. The father believes this is not because he cannot remember but because “the child chooses not to remember” (Thien 7). This stands in contrast with Thien’s remark in her autobiographical text “But, I Dream in Canadian”, where she says that “[n]ever do you forget the language in which your mother loved you” (2). The daughter, on the other hand, has been taught the language “but it never came easily” (Thien 7) so she does not speak the language either. However, she feels a certain connection with the language. This connection can be linked to memory, which has often been described “as a form of language or narrative” itself (King 25):

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 (Thien 12).

What is remarkable about this quotation is the use of pronouns: there is a particular insistence on “I” versus “they”, which implies how the “I”, in this case the autodiegetic narrator, does not count herself as belonging to this other group of “they”. Because of this particular contrast constituted in the use of pronouns, the narrator can be perceived as an outsider to the language, and consequentially also the culture. What is at work here is what is described by Maria and Martin Löschnigg as the “double consciousness about languages which characterizes the situation of the juvenile protagonist, and [her] struggle between two languages may equally result in silence and alienation” (15).

13 A similar scene that reflects the importance of language in the process of remembering can be found a little later in the story, when the mother tries to comfort the father, after he has domestically abused his son for disrespecting his parents’ culture:

My mother comes downstairs again and puts her arms around him and holds him, whispering something to him, words that to me are meaningless and incomprehensible. But she offers them to him, sound after sound, in a language that was stolen from some other place, until he drops his head and remembers where he is (Thien 17).

Here, several frameworks are at work. First of all, there is language and memory. The father remembers where he is because he hears a familiar language. The words are comforting to him, whereas they are “meaningless and incomprehensible” to the second generation, illustrating a generational gap. A second framework at work here is spatiality, linked to the father’s remembering of “where he is”. This reference can be interpreted as referring to ‘home’, both in the sense of Canada, the present, as well as his remembering that he is now also Canadian, referring thus to his new identity. It becomes clear that “memory blurs time and space, unmooring place from its present, earthly coordinates” (Krotz 144). Language and memory thus have the potential to take someone across factual or imagined boundaries, to spaces and places of the past, but also to bring that person back into the present, as illustrated in the story.

Another example of the use of language as a motif can be found in the verbal conflict between father and son as they argue about him not wanting to eat the fish. In contrast with the rest of the story, where no one is ‘named’, the son here ‘names’ the father. However, rather than calling him a name he calls him “a fucking asshole chink” (Thien 14, my emphasis). By using this racist term for someone of Asian descent, he identifies with the culture of his homeland Canada, distancing himself from, or even denouncing, his Asian heritage. The son is using a racist term that could easily be used for him too. Here, language becomes an instrument of identification or dissociation with a certain culture. It is in other words “one way in which we demonstrate our personal identities and recognize those of others” (Aujla 44). These are “attempts to reject South Asian culture and assimilate”, displaying also the frustration of being “not quite Canadian” (Aujla 43). What is demonstrated here is one of the responses that is often used by the second-generation Canadian immigrant as a coping mechanism against the

14 racism and exclusion that he is confronted with daily: “[t]he inferiorized group attempts to escape these feelings by “proclaiming his total and unconditional adoption of the new cultural models, and on the other, by pronouncing an irreversible condemnation of his own cultural style” (Aujla 44), even if that new cultural model includes racism towards his own heritage and his own family.

Eventually, this generational gap can become impossible to overcome and the incomprehensibility of the language, culture and behaviour of the first generation can turn into hate for it, leading to an ultimate breach between the two generations. The generational gap is described entirely through the protagonist’s eyes, who finds herself in a state of in- betweenness, “walking the tightrope of culture” (Shariff 72) as it were, where she has to decide whether or not she will identify with the culture of her parents, or, like her brother, refute that culture all at once. Because of this, the reader is given a depiction of the difficulty of overcoming the gap between the two generations. Shariff describes this as a conflict where “there are often conflicting messages [the] children encounter in the hopes they will fit in, while at the same time staying true to their own cultural ideals” (70), and contrasted with the first generation who are “unaware of the significant contrasts” (70). Thien is thus aware of the fact that it is this ‘liminality’, or being in between two cultures, that is so interesting to discuss in the context of an increasingly diverse Canadian society, where boundaries continue being blurred and where ‘space’ and ‘culture’ are no longer self-evident concepts, but rather fluctuating constructs.

4.2. Four Days From Oregon The second story of the collection, “Four Days From Oregon”, tells the story of three daughters who live with their mother and father. The mother, Irene, however, is described to have mental issues and the father often seems to try to escape the home situation, leaving his daughters to their own devices. The reader knows two of the daughters’ names: Helen and Joanne. The story, however, is told from the perspective of the third daughter, whose name remains unknown to the reader. There is a third adult figure present in the story too, Tom, who is Irene’s secret lover. The story follows the three sisters as they are dragged on a four- day trip, and ultimately move away from Oregon, hence the title, when their father finds out about their mother’s affair. What makes this story particularly interesting is the way it plays with memory and the concept ‘home’. It is told from the perspective of the adult daughter, who reflects on her childhood memories, more specifically how she experienced the break

15 between her parents and moving to another town as a child. It is part of the category of stories that I have previously classified as stories focusing on trauma or a broken family.

The first thing that can be noticed when reading this story is the importance of ‘home’ in its multitude of meanings. The importance of the physical meaning of ‘home’ can be found in the two different houses that the three daughters spend part of their childhood in. First, there is the home that Irene and the father live in with their daughters. This home is often physically broken, and, ultimately, it becomes a symbol for the broken family. The mother expresses her unhappiness through parts of the dwelling. For example when she “slammed the kitchen door over and over until its window crumpled and shattered to the floor” (Thien 24), as a way to rid herself of her anger towards life. When she feels sad, she “sat in the bathroom because it was the smallest room with a door that locked” (Thien 23). By using the house as a physical space to express feelings, by slamming doors open or shut, or by locking oneself in a room, it gains importance as a symbol for the unhappiness that roams the house. “Space”, in other words, “is made meaningful” (Gupta & Ferguson 11). In addition, all that is broken in the house itself becomes a symbol for how broken Irene feels, and how the family is slowly breaking too. This specific use of the symbol becomes even more prominent when the children are depicted as they “tiptoed around the pieces” (Thien 24). This can be interpreted not only literally, as they have to tiptoe around the pieces of the broken kitchen window in order not to be cut, but also figuratively, as they have to be careful not to become hurt emotionally as they stand right in the midst of the family issues, arguments and drama. The children have to leave the house so suddenly and never receive any real closure, when they are dragged to a new city. This is then symbolised through the image of the house where “all the lights [are] left on” (Thien 30).

As was indicated by the importance of the kitchen door and its broken window, a symbolic closure and opening of doors also forms a prominent motif throughout the story. Doors have the symbolic potential to represent new beginnings, a new door opening, but they also have the potential to represent closure or fencing off people emotionally. Examples include the “screen door creaking shut” (Thien 26) when Tom visits, which could be read as an indication of problems ahead, perhaps even as the difficulty between the father and mother. However, it is only when the “father drove his fist into the closet door and the wood splintered” (Thien 28), that the closed door stands for the ultimate destruction of the marriage. Again, these at

16 first glance seemingly unimportant material parts of the house represent much larger underlying issues.

The symbolism invested in the house as such is obviously linked to the interpretation of home in the sense of “a family or other group living in a house or other place” (Mallett 62). Additionally, there is a recurring insistence on wanting to return home. Despite the entire trauma caused by the affair, including the sudden separation and the familial problems, the narrator “wanted to go home, even if it meant more of the same” (Thien 36). “The same” here refers to her mother’s unhappiness and anger, whereas “home” here refers to a place where the family is still together, a place where the mother and father still live in the same place. Later on in the story, this insistence on the return home resurfaces. When the narrator is older, she still feels this urge to go back home, even if this home has become a different place: “I am thirty years old and I don’t know if I will ever leave this town. I should, of course, just to see the world. But I would want to come back here” (Thien 52). In other words, even if that place means misery, it is still better to have such a fixed, stable and known place than to be entirely lost: “[H]ome” as “durably fixed” (Gupta & Ferguson 11) is still a thought present in the perception of the narrator.

A final item that is worth discussing in relation to home is the fact that the new family, with the mother and Tom, spends a considerable amount of time camping. This indicates not living in a house, but rather it represents a phase of transition: from one house to a new house, from one state to another, from one family to a new one. It is interesting that, while being on the road, “Joanne scratched at the dirt with her feet to say that we were still here” (Thien 36). Even though Joanne and her sisters have no idea where this “here” is, by touching the physical, material ground, she receives confirmation that there are still certainties in her life. She remains grounded, as it were.

As Neumann has remarked, “life and the self are not only temporal but also spatially positioned” (Neumann 11) and important events are thus not only marked in time, but also by movements in space. Each time the sisters move away to a new place, it means a breach and the announcement of a new phase in their lives. The first time they move is what this story describes, namely when they are dragged to a new town with their mother, Irene, and her lover, Tom. The second breach that introduces a new phase is when the daughters move out of the house: “In the morning Joanne packed her things and left, caught a bus straight out of

17 Oregon and headed north. My sister Helen moved out not long after” (Thien 51). In contrast, the third sister, the autodiegetic narrator, decides not to move away and ends up being ‘stuck’ in her town, which could indicate that she has difficulty moving on, literally, from her past. She states that she “can hear their voices through the walls, and the past finally seems right in its place. Not everything, not large, but still present” (Thien 53), which indicates that the past is indeed still present in her life.

A second element that plays an important role in this story is the way memory works. First of all, there is a recurrent description of photographs, which serve as memorabilia. The first example can be found when the “father pulled a photograph from his pocket” (Thien 27) and starts to remember things from his past. This shows that there are “[t]wo dominant and distinct ways of imagining memory,” one of which is “as a series of photographs or visual images” (King 25). As the image triggers the memory, what follows is a description of what he remembers: “He could see the house where he grew up, plain as day” (Thien 27). This is no coincidence, as the story revolves around the importance of home. It turns out that the father is an immigrant as “he came to Canada and fell in love with our mother” (Thien 27). His place of origin is not indicated in the story. However, the way his immigration is depicted here seems to suggest he never succeeded in fulfilling any of his aspirations or dreams; by stating his aspirations and dreams first, only to follow with “but”, and then talk of his migration, creates the impression of failure. What this scene also illustrates is the layered nature of memory: the daughter is remembering how her father remembers his childhood home. By using this process of layering, a certain distance is created between the memories themselves and the narrator. This distancing effect can also be found in the naming of the mother. Rather than calling her ‘my mother’, in likeness with ‘my father’, she calls her mother “Irene” (Thien). This suggests an impersonal connection with her mother, which stands in contrast with the actual distance between her and her parents. Paradoxically, her mother, whom she sees daily and whom she lives with, is treated as distant, whereas her father, whom she is estranged from and no longer sees, is treated as familiar.

A second extract revealing the importance of photographs is when Tom decides to photograph the three girls and their mother:

That afternoon, he snapped close-ups of us, the lens of his camera inches from our faces, our hair tangling in front. Days later, he put a picture of Irene and the three of

18 us up on the wall, my sisters and I transformed into bold sea creatures, the clouds and the sky brimming behind us. “What about you?” Helen asked, when we stood admiring the photograph. “ Why didn’t you put op one of you?” “Me?” he said, laughing. I’m just the photographer, nothing more.” (Thien 49)

In this extract, we can find what Silverman has described as follows: “that the family exists as such largely in and through the group photograph and photograph album, which confer upon it an actuality and a coherence which it would otherwise lack” (199). Tom then, by naming himself solely as the photographer, and placing himself outside the picture frame, does not allow himself a place within the family. Instead, he identifies as the outsider, although he continuously tries to prove that he really is part of the family by actively taking on the father role. However “because of the social and physic importance of the family, photographers, whether amateur or professional, devote themselves to this subject more than any other” (Silverman 199). This is reflected in the scene that follows. First, “Irene stared hard at the picture, her expression sad all of a sudden. She looked from Tom to us, as if from a great distance, then she turned and left the room” (Thien 49). What is exemplified here is the way memory is sometimes triggered by photographs. Irene remembers that Tom is not her daughters’ father and realizes the “great distance” that he himself has hinted at before, as being only the photographer. Tom shows that he is nevertheless devoted to this family when he goes after Irene and brings her back into the house (Thien 50), a symbolic place for the home and family. His devotion is also symbolized through the act of putting the picture on their wall in their new house with which the start of a new family is declared.

Finally, although Tom tries to take on the father role, the protagonist’s father and the memories that she has of him is one of the main reasons why she has difficulty moving on. The way the protagonist remembers her father is therefore interesting to discuss. The one “vivid memory” she has “of her father” is related to the childhood drama she experienced: she unknowingly told her father her mother was having an affair (Thien 44). Consequentially, the only vivid memory she has is one embedded with guilt. Later, then, she remembers her father merely as “someone from a dream” (Thien 47). Dreams are generally seen as a state of liminality (Staels), considering they are neither here nor there, present nor past, and neither conscious nor unconscious. Situating her father in this liminal space shows she has yet to fully process her memories of the childhood trauma: she has not yet crossed the boundary of full

19 acceptance. Her sisters too, although they did leave home, “fell in and out of dreams” (Thien 42), indicating that they may not yet have left their past behind psychologically.

The fact that the sisters have not processed their past trauma combined with the fact that the trauma itself is almost never explicitly mentioned suggests that the motif of language failing is once again important. Words always fall short of explaining to others the trauma that one has gone through. First of all, when the family is driving to the new town, right after the children have been taken away from their home, words fall short to answer questions about the situation. When Helen asks a question “no one answered” and “none of us spoke” (Thien 32). This same difficulty of expressing oneself in words can be found when the narrator writes letters to her father: “Afters years of writing to him, I found it difficult to get past the first few sentences” (Thien 47).

What seems to be important here, rather than words, is the motherly touch, sometimes referred to as the mother language. This is because it is the first form of communication a child adopts once it is born (Staels). When the daughters seem to be falling apart “the smell of her seeped into our noses and her hair swung around and wrapped us in a dark cave” (Thien 35). The cave that is referred to here is also a reference to space, more specifically a space generally associated with safety and security. Freud has also commented on this. According to him touch is linked to the mother and the “dark cave” refers to the safe environment of the womb, commonly associated with refuge and protection (Staels). Rather than words, thus, smell and touch become important and they seem to have a calming effect because “children build an internal world in which they melancholically internalize their attachment to their parent initially as loved objects” (Vu 66).

4.3. Alchemy “Alchemy” is the third story in the collection and tells the story of a girl, Paula, and a friend who is never named. It is a story that belongs to what I have previously classified as stories involving some kind of child trauma or a broken family. In this case, Paula lives in an abusive home, as she is sexually abused by her father. As a result, she is very insecure about her body and feels like she needs to lose weight in order to become invisible, resulting in a bulimic eating disorder, which she denies: “Afterwards, in the bathroom, I stood back while Paula threw up dinner […] She rinsed her mouth and said, “I only throw up dinners. You only have an eating disorder if you throw up everything”” (Thien 59). The story is told entirely from her

20 unnamed friend’s perspective, which allows the reader to discover Paula’s secret of being abused with the narrator simultaneously.

As with the previous stories, ‘home’ is a central theme and it is not always “simply recalled or experienced in positive ways” (Mallett 64), which is especially relevant considering the (childhood) trauma takes place within the home. This stands in contrast with the generally accepted notion of ‘home’ as a safe haven, where one can feel protected. Instead, “in her own house, Paula was always afraid to sleep alone” (Thien 75). The situation ultimately becomes so unbearable that she escapes the situation and simply runs away from home, never to return. This is what Mallett describes when she states that “those who are abused and violated within the family are likely to feel “homeless at home” and many subsequently become homeless in an objective sense, in that they escape – or are ejected from – their violent homes” (73). Because Paula’s house is no longer an environment in which she feels safe, as the family is indeed broken, it loses this particular meaning of ‘home’. In order to create a ‘home’ for herself, she invites her friend to come live with her (Thien 60) and to, in a way, replace her own broken family. Although Paula insists on the narrator’s staying by saying “I need you here” (Thien 65), the narrator seems to be blind to the problems going on in Paula’s direct environment.

It can be argued, though, that the narrator herself also has problems at home. The first indication can be found at the beginning of the story when she states: “I preferred Paula’s home to mine” (Thien 59). The narrator’s ‘home’ also contains a kind of broken family: her parents “slept in separate rooms” and had “made it an art to see something but believe it wasn’t there”, namely each other (Thien 62). This perhaps has an influence on the narrator’s perception and awareness of the abuse going on in Paula’s house: she too, is better at ignoring the problem than to acknowledge it and deal with it. What is especially worth remarking is that the more the narrator seems to find out about the issues in Paula’s home environment, the more she tries to avoid Paula’s house, feeling even “the sensation of flight” (Thien 69). She moves from preferring Paula’s home because her parents “hardly notice whether [she] was home or not” (Thien 60) to stating “I have my own family, Paula”, (Thien 65) denying that she hates them (Thien 60).

This difficult concept of ‘home’ is symbolized through the rabbits, a recurrent motif. The animals have many similarities with Paula. First of all, the animals as well are trapped and are

21 forced to endure regular and awful practices: “once a week, at supper time, her mom pulled one or two from the cage, broke their necks, skinned their bodies and drained the blood in the kitchen sink” (Thien 61). Paula understands their situation of mistreatment and feels an obligation to set them free, because she too feels ‘home’ to be “a site of oppression” (Mallett 74). However, the rabbits “scampered back to their hutch” (Thien 61) because “they feel safe here” (Thien 61). The ‘home’ is, in other words, still safer than what may lie beyond, in the outside world: ‘home’ represents stability and the known, whereas the outside world represents insecurity. Children who “experience unease with their external parents or who lack loving and comforting experiences with them grow anxious and ambivalent” (Vu 66), which might make it even harder for them to leave considering they are particularly vulnerable. Later, Paula tries to release the rabbits a second time, which she claims “might be your last chance” (Thien 67). This sentence is ambivalent: it can either refer to Paula herself, who sees running away from home as her last chance to escape the abusive situation, but it can also refer to the fact that she has indeed already decided to run away, which would mean this is in actual fact the last chance the rabbits might have of being set free. In that last case, Paula uses the rabbits as a way to communicate to the narrator, which is suggested by the very first scene of the story: “Before disappearing she had said, “The rabbits are gone,” and I understood that as a sign. Move on, she was telling me. I’m on my own now. So I left her” (Thien 57). Whether the rabbits were actually gone or not is irrelevant in this case; what is relevant is that the disappearance of the rabbits foreshadows Paula’s own departure.

Eventually, Paula runs away and she no longer has to merely “imagine […] some new place further inland, a new city identical to this one, but different in all the right ways” (Thien 67), namely a place where she is not sexually abused by her father. The house they spent so much time in together is all that remains to the narrator to remind her of Paula. “From the outside it looked the same” (Thien 73), but the narrator realizes that, to Paula, nothing will be the same ever again and that “[w]ithout the family a home is ‘only a house’”(Mallett 74). This also illustrates that, despite the expectations of the house being a safe place where the family lives together harmoniously, one can never be sure of what goes on inside. The hope of the parents that “one morning she would climb back in again” through the “bedroom window” (Thien 76) is contrasted with the narrator’s hope “that wherever Paula was, they would never find her and make her go home again” (Thien 73). It is only then that the narrator fully acknowledges Paula’s abusive home. This, however, goes completely against the general notion of ‘home’ as a place “to which [people] generally hope to return” (Mallett 77). Paula’s house is thus not “a

22 nurturing environment underpinned by stable relationships that provide continuity of care and foster interdependence while also facilitating a capacity for independence” (Mallett 78), but rather a destructive one.

One of the reasons that Paula communicates her plans for her departure by means of talking about the rabbits is the again recurrent theme of the inadequacy of language. The story contains multiple references to people not being able to express certain things in words and opting instead for silence. For example, it is already clear from the beginning to the narrator that Paula has a secret but she “had the sense that some things were impossible for [Paula] to say” (Thien 63). The autodiegetic narrator too seems to have a hard time talking about important issues and she is overcome by the feeling that she “never knew what to say” (Thien 66). This being unable or unwilling to talk is contrasted with not wanting to hear or see the complications within the homes of the two friends. For example, when Paula tries to talk about what actually goes on in the house, the narrator tells her to “[s]top talking” because she “didn’t want to believe her” and she “didn’t want to hear it” and shakes “her head to block her out” (Thien 70). Just like her parents, the narrator tries to do away with the problem by simply pretending it does not exist, “to see something but believe it wasn’t there” (Thien 62). Putting things into words and accepting those words takes courage. In one of the final scenes of the short story, the narrator finally assembles enough courage to tell a couple of authoritative figures the truth about why Paula ran away from home. She realises that they “had both known the truth, but Paula was the only one brave enough to say it then, and not me” (Thien 74). By telling the truth now, the narrator hopes to make right what she believes to be guilty of.

Another motif that frequently recurs within the story is that of Paula’s hair as numerous references are made to its colour and smell. At first, it represents a sense of security and safety. The first time Paula makes this connection is in relation to the rabbits: “We lay down, and they crawled timidly on top of us, onto our head. “They like our hair,” Paula told me. “They feel safe here”” (Thien (61). To smell someone’s hair here is attributed the meaning of having someone you love close to you, which creates a feeling of safety. The narrator takes up this same meaning when she talks about lying next to Paula in bed: “I wondered what it would be like to wake up beside someone night after night, hair in your face” (Thien 62). However, other emotions are also expressed through this motif. When the narrator is angry or frustrated with Paula, she “imagine[s] holding a match to Paula’s hair” (Thien 65). Ultimately, this

23 symbol of safety and security is turned into a symbol for Paula’s abusive father, when “her father was standing beside our bed. He was touching her hair” (Thien 75), and the sense of security is contaminated. This is one of the reasons Paula desperately wants to change her hair colour. She has it different shades throughout the story: from “bleached blonde” (Thien 59), “yellow hair” (Thien 65) to “a different shade. Clairol “Startdust””(Thien 66). It looks like Paula seems to think that changing her hair colour might make her father not want to touch it any longer, but the narrator remarks that “if you could change your life with a shade of colour, if it had ever been that easy, we would not be standing here in the first place” (Thien 76). Changing her hair colour, in other words, does not make her father stop abusing her.

Another element that returns on a regular basis is the concept of time. The first reference to this concept is made when the narrator describes it as a way to brush off the family problems that they are experiencing: “in the grand scheme of things, in the long run, they meant as little as dust” (Thien 58). Because time is so vast and hard to fathom, their childhood traumas become insignificant. However, a later reference to time shows how, in relation to the trauma, time can feel like a very long time, too:

But I could not imagine ten years, fifteen, twenty. My sixteen years felt like eternity but I knew I wouldn’t be like this forever. In all of my life, the total sum of it, I was a species rising and falling. One day I would wake up and all of it would be gone. (Thien 63)

Here, the narrator seems to hope for time to heal all wounds and for the issues to resolve themselves. Time becomes a cure, as it were. Another reference to time is made when the narrator receives her first kiss and she feels herself “moving through years and years” (Thien 64). All of a sudden, she has aged and feels much older, which stands in contrast with how her age seemed like “eternity”.

Finally, the last paragraph of the short story is worth discussing, because it stands out in comparison to the other parts of the story. First, there is a reference to the title. “Alchemy” was a science that was used in the Middle Ages in order to change ordinary metals into gold, or “people tried to make something out of nothing” (Thien 76). Nevertheless, a link can be found with the liminality that I have mentioned before. Instead of being able to tell Paula those things she learns in school and about life, the narrator dreams them. This dream state is

24 again also a state of liminality, indicating that the narrator has perhaps not fully accepted Paula’s departure. She imagines “a place of great abundance” (Thien 76), where people no longer have to change ordinary things into gold but where the gold is already present and people no longer have to fight for gold, like gold diggers. This can be related to the other meaning of “alchemy”, namely the transmuting of something of low value into something brilliant and highly valuable. What this might mean in relation to the story is that out of all the misery that both girls have gone through, especially Paula, having been abused by her father, something good might come of it. Or as the narrator puts it: she wonders “if the act of leaving had taught [Paula] some truth I still could not grasp” (Thien 73). Alchemy is thus the expression of a hope to restore the situation and prevent the guilt that the narrator feels.

4.4. Dispatch “Dispatch” is probably the most remarkable out of all seven short stories. Despite the fact that it can be classified as a story focussing on trauma, “Dispatch” can also be seen as ‘the odd one out’. What makes the story particularly interesting is the way it uses narration and focalisation. The story is told entirely from a you-perspective, also known as a second-person narrator. One can assume the narrator is female, because she talks about a husband. Content-wise, the story deals with love and marriage, betrayal within that marriage and the grief that follows when the woman discovers her husband is in love with a woman called Charlotte. This so- called ‘other woman’ goes on a road trip with two of her best friends, Heather and Jean, to acquire some perspective on the situation but ends up involved in a car accident and dies. The events, however, are told entirely from the wife’s perspective, as if she were a fourth person present in the car and witnessed everything first-hand, the way a heterodiegetic narrator would. When the news of Charlotte’s death then reaches the husband, the story goes on to describe the situation between husband and wife, characterised by grief and anger. Throughout the narrative, themes of memory, spatiality, home and grief are crucial, which aligns the story, despite its different form, with the other stories of Simple Recipes.

A first important element is the way the story uses narration to generate a special effect. As the story is told by a second person-narrator, two important effects are achieved. On the one hand, by using “you”, the distance between the reader and the events is lessened and the reader might feel more involved. The fact that the narrator uses “they” to indicate Charlotte and her friends, however, stresses that the reader is not part of the events but rather looking at them from a certain distance and thus only as a witness. This ties in with the distancing effect,

25 where the use of a second person-narrator creates distance as the (again unnamed) protagonist tries to remove herself from the events. As such, the use of “you” turns her into ‘the other woman’ and allows her to look at herself as ‘the other’, namely the woman her husband still loves. In addition, focalisation mainly happens through the protagonist, creating a very unusual, estranging effect:

When you heard the sound of water drumming against the bathtub, you snuck inside, steam and hot air hitting your lungs. For a full minute, you watched your husband shower, his back to you. The skin on your face broke into sweat. You watched his body, the runner’s muscles, the tendons (Thien 82, my emphasis).

The perspective, however, is explained later on in the story: “In all these vivid imaginings, you are the spectator, the watcher, the one who refuses to leave until the last act. (…) [A]nger settling on you like some forgotten weight. It makes you watch until the end” (Thien 90). The narrator here defines the reader, and ultimately herself, as the one who watches the events from the outside. Later, it is added that “[r]eally, you are just a bystander. (…) If this were a picture, you would be a blur in the background” (Thien 94). The spectator is barely present, hovering over the events, which can be read as a representation of how the wife feels in her marriage: like a bystander who is present but does not really take part.

A second element that makes this story interesting is the way it exploits memory. This remembering should not be confused with the escapist fantasies of the narrator: what is imagined has not yet happened or is happening as it is being imagined, whereas remembering applies only to events that already belong to the past. Two strategies are thus used to deal with the present and the past: imagination and memory. Although the wife imagines the majority of the events, which “tell[s] us more about the rememberer’s present, his or her desire and denial, than about the actual past” (Neumann & Nünning 54), the events that form the storyline’s spine are part of her memory. The narrator evaluates memories more as an intrusion: “Sometimes a thought settles in your mind like a stray hair and refuses to leave” (Thien 82). Memories are here described as annoying and something that you want to rid yourself of as soon as possible. However, the persistence of memory and the involuntary nature of remembering by the subject prevent this. Another example is when Charlotte remembers how a male person in her life died while she was still in elementary school, presumably her father: “she feels her life coming back to her. Bits and pieces she thought were

26 long forgotten” (Thien 84). Memory returns not as a whole, but in fragments, often at unexpected moments. In some parts of the story, there is thus also a layering of memory: the wife imagines Charlotte and her friends remembering certain parts of their lives. The imagining already gives this part of the story dubious status because it cannot be considered true memory. Additionally, because they are not her own memories but the memories of Charlotte and her friends, their status becomes twice as dubious. Other references to this involuntary remembering include: “There’s a memory in your mind that you can’t get rid of” (Thien 87) or a memory “come[s] to you, clear as a picture” (Thien 90). What becomes clear from the story is that “the relation between memory and reality and between narrative and truth is much more complex than is insinuated” (Neumann 55). It is the combination of exploiting narration and focalisation with this two-fold structure of memory that blurs the boundaries of what is real and not real, making the story one about liminality and in- betweenness. This is particularly essential as, thematically, the story deals with a sense of (not) belonging, something that becomes increasingly difficult in a world where space is blurred.

Before it is becomes possible to analyse the use of spatiality and memory in detail, it is important to focus on what can be seen as the core of the story: the thematic use of grief, which is emphasised through the ways events are narrated and focalized. As the wife discovers that her husband has not cheated on her but is in love with a childhood friend, Charlotte, she goes through the process of grieving and the distance that this way of narrating creates symbolises her own letting go. Her husband grieves too, but he grieves for Charlotte’s death, which announces the symbolic ending of their marriage, which is imminent throughout the story. The first signs of grief are noticeable when husband and wife climb into bed together and “he pushed his face against your chest, his body taut and grieving” (Thien 87). The use of “your” here also implicates that the husband is already with someone else, and no longer belongs to his wife. Her own grief is never made explicit but becomes evident by means of references to different images from news broadcasts, which she uses to express herself indirectly. The tragedies on the news stand in correspondence with her own tragedy: the disintegration of her marriage. Images of natural disasters, war and revolutions are alternated with talk about her marriage (Thien 88). She notices “a woman weep” (Thien 87) and “a woman clinging to a rooftop” (Thien 88), all of whom can be seen as impersonations of her own grief and the fact that she, too, is still clinging onto her marriage. Nevertheless, she acknowledges that grief is a universal emotion and by projecting it onto places across the globe, she feels she has less right to it than those other people suffering across the globe.

27 Another reason for this projection could be that it is a way of reducing the weight of the grief: by spreading it across the globe, it becomes less personal and concentrated and thus less heavy to carry. When looking at the woman who holds onto the rooftop, she believes “she would look at you with only the faintest expression of pity” (Thien 89). Later, too, when she “list[s] all the things [she’s] afraid of”, she lists “[n]uclear catastrophe” and “[w]ar” next to familial events like “[c]hildbirth” and last but not least a “failed marriage” (Thien 95). By aligning world disasters with domestic situations, she tries to show their likeness, namely the fact that people’s emotions are involved in both types of situations, whether they are global or domestic. However, it is also clear that a true comparison is impossible, as she herself suggests: “As if there is any equality between these things” (Thien 95). She explicates this by saying “it is irrational to feel this way to be so overwhelmed by the small tragedies of your life when all around you, there are images of men and women and children” (Thien 92).

The husband and wife are suffering through two different tragedies, and the wife feels that her husband’s grief over Charlotte adds to her own grief over their marriage. She would rather be grieving Charlotte than to be the one watching her husband grieve not over their own marriage, but over a different woman: “So badly, you want to be the person who grieves for her. Not the envious one, not the one whose heart has toughened up” (Thien 90). Although the husband grieves, he realises that it could hurt his wife so he tries to hide it from her: “If your husband grieved, he did the gracious thing and refused to show it” and “his private sorrow is not on display for you. It belongs to him alone” (Thien 93). The wife feels that her husband “refused to part with it” (Thien 93), meaning he refuses to let go of the feelings that he has for Charlotte. It is only near the end of the story that the two admit what they feel towards one another and it becomes clear that their grief is conflicting and irreconcilable. Whereas at first, “you tilt between anger and sorrow” and “you expect his grief, are willing to understand it even” (Thien 93), this “grief and anger” is a feeling that “ you can no longer withhold” (Thien 97). When the husband ultimately shows his grief and “his private grief” is “laid out in view of the world”, all that remains is “your chest (…) bursting with sadness” (Thien 98). Grief is laid bare and anger is replaced by sadness. Although the two have been grieving continuously throughout the story, it is only when they admit that their marriage is really over that they can start the actual process of mourning.

As a way to cope with this grief, the narrator uses her imagination to invent events that have a much better ending than the events that are actually part of her life. To make the thought of

28 this other woman, Charlotte, more bearable, the wife pictures herself going on a road trip with Charlotte and her two best friends, Jean and Heather (Thien 80). She admits that it is a way for her to avoid “getting on with (…) life” (Thien 90). By the frequently telling the reader that what the narrator tells is imagined, the lines between what is real and what is not become blurred. At a certain point even the existence of her husband is questioned: “Perhaps you only wanted to see if through the steam and heat he was truly there, or just a figment of your imagination” (Thien 82). This could be a way of questioning whether her husband is still really there, in the marriage, or if he has already left her for Charlotte, who belongs to the wife’s imaginary world, seeing as they have never met. In fact, the entire story is surrounded by the question of what is real or not, what is dreamt or what really happened, what is imagined and what is fact, strengthened by the distance that the narration creates. Although this in-between world never really leads to a full acceptance of her own or her husband’s loss, it allows presenting the situation better than it actually is. For example, when she is “lovesick”,

you dream yourself sitting in an orange rocking chair, a steaming cup of coffee resting on the arm, the chair tipping back and forth and nothing spills. As if you could do that. Keep moving and the tiny thing you balance, the thing that threatens, stays secure (Thien 91-92).

The metaphor of the coffee cup that is about to be spilled stands for the marriage that is about to bleed to death. Rather than a failed marriage, or a spilt coffee cup, the wife is able to “balance” everything and not spill. Her narration of her trauma is in itself a balancing act. This stands in contrast with her factual life, where everything is messed up. Other examples of the wife trying to ameliorate the situation through her escapist fantasies include her imagining saving men and women and children from a flood: “You picture them standing on the street on a summer day, dust against their feet. You picture them safe” (Thien 92). The reason the wife includes children here is because normally they have not yet been tainted with painful memories and trauma. Another example is related to the accident. Although Charlotte is the woman her husband is in love with, the wife still wants to save her: “When the car leaves the road, you want to nudge it back. Point it back on course. Let it not end like this” (Thien 94). The wife also dreams that she is the one in the accident rather than Charlotte: “You almost convince yourself you’re there, that it’s you, semi-conscious in the driver’s seat: exactly when you realize that the car is out of control, that it cannot be undone, exactly when, you’re not sure” (Thien 91). Again, there is an emphasis on liminality through the dream as well as

29 through the semi-consciousness of the driver. This could potentially indicate that the narrator is not yet over what has happened in her marriage; she has yet to arrive at a stage of full forgiveness or acceptance. Toward the end, however, when the husband and wife finally speak about their feelings, she imagines “people all around the world turning, diving, coming up for air” (Thien 98), which refers to her own relief, her own coming up for air after a long period of time. Additionally, this water imagery is another way of describing the liminal state that the wife finds herself in: she finds herself on the border of acceptance of the failed marriage. This relief can thus either refer to relief over the marriage itself ending because she was no longer happy, but it can also refer to relief over the fact that she can finally start grieving for the marriage that failed: she is “coming up for air”, which means she has crossed the liminal space into a state of acceptance.

This liminality and intermediateness, represented by the questioning of what is real and what is unreal, is strengthened by the use of space. First of all, the majority of the story takes place during a road trip, which is in itself a space of in-betweenness. It means being on the road continuously, driving between two places and being far away from home. Add to this that the entire road trip is part of the narrator’s imagination, and the liminality of the story doubles. They drive all the way “[o]ver Confederation Bridge” (Thien 79) , through “New Brunswick” (Thien 80), past “Thunder Bay” (Thien 83), “[t]hrough small-town Ontario” (Thien 89), all the way to Vancouver (Thien 89). During this cross-Canadian journey, they go through all types of emotions and memories are constantly triggered. However, “no one” of the girls “wants to stop, [l]ike they’re married to the highway, the exit signs flashing past. They ‘re thousands of exits away from Vancouver” (Thien 82). The fact that the word “married” is used here is no coincidence: Charlotte prefers to move past the exits, just like the narrator would rather go along with the fantasies than to choose a definite exit and go past her grief.

What can also be noticed is the urge to go back home, because when given the option to “not go back” and “be in Chile”, they “continue west and no one complains” (Thien 83), homewards. Again, home is Vancouver, but unlike in the other stories, it is now the end point, rather than the starting point of the trip, even if that end point is never reached. The narrator’s process of imagining and remembering, however, does take place in Vancouver, because this is the place where her traumatic experience took place. For Charlotte, “when they arrive in Vancouver, her life will return to normal” (Thien 89), but since she never arrives, nothing will ever be normal again. The time spent in the liminal space of the road trip

30 seems to not count as actual time spent. Time seems to stand still in this liminal space as Charlotte will be able to “catch up on all the time she’s missed” after she heads “home to Saskatoon again” (Thien 90). The liminality that envelops the story is also tangible in the last scene:

Your husband and you in this quiet circle. He crouches down to the ground, face in his hands. There is Charlotte, asleep and dreaming in a car moving through the Prairies. Your husband comes to his feet and looks for you, through the dark and the trees. One perilous crossing after another (Thien 98).

First of all, Charlotte is a character who is related to sleep and dreams, which is frequently described as a state of liminality. She is also the person who will forever stand between the wife and her husband, so that they cannot move on within the boundaries of their marriage, here depicted as a circle: “This is the way that you remember her, because between you and your husband, she will always have a kind of immortality” (Thien 94). Secondly, there is the moving across the Prairies, which is a reference to the road trip, which I have mentioned to be a state of in-betweenness before. Lastly, the darkness and the trees form an obstacle for the crossing. This can be a reference to the accident in which Charlotte lost her life, because she drove into a tree at night, but it can also be a general reference to the darkness of their grief. The last line then explicitly refers to “one perilous crossing after another”.

Mallett insists that “ideas about staying, leaving and journeying” such as depictions of the road trip and the liminal spatiality, “are integrally associated with notions of home” (77), making visible in this case the absence of it. Because of individual issues unknown to the reader the three woman on the road trip contemplate “what it would be like not to go back” (Thien 83). However, because the focalisation happens mainly through the wife and because the scenes are entirely imagined by her, it can be argued that those expressions of not wanting to return home are actually the wife’s rather than Charlotte’s. Charlotte also states that she is “tired of sleeping in motel rooms every night” (Thien 83), instead she would rather sleep in a tent. This can be read as an expression by the narrator, seeing as it is her imagination, of preferring a place that looks less like an actual house and can be put up anywhere, allowing a sort of freedom. This is contrasted with the motel room, which is fixed in space and can still remind narrator of her house back home, which is no longer a home because of the failed marriage. The motel room in itself can also be read a place of transit, a liminal space between

31 two homes. By sleeping in a tent, in other words, she admits to having given up the house as well as home in the sense of a family that often goes along with that. Mallett insists that “home is a virtual place, a repository for memories of the lived spaces” (63) and, consequentially, if those memories are not very happy, home is not a place that one feels the need to return to.

On the other side of the country, in Vancouver, the wife and husband’s apartment is also a metaphor of what is going on in their marriage. First, “you went out but didn’t come home” (Thien 86) and later “at home, your husband was already gone” (Thien 87). This leaving the house and not being at home can be an indication for leaving the marriage. They are almost never in the house together, a symbol for their not being in the marriage together. Instead of a shared space it has become a space of solitude: “You left him alone in the apartment. It’s the space that he needs and that’s what you give him” (Thien 93). As such, the house becomes a symbol for the marriage and for the self.

In this context, it is interesting to recall the wife could be found empathising with a woman “clinging to a rooftop”. If one continues the house as a metaphor for the marriage, the rooftop of the house as the only visible part and the rest of the house having already sunk indicate that not much of the marriage is left. Additionally, “your house is a silent place” (Thien 93) and what needs to be said to resolve the marriage is left unsaid: both husband and wife refuse to admit to one another that their marriage is over, leaving them in a liminal state of being both in as well as out of the marriage. Both husband and wife retreat into their own bubble, which is here depicted as “two cedars, side by side and solitary” (Thien 93). It is only in the final scene of the short story that the two speak and they “walk home together, not because it is expected or even because it is right” (Thien 98). When they find themselves on a walk in their neighbourhood, the metaphor of the house as the broken marriage is continued: wife and husband are “examining the houses, trying to guess if the mansions are really abandoned as they appear” (Thien 97), or rather they are trying to estimate whether their marriage is as empty it appears. There is still a glimmer of hope as they are “watching for signs of movement expecting the lights to come on” (Thien 98), as if they hope for their marital issues to resolve themselves and hope for everything to go back to normal, which has been described by Mallett as “a nostalgic longing for something to be as it was in an idealized past” (70).

Spoken words are not very prominent in this short story and the silent house symbolically stands for this lack of conversation. Words seem to fall short again, and spoken words are

32 often replaced with written words or plain silence. The importance of writing is illustrated by the letters exchanged between Charlotte and the husband and that form the base for everything that happens. Instead of stating what is wrong in his marriage, it is only in the letters that “he confessed that he loved her” (Thien 85), another woman. After that, the husband and wife never really talk about the incident. They watch other tragedies on the news instead, and they do it “soundlessly” (Thien 88) and even though they may “think this”, they “never say it aloud” (Thien 88). Not talking about their failed marriage is a way for them to deny it. This is literally stated by the narrator:

Your house is a silent place. The two of you, solicitous but lost in thought, the radio constantly murmuring in the living room. And because you believe in protocol, in politeness and respect, you don’t ask him and you never mention her name. When you dropped those letters in the trash, you were telling him the terms of your agreement. Don’t mention it, you were saying. Pretend it never happened (Thien 93).

The event is silenced to death. They both believe that not speaking about it will make it disappear. The letters are used as a way to communicate but are even reduced to silent objects that are thrown in the trash. However, the narrator soon realises the failure of written words, because “[y]ou know that writing them out will not make them go away” (Thien 95). Putting traumatic experiences down on paper does not make them any less real but it can help to process them quicker. At the end of the story then, the couple finally speaks to each other “what” they “can no longer withhold” and the narrator’s “own words surprise [her]” (Thien 97). Only when they speak what they have been feeling, when they speak the truth, are they able to acknowledge these feelings and, perhaps, process them. Nevertheless, finally being confronted with this truth can feel shocking to the parties involved and the narrator indicates that the husband “tells you more than you can bear to hear” (Thien 97).

Finally, because not much is spoken, the motif of the visual is one that is interesting to discuss. As was the case in the previous stories, pictures play an important role in triggering memory and “narratives are” therefore “replete with metaphors, imagery and intermedial references to pictures, photography and images” (Neumann & Nünning 11). The first reference to pictures can be found in the recurrent use of postcards. When the unnamed narrator imagines the story of Charlotte’s death, which she is unable to remember because she was never part of this memory, she says “you saw this bridge on a postage stamp once” (Thien 79). The narrator

33 combines information she has about the accident with other things she remembers: she may really remember seeing this bridge on a postage stamp, but not in this situation. It becomes even clearer that the narrator puts together recollections from photographs when she combines the image of the bridge with the image of Charlotte, whom she “saw a picture of (…) once” (Thien 79) but has “never met” (Thien 80). The environment that the girls drive through, too, is imagined because “the farthest east you have been is Banff, Alberta” (Thien 80). Instead, from “postcards of white clapboard churches, high steeples glinting in the sun” (Thien 80) the narrator constructs the entire story about the road trip. The way the wife uses memories to construct an imagined story is what Neumann and Nünning have described as follows: “What makes individual recollections important to the self are not the memories per se, but the subjective and creative interpretations of those memories in the light of present needs and imagined futures” (7). It is thus not the memories of those childhood postcards that are important now but the fact that she uses them in order to escape her own, difficult reality.

What ties everything together is the title of the short story. ‘Dispatch’ has a few different meanings, which are all related to the story in some way. First of all, it can mean “to send someone on official business somewhere quickly” (Cambridge Dictionaries Online). This can be related to Charlotte’s running off on a road trip with her friends. Although she is not on official business, it can be read that way because it seems to be a way for her to clear her head. The second meaning implies “to kill with quick efficiency” (Cambridge Dictionaries Online), which can be related to Charlotte’s quick and sudden death in the car accident, as well as the death of the marriage and the mourning that follows. In that sense, ‘dispatch’ can also mean “haste or speed” (Cambridge Dictionaries Online), which applies here to the car speeding across the bridge. A third meaning can be related to marriage, namely in the sense of “the dismissal or rejection of something” (Cambridge Dictionaries Online). Then, ‘dispatch’ would relate to the wife’s final acceptance of the failure of the marriage and dismissing it. Finally, a ‘dispatch’ is also a written text, often an official news item (Cambridge Dictionaries Online). In that case, ‘dispatch’ refers to the letter(s), which are what bring about the consequent story, and which disclose the major issue in the marriage. However, it can also refer to the many tragic news items to which the wife compares her own tragedy. In this sense, too, dispatch can refer to the writing down of the story, which makes it “official” and urges the wife to accept it as true. By doing this, she is moved towards a state of acknowledgement and acceptance.

34 4.5. House “House” is another short story that can be classified amongst stories that deal with a form of trauma. It tells the story of two sisters, Kathleen and Lorraine, as they revisit their old house and are confronted with different memories of it. The story is told from the perspective of Lorraine, making it an autodiegetic, homodiegetic narration. As the two stand and wait in front out their old house for their mother to return, Lorraine reflects on memories of her mother and father. It is through these memories that the reader is given a better view of the sisters’ situation: their mother is an alcoholic and their father is always absent, which forces them to care for themselves until their mother leaves permanently and they are placed with their foster mom Liza. This is what Neumann and Nünning have described as “a reminiscing narrator or figure who looks back on his or her past, trying to impose narrative structure on the surfacing memories from a present point of view” (13). However, chronology is often lost or jumbled up as the narrator continues to switch between present day and past memories.

One element that does keep recurring, however, is home. As was the case in all the previous stories discussed, home is present in multiple ways. First of all, there is the physical meaning of home, namely the actual house. The prominence of the house is present from the first sentence of the short story as the girls “go back to the house” (Thien 101), as well as in the title itself. It is through viewing the house that Lorraine’s memory is triggered, turning the house into “the representation of space as a symbolic manifestation of individual or collective experiences” which has the possibility of “triggering individual, often repressed, past experiences” (Neumann & Nünning 15). The house thus becomes a symbol for the memories experienced in it. Already when they enter their earlier neighbourhood, “the streets and shops [are] suddenly familiar” (Thien 101). However, it soon becomes clear that their visit is not random as “they have come all the way across the city to visit their old house and mark their mother’s birthday” (Thien 102). Because their mother has left, and the girls have no one to actually share this birthday with, the house is the closest thing they have to remind them of their mother. The house is inseparably linked to their mother, because it is this place that represents all of their memories. It was “at home” that “her mom drank until her eyes were bulging” (Thien 105) and where she “was used to finding her mother around the house, sometimes on the floor, right beside Lorraine’s bed” (Thien 113). Despite the house thus being the place where their trauma unfolded, they still hope for their mother to return to this place. As soon as Lorraine spots the neighbourhood and the house, “Lorraine has a sudden vision of her mother standing, on the sidewalk there, her hands roaming the plants, her face lit up by

35 the bloom of colour” (Thien 101). It becomes evident that the sisters no longer live in the house when “Lorraine is watching the house” and “a woman is in the window now, peering out at them” (Thien 109). This scene contrasts how the sisters are now no longer in the house, symbolising that they are no longer part of their own family. Instead, they find themselves outside, and a new family that is not their own is peering at them from the inside. The house is thus not just a physical place but becomes a symbol for the falling apart of the family. Especially the father, who accidentally drives past and returns to the house too, seems preoccupied with wanting to make sure that the “house is” not “falling apart” (Thien 118), as he admits to “driv[ing] by the old place, just to make sure it’s still standing up” (Thien 119).

To Kathleen, ownership also seems important, because the two girls have never really felt at home in any place after they were removed from their parental house. Perhaps they did not even feel at home in that one. Additionally, they have been dragged from place to place after their mother left, because of which Kathleen attaches much meaning to owning a place of her own. When sitting on the grass, she states: “No one owns this grass. (…) All this stuff between the sidewalk and the curb? It’s no one’s. So it’s mine” (Thien 109). In claiming this small piece of her own, she claims a kind of power over her own situation, too.

Finally, the house is important in the sense that the characters move away from it, but inevitably also return to it. Even before the sisters are taken to their foster family, Lorraine is aware of the fact that she might have to leave her house now that their mother is gone, and she wonders if she will be able to take a piece of the house, some furniture, with them, as a way to remember her mother: “She went and stood inside her mother’s closet, wondering if they would be able to take it with them when they left the house” (Thien 113). To Lorraine, the question is thus not why or if they would leave the house, but rather when.

When finally, the house is empty and sold to another family, it seems to be a place they have a hard time letting go of. First of all, as mentioned before, the girls return to the house to remember their Mom’s birthday. The father, too, admits to driving past occasionally and admits that he “can’t stand to see it and can’t stand not to” (Thien 119). Despite all the misery and trauma that has taken place in the house, it pulls the family back in, like a magnet, even if they do not want it to. However, the two sisters seem to finally move on from the house at the end of the story when they refer to Liza, the foster mom, as “home” (Thien 118). In the final scene of the short story, Lorraine pictures a “woman standing in front of the house like

36 someone in mourning. She was admiring the flowers and thinking of her children and husband” and “how they climbed into his truck together, how he comforted them, so that when they left, when they turned their backs on the house all their grief was left behind” (Thien 124-125). The house in that case becomes the embodiment of their grief. The mother, on the other hand, will always be trapped mourning beside the house. She can be read as either a memory in the house, or as a person who cannot leave grief behind and will forever be stuck in the vicious circle that is alcoholism: “She would never leave. (…) She was standing on the corner waiting for the light to change (…) [S]he was still there” (Thien 125). This shows that their mother also finds herself in a space of liminality: she has difficulty leaving the house, not physically but psychologically.

A second element that is very prominent and important to this short story is memory. First of all, the majority of the story is made up of Lorraine’s memories. The chronology of the one day that the sisters spend near the house is jumbled up by a continuous stream of her memories cutting in. The first explicit reference to remembering and forgetting is made in relation to Lorraine and Kathleen’s mother, who enters Lorraine’s mind involuntarily; she is “lodged in Lorraine’s head” (Thien 103). She is scared, however, that if she tries to push the memories away, she will not be able to remember: “Lorraine can’t make them leave. She thinks she shouldn’t try. If they disappear, she doesn’t trust herself to bring them back” (Thien 103). This shows that memory is fragile and that the subject does not always have those memories under control. Remembering and forgetting is not always a voluntary, conscious process, but rather “the same memories can be recalled voluntarily, and resurface involuntarily. Moments of the past can be invoked by words, smells, tastes and sounds” (King 9). Lorraine seems to be very aware of this: she describes her father as always having been a memory, which makes it easy to recall what he smells and looks like, whereas this is more difficult with her mother, who has always been near and who has thus only recently become a memory rather than a real person:

On the day he dropped them off at Liza’s he said he’d never forget them. Lorraine said the same and she wasn’t lying. Dad, smelling of the great outdoors and cabin sleeping, would never fade. He’d always been a memory. But her mother, with her dishevelled blonde hair, was already slipping by. When Lorraine tried to recall her face, it seemed to disappear from view (Thien 116).

37 It can also be argued that moments like this one, which form a key change in the girl’s life, are harder to forget. It is because Lorraine believes this moment to be the last moment she will ever see her father, that it becomes something that she claims “she would remember (…) forever” (Thien 116). She is able to describe all the details of this moment because she is conscious that it might be the last time to take in all those details: “white smoke trailing out the back, his left arm stretched out the window, temporarily fluttering, and the car rolling across the driveway rolling out of sight” (Thien 116). It is memories like these that have the potential to “divide the pattern of our lives into a ‘before’ and ‘after’” and “make the relationship between the self ‘before’ and the self ‘after’ much more problematic” (King 3).

To mark the importance of memory, there are a number of motifs that recur. The first one is their mother’s hair, also an important motif in “Alchemy”, which Lorraine seems to remember in every memory of her mother. She literally mentions this when she says that

[l]ately all Lorraine thinks about is her mother: (…) her muddy-blonde hair cut short and left to grow out slowly over months and months until it feathered up against her shoulder blades. When she was little, Lorraine thought her mother’s hair was directly related to the passing of time, short in the summer, long in winter, in-between in all the other seasons (Thien 103).

Here, the hair represents a kind of consistency in Lorraine’s life. The length of her mother’s hair seems to suggest a way for her to measure time but also a way for her to make sure that everything is still as it should be. However, as the story unfolds, what can be noticed is that the hair becomes a symbol for the mental state their mother is in. For example when the mother acts hysterically at a restaurant “her hair came down tangled from its elastic band” (Thien 104), much like the mother herself becomes untangled, or unhinged. Good times, when the mother is not drinking but is able to act normally and have fun with the girls, are also described by means of hairdo. She is then described as “[t]heir mother, the fun-time girl, with her short summer hair” (Thien 107). When her mother is depressed on her birthday because she promised to stay sober this one day, “her hair fell straight as a turning page” (Thien 110). This reflects how the mother, like the hair, is straight; it behaves, but it is no fun either and denounces a sort of boredom. In the final moments Lorraine manages to see her mother, before she leaves never to return again, she feels that her hair is deceiving her: “The sun on the back of her mother’s hair turned it blonde. That hair, the prettiness of it, made Lorraine

38 think there was nothing wrong” (Thien 112). At this stage, her mother’s hairdo represents the fact that Lorraine does not want to see what is going on with her mother. Later on in the story, she describes the same hair as “dishevelled blonde” in relation to her mother who “was already slipping by” (Thien 116). In this scene, the same hair is acknowledged by Lorraine as “dishevelled”, which may also be a way to describe her mother’s mental state.

One of the reasons Lorraine does not want to acknowledge how badly her mother’s alcoholism influences her is because she is very much like her mother. She, too, sometimes has these periodic episodes of hysterical behaviour that she “[does not] know how to explain” (Thien 106). An example of this is how Lorraine throws herself onto the middle of the road, screaming and refusing to stand up, because she “had the sensation she was dying” until the “two of them”, Lorraine and her mother, end up “sobbing uncontrollably” (Thien 105). Lorraine’s mother is aware of the fact that her daughter is also vulnerable to the ups and downs of life and therefore has a greater potential to end up like herself. She wants to prevent her daughter from becoming like her, despite the fact that they are so like each other. This is reflected in the following extract:

“We’re a pair,” her mother said, words running together. “How do you like that? The pair of us.” Lorraine stared at her mother’s slender hands, the nails soft and ragged. “I like it that we are a pair,” she whispered. Her mom shook her head. “No,” she said. “Wrong answer” (Thien 105-106).

However, it is not just Lorraine who is influenced by her mother’s behaviour. Her sister, Kathleen, also behaves “out of character” when her mother disappears and their father has to come and pick them up and she was “hysterical” and “screaming” (Thien 114). As a response to this behaviour, which is unlike the normal pattern, where Kathleen acts as the responsible sister who is able to keep things together at all time, Lorraine feels “afraid that she was not real at all” (Thien 114). In other words, when people stop responding the way she expects them to, the boundaries between what is real and what is not become hazy. This search for clear boundaries between what is real and not, a frequent theme in the short stories of Simple Recipes, are also reflected in her eagerness to separate her mother’s disease, alcoholism, from her mother’s personality: “She would be able to divide her mom’s sickness from her mom’s real self and she would keep them separate like glasses of water” (Thien 111).

39 With the father also constantly away from home, considering “[t]hey wouldn’t see him for months” (Thien 107), the mother figure becomes more prominent, even if that figure is not a stable one. Related to this mother figure are smell and touch, primordial senses that could remind one of the mother’s womb. This can be related to what Freud has described as “das Unheimliche” (2). They are sensations that were once familiar but now seem strange to the observer (4). This short story contains quite a number of references to these senses. I will divide them into smell and touch. Smell is related to memories that Lorraine has of her mother and father and can be connected to pivotal moments in the story, where one of the parents leaves them behind. First, there is “the morning her mother left” and “Lorraine climbed into her parent’s bed and sniffed their scents on the pillows” (Thien 104). When her father leaves them behind, his smell is something that she will remember: “Dad, smelling of the great outdoors and cabin sleeping, would never fade” (Thien 116).

The other element, touch, is related to the mother, as she is the first one to touch the child at birth, making it a very meaningful event. This touch is a recurring motif throughout the story. To Lorraine, this touch seems to be very important, as she loves to hug her mother: “Lorraine climbed into bed beside her and held on, one arm circling her mother’s rib cage” (Thien 105). This scene foreshadows that her mother will be leaving and it shows how Lorraine is literally still hanging on to her mother. Later, however, when their mother is gone, it is Kathleen who comes to perform this role of the mother and it is also her touch that is able make Lorraine feel “it all come together, what was real and what was not” (Thien 104). Again, there are references to reality and what is not real, which are sometimes blurred in Lorraine’s mind. Touch here has a disambiguating function between what is real and not real, which has a calming effect on Lorraine. Kathleen too feels like she needs this touch, and when their mother is gone, it is Liza who takes on the mother figure role and “rocked her” (Thien 121) as the two have “their arms wrapped around each other like long-lost relatives” (Thien 120). Liza does not only take over the role of caring for the girls as a foster mother, she also stands for this motherly touch that the girls need. It is thus these other ways of making meaning, such as sense and touch, that have come to replace the “unstable processes in meaning-making”, like literature and language, which can no longer be “final products of past and fixed meaning” (Hutcheon 189). This is due to the fact that touch and smell are more straightforward than language, which can be ambiguous and therefore not something that one would want to use as an anchor in a troubled and confusing situation.

40 This inadequacy of language is a common theme throughout each of the previously discussed short stories. Even Thien herself states that for some things “[she doesn’t] have the language to explain how this could be” (“But I dream in Canadian” Thien 2). Especially near the end of this particular short story, words seem to fall short and silence replaces possible conversations about issues too hard to discuss. As the father drives them back to their foster family “[t]he three of them have not spoken for a long while” (Thien 122) and they continued to “dr[i]ve in silence” (Thien 124). Lorraine has no connection to language either, because she feels it does not have the power to express any of the things relevant to her life: “Thinking words didn’t mean anything, and least of all what they said. These were words: alcoholic, trauma. But they never linked up to her life” (Thien 122). In other words, they are insufficient to describe or contain the severity of her situation and this is what Mitchell has described as the fact that “[t]rauma, whether physical or psychical, must create a breach in a protective covering of such severity that it cannot be coped with by the usual mechanisms by which we deal with pain or loss” (121), one of these mechanisms being language. At some points in the story, however, the mother attempts to say something that would make the situation better or more bearable, but she realises that no words can do that: “her mother’s mouth, the lips chapped and dry, how they opened to say something, about the storm, about anything, but no words came out” (Thien 122). The father uses his vision as a way to express what he feels: “He stared across at the house, at a loss for words” (Thien 123). By looking at the house, the symbolisation of what has been lost, he communicates a kind of mutual understanding to Lorraine, like they both know that something has been lost and that that fact needs to be accepted. Words also have a strong impact on Kathleen; she refuses to accept the fact that her mother will not be coming back and one of the ways she expresses this is “she turns her face away, as if that will stop her from hearing” (Thien 122). In this way, she denies her father “the listening voice”, which “is our primary form of care” (Penn 43). Not hearing the words seem to be a way for her to ignore the factuality of them and to deny her father this form of care.

4.6. Bullet Train “Bullet train” is the penultimate story of the collection and it can be classified as part of the short stories foregrounding traumatic experiences. The story is written from the perspective of three different individuals, whose lives become intertwined. First of all, the story is told from Harold’s perspective. It describes how he lives with an abusive father and an ill mother, who is therefore absent. Fear and sorrow seem to be the key words that rule Harold’s daily life, until he meets Thea, in whom he finds the love of his life. The second part, then, is told from

41 Thea’s perspective. It tells the story of how she became a teen mom to her first daughter, Josephine, or Josie. The third and final part, then, is told from Josephine’s perspective as she feels suffocated by her environment and feels the urgent need to run away. I will be discussing the three perspectives together as they all relate to one another in some way and because, even though the events are focalised through different characters, there is one omniscient narrator who has the ability to look back to the past as well as into the future.

First, it is important to look at the way Harold shaped as a person by the traumas of his past. He grew up in a house where he felt he had to live “life on his tiptoes” (Thien 131). He lives with his mother and father, but his father is the dominant figure in the story as his mother is in bed because she has cancer: “he could see the narrow outline of her body beneath the blankets” (Thien 131) and “[h]e missed his mother, missed her like crazy even though she was right there, inside the house” (Thien 133). In addition, his father does not know how to deal with Harold and mentally abuses him by punishing him for forgetting to do chores or falling asleep:

Sooner or later on the weekends, his father would make him climb the ladder onto the roof. It was a kind of punishment. If Harold forgot to put away the dishes in the dish rack, or if he fell asleep on the couch, as he often did in the afternoons, his dad would lose his temper. He would point his hands toward the roof, “Go think about things. Go sit where I can’t see you” (Thien 131)

Harold thus feels it is best to become invisible because it creates the least chance for him to be noticed and possibly punished. By punishing Harold for futile things, his father creates a hostile environment, and their home becomes a place dominated by fear where Harold “drowned his sorrow” (Thien 129). As “[p]lace is constituted by the particular social relations that occur in specific locations, the social effects that arise” (Mallett 70) and as Harold’s difficult relation with his parents constitutes a lack of such social relations, home becomes a foreign concept to him. Nevertheless, Harold still hopes that “by morning, she [= his mother]‘d be up and about again” (Thien 134), because it would create a greater chance of there still being a family and a home.

In light of the fact that on multiple occasions “[h]is father pull[s] him by the arm onto the back lawn and shove[s] him up the wooden ladder onto the rooftop” even though he knows

42 that “Harold [is] afraid of heights” (Thien 132), Harold’s abusive father can be seen as the trauma that dominates his memories. This trauma is added to when his mother dies and the bullying continues. It is apparent that this is the only constant in Harold’s life: “Nothing was the same, except here he was again on the roof” (Thien 136). This information of his past is revealed through Harold’s fragmented memories. As he sits on the roof after his father has sent him up, he thinks back of these different moments that included both his parents. What is particularly interesting is the chronology in which the events are told. Harold sitting on the roof is the story’s present and as these past events are remembered in the present the “chronological order is dissolved at the expense of the subjective experience of time” (Neumann 336). In other words, the narrative’s present time is frequently interrupted by memories that function as flashbacks. This results in a fragmented chronology that jumps back and forth between present and past time. What makes it even more difficult to retrieve the chronology of the events remembered is that they are constantly interrupted by Harold’s continuous stream of thoughts. For example “Harold thought of his grandmother, her soft wrinkled arms and watery eyes (…), of snow falling on Trout Lake, how it melted on the surface of the water (…) of elephants in the National Geographic, their sad, baggy eyes (…), of dream-catchers, the netting and the beads woven together, holding his most secret wishes” (Thien 131). Finally, he “thought about the bullet train in Japan, speeding across the country” (Thien 133), which is where the short story’s title comes form. This intermittency by thoughts that are meaningful to him may be typical of “traumatic memory” as “this may be a process of repetition with a difference, as we revisit painful or otherwise significant moments of the past with changed and changing emotion and understanding” (King 177). It is thus possible that Harold associates new imagery with his past trauma each time, rather than being able to tell the story straight. The imagery, in a way, allows him to stall his own confrontation with his traumatic past.

Another element that is particularly interesting in relation to memory is the use of tenses within the short story. First, the simple past is used to express things that Harold remembers. However, because the omniscient narrator is aware of what will happen, the tense changes to the future: “He will remember”. Another example includes: “When he was ten, Harold experienced what he would come to think of as the turning point of his life” (Thien 135, my emphasis). Although ten-your old Harold is yet unaware of this, the narrator, Harold’s older self, already reveals what Harold will think in the future. There is thus a discrepancy between Harold’s younger narrating self and his older narrating self. He is aware that certain moments

43 are more important when it comes to remembering them: “He looked her [=his mother] straight in the face and said, “I will never forget you””(Thien 136), which takes place when he realises that his mother is dying. Although Thea’s narrative also includes scenes from the past, there is never a shift in tenses: everything that is told has taken place in the past. This seems to suggest that she has accepted her past for what it is, without wanting to keep connecting it to the present. In Josephine’s story, however, a shift can be perceived from past tense to future tense: “In the end, Josie will not marry the boy with the dark hair” (Thien 155). This use of future tense is still different from the way it is used in Harold’s narrative: here it is used to look at the future from the present, whereas in Harold’s narrative it is used to look at the present from a past perspective. These uses represent a continued importance of the past in the present for Harold and insecurity about the future for Josie.

When one considers the challenges posed by Harold’s past in the present still, and the associative nature of his process of remembering, it comes as no surprise that he chooses to be surrounded by people that understand this importance. Thea, for example, states the following: “I have an excellent memory. It goes with my line of work, I guess. I remember everything someone tells me. I just pack it down. I’ve always been good with secrets” (Thien 141). She later also employs her memory in comforting Harold: “Because I’ll never, ever forget anything you tell me. I’ll always remember. I’ll always remember everything you tell me” (Thien 141). Not being able to forget is usually associated with traumatic experiences, usually these events are burned into one’s memory. Here, not being able to forget is presented as a positive way of looking at memory: the fact itself that Thea remembers what Harold tells her is a sort of comfort.

As indicated before, home is again crucial to the process of remembering, just like in the other stories. The use of meandering time through the character’s memories, intensified by the different tenses, can be connected to a similar movement in space. There is neither a clear line between home and away, or between house and home and characters wander between them. As already suggested the house where Harold lives does not feel like home because his mother is often absent due to her illness and his father abuses him psychologically. Home then becomes a place where he “wandered (…) from room to room, with a pain in his chest” (Thien 133) rather than a place where he feels safe and secure. This meandering in the narrative in a way mirrors his own mental wandering in his memory. With this comes the urge to run away (Thien 133), in search for a place where he does feel like he belongs.

44 Harold is not the only character in the story who feels the urge to run. Josephine, Thea’s daughter, states the following: “I hate it, I hate it here” and she urges Harold to “let [her] go” (Thien 138). Josephine too feels like she no longer belongs in the apartment with her mother, because ever since Harold moved in, there is a different family dynamic, where she feels like she is superfluous: “She wasn’t meant to be here any longer (…) wanting to be set loose. It wasn’t Toronto so much as the fact that she needed to be gone (…) it didn’t matter so long as she left here” (Thien 153). The apartment becomes the place where she feels this most clearly: “In this apartment, Josie thought she might drown” (Thien 150). It becomes clear then that it is not necessarily the physical presence of people in the house or home that makes one feel like one has family but rather the sense of belonging to a certain constellation of people. Harold’s mother is present in the house, but she is no longer part of the family dynamic. She used to be what kept Harold and his father together, now leaving a gap between the two as she leaves the two on their own: “He missed his mother, missed her like crazy even though she was right there, inside the house” (Thien 133).

This notion of journeying away from home is also closely linked to space seeing as “home is not a pure bounded and fixed space of belonging and identity that is as familiar as the away is (…) strange” (Mallett 78). There is no clear boundary between what is home and what can be seen as away. Rather, what feels like home and what does not is linked to family and sense of belonging. Harold finds his belonging in Thea, whom “he will be holding on to (…) with all his strength” (Thien 139). It is the first time he has experienced some sense of family and he wants to hold onto it for as long as he can. To Thea, this belonging is her own daughter, who makes her realise that “in all her mistakes, in all her failures and missteps, she had finally managed to do something supremely well” (Thien 148). It is also the first time she experiences real love. For Josephine, family does not seem to be a reason for her to stay or feel like she belongs because despite her claiming “I already have one [=a family]” (Thien 156), she constantly feels like “something in her can’t rest, something inside her fights it tooth and nail” (Thien 156). It can be argued that Josephine has not yet found anything that gives her the sense of belonging, the sense of home, that family gives to Harold and Thea; instead “when people ask, she will say that her favourite country is one that has not yet been discovered” (Thien 157). In other words: she has yet to find a country, or a space, where she feels at home, and instead, like Harold used to, she is wandering. This wandering and feeling lost is closely interwoven with the form of the story: the temporal shifts, shifts in perspective and shifts in tense all reflect the difficulties in figuring out oneself.

45 This not feeling at home, then, and this search for a sense of self and belonging is often difficult to express and it is thus not surprising that silence plays a prominent role throughout the story. The first time this silence becomes prominent is between Harold and his father. They are both affected by the tragedy of the mother being ill and eventually passing away, but instead of talking about this, “[i]n silence, they made ham sandwiches for lunch” (Thien 135). Food is here used, like in the first story, “Simple Recipes”, as a way to avoid talking about the issues present, to avoid verbal conflict. Thea on the other hand, grows up in a family where she “developed a booming voice. She had to just make herself heard. Dinner conversation was warfare” (Thien 142). However, although at first glance it seems that the family has actual conversations, what soon becomes clear is that they do not talk with each other but rather to one another, each having a monologue of their own. What can be noticed later on in her story is that the real issues are not discussed either in her family. When her mother finds Thea tangled up with her much older boyfriend in bed “[t]here was a long silence. Then her mother closed the door. Thea listened to her mother’s silent retreat down the hallway” (Thien 144). Whereas Thea describes herself as having “a booming voice” (Thien 142), it is “[h]er daughter” who “will leave her at a loss for words” and she “will nod, afraid to speak” (Thien 147). When it comes to saying what she feels about Harold Thea cannot find the words to express this. Lastly, Josephine also finds it difficult to express to her mother how she feels about living in the one-bedroom apartment with her and Harold. She finds it hard to explain to her mother why she wants to leave without hurting her mother’s feelings if she were to speak out loud that she wants to leave: “She’d tried saying it in different ways, but no matter what she wrote she ended up sounding trite” (Thien 153-154). By writing a note, she hopes she “can reach, through metaphor, one’s sensory and emotional experiences bumping the needed words, and the unspoken is spoken” (Penn 49). The fact that it is sometimes easier to write how one feels plays a role here, but Josephine also acknowledges that there are certain things that need to be spoken and not written: “She loved her mother to death, but that wasn’t the kind of thing she could write in a note” (Thien 154). Thus, instead of fulfilling the function of expressing everything that was left unsaid, the note becomes not even that and is, as it were, silent.

As is the case in most stories, the bond between mother and child is important in the analysis of the story, seeing as words are less important in this relationship. As mentioned in relation to the previous stories, the relation between mother and child is often one of the primordial senses, like sound, smell and touch. Josie expresses this special bond when she says that “even

46 though [she] was fully grown, she liked sleeping beside her mom. She liked her mom’s clean, antiseptic smell” (Thien 149). The smell itself also reminds her of earlier times, as it gives her a melancholic feeling so that “she misses the way things were before” (Thien 149), potentially referring to her life before Harold. This feeling of melancholy is also typical of memory of the mother because one associates it with the warm and safe environment of the womb. Touch is also important in this regard: “Her mom kept her arms tight around her, and Josie couldn’t pry herself loose” (Thien 153). This can be read literally, but also figuratively, where Josephine feels like her mom is unable to let her go, even though Josephine has the urge to run. This is contrasted with the fact that “[w]hen Josie was a little girl, she was worried that her mother would abandon her. A common fear, she later learned” (Thien 153). This fear of the mother abandoning the child is commonly related to this primordial relation where the child is taken away from the mother: it is pried away from the womb once it is born and where its life is signified by a fear of this ever happening again. This bond can also be perceived between Harold and his mother. Without her, the house does not feel like a home and the family disintegrates.

4.7. A Map Of The City The final story of the collection is “A Map Of The City” and it is the second story that can be classified as a narrative of migration. Important to note is the fact that the collection is clamped by two immigration narratives. This can be read as a symbolic representation of the immigrant being suspended between two cultures. In the centre of this experience of migration, then, are the stories on trauma, suggesting that migration itself is a form of trauma. This final story is told by Miriam, an autodiegetic narrator, who discusses what it feels like to grow up as the child of Asian immigrants in Canada. Note also that the migrant narrator is named, in comparison to the first story, which could suggest that the second-generation Canadian immigrant assumes an identity, and hence also a name, in the end. The story itself talks about the issues that follow this migration from different perspectives. First of all it looks at the situation from Miriam’s perspective, as a second-generation immigrant. Secondly, it also looks at the situation from her parents’ perspective, although her father and mother have separate ways of dealing their experience of migration: her father melancholically longs for his homeland, whereas her mother realises the benefits of integrating fully into Canadian culture.

As is the case in all the short stories, memory is of primordial importance once more. Again, the story is told from the perspective of a reminiscing figure, in this case Miriam. It is through

47 her memories of her childhood as a second-generation immigrant living in Canada that the reader receives information about her relationship with her parents. To Miriam, the fact that her parents are immigrants seems to be something that prevents her from feeling entirely free: she wonders: “does my family have any hold over me?” and her answer is that “their hold would never diminish” (Thien 162). Even after she moves out of her parents’ house she says “I used to glimpse my parents in unexpected places. I would see the two of them” but “I never felt the urge to join them. I only wanted to remain where I was and watch while they negotiated their way through the aisles, their bodies slow with old age” (Thien 161). They are inevitably, inescapable images of her past, which she would rather ignore than acknowledge because she envisions a different life for herself than the one her parents have. This is something she only realises when she is older. It is clear that she too is “a homodiegetic narrator who looks back on […] her life, trying to impose meaning on the past from a present point of view” (Neumann 59): “Now with the distance of time, I look back at my parents differently. If I change the way shadow and light play on them, will I find one more detail? Some small piece that I could not see before” (Thien 181). As her memories of her parents change over time, memory is once more shown to be a narrative that is constantly retold rather than set in stone. As Neumann and Nünning argue: “What makes individual recollections important to the self are not the memories per se, but the subjective and creative interpretations of those memories in the light of present needs and imagined futures” (7).

Although Miriam’s memories of her childhood and her parents are important to her, memory seems to be even more key to her father, who “seemed lost in the past” (Thien 166). As an immigrant, he struggles with finding a new identity in Canada. Rather than grieving and accepting the loss of his motherland, he continuously remembers and misses it with “[h]is expression melancholy” (Thien 186). His longing for Indonesia becomes so overwhelming even that he finally decides to leave everything in Canada behind to move back: “The country that loomed so large in his imagination finally drew him back. Despite family, despite our hold on him, in the end, that place won out” (Thien 198). Although home is often considered to be the place where one’s family is, home in the sense of homeland wins out. Memory here becomes a burden because it has the meaning of “memory as a profound homesickness” (Krotz 146), which prevents the father from moving on and making something of his life in Vancouver. Miriam realises this as she states: “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

48 blessed with such forgetfulness” (Thien 221). Forgetfulness is thus seen as a blessing because it would allow her father to move on from his Indonesian past. What is more, he is in denial of the melancholia he is suffering from. He says that “the country, I’ve almost forgotten” (Thien 171), which stands in stark contrast with the references to his old country throughout the story. These references can be as subtle as singing John Denver’s “Take Me Home Country Roads” (Thien 169).

Her father’s melancholia is contrasted with her mother’s will to move on and make something for herself: When my parents left Indonesia, they walked away from a familiar life (…) That country lay like a stone between my parents. Once here, my mother did not look back. She worked herself to the bone but set her sights on the future. But my father could not see so far ahead. He held on to those old photographs of Indonesia (…) to see whether the photographs were true to the memory he carried, if a picture could ever do his country justice. The bad luck of his life was not, as he thought a lack of opportunity or ingenuity. It was the tragedy of place. To always be in the wrong country at the wrong time, the home that needs you less than you need it (Thien 201).

Her father and his melancholic longing for Indonesia are contrasted with both his wife and her urging him to move on, and his daughter and her views as a second-generation immigrant. Nevertheless, her mother’s urging to move on and integrate are problematic too: she ignorers her own longing for her homeland and focuses solely on the integration, not acknowledging her loss.

Contrasts between the first and second generation are created through a number of motifs, which reveal “the complexities of personal relationships, in particular the divide between children and parents, as well as the sense of loss and dislocation arising from immigration” (Thien “On Making Fragments Whole”). As was the case in “Simple Recipes”, language again constitutes a difference between the two generations. Miriam experiences her parents’ use of English as strange, even though they have a tendency to use their native tongue from time to time: “Despite the violence and the political tension, my parents missed Indonesia. It came out in small ways, their English interrupted by a word of Chinese, a word of Indonesian” (Thien 178). To Miriam’s father, the English language feels strange and he is described on multiple occasions as learning new words: ““Noo-moan-ya,” my father said,

49 testing the word out” (Thien 215), using phonetic Indonesian syllables to spell out the word, and “That afternoon, I watched my father read the newspaper, cover to cover, retaining names and news for his casual conversation: “Trudeau”, he said to one customer, then shrugged his shoulders, or “Bill Bennett,” or “Thatcherism,” the word hanging disturbingly in the air” (Thien 170). Miriam describes his use of these English words and cultural terms as strange and unnatural. This stands in contrast with herself, as she has “lived in Vancouver all [her] life” (Thien 172). Her life does not resonate with the Indonesian language or culture because she has been brought up in Canadian society and therefore does not have to deal with the difficulty of being suspended between two cultures as her parents do. “At home, they spoke Indonesian and Chinese only to each other, never to me” (Thien 179). Despite Miriam’s efforts to try and learn something about the culture of her parents’ home country, she is excluded from it, forever left wondering. This gap is symbolised in the scene where her father takes her to school: “He let go of me and I ran into the schoolyard, immersed myself in hopscotch and California kickball. I would adapt. He knew I would grow up and do well here. My father turned around, he started walking home again” (Thien 185). Miriam’s easy integration into the new culture and fact that she adapts easily is represented by her playing “hopscotch” and “California kickball”, games that are typical of Canadian and North- American culture. Symbolically, her father walks away from all of this.

The contrast between the two generations is also strongly symbolized by the foregrounding of space: “I was the only one of us born in Canada, and so I prided myself on knowing Vancouver better than my parents did – the streets, Rupert, Renfrew, Nanaimo, Victoria. Ticking them off as we passed each set of lights, go, go, go, stop. But nothing in Vancouver had the ring of Irian Jaya, where my parents lived in the first year of their marriage” (Thien 178) and “When I was twenty-one the familiarity of this city comforted me” (Thien 173). Whereas Vancouver feels familiar and comforting, she “thought of Indonesia as the place of tumult, of unrest” whereas “for [her] parents, though, no other country will ever do” (Thien 202). Space thus only becomes meaningful in people’s minds. What is noticeable here is a chiasm of what Indonesia and Vancouver mean to Miriam and her parents: Vancouver is familiar to her, but strange to her parents, the same way Indonesia feels unfamiliar to her but home to her parents. The difference is that Miriam has the opportunity to reside in the city that she loves so much, whereas her parents have been taken away from that place and “find themselves haunted by the persistent ghost of an earlier place” (Krotz 146). Miriam is unable to understand her parent’s tragedy, especially her father’s “tragedy of place. To always be in

50 the wrong country at the wrong time” (Thien 201). Even when Miriam tries to understand her parents by showing an interest in Indonesia: “When I was younger, I used to study all the details of Indonesia, its wealth and beauty, its lost ages. As if I could understand my father and myself by knowing this, as if what I needed could be compiled, written down, and it would shore me up against the present day” (Thien 214). It seems that understanding this tragedy of place has nothing to do with knowing the place but rather with feeling at home in that place. As a result, Indonesia continues to escape Miriam’s grasp, extending the gap between her and her parents.

The reason her parents probably do not want her to become involved with the culture that they feel at home in is because they see it as an obstruction to fully integrating into Canadian society. The culture would then become a hurdle, the same way it forms an obstacle to her father. Instead, they cherish great hopes for their daughter. Especially her father sets his own dreams aside in order for Miriam to obtain a rich and accomplished life. Lorre describes it as the classic “pattern of the immigration story: he, as a first-generation immigrant, is ready to do all he can for the benefit of his child, in the hope that she, of the second generation, will achieve material success, and eventually express her gratefulness to her loving parents” (3). It is probably also the reason they moved away from Indonesia; it represents a lack of opportunity, whereas Canada stands symbol for opportunities and ‘making it’. This is symbolised through the roads in Indonesia and Canada: ““In Irian Jaya,” my father told me, “the road stops dead at the jungle. If you want to reach the next town, you must go by boat or plane. You can’t just get in your car and drive there” and “My father was suspicious of Canadian highways, the very ease of crossing such a country” (Thien 180). Whereas in Indonesia the roads stop, a symbol of lack of opportunity and freedom, Canadian highways allow you to cross an entire country, representing the opposite. Although Miriam’s father does not feel at home in Canada, he stays and everything he does, he does in order for his daughter to have a better life. However, “[her] father would often say that [she] had ruined his life” (Thien 164) because ever since she was born, he felt obligated to self-sacrifice his own dreams and his own longing for Indonesia is put aside. Because he feels frustrated with the situation he seeks someone to blame and Miriam’s mother becomes the ultimate victim: “He told my mother, over and over, that it had always been her decision to leave Indonesia, and never his. She had separated him from the country he loved” (Thien 191) or when he tells her “Remember, you are the one who wanted to leave Irian Jaya. It is because of you that we are in this situation” (Thien 184).

51 The frustration expressed by Miriam’s father results from finding himself in between spaces and caught in a state of liminality. As Homi Bhabha puts it, “[i]n that displacement” which the immigrant experiences “the border between home and world becomes confused; and, uncannily, the private and the public become part of each other, forcing upon us a vision that is as divided as it is disorienting” (141). References to such a division can be found in Miriam’s description of her parents’ relationship, in which she becomes the bridge that connects the two. They appear to be in two different places mentally, and Miriam therefore finds herself in between those two places, in the in-between. This is materialised in Miriam’s experience with her parents: “That night, I slept between them. They stayed on far sides of the bed, me in the middle drifting from one side to another in all their empty space” (Thien 172). She also describes herself as having been “the line between them” for too long, “the message carrier” (Thien 195). Ultimately, Miriam becomes the embodiment of her parents’ in-betweenness and most images of liminality are attributed to her father. He is continuously described as remembering Indonesia, which is in its own a state of liminality, as memories are suspended between the here and then (of the remembered time). However, this liminal space is eventually crossed when he goes back and literally crosses the ocean, the space that separated him from his motherland. However, when he comes back he has the following conversation with Miriam: “”I’m home.” “In Jayapura?” I asked. He paused for a moment. “No, no. Here. Vancouver” (Thien 203). This is the first time he has ever referred to Vancouver as home, rather than Indonesia. It seems that after his return from his trip to Indonesia, he has finally crossed the threshold and is trying to find his place in Canadian society. It took his going back to realise that Indonesia no longer feels like home. Once he has crossed this imaginary line between melancholically longing for Indonesia and integrating into Canadian society, he is hesitant to go back to the things that remind him of his past: “He waited there, as if he could not step over the line that would separate him from where he now lived” (Thien 207). In the end, however, it turns out that Miriam’s father did not feel at home at all in Canada, when he tries to commit suicide. After that, he is kept in hospital and is sleepy and drowsy, which again is a state of liminality. However, “[f]rom time to time, he opened his eyes and regarded us as if from a great distance. (…)Where he was going, into another country or into another life, I could not follow” (Thien 222). This scene is the ultimate breach between Miriam and her father as they say goodbye.

As becomes clear from this discussion of liminality, space and place constitute an important part of this migration story. One place that is particularly key to the story is the furniture store

52 where Miriam spends most of her time growing up and which represents the hopes and dreams that her father has for the future. It is also one of the first things that Miriam remembers in this short story: “Some mornings I wake up remembering the store” (Thien 166). It is something her father feels extremely proud of, and it is a pride that Miriam shares. She comes to realise that “the idea of ownership meant something” (Thien 163). As Mallett puts it: “the significance of home ownership variously argues that it is a source of personal identity and status and/or a source of personal and familial security. It can provide a sense of place and belonging in an increasingly alienating world” (66). To Miriam, this is exactly what the store was to her, “it had its place in the accepted order of things” (Thien 163). Lorre agrees that “[t]he second-hand furniture store (…) is a recurring memory in Miriam’s narrative, a sign of her nostalgia for those years of her life” (2). However, as Miriam grows older she states that “[n]ow, looking back, I see that the store had an impoverished look to it” (Thien 185). This shows the narrator looking back on her past, with a different way of viewing things. As time passes, the store itself undergoes changes too, and because of this, it becomes a symbol for the changes in Miriam’s life:

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. (…) 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. (Thien 227).

The building, a symbol for a certain stage of her life, makes room for “a new development”, a new stage in her life. Buildings, more specifically houses, are also a symbol for achievement and having made it in the new country. It is therefore that Miriam’s father insists that “[w]hen she grows up, she is going to buy her parents a big house” (Thien 165). Mallett agrees that “men consider it to be a signifier of status and achievement” (75). That space is embedded with meaning and that places can mean more than just their material dimensions becomes clear from other references as well. An example is the recurrent motif of the car throughout the story: “The car was warm and self-contained, a moving house” (Thien 215). The car here has the meaning of a house because it is the one place where the three family members are in

53 the same place, moving in the same direction. In other words, the car becomes a house because “the car is always associated with family unity and protection” (Lorre 7).

Lastly, the title itself suggests the importance of spatiality. The first direct reference to the title can be found in that same scene, where Miriam’s mother holds “a map of the city, unfurled on her lap” (Thien 181). This map later becomes a symbol for the family’s difficult history: “Perhaps, knowing everything that has brought us here, I would redraw this map, make the distance from A to B a straight line. I would bypass those difficult years and bring my father up to this moment, healthy, unharmed” (Thien 188). Here, the family’s history is mapped out as it were as dots on a map, which allows the history to become more easily accessible and straightforward, making it easier for Miriam to process.

As several passages have already suggested, it can sometimes be difficult for the characters of the story to process memories into words. Again, language often falls short, and people have to resort to other means of expressing themselves and telling their stories. “A Map of the City” is specked with such references to the inadequacy of language. First of all, there is the silent understanding between Miriam and her father, which she refers to as “a tacit understanding” (Thien 164). At first, this tacit understanding can be read as something positive: they do not need many words to understand each other because they are completely in sync. A recurring conversation they have is the following: “When the car was warm enough, my father said, “Okay,” and I replied, “Okay”” (Thien 167), a conversation that she later mirrors with her boyfriend Will (Thien 175). This silence between the first- and second-generation within one family is caused by a “hope that was never explicitly stated” (Thien “But I Dream in Canadian” 2) but “[is] written upon [the children of immigrants’] childhoods, and is played out in the present existence that my siblings and I are now living” (Thien “But I Dream in Canadian” 1). It is this hope that embosoms Miriam with a certain fear, because she is scared to disappoint her father and to fail to live up to her father’s expectations: “I needed to ask him, Have I disappointed you? But the question itself seemed too simple” (Thien 166) and “I should have said then what I feared. Instead, I allowed the moment to pass. I let it drop there like glass in the sand” (Thien 189). Rather than asking him what she fears most, she remains silent, and their once tacit understanding becomes negatively charged. What used to be a silence of understanding is now one of unasked and therefore unanswered questions and it is this tension that comes between father and daughter in the end. Miriam explicitly states this:

54 I thought of my father standing in the doorway that night, one unspoken conversation. As if I could have changed the outcome with some small, simple act. If there were words that could have kept him here, if I had been the kind of daughter who would say them (Thien 198).

Silence is also prevalent between Miriam’s mother and father. Because of the different ways they deal with migration, as mentioned before, they often have conflicting views and are, figuratively, in two different places. This silence is spatialized in this case as well: “Our apartment became a silent place. My parents chose not to speak, rather than risk an argument that would shatter their fragile peace” (Thien 192). When her father eventually leaves for Indonesia, he “left only the quiet of his departure” (Thien 197) and “left her sitting there, wordless” (Thien 190). Even with her father’s departure then, silence is still prominent in their family. It is only when Miriam’s father attempts suicide, “an act that made all the words fall silent” (Thien 225), that “[w]e kept our silence, as we always had, but this one was different. It was not filled with the unspoken” (Thien 223). The act of committing suicide can thus be read as the act that dissolves all unanswered questions as it speaks louder than words: the father’s melancholia and consequent unhappiness are finally ‘spoken’ through this act.

Finally, considering the difficulty of talking about and putting into words such memories linked to one’s family or past, there are numerous references in the story to images and vision. The first element that returns frequently is Miriam’s father’s melancholic reminiscing through photographs. Rather than expressing his missing Indonesia in words, “[t]he place of the past he longs for is mediated through pictures” (Lorre 4):

My father reached into his desk and pulled out a handful of photographs. Indonesian plantations spread out under wide skies. He tapped his index finger down, pointing out the house where my parents lived before coming to Vancouver. (…) My father ran his hands over the trees in the backdrop, told me about the fruit, strange and exotic things, rambutan and durians. From memory he sketched a map of Irian Jaya – the shape like a half-torso, one arm waving – where my parents had lived for a short time (Thien 170).

The photographs are a way for him to access his memory and to roam the spaces that he once felt so at home in. They also form a different medium for narration. The fact that “[d]uring

55 our visits, he always reached for his photo album. (…) We would start at the beginning”, indicates that to look at photographs from the past allow for a less complex chronology. The images have sharp boundaries in time because they are only snapshots. Real life is more complex than demarcated moments in time. In other words, “they arguably allow for alternative ways of sense-making” (Neumann & Nünning 11). When he moves back to this place in Indonesia, however, he “no longer needed to carry these” (Thien 202). The photographs no longer need to serve as a way to trigger his memory or understanding because he is back in this place of the past where he feels at home.

A second element that is related to the visual and sight is the fact that Miriam’s goodbye to her father is represented by metaphorical blindness. As mentioned before, words often fall short of the meaning they need to convey and silence takes their place. In this scene, Miriam also loses her sight. She describes herself as “[t]oo blind” (Thien 219), “I pushed through the curtain blindly” (Thien 220) and “blind now” (Thien 221). Compared to the remark that “longing manifests itself in sight” (Thien 162), it is possible that Miriam’s blindness is a symbolic representation of her letting go of her father: with her sight, her longing for her father goes too.

5. Conclusion Madeleine Thien’s short story collection Simple Recipes consists of two main types of stories: the migration story and the story that focuses on trauma. Nonetheless, despite the different experiences of the characters in the stories, there are a number of key themes and motifs as well as formal features that recur.

Liminality or in-betweenness is the key concept to understanding the collection. All characters, no matter their situation, find themselves somewhere in between two phases of their lives: migration or trauma mark a breach in the character’s lives and announce a transition to the next stage. Meanwhile, they are suspended between past and present, there and here, real and imagined, home and away and new and old culture. The narrators in Simple Recipes are typically young adolescents, or sometimes adults looking back on their childhood, because they have a different way of viewing the world considering they are still young and in search of their identity and place in the world. They are, as it were, suspended between childhood and adulthood. Often, they are forced to find a way to identify separate from their parents, especially their mother. Characters in Thien’s short stories are thus often

56 confronted with the loss of a mother or the mother country and forced to search for a new sense of self. This search is often a difficult and confusing one, filled with grief for what has been lost. It is also marked by a longing for a clear separation between the past and present, the here and there, the real and imagined, etc, rather than the confusing state that is liminality. Often, the mother is able to fulfil this disambiguating function as her touch brings everything together again. Thien’s idea about this longing for a clear separation can be related to Kristeva’s ideas on abjection, which describe “attempts whereby the child tries to separate itself from its (m)other and establish borders of its own” (De Smyter). This abjection is related to the liminality as well, as trying to figure out those clearly delineated borders often holds a gradual crossing, where the subject finds him or herself in an in-between state.

This liminality is intensified by the recurrent use of space, which is attributed meaning by the characters in the stories. Ultimately their search for identity is mapped onto places. Home is the central premise in this search for identity. With the loss of one’s family or the culture one grew up in, home becomes the starting point and a metaphor of that often very difficult search for the self. Often, the house a family lives in becomes a symbolic representation of what the characters are going through. In some cases, like those of the immigrant narratives “Simple Recipes” and “A Map of the City”, the house is a symbol for lifestyle and culture; in others, like “House”, it becomes the physical representation of emotion. What is clear from all stories, nonetheless, is that the home is only a home if it also fulfils the meaning of family and belonging and with each of the stories the character’s sense of belonging is exactly what is at stake as their families fall apart or are pulled away from the place that they experienced as home. Although most of the stories portray a home that is broken because of a traumatic incident, a few characters still show an urgency to return. The longing of being one again with the mother(land), which is materialised in the object of the house, is thus evident. The bond between mother and child is one that is hard to break and in many of the stories, the mother figure is what hold things together or, because of her absence, lets things fall apart. If this break with the mother(land) is not complete, and the subject thus finds him or herself in the previously discussed state of liminality, he or she remembers the mother(land) with a sense of melancholy: “if the subject does not succeed in recovering the mother in signs, however imperfectly, it ends up being overwhelmed by melancholia” (De Smyter).

In stories of migration, this liminality of space and identity and its subsequent melancholia is overcome through language. Speaking the mother tongue can help connect the present and

57 the new country, with the past and the homeland, closing the gap between which the immigrant subject is suspended. It is a way for the characters to assert themselves as being part of a particular culture or denouncing another. Nevertheless, language frequently proves insufficient as a mechanism to cope with trauma. Until the characters are able to speak the words they feel, they are stuck in a liminal space and unable to move on from their trauma. This means the subjects “carry an unnameable grief” (De Smyter), one that peaks through in their silence as they leave their (failed) abjection unspoken. Often, they try to communicate their concerns and emotions by other means such as postcards or images instead.

In addition to using such recurrent motifs as the photograph, Thien uses a number of narrative techniques to add to the sense of liminality that is at the heart of the collection. She most frequently uses a narrator who tells his or her life narrative through recollection and memory. This narrator then makes his or her memories meaningful from a present point of view, which makes for the fact that the stories are always somewhere in between the past and the present. Additionally, these narrators are often anonymous, which could indicate that they do not have a clear-cut identity but rather stand for groups as a whole. The fact that most of these are also female might indicate Thien’s insistence on the need for female Canadian voices. On the other hand, it can be read as a link to Kristeva’s abjection, where the mother(land) that is so crucial to identification are defined as female. Through the use of different types or narrating and alternating focalisation, as well as play with the order of events and blurring of boundaries between what is real and unreal, it becomes clear that memory is personal, selective, fragmented and remembering is often involuntary in nature.

In short, I have explored each story of Madeleine Thien’s Simple Recipes formally and thematically in search of ways memory and identity are constructed and employed in the face of traumatic events. Thien caters the reader with a layered exploration of what these traumas mean to the characters through her multifaceted use of ‘home’. Her techniques of focalisation and narration allow that same reader to go on a search for a new identity in light of those events. Through the use of the short story, Thien inscribes herself in a tradition of English- Canadian short story writers that explore relevant, current issues by means of condensed, though nonetheless nuanced, form. By questioning concepts like space and memory and making use of the liminal character of both, ‘home’ becomes manifold and stands not just for the personal but also the communal. Thien has hereby proven that authors of her generation should not just be dismissed as a continuation of that English-Canadian literary tradition but

58 that they are relevant, renewing and original and therefore deserve a yet unattributed place within contemporary research on Canadian literature.

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