51 pages • 1 hour read
Madeleine ThienSimple Recipes
Fiction | Short Story Collection | Adult | Published in 2001A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
The Literal and Symbolic Meanings of Home
Thien situates the concept of home in every story, whether as a house from the past, another country, the arms of another person, or empty space. Home in Thien’s construction is therefore either literal or symbolic. In the story “House,” home exists in both the house the sisters once lived in and in their relationship with their mother. Both ideas of home are described as an absence. For most of the characters, home is often blurred by memory, distance, and location, as well as by abuse, trauma, and grief.
In the stories that most deal with the concept of immigration, home is often metaphorical. Family represents home in the same way that a home country, or an adopted country like Canada, represents home. The idea of home is not always tactile, but in the mind—it is not always a literal building with family members inside, but a memory, a thought, a yearning. These metaphorical images of home are the most elusive for the characters; yet, at the same time, these symbolic meanings are emotionally felt.
Thien’s use of both a figurative and literal sense of home allows for deeply felt, sometimes tragic experiences for the characters. The characters are everyday people whose idea of home is often complicated by loss or abuse. One such symbol of home occurs in “Map of the City,” where the sense of home as both a place (both Canada and Indonesia) and an idea are destroyed by trauma and mental illness/alcohol abuse. The stand-in for home is the Bargain Mart furniture store owned by the father, where “a hall of couches” (166) is a ghostly living room where no one sits. Whether literal or symbolic, empty or full, the concept of home haunts Thien’s characters both literally and symbolically.
Memory as a Complicated Storehouse of Events
Every story in this collection features some aspect of memory. Some stories use memory as the overriding theme, but all of the stories refer to the main characters’ memories, especially in regard to their home countries and/or their lost homes, as seen in stories like “Simple Recipes,” “Map of the City,” and “Four Days from Oregon.” Memory works as a storehouse of events, whether true or not, that motivates the characters’ actions and propels the plot. Remembering equates to the active use of language when characters re-tell events. Both remembering and retelling are used to give meaning to the stories and to delineate the characters’ relationship to the conflict.
Memories are often recalled by encountering objects. Each story contains beloved objects, mementos, and photographs. For example, in “Four Days from Oregon,” the photograph that Tom takes of the family is one that doesn’t just capture a memory, but captures the memory of the original family unit, one from which Tom and the biological father are removed. This means that the photograph shows not just what the family consists of in the present, but in the absence of the father and stepfather, reveals the memory of things that are absent.
Memory is also often layered. Many of the characters remember the way other characters recollect their home country. This is especially true in “Simple Recipes,” when the narrator uses food to demonstrate her father’s identity with and memory of his home country. Another example of “tiered memory” occurs in “Four Days From Oregon.” Here, the narrator repeatedly remembers the way her father spoke of his home country. Because of this filtering and layering aspect of memory, much of what is remembered or thought to be memory may be unreliable. When filtered through the narratives of the character’s own memories, the ambiguity of relationships becomes a key factor, altering whatever might be considered “true” about the past and thereby redefining truth.
In some stories, like “House,” memory is the primary factor in the narrative. For the sisters, standing in front of the object—their former home—triggers their memories about their parents and their lives. Memory in this collection, then, is often associated with trauma, abuse, grief, and loss. The author spares no detail about the suffering of her characters as they examine their memories or use unreliable memories to create truth.
Finally, memories also include the immigrant characters’ recollection of their home country. Often these recollections serve to show how immigrant characters live in liminal states—neither fully in their home country nor fully in their adopted country. Again, the trauma of immigration and notions of home are filtered through the memories of the characters, which in turn explain or demonstrate the nature of their abuse, their alcoholism, and their traumatic relationships with family members.
Immigration: Identity Through Dislocation and Displacement
Immigration is a key theme throughout the collection. Many of the stories contain primary characters who are first-generation immigrants—they have recently settled in Canada from their home country, which is usually, in this collection, Indonesia.
The second type of immigrant story in the collection has to do with second-generation immigrants. Often these two types of immigrants are found in the same story and offer the story its main source of tension.
The immigrant theme is closely related to the theme of memory since the characters’ identities are often entwined with their immigrant experience. The first-generation characters, as immigrants, live in a middle state, in the stories—somewhere between their memory of home and their new lives in Canada. The theme of immigration thus anchors the stories, providing their momentum and meaning.
The author also shows that for second-generation characters, memories are inherited. Memories are experienced by the children of immigrants and, as we see, often become the basis of their memories for lost or distant parents, or memories obscure the meaning and identity for the second-generation characters.
Finally, the immigrant theme is also closely tied to the theme of home. Thien consciously intertwines these three themes as a way to build characters and create narrative identity. The immigrant theme is one that builds the plot points involving dislocation and displacement. For many of the characters, immigration is the aspect of their lives that makes them feel disassociated from their present circumstances or is part of the underlying cause for absence, loss, grief, and trauma.
