SIMPLE RECIPES

Seven spare, eloquent tales of family ties that fray but don’t break the US debut of prizewinning Canadian author Thien, who draws occasionally on her family’s Asian background but is first and foremost a perceptive, observant child of Vancouver.

In the title story, a Malaysian immigrant father’s supportive love for his daughter contrasts with his frightening violence toward his son. The daughter’s question to herself—“How to reconcile all that I know of him and still love him?”—resonates throughout the collection. The young wife of “Dispatch” stays in her marriage though she’s learned that her husband—now devastated by grief—would have left her if the other woman he loved hadn’t turned him down. The narrator of “A Map of the City” evokes her father’s shabby used-furniture store, Bargain Mart, and describes the way it once filled her with expectation and pride. She has already become aloof from her father by the time he ends up alone and on welfare, but her remoteness, now extending to her own marriage, must yield to greater generosity and love. Thien mostly offers retrospective narratives of girl children estranged from their parents through divorce, alcoholism, and disappointment. The accounts are rich in detail, with memory serving to acknowledge complexity and to preserve what would otherwise be lost. The narrator of “Four Days from Oregon” recalls her mother’s unhappy marriage, how Tom—her mother’s lover—first entered their lives, and how she used a badminton birdie to hint of the affair to her father. In “House,” two sisters now in foster care sit in front of the house where they used to live to mark their alcoholic mother’s birthday—the one day each year she stayed sober—hoping she’ll reappear.

Truthful and suffused with quiet ache: a welcome collection, with the Asian background presented without exoticism, as a matter-of-fact part of North American life.