Work Text:
This is heavily based on the short story "Simple Recipes" by Madeleine Thien, a daughter of immigrants from Malaysia who came to Vancouver, Canada shortly before she was born. I changed some parts pretty heavily (Regulus being half-Japanese instead of Malaysian, and then living in London, as well as quite a bit more) but a lot of it is the same. I really recommend reading the actual story. You can find the free online pdf linked. It was published in 2001 by Thien, a graduate of UBC's Creative Writing Program (M.F.A.). It won both the Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize and the City of Vancouver Book Award, and became a Regional Finalist for the Commonwealth Writers Prize for Best First Book. Thien also won the Canadian Author's Association Award for most promising Canadian writer under the age of 30. Her early writing deals with the experiences of immigration and the bonds that unite families and tear them apart:
"I think my interest was always in families and immigration, in what kinds of lives people lived then let go of in order to immigrate, the way they remake themselves, the divides between parents and children in those kinds of families."
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My mother made origami look simple. She taught me when I was a child. Back then, I would sit on the short footstool in the drawing room and watch her, how she folded the paper so meticulously, knowing just where to press it into shape. The sharp sound of paper folding and my mother’s acrylic nails moving past each other was soothing in the otherwise silent house. Over and over, she folded the paper, stuck it into shape, and started again.
The instructions are simple. My mother had a book of patterns to follow, but she didn’t need to look at them– she hadn’t had to for many, many years. I would try to copy her movements, with my own separate piece of paper, but she always moved too fast. I would have to look down at the book and try to follow the pictures; I couldn’t read Japanese– I couldn’t even read English very well at that point, so the written instructions were useless to me.
Sometimes I still dream of my mother, her dark hair was most often braided down her back, unless she had plans or was expecting company. But on days when she had time to fold origami in the drawing room with me, it was almost always braided. I remember the heels that she wore every single day. My father told her that she would permanently damage her feet wearing them so often, but she only took them off for bed. I have an image of her in my mind of her with her heels kicked off, paper in hand, sunlight falling on her lap. I don’t know if she ever took off her heels while we did origami; I don’t know if this image is real. But sometimes it stuns me, the detail with which I can see it.
I would go through the motions clumsily, ending up with a shoddy swan, or dragon, or elephant. My mother would lay them both on the mantel as if they were overlooking the room. While I always thought of my mother’s as regal, whatever animal it was, mine was always injured or disabled in some way. Blind. “Sorry” I would say, looking down at my feet at yet another failure. She would stand them next to each other as if they were equal. Then she would straighten, let out a small, rare smile at the sight of the two paper creations, and exit the room, heels on hardwood, every motion so regular and sure, I would be convinced by her that all was well in the world.
***
For many hours at a time, it was just the two of us. My father worked and my older brother, Sirius, liked to play with the boy down the street rather than stay in the house. My mother and I would spend time in the drawing room, mostly. She loved to read. She would sometimes read aloud passages from books like Kokoro or The Honjin Murders. Kosuke Kindaichi was a detective. My mother would sniff at his discoveries as if they had been obvious the whole time. I thought he was more clever than anything. My mother would say, “Kosuke is slow.”
Still, sometimes I studied my mother’s face as she read silently. Confusion was present. She would finish reading and go off to do other things with a furrowed brow.
On weekdays I had a tutor. At three o’clock after he had gone home, I would find my mother to rattle off what I had learned that day. “The brachiosaurus,” I informed her, “eats only soft vegetables.”
My mother nodded. “That is like me. Let me see your forehead.” She bent down and stared at me. “You have a high forehead,” she said. “All smart people do.”
I walked away proudly. Sometimes I would imagine I had heeled shoes like her. We would walk down the hallway together and I’d match my steps with hers, overjoyed when my feet kept time with hers, right, then left, then right, and we walked like a single unit.
My mother was born in Japan and she, my aunt and my grandparents immigrated to England when she was a late teenager. They settled in central London and when my mother and father married, she moved into Grimmauld Place in Islington. While I was born into the persistence of the London rain, my mother was born in the humidity of Tokyo. When I was young, she would try to teach me and Sirius her language, but it never came easily to me. My mother ran her thumb gently over my mouth, her face kind, as if trying to see what it was that made me different.
Sirius used to speak the language better, but as he grew older he forgot it, or he refused it, and this made my mother angry. “How can a child forget a language?” she would ask my father. “It is because the child is lazy. Because the child chooses not to remember.” Sirius started staying away in the afternoons when he was twelve years old. My mother didn’t like the boy he played with. She called him outspoken and rude. A bad influence. Sirius would return home only at dinner time. During the day, my father worked in a very tall building. He drove there in his dark, black car.
I loved the dark green velvet of the footstool in the drawing room. I would run my hand over its softness and stare at the change in hue as the fabric alternated. I would smooth it all back in one direction when I was done.
***
My mother gave me the book of origami instructions when I first moved into my apartment. It has not been taken off the bookshelf in the shadowy corner of the living room. I have no longing for the little animal decorations themselves, but I miss the way we sat down together, our bodies leaning forward while my mother, the magician, created perfect replicas. We laughed together sometimes. Sometimes, my father would pick the animals off the mantel and hold them in his palms one at a time, staring down at them with an expression I never really understood, but just his attention made my chest grow with pride. His eyes were clear, the most dark sea-blue.
***
Sometimes my mother goes into the kitchen and watches the cook, Kreacher, prepare dinner. I get the feeling that she did this when she was a little girl to her mother. Today, there is a fish in the sink. It is the length of my arm from wrist to elbow. It floats in place, brushing up against the sides of the sink.
I keep watch over the fish while my mother watches Kreacher begin the preparations for dinner. The fish folds its body, trying to turn or swim, the water nudging overtop. Though I ripple tiny circles around it with my fingers, the fish stays still, bobbing side-to-side in the cold water.
I can tell that it is dying slowly. It has a glossy sheen to it, as if its skin is made of shining minerals. I want to prod it with both hands, its body tense against the pressure of my fingers. If I hold it tightly, I imagine I will be able to feel its fluttering heart. Instead, I lock eyes with the fish. You’re feeling verrry sleepy, I tell it. You’re getting verrry tired.
Beside me, Kreacher chops green onions quickly. He uses a cleaver that my mother says is older than I am by many years. The blade of the knife rolls forward and backward, loops of green onion gathering in a pyramid beside Kreacher’s wrist. When he is done, he rolls his sleeves back from his right hand, reaches through the water in the sink, and pulls the plug.
The fish in the sink floats and we watch it in silence. The water level falls beneath its gills, beneath its belly. It drains and leaves the sink dry. The fish is lying on its side, mouth open and its body heaving. It leaps sideways and hits the sink. Then up again. It curls and snaps, lunging for its own tail. The fish sails into the air, dropping hard. It twitches violently.
My mother reaches past Kreacher and, with her bare hands, lifts the fish out by the tail and lays it gently on the counter. While holding it steady with one hand, she hits the head with the flat of the cleaver. The fish falls still, and she backs away to let Kreacher clean it.
Sirius comes into the kitchen and his body is covered with dirt. He leaves a thin trail of it behind as he walks. A soccer ball, muddy from outside, is encircled in one arm. Brushing past my mother, his face is tense.
I slide my hand under the dead fish’s head as it lays on a board on the counter. Kreacher tells me to turn the fish over so he can continue to fill its insides with ginger. I do so, very carefully. It is firm and slippery, and beaded with tiny, sharp scales.
After he’s done, Kreacher picks up an old teapot. It is full of oil and he pours the oil into the wok. It falls in a thin ribbon. After a moment, when the oil begins crackling, he lifts the fish up and drops it down into the wok. He adds water and the smoke billows up. The sound of the fish frying like tires on gravel, a sound so loud it drowns out all other noises. Then my mother steps out from the smoke. “Spoon out the rice,” she says to me, as she lifts me down from the counter.
Sirius comes back into the room, his hands muddy and his knees the colour of dusty brick. His shorts flutter against the backs of his legs. Sitting down, he makes an angry face. My mother ignores him.
Inside the pot, the rice is flat like a pie. I push the spoon in, turning the rice over, and the steam shoots up in a hot mist and condenses on my skin. I dish the rice out under my mother’s gaze: first for my father, then my mother, then my brother, then me. Behind me, the fish is cooking quickly. In a crockery pot, Kreacher steams cauliflower, stirring it round and round.
Sirius kicks at the leg of the stool on which he’s sat.
“What’s the matter?” My mother asks.
He is quiet for a moment, then he says, “Why do we have to eat fish?”
“You don’t like it?”
Sirius crosses his arms against his chest. I see the dirt lining his arm, dark and hardened. I imagine chipping it off his body with a small spoon.
“I don’t like the eyeball there. It looks sick.”
Kreacher tuts. His forehead shines, as if grease has settled there. He says, “Why don’t you wash your hands and get ready for supper, Sirius?”
Sirius glares, just for a moment. Then he begins picking at the dirt on his arms. The dirt flies off his skin, speckling the counter near the plates of rice. “Stop it,” I say crossly.
“Stop it,” he says, mimicking me.
“Hey!” My mother slams her hand down against the counter. The sharp sound makes me jump. She points at Sirius. “No fighting in this house.”
He looks at the floor, mumbles something, and then hops off the stool and shuffles away from the counter. As he moves farther away and out of the kitchen, he begins to stomp his feet.
My father appears at the doorway. He inquires about Sirius’ behaviour. My mother merely shrugs her shoulders. And then she says something under her breath, in the language neither me nor my father can understand, and I think her 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 she speaks is full of soft vowels, words running together so that I can’t make out the gaps when she pauses for breath.
***
My cousin told me once about guilt. Her own guilt she held in the palm of his hands, like an offering. But your guilt is different, she said. You do not need to hold onto it. Imagine this, she said, his hands running along my forehead, then up into my hair. Imagine, she said. Picture it, and what do you see?
A bruise on the skin, wide and black.
A bruise, she said. Concentrate on it. Right now, it's a bruise. But if you concentrate on it, you can shrink it, compress it to the size of a pinpoint. And then, if you want to, if you see it, you can blow it off your body like a speck of dirt.
She moved her hands along my forehead.
I tried to picture what she said. I pictured blowing it away like so much nothing, just these little pieces that didn’t mean anything, this complicity that I could magically walk away from. She made me believe in the strength of my own thoughts, as if I could make appear what had never existed. Or turn it around. Flip it over so many times you just lose sight of it, you lose the tail end and the whole thing disappears into smoke.
***
Kreacher pushes at the fish with one edge of his spoon. Underneath, the meat is white and the juice runs down along the side. He lifts a piece and lowers it carefully onto my plate.
Once more, his spoon breaks skin as he serves us in the dining room. Gingerly, he lifts another piece and moves it towards my brother.
“I don’t want it,” Sirius says.
My mother waves a hand at the end of the table. “Try it,” she says.
“No.”
Kreacher looks stuck, the piece of fish hovering over Sirius’ plate. When my mother does not press for him to accept it, Kreacher turns and gives the piece to my father. We eat in silence, scraping our spoons across the dishes. My mother uses chopsticks, lifting her bowl and motioning the food into her mouth. The smell of food fills the room.
Savouring each mouthful, my mother eats slowly, head tuned to the flavours in her mouth. She eats with her head bowed, as if in prayer. Her posture was always so regal, so this sight often unnerved me.
Lifting a stem of cauliflower to his lips, Sirius sighs deeply. He chews, and then his face changes. I have a sudden picture of him drowning, his hair waving like grass. He coughs, spitting the mouthful back onto his plate. Another cough. He reaches for his throat, choking.
My mother slams her chopsticks down on the table. In a single movement, she reaches across, grabbing him by the shoulder. “I have tried,” she is saying. “I don’t know what kind of son you are. To be so ungrateful.” Her other hand sweeps by me and bruises into Sirius’ face.
I flinch. Sirius’ face is red and his mouth is open. His eyes are wet.
Still coughing, he grabs a fork, tines aimed at my mother, and then in an unthinking moment, he heaves it at her. It strikes my mother in the chest and drops.
“I hate you! You’re a fucking bitch!” He holds his plate in his hands. He smashes it down and his food scatters across the table. He is coughing and spitting. “I wish you weren’t my mother! I wish you were dead!”
My mother’s hand falls again. This time pounding downwards. I close my eyes. All I can hear is someone screaming. There is a loud voice. I stand awkwardly, my hands covering my eyes.
“Go to your room,” my mother says, her voice shaking.
And I think she is talking to me, so I remove my hands.
But she is looking at Sirius. And Sirius is looking at her, his small chest heaving.
My mother leaves the room soon after Sirius does. My father and I sit in silence until he calls for Kreacher to come clear away the dishes. He does, face pale, plates piled high.
I move away from my chair, past my father, onto the carpet and up the stairs.
Outside Sirius’ bedroom, I crouch against the wall. When I step forward and look, I see my mother holding the bamboo pole in her hands. The pole is smooth. The long grains, fine as hair, are pulled together, at intervals, jointed. Sirius is lying on the floor, as if thrown down and dragged there. My mother raises the pole into the air.
I want to cry out. I want to move into the room between them, but I can’t.
It is like a tree falling, beginning to move, a slow arc through the air.
The bamboo drops silently. It rips the skin on my brother’s back. I cannot hear any sound. A line of blood edges quickly across his body.
The pole rises and again comes down. I am afraid of bones breaking.
My mother lifts her arms once more.
On the floor, Sirius cries into the carpet, pawing at the ground. His knees folded into his chest, the crown of his head burrowing down. His back is hunched over and I can see his spine, little bumps under his skin.
The bamboo smashes into bone and the scene in my mind bursts into a million white pieces.
Kreacher picks me up off the floor, pulling me across the hall, into my bedroom, into bed. Everything is wet, the sheets, my hands, his body, my face, and he soothes me with words I cannot understand because all I can hear is screaming. He rubs his cool hands against my forehead. “Stop,” he says. “Please stop,” but I feel loose, deranged, as if everything in the world is ending right here.
In the morning, I wake up to the sound of oil in the pan and the smell of French toast. I can hear Kreacher bustling around, putting dishes in the cupboards.
No one says anything when Sirius doesn’t come down for breakfast. Kreacher piles French toast and syrup onto a plate and pours a glass of milk. He takes everything upstairs to Sirius’ bedroom.
When my mother and I are finished eating, she clears the plates and takes them into the kitchen. I follow her, as I always do. I follow her around the kitchen. I track her footprints, follow behind her and hide in the shadow of her body. Every so often, she reaches down and ruffles my hair with her hands. We cast a spell, I think. The way we move in circles and we never bump into each other. She smiles down at me, but when she does this, it somehow breaks the spell. My mother stands in place, hands dropping at her sides as if he has forgotten what she was doing mid-motion. The intricate tiles of the backsplash gleam in sunlight.
My persistence, I think, my unadulterated love, confuse her. With each passing day, she knows, deep down, that I will find it harder to ignore what I can’t comprehend. The unconditional quality of my love will not last forever, just as my brother’s did not. My mother stands in the middle of the kitchen, unsure. Eventually, my father comes downstairs and puts his arms around her and holds her, whispering something to her, words that I cannot hear, they are spoken so lowly. But he offers them to her, until she drops her head and remembers where she is.
Later on, I lean against the door frame upstairs and listen to the sound of a metal fork scraping against a dish. Kreacher is already there, his voice rising and falling. He is moving the fork across the plate, offering Sirius pieces of French toast.
I move towards the bed, the carpet scratchy, until I can touch the wooden bedframe with my hands. Kreacher is seated there, and I go to him, reaching my fingers out to the buttons on his cuff and twisting them over to catch the light.
“Are you eating?” I ask Sirius.
He starts to cry. I look at him, his face half hidden in the blankets.
“Try and eat,” Kreacher says softly.
He only cries harder but there isn’t any sound. The pattern of sunlight on his blanket moves with his body. His hair is pasted down with sweat and his head moves forward and backward like an old man’s.
At some point I know my mother is standing at the entrance of the room but I cannot turn to look at her. I want to stay where I am, facing the wall. I’m afraid that if I turn around and go to her, I will be complicit, accepting a portion of guilt, no matter how small that piece. I do not know how to prevent this from happening again, though now I know, in the end, it will break us apart. This violence will turn all my love to shame and grief. So I stand there, not looking at her or Sirius. Even my mother, the magician, who can make something beautiful out of a piece of paper, she just stands and watches.
A face changes over time, it becomes clearer. In my mother’s face, I have seen everything pass. Anger that has stripped it of anything recognizable, so that it is only a face of bones and skin. And then, at other times, so much pain that it is unbearable, her face so full of grief it might dissolve. How to reconcile all that I know of her and still love her? For a long time, I though it was not possible. When I was a child, I did not love my mother because she was complicated, because she was human, because she needed me to. A child does not know yet how to love a person that way.
How simple it should be. Smooth paper folding over, the feel of the surface between my hands, the sound of it like water washing ashore. My mother would fold the paper over and over, smoothing out any wrong folds.
If there were some recourse, I would take it. A clumsily made elephant in my open hand, a smoothing out, finding the impurities, then removing them piece by piece. And then, to be satisfied with what remains.
Somewhere in my memory, a fish in the sink is dying slowly. My mother and I watch as the water runs down.