The Father in the Kitchen

By Andy — 2026-09-17 — Literary News

I watch someone else's father through the kitchen window of memory.

The water holds the rice. The ritual is patient—a man's hands, his closed eyes feeling for the waterline at his fingertip's bend, a thing he doesn't need to measure because he's done it thousands of times. Madeleine Thien's story does something less obvious than celebrate this. It watches what happens when memory and longing and even violence get tangled in the same kitchen.

The story opens clean. A recipe for making rice. But by the middle you're looking at a live fish in a sink, the father chopping green onions with a cleaver older than the daughter, and something darker underneath everything—a family scrambled between languages, a boy who lost Malaysia and refused the words for it, a father whose kitchen tricks and tenderness sit next to something the narrator struggles to name, let alone forgive.

What got me was the precision. Not the plot. The details. The way Yan from the cooking show shouts "Take a wok on the wild side!" and the father laughs—his shoulders shaking—at a pun that probably isn't even funny. That's where the love lives. That's also where the damage gets done, because this man can carve a watermelon into a castle but also, the story suggests without quite saying it, do something to his son that makes a child forget his own language, or refuse it.

Actually, that's not quite right. The story doesn't suggest it—the narrator comes right out and says the father's anger, his confusion: "How can a child forget a language? It is because the child is lazy." That's the whole split open. A man who is good at small things, who teaches carefully, who loves his daughter enough to eat her badly-cooked rice without complaint. And who cannot understand that his children might be changed by the country they landed in.

The strongest part of the collection, as far as I can tell, is that question the story leaves hanging. The daughter, older now, remembering. How do you hold both versions of a person in your mind at once? Not reconcile them. Just hold them.

You don't get the answer, which is probably the point.

Source: "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." — Kirkus Reviews