"Liminal Spaces in Madeleine Thien's Simple Recipes
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| Year of publication | 2016 |
| Type | Appeared in Conference without Proceedings |
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| Description | Madeleine Thien’s début collection of short stories Simple Recipes (2001) has been hailed by the critics as articulating a new voice in Asian Canadian writing, giving literary representations of urban space, in Thien’s case mostly Vancouver, a new sensibility. Thien’s stories abound in images of streets, roads, cars, maps, houses, suburbs and city centers in a mélange of new spatial consciousness. Glenn Deer even identifies Thien among those recent Asian Canadian writers who transgress the earlier representations of urban space as confined to the ethnic Chinatown enclave (119). In my presentation, I will look more closely at Thien’s stories from the perspective of liminal spaces. The urbanity of contemporary Vancouver plays a major role in some of them: for the narrator in “A Map of the City”, it is “the city wading out into the ocean, the borders of mountains” (213), a space that for immigrant characters is a source of diasporic melancholia, while for the next generation’s young characters it is space both strange and familiar that has the potential to anchor them is their sense of belonging. In this light, some of the narrators, e.g. Mirriam who appears in a couple of stories, explore the city and comment on what they see in such a way which may relate them to the concept of ‘flâneuse’. Ultimately, I want to explore the liminality of public spaces which are contrasted to the private ones: while domestic space is no longer a haven of safety and familiarity but is rather characterized by the breakdown of familial structures, the outside city is where the younger characters escape their parents’ failures, displacements, even abuse and violence, searching for consolation in the anonymity of post-immigrant urbanity. |
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