Simple Recipes Madeleine Thien Analysis

Most people are trapped into believing that Canada is a very diverse place to live as it welcomes many cultures, but do not realize what happens to their culture when they have lived in Canada after time. Throughout the stories Simple Recipes by Madeleine Thien and A Short History of Indians in Canada by Thomas King, the authors tell the actions of what is happening in the characters lives to show the stripping of other cultures when they come to Canada. These two stories reveal how difficult it can be to be a person with a different culture existing in Canadian society.
Due to the characters not being able to properly celebrate their cultures, unfortunate incidents take place which make it extremely hard to live happily in Canada. In the story called Simple Recipes, the children were not able to keep their culture strong in Canada, making their father upset enough to hit his own son. In the text, the author says that the father’s “other hand sweeps by [the narrator] and bruises into [their] brother’s face”(Thien 344). The anger that stemmed from this was when the son, “[did not] like the eyeball,” that was in their fish for dinner (Thien 342). The eye being on the fish is something that their culture sees as a norm. By the son thinking that it was improper to eat something with their eye present, it showed his father that he is losing the sense of culture that their family practices, causing

In connection to the story A Short History of Indians in Canada, the “Indians” are dying repeatedly due to the fact that in history, they were forced to go into residential schools and were