“Squatter” is a short story by Indo-Canadian writer Rohinton Mistry about a man named Sarosh who immigrates to Canada from India but leaves a decade later after failing to use the toilet properly in his new country. “Simple Recipes” is another short story by the Chinese-Malaysian Canadian writer Madeleine Thien about a Chinese Canadian family that experiences intergenerational struggles in the background of their family dinner. This essay will argue that two characters from both stories, Sarosh and the brother, mirror each other in their struggle to assimilate, and that they both encounter outside backlash: the first from Canadian society and the other from his family. But they both end up in the same place: assimilated yet alienated from their ancestral cultures. These stories challenge the ideal of multiculturalism by showing the struggle between Canadian and immigrant identities.

Sarosh and the brother are at first mirrors of each other, having different problems with assimilation. When Sarosh immigrants to Canada, he attempts to assimilate by sitting down and using the toilet in the Canadian way. But he is failing, and each “morning, he had no choice but to climb up and simulate the squat of [the] Indian latrines. If he sat down, no amount of exertion could produce success” (Mistry 943). Sarosh came to Canada because of its high living standards, represented by the “white plastic oval of the toilet seat”. This is because the toilet seat is white and likely clean, and it is probably more advanced than those in India. It is meant for sitting down, just like Sarosh is meant to assimilate. But he cannot let go of his nostalgia for India and its culture. “By clinging to old world social practices – though apparently not by choice – Sarosh […] may at some unconscious level be attempting to preserve remnants of meaning unique to his domain of experience in India” (Janes Slide 23). Sarosh sitting down in the toilet seat represents assimilation into Canadian culture, but it would also mean giving away his Indian culture and submitting to Canada. Discharging while sitting down would not just mean discharging what is in his body, but also his Indianness so he can assimilate. His body is naturally rejecting that, standing up for what he is: an Indian. But his mind is not, which is why it causes him so much depression and misery.  Sarosh cannot be a Canadian if he cannot discharge his former culture.

The brother of the Chinese family, at the same time, does successfully assimilate. Even though he “was born in Malaysia […] when he immigrated with [his] parents to Canada the language left him. Or he forgot it, or he refused it, which is also common” (Thien 1252). It is likely the former, since when he eats the cauliflower in the family dinner he chokes and spits it back onto his plate. He spits out the Chinese language in the same way. The author herself has admitted that she is interested “in what kinds of lives people lived then let go of in order to immigrate, the way they remake themselves” (Janes Slide 3). This can be metaphorized by “the fish in the sink […] dying slowly” (Thien 1252). The water of Chinese influences is being swept away by the water of the Canadian sink, and as a result the fish, representing the brother’s Chinese identity, is slowly dying. This can also be seen by how the brother is outside playing soccer in the afternoons, only coming home for dinner with his family. He spends most of his time in contact with the Canadian culture outside and only marginally engages with his ancestral Chinese culture. At the same time, his younger sister often stays home with the parents, so she is still close to her Chinese culture although she has trouble with it as shown by her cooked rice which is not as good as her father’s, making her analogous to the fish when it is in the packet. But she is still in the packet unlike her brother. So Sarosh is the antithesis of the brother, and they are both represented by symbols.

Sarosh and the brother encounter backlash from opposite sides. When Sarosh is in the toilet people see “the absence of his feet below the stall door, the smell of faeces, the rustle of paper, glimpses caught through the narrow crack between stall door and jamb – all these added up to only one thing, a foreign presence in the stall, not doing things in the conventional way” (Mistry 945). By not having his feet below the stall door, Sarosh has not made Canada his home. He has not implanted himself in Canada’s soil and taken on Canadian practices, and the white, “actual” Canadians can see that. To them, Sarosh’s cultural practices smell like “faeces” that shouldn’t be there. Although multiculturalism is supposed to grant a type of privacy for different cultures to coexist in a mosaic, clearly the Canadian public here expects adherence to their cultural norms. They want Sarosh to “do as the Romans do”, since he is “in Rome”. Sarosh gets in trouble at work due to being late, and is eventually referred to Dr. Maha-Lepate, whose second last name means “exaggeration” (Mistry 946). This could be because from the Canadian point of view, immigrants have exaggerated, strong reactions to such seemingly simple things like Wonder Bread, Coca-Cola, or swallowing. In contrast, she is understanding, and directs him to Dr No-Ilaaz, whose name means “no cure” (Mistry 949). This shows that he subscribes to the multicultural model that allows immigrants to keep their culture in Canada. But these two people with two names show the clash between the demands for assimilation and multiculturalism, with the former ironically winning out after Sarosh decides not to take the CNI. Subsequently, he loses his job.

The backlash encountered by the brother is similar. Thien herself with her story “turns displacement into an ordinary family tragedy” (Janes Slide 2). She explores “the divides between parents and children in [immigrant] families” (Janes Slide 3). The father is angry that his son has lost his Chinese identity and thinks “it is because the child is lazy. Because the child chooses not to remember” (Thien 1252). When the father gets upset with him, he says “[he has] tried” and “[he] doesn’t know what kind of son [the brother is]. To be so ungrateful” (Thien 1254). This shows how the father views his own son as a failure. When the brother enters the kitchen, “his body is covered with dirt” and “he leaves a thin trail of it behind as he walks” (Thien 1252). This is a metaphor for how the father views him: as dirty for losing his Chinese identity, with the dirt being Canadian culture. Indeed, the son has a dirty mouth, calling his father a “fucking asshole chink” and showing that he has taken on even the bad words and racial stereotypes of the dominant Canadian culture. He doesn’t even see his father as part of the family anymore, and wishes that he wasn’t his father, even that he was dead (Thien 1254). Canada is severing the brother from his family. The father has escalated his son to this point. Like Sarosh, it is not the brother’s fault that he is losing his Chinese identity. But the father does not care, just like the Canadians do not care about Sarosh: they demand conformity, and view failure to do so as a lack of gratitude. The brother is displaced in his home, and Sarosh is displaced in Canada.

At the end, Sarosh assimilates, putting him in the same position as the brother. Once he enters the plane, he feels an urge to go to the bathroom. As the plane moves faster, Sarosh pushes “harder than he had ever pushed before, harder than all his ten years of trying in the new land. And the memories […] all these, of their own accord, emerged from beyond the region of the ten years to push with him and give him newfound strength” (Mistry 951). He succeeds in his discharge. Sarosh has finally appreciated the Canadian culture and discharged his Indian identity as a result. His body has gotten used to Canada. But it is too late for him. He, along with the Canadian society, had already agreed to send him back to India. People often only appreciate precious and important things once they are lost. That is why when he is back in India Sarosh fails to return to “the pattern of life he had vacated ten years ago. Friends who had organized the welcome-home party gradually disappeared. […] The people who sat on the parapet while waves crashed behind their backs were strangers” (Mistry 952). It is ironic that Sarosh was once a stranger in Canada because he is Indian, and now he is a stranger in his own India. He can now smell excrement when he is at the parapet, with the cement and concrete hulks now black where they were once grey. Sarosh’s own Indian culture is foreign to him, and he wishes he was back in Canada. He is unhappy.

The brother is condemned to the same fate. His father hits him with a bamboo pole, “smooth” and with “long grains, fine as hair […] pulled together, at intervals, jointed”. When the pole hits him, it “rips the skin on [his] back. […] A line of blood edges quickly across his body” (Thien 1255). The choice of a bamboo pole is important here: bamboo is a grass from China and East Asia, so it represents the brother’s Chinese family rejecting him. It is smooth and its hairs are pulled together, showing the father’s firmness in his sense of being Chinese, in contrast to his son whose body he is breaking. His son is not just bleeding from being hit, but his Chinese blood is leaving him. The father and his bamboo cannot tolerate a Chinese becoming non-Chinese. Later in the morning, the brother stays in his room and refuses to come out. His family comes and offers him breakfast. The brother “cries only harder but there isn’t any sound. The pattern of sunlight on his blanket moves with his body” (Thien 1256). Despite his Chinese ancestry, his emotional and mental alienation from being Chinese is complete. This makes him like an empty husk. The fact that his movements are synchronized with the sunlight’s pattern show that his assimilation to Canadian culture is also complete. The sunlight comes from outside, where the brother spends so much time. The outside rather than his own family is moving him. Sarosh and the brother are displaced by Canada from their heritages.

Both Sarosh and the brother start out as mirrors, with the former failing to assimilate and encountering backlash from Canada, and the other assimilating but encountering backlash from his Chinese family, but their assimilation leaves them alienated from their own blood. This undermines multiculturalism’s idealism. It assumes that immigrants can bring their culture to Canada and that Canadian and immigrant cultures can exist equally side to side. But these stories show both cultures clashing and one eventually being dominant. Neither do attempts at assimilation bring the immigrant to Canada. Nariman says it better than this essay can when he says that the “mosaic and melting pot are both nonsense, and ethnic is a polite way of saying bloody foreigner” (Mistry 948). As far as these stories are concerned, the immigrant can never truly be at home. He will be a “bloody foreigner” to Canada if he doesn’t assimilate, or his family if he does.

Bibliography

Janes, Daniela. “”Squatter” (1987) by Rohinton Mistry.” ENG255. UTM, 25 March 2021.

Mistry, Rohinton. “Squatter.” Lecker, Robert. Open Country: Canadian Literature in English. Toronto: Nelson, 2008. 938-953.

Thien, Madeleine. “Simple Recipes.” Lecker, Robert. Open Country: Canadian Literature in English. Toronto: Nelson, 2008. 1250-1256.