The Turk Who Loved Apples: And Other Tales of Losing My Way Around the World

by Matt Gross

  “Do you want to drink coffee?” Dr. Kan-nan Liu asked me one evening in 2002. We were sitting on the couch in his living room, and the TV was on, showing the daily news. Dr. Liu’s daughter, Jean, who would in a few years become my wife, was in the kitchen with her mother and the family’s longtime cook, A-Mui. Jean and I had landed in Taipei only a couple of hours ago, on this, our first-ever visit to her family as a couple, and I was wiped out. I could really have used a cup of coffee. Instead, I kept silent.

  This was, I think, because Jean’s father had been speaking Mandarin. He’d spoken so softly (and I’d been so jetlagged) that by the time I realized he’d been addressing me, and that I did, to my surprise, understand those simple words, it was too late to respond. A few quiet minutes later, Jean came in and we went upstairs to bed, in separate rooms.

  As first encounters with future in-laws go, this was not auspicious—exactly what I’d feared. At the time, Jean and I had been dating a few years and were fairly serious. We’d moved in together, to an overpriced studio on the Lower East Side, but we did it secretly, so as not to offend her traditionalist parents. Some guys, I knew, would be hurt by this need for secrecy, but not me. I understood that she needed to maintain one image with her family, and another with me. This was a basic component of Asian life: the clear distinction between one’s public and private faces. In public, one strives to appear upright and honorable, but behind closed doors, one can be, well, anything one wants. The disjunction between these two identities may be the kind of thing that provokes outrage in the West, but in much of Asia, it seems more accepted. Not to say Asians (and even using the term Asians is a sketchy generalization) aren’t outraged when some moralizing politician turns out to be a criminal; there’s simply less surprise.

  The distinctions between public and private, and the sometimes obvious contradictions between them, also allow people to feign belief in the former in order to preserve some semblance of interpersonal harmony. That is, I don’t know whether or not Jean’s parents knew we were living together, but because she acted as if we didn’t, that became the accepted truth, even if, occasionally, when they’d call her late at night, I’d answer the phone. Oh, he’s just visiting, she’d say. And because no one wanted a fight, that was what they chose to believe.

  Jean, however, had her limits. During her year abroad in Paris, she had actually dumped me. Her mother was coming to visit for Christmas, she’d told me by phone, and she didn’t want to have to lie to her about us. And so we broke up until she returned to New York the next fall.

  Though she’d hate for me to remark on this, her desire to be honest with her mother was probably a sign of her Americanization. Jean had grown up in Taipei, had gone to school and learned to read and write Chinese there, but at eighteen she’d come to the United States, first to study biology at Johns Hopkins, then earning a second B.A. in fashion design at Parsons. By the time we went together to visit her family, she’d been living here a decade and had changed in subtle ways—one of which was that she was willing to date a white guy.

  This should not have surprised her family. After all, they were the ones who’d sent her overseas. What did they expect? Nor were they outwardly traditional or backward bumpkins. Both her parents were doctors—her mother a general practitioner, her father a neurosurgeon—and the extended family was full of other doctors, dentists, bankers, and engineers. They lived in the center of Taipei, in an old but neon-lit neighborhood where teenagers shopped for cheap fashions and snacked on grilled fish balls and skewers of stinky tofu. Their home, four stories carved from a former hospital, was comfortably modern, if not showy. Jean’s parents spoke some English—better than my Chinese, but not fluent—and they vacationed all over the globe, from Japan and Russia to Italy and South America. That they could bring their daughter up in such a worldly environment, and send her abroad for years, and still expect her to date and marry a guy from back home seemed unrealistic.

  On that first visit, at least, they showed none of what was likely a growing frustration with my presence. Along with several aunts, uncles, cousins, and Jean’s grandmother, we went as a family to a sparklingly new Shanghainese restaurant, where, over racks of bamboo steamers full of the best soup dumplings I’d ever eaten, they quizzed me on my own family background. That my father was a history professor and my mother an editor seemed acceptable. My great-grandparents’ origins provoked brief discussion—how do you say Lithuania in Mandarin? in Taiwanese?—but it was interesting for them to learn I was Jewish. In Asia (as elsewhere), Jews have a reputation for being clever and successful.

  From across the table, Jean’s grandmother made an observation: “Good thing your eyes aren’t too blue,” she said, “otherwise it would be scary!”

  Her eyesight, it should be noted, had faded with age. My eyes are large and frighteningly blue.

  By the time we flew home, a week later, I could tell the trip had not gone well. There had been no catastrophes. I wasn’t the guy in The Joy Luck Club who pours soy sauce over the delicate crab. Instead, I was an enthusiastic eater (especially when it came to the meals prepared by A-Mui, the live-in chef), and I knew my way around a pair of chopsticks. To Taiwanese, who are easily as obsessed with food as any Brooklyn blogger, this was important. Also, I was polite and deferential—I had to be, since I didn’t speak the language—and I tried never to appear loud, in the way, or stereotypically American.

  Once we were back in New York, however, the criticisms began to trickle through the grapevine. My Chinese wasn’t very good—true (but I could learn). I was a writer, unable to support their daughter—true (but she didn’t want such support). I was an American, and therefore a wasteful spendthrift; I was Jewish, and therefore wealthy and, at the wrong times, stingy. Although one of Jean’s aunts was lobbying for me, I was not right for Jean. No one mentioned the first night’s coffee incident, but I bet Jean’s dad—with his gentle demeanor and easy smile—was thinking about it.

  But Jean and I lived on the other side of the planet, so life went on much as it had before. I did my copyediting jobs, and Jean worked her way up in the fashion world. Who cared what her parents thought?

  One night in the middle of 2003, after a few years of relative peace, things came to a head out of the blue. Jean’s mother called up. Voices were raised, tears were shed. I tried not to listen too closely, even though they were arguing in a language I didn’t understand, and when Jean finally put down the phone, she explained the situation.

  Her parents, she said, thought we should break up. They wanted her to date, and eventually to marry, a Taiwanese man. (And, incidentally, not any other Asian, nor any Taiwanese whose forbears had immigrated from the Chinese mainland after 1945.) Jean, however, had held firm—I was hers. And so she and her mother had arrived at a compromise. For two years, Jean agreed not to get married—two years being the length of time, as specified by the family fortune-teller, during which it would be inauspicious for Jean to marry at all. And during those two years, Jean would agree to go on dates with Taiwanese men her family found for her in the New York area. If, at the end of two years, she hadn’t found someone she liked better than me, then the family would try to accept me.*

  So, I asked, all we had to do was let her date other guys for two years, and then we’d get their blessing?

  That, she said, was how it was.

  This . . . was . . . amazing! Instantly I realized the comic potential, and I formulated a plan of my own. Whenever she had a date, I would have to make one, too—for the same place and time, with some Jewish girl I’d find on JDate.com. That way, Jean and I could keep an eye on each other, and sneak away whenever possible to make out by the payphones. What would we do if we were caught by our dates? Could we try to hook them up instead? What if we, you know, kind of liked them? The weirdness of this relationship wouldn’t just be a trial—it would be prime material for a brilliant magazine article. No, a screenplay!

  “How soon can they set you up?” I wanted to ask. But I di
dn’t. Jean had only just stopped crying. We’d get to comedy soon enough. For the night, tragedy reigned.

  “You are brothers!” cried the money changer from behind the bulletproof Plexiglas window in Montreal’s Chinatown. “And I would bet anything that he is the older one!”

  The man, of South Asian extraction, was pointing directly at Steve, who looked at me and smiled. We’d been playing this game for several days in the frozen February streets of Montreal (average temperature: 25 degrees Fahrenheit), and it always came out the same. Steve, one inch taller than me, his hair longer but his hairline more receded, his clothing more restrained, his face clean-shaven, was the older one. I, trim-bearded and thinner (not that you could tell under my insulated outerwear), was the younger.

  In the context of Montreal, this reversal was a regular amusement, but also a relief. Here, at last, our traditional roles might not define us, and we could just be ourselves, two guys in their mid-thirties sharing a love of Francophone culture and hearty, fatty, inventively delicious Québécois food. For a little over a week, staying at a rented sixteenth-floor apartment in the heart of Le Plateau, the city’s hippest neighborhood, Steve and I figured we’d do little but wander the streets, eat and drink to excess, pose for the photographer from Afar magazine (for which I was writing about the trip), and do something vaguely highbrow, just so this wouldn’t be another tale of nonstop gastro-indulgence.

  There was one thing, however, I did not tell Steve about our adventure: that its true purpose was to save our relationship. This felt like too much to burden us both with—what if it didn’t work out? What’s more, to reveal my ulterior motive would have required me to admit, up front, why I thought the relationship was in peril, and I was definitely not ready for a confrontation so explicit. Plus, I didn’t really have any idea whether Steve himself thought there was a problem. For all I knew, he thought things were great, functioning just as a brotherly relationship was supposed to function. We were each other’s only brother, so why would he think it should be any better—or worse?

  And so, instead of discussing these sensitive topics, we ate. Foie gras poutine and “duck in a can” at the famed Au Pied de Cochon, where we watched another table receive a whole roasted pig’s head garnished with an entire lobster. Smoked-meat sandwiches at the Jewish diner Schwartz’s, where the French menu lies under the heading “Sandwiches” and the English menu under “Les Sandwiches.” Surprisingly good Vietnamese food in Chinatown, and incredible Portuguese roast chicken from Rôtisserie Romados, and more poutine, spiked with merguez and jalapeños, at La Banquise, a twenty-four-hour joint that was almost across the street from our apartment. In the sunny windows of Club Social, we drank well-pulled espressos, and we downed early-evening beers at a half-dozen neighborhood bars, our winter gear piled high on banquettes.

  Eating worked, mostly. Put a platter of pig or duck parts in front of me and Steve, stick wineglasses in our hands, and we will grin, gobble, and moan with delight. We love this—we understand it. And we can look into each other’s eyes and know that the other guy, my brother, gets it, too.

  Except when we don’t. That is, I couldn’t help noticing that our tastes did not entirely overlap. At Schwartz’s, Steve had plucked the fat from his smoked meat and laid it on his plate, never to be consumed, just as he’d done with everything from bacon to well-marbled steaks since we were children. At a dark lounge called Après le Jour, we happily ordered beers—a bitter hoppy ale for me, a Belgian-style white for him—and we were each disgusted with the other’s choice. These were minor differences, I knew, and I kept quiet about them, but they annoyed me all the same. And that annoyed me even more—that I was annoyed in the first place. Why couldn’t I just accept Steve for what he was? How is it that I could put up with recurrent giardiasis, survive long, lonely nights in strange lands, and subject myself to the indignities of an artificially tight budget, but I couldn’t do this?

  It’s different, though, when you’re traveling with someone. Out of your element, out in the wider world, where nobody knows you and you can do just about anything you want, you actually live in a bubble that draws you closer than you’ve ever been—than you’ve ever wanted. You want to be in sync, to enjoy (or detest) the same things the same way, because if you’re not, then what are you missing that the other one gets? Or vice versa? And when that unsynched someone is family—a person you’re supposed to know better than anyone else, a person you will continue to know and see and interact with long after this disastrous trip, a person whose identity has been bound up with your own since the earliest days of your lives—the failure to get along and enjoy (or hate) the journey as equal partners can be crushing. Now that I’d brought Steve into the universe of the globe-trotting writer, I desperately wanted him to see things as I did, to understand that it’s the brisket fat that makes the smoked meat so incredible.

  And when he didn’t, all I could see was Steve being Steve—off in his own bubble, cooing over every halfway adorable dog on the street and squealing “Meester Gross!” at random moments (a tic, I’m told, he learned from our grandfather). In our apartment, Steve would belch operatically, and everywhere we went, from the Bikram yoga studio to the comic-book shop, he’d quiz people on points of French vocabulary. How, he asked the comic-shop clerk, do you say “poke”? Sadly, the clerk said, there was no such word.

  “What do little kids do to annoy each other, then?” Steve asked, not entirely joking.

  Listen and observe, I wanted to tell him (but didn’t), that’s how you learn. It’s what we’d done one night at the theater. The play was Histoires d’Hommes, and it was highbrow indeed: Three actresses embodied a dozen different characters, all monologuing about the crazy men who’d made them crazy in turn.

  Or something like that. The play wasn’t just in French but in slangy, heavily accented, imitation-drunk French, with no overt narrative to link one scene to another. Only afterward—over deer carpaccio and maple-lacquered duck at the chicly rustic La Salle à Manger—did Steve and I have a chance to figure out what we’d understood. Amour de shit? Got it. Se tromper, we deduced, did not mean “to err,” as it normally does, but “to cheat.” Altogether, I estimated, we understood 65 percent of the play, a shared success—perhaps our first in decades—and we didn’t have to ask anyone but each other for help.

  The thing is, maybe Steve had the right approach. After all, his French was better than mine, so good that the owner of one antiques shop complimented him on his accent, and asked if he had any French background. (He’d lived in Strasbourg one summer, Steve stammered, switching self-consciously to English.) And during a dinner party we threw for a small group of friends and friends of friends, everyone seemed to find his questions amusing: How do you say “jailbait”? “Hooters”? “Bring it on”? “Fuck it!”?

  As we went through six bottles of wine, a deli’s worth of cheeses and cured meats from the Marché Jean-Talon, a couple of frangos from Rotisserie Romados, and some potatoes that Steve had roasted perfectly, I watched how our guests—one Francophone Montrealer, two Anglophones, and two expatriate Parisians—were interacting with Steve. He was on fire, issuing informed opinions on everything from the design of bike lanes to gas plasmification, a high-tech waste-disposal process. And they were hanging on his every word, amused at his enthusiasm and amazed by the breadth of his knowledge. As was I. I was even a bit jealous of his ability to be so happy, so unself-consciously himself—as if, as the money-changer and countless others had suggested, he was the role-model older brother, I the younger looking up.

  As he spoke, however, I also felt myself retreating from the conversation, watching and observing but speaking less and less, no longer the travel writer at home anywhere but a bit player in this drama. And as I turned inward, I wondered again: Why can’t I be happy for/with him? Why does it have to be a zero-sum game?

  The next morning, as we rode the elevator down to the lobby, Steve started talking about some cute puppy—a French bulldog—he’d spotted i
n a store the day before, and I finally blew up at him.

  “You know, Steve,” I said, “I really don’t like dogs at all.”

  “Well,” he said, “I’m not going to stop talking about them.”

  Just before the elevator stopped and its doors opened, he added, “You really have terrible relationships with living things, don’t you?”

  Sasha was cranky. Two-and-a-half-year-olds, you see, don’t understand jetlag. They don’t understand that the world is big and round, that the sun revolves around it, and that flying from one side of it to the other, in the span of twenty-odd hours in an aluminum tube, means that their sleep cycle will fall out of sync with that of everyone at their destination. We adults do what we can to game that system: We time our in-flight naps, we take melatonin supplements, we go for jogs on landing. But to a toddler, every detail of the jetlag-adjustment routine is a mystery so absolute it’s not even recognized as a mystery. All Sasha knew was that she was tired, or hungry, or wide awake, and that Jean and I were not. And so Sasha was miserable and making us miserable too.

  If we had anticipated the horrors of intercontinental air travel with Sasha, we might also have been prepared for what awaited us on landing in Taipei: a full-family multiday road trip to the southern tip of Taiwan. Correction: We did know that less than forty-eight hours after we arrived, nine of us would ride the high-speed train to Kaohsiung, Taiwan’s second city, then climb into an enormous rented van and roam around the south for a few days. We knew all this, and there was still nothing we could have done. There was no staying home to catch up on sleep and adjust. This was a family trip, and we were family.