by Matt Gross
This part of Taiwan is not just scenic—it’s where Jean’s mother’s family originated, generations ago, and as we drove through the region we paid visits to the relatives who still lived here. One served us bell fruit and papaya harvested from his own trees. In another village, a small side road led us to a vast mansion on a manicured lawn, the home of another, extraordinarily distant cousin, the former director-general of the Investigation Bureau of the Ministry of Justice, under Taiwan’s ex-president Chen Shui-bian; like Chen, the cousin was in prison on corruption charges. Still, we walked across the neatly trimmed grass and peeked in the windows with a proprietary air. We could do this—we were family, weren’t we?
In a third village, we stopped at a temple run by the Dai clan, another precursor of Jean’s family. The temple was tight and unadorned, more like a two-room schoolhouse than a proper temple, and as Jean’s family chatted with a caretaker, I flipped through the Dai Family Annual, a catalog (in Chinese and English) of relatives around the world, with photos and updates and contact information. These were, I realized, my relatives, too, and the enormity of the connection was overwhelming. The Gross family was tiny: I had no aunts, one childless uncle, no living grandparents, no close cousins, no bushy tree extending through the generations. Mom and Dad and Steve and Nell and I were it, and though Uncle Gary and the wives and boyfriends fleshed us out a little, the Grosses were but a tiny band.
No longer. There was, I knew, a bigger world I was now part of, and in my travels I might one day come across a Dai or Liu or Chen who could trace his or her lineage to that southern Taiwanese village as well, or back to the mainland, or to Canada, or to Brooklyn. I was, as Vince had said, family—we all were.
Which was what was so maddening. Because this family’s travels around southern Taiwan made no allowance for the fact that the youngest of us, Sasha, was having a terrible time—and therefore so were Jean and I. Jetlag reigned. I could barely stay awake, or I couldn’t fall asleep, and I certainly couldn’t enjoy myself, even though I’d wanted for years to visit the south. We seemed to be constantly on the move, and lunch and rest stops always came too late; for a toddler accustomed to eating at noon, 1:30—when she was normally well into a two-hour nap—was pure torture, especially when she hadn’t had a chance to expunge her morning’s supply of energy. The final day was perhaps the worst. The van trip that morning took hours and hours, and Sasha’s fidgeting, a horrific mix of hunger and restlessness, threatened to boil over entirely—bao cha! The only thing we could do to keep her calm was feed her lollipops and hard candy until at last we reached the city of Kaohsiung, where we stretched our legs at a riverside park and watched candy-powered Sasha run a flat half-mile nonstop.
Where, I wanted to know, was the sign of our—Sasha’s and my—acceptance into the family? Where was the concern for our comfort and sanity? We’d been enthusiastically welcomed back to Taiwan, but now we were being taken for granted.
Oh. Right. This was it—this was how I knew. It’s when you—your personality, your history, the fact of your presence—are finally taken for granted, even ignored, that you’ve truly found your place in a family. When no one notices you coming and going, when they no longer feel responsible for your happiness, when they stop asking if you need a towel or whether you’d like to drink some coffee, that is when they are treating you as their own. We were family, and we were miserable, and we were the one because of the other.
And two days later, we were back in Taipei, comfortable once more in the family home. And Sasha played eagerly with her three-year-old cousin and held her grandparents’ hands without fear, and random people in the street remarked on how curly Sasha’s hair was and asked if we permed it (uh, no), and A-Mui cooked amazing lunches, and Jean and I got a little sleep. Not enough, never enough, but a little, and that, I guess, was enough.
One day in Montreal, Steve and I rode the Métro to the Olympic Stadium and walked a few unlovely blocks to a bland, one-story building with mirrored windows on Rue Hochelaga. This was Les Princesses, the most famous “resto-sexy” in all of Montreal. This was a topless diner. This was our destiny.
Long before I’d planned to visit Montreal, I’d heard of its topless diners: Diners! Where you could get fried eggs! Served by topless women! I’d never been a strip-club habitué, but this seemed like such a weirdly unique Montreal institution—representative of the city’s working-class tastes and its Frenchified libertine pretensions—that I had to check one out. Maybe two. But no more than three. (Okay, five.)
But when I told my Montreal friend Stacey of my plans, she revealed that the English phrase “topless diner” didn’t quite, uh, cover the reality. The waitresses, she said, would be completely naked, and hardcore porn would be playing on TVs around the diner. These restos-sexy were serious.
When Steve and I mustered the courage to walk through the door of Les Princesses, we were horrified. The waitresses were . . . wearing bikinis? The TVs were showing . . . local news? Was this the wrong place? We sat down, and a pretty woman with a belly-button ring took our orders: black coffee, smoked meat, french fries. It was dreadful.
A few weeks later, I would learn what happened. In December 2009, the city had brought Les Princesses to court, arguing that it was an erotic business operating in a zone where erotic businesses were forbidden. Claiming it was a restaurant (never mind the nudity and porn), Les Princesses won the case—then lost when the city appealed. Since then, Montreal’s resto-sexy waitresses have worn swim-suits, which make the restos feel even more desperate and tawdry.
Still, we were disappointed. No nudity, and bad food to boot. We walked out into the cold and headed for the subway.
After a while, Steve spoke. “I know you’re my big brother and all,” he said, “and you wanted to introduce me to women. But is that it?”
And that was it—but a different it. His comment had been so perfect, so balanced between comedy and gentle criticism that I knew then things could get better—and that I would have to tell Steve a secret. Really, the Secret, one of the very, very few details of my life I’m unwilling to reveal to the general public (including you, dear reader).
But how, and when? No moment seemed right—I certainly couldn’t say anything out here, in the blasé wasteland outside Les Princesses. So I put it off, again and again, until our final night together in Montreal was upon us. I’d booked us in to Le Club Chasse et Pêche (the Hunting and Fishing Club), a lush, cozy restaurant in the old part of the city. It seemed ideal for the exchange of intimacies: private, dark, refreshingly old-school. But from the arrival of our cocktails—Sidecar for him, Negroni for me—the meal got in the way. Oysters, bison tartare, razor clams, arctic char, seared veal—each new course filled our mouths with joy, and kept me from saying what I needed to say. Because what if I failed? What if my revelation hurt Steve, and ruined dinner? And so I held my ecstatic tongue all the way through the ice cream, and then we were stumbling out again into the cold, searching for a taxi to take us downtown to Club Soda, where I’d bought tickets to see a French-Moroccan indie-pop singer.
We were too late. As we arrived at the theater, the last round of applause was dying, and the crowd began streaming past us into the street. Steve and I shrugged. Oh well. We walked back into the subzero streets once more, looking for just the right bar, not finding just the right bar, and talking about nothing in particular.
The night, we knew, was over, and so was our Montreal adventure. We flagged down another taxi, and on the way back to the hotel, almost without realizing what I was doing, I told Steve everything: that ever since he’d betrayed me to our parents, revealing the existence of my first girlfriend almost twenty years earlier, I hadn’t been able to trust him, but that now I wanted to, and thought maybe I finally could. Betrayal? Steve, it turned out, didn’t remember any of that. And why should he? He was a kid. So was I. But, with any luck, we no longer were.
And so I told him my secret.
When I’d finished, he looked at me and star
ted to smile. Then he said, “Okay.”
________
*Jean now disputes this account, but the craziness of the situation fixed it in my brain. She’s wrong, I’m right.
Chapter 8
The Touron’s Lament
On the Differences Between Tourists and Travelers, and Never Quite Knowing Whether You’re One or the Other
“Hey!” said the man who walked up to my table late one night at an outdoor rotisserie-chicken stand in a suburb of Tunis. I’d been tearing crackly skinned thighs apart with my fingers and dipping the meat into a puddle of harissa and olive oil, and I looked up at him with shreds of chicken still in my hand. He was in his mid-forties, neatly dressed, with a ghostly silver mustache.
“We know each other,” he said. “From Saudi Arabia. Ten years ago.”
I didn’t know how to respond. Had I been in Saudi Arabia a decade earlier? Was this a spy’s coded message? And why was he addressing me in English rather than in French? At last, I answered him with another question: “Who do you think I am?”
It was a question I might as well have asked myself. To this man—Kamel, he called himself—I was Tarek, an Englishman originally named Tom, whom he’d befriended ten years earlier in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. And for a moment, this seemed plausible. Maybe I was Tarek/Tom. My time in Tunisia had been so invigorating, so confusing and rushed and scattered and enjoyable, that I no longer felt like the Matt Gross who, just a few days before, had blindly boarded a plane for the middle of North Africa’s Mediterranean coast.
That Matt Gross vanished soon after landing in this metropolis of four million, depositing his bags in a locker at the Tunis train station, and plunging into the medina, the beige and white morass of highwalled alleyways, crumbling arches, pocket mosques, spontaneous markets, and hidden palaces that make up the UNESCO-approved historic heart of the city. The facts of those first medina hours were sketchy: one (or three?) cold glasses of street-corner lemonade (more common, to Matt’s surprise, than orange juice); an encounter with Ali, mustachioed, snaggletoothed, and vibrantly be-shirted, who attached himself to Matt as his personal guide after discovering him at a royal mausoleum; the acquisition of a cheap rented room atop a defunct museum devoted to dusty pottery and nineteenth-century caftans and connected, in some shadowy way, with Sicily.
But what’s beyond doubt is that by the afternoon, Matt had become someone else—whatever other people thought him to be. How long, strangers would ask, had he been living in Tunisia? Were his studies, a taxi driver inquired, going well? Assumptions bred assumptions—Ali the guide apparently thought Mathieu would be interested in a medina alley full of prostitutes who were, as he put it, “not very expensive to fuck”—and Mathieu was often too polite to correct them (although he did stay out of that alleyway; he’d learned something since Cambodia). Instead, the layers piled up, and he was everything, all at once.
No, this is all wrong. I did not become “someone else,” or at least not consistently enough throughout my four days in Tunisia that it makes any narrative sense to view the experience through that thematic lens—even if Tunisia’s own multiple identities are worth exploring.
Three thousand years ago, Tunisia’s arid nook of the Mediterranean was populated by Berbers and Touaregs, the indigenous nomads of the Maghreb, but in 800 B.C. a ship arrived from the city of Tyr, in what is now Lebanon, bearing the Phoenician queen Elissa—a.k.a. Dido—who’d fled home after her brother, the king, killed her husband, who was also her uncle. The land she secured for her people (in a tricky real-estate deal involving a cow skin cut into slivers) became the legendary city of Carthage, a haven of civilization for hundreds of years. Until, led by the General Hannibal, Carthage took on the Roman Empire and was utterly destroyed, its earth salted, its people slaughtered and enslaved and colonized. By the fourth century A.D., Carthage still existed, but in a degraded, depraved state—a “cauldron of unholy loves,” as St. Augustine described it in his Confessions.
Later, Arabs came, and Italians of various stripes, and then the French, and for a short time the Germans, and then the Americans and the British. And since World War II, they’ve all left, except for the Arab-French-Berber-Touareg-Carthaginian-descended people who now get to pick and choose which of their forbears to acknowledge.
One proud, self-identified Carthaginian was Abdelaziz Belkhodja, a novelist and amateur historian I located through A Small World and met up with my first afternoon in Tunis. Curly-haired and pink-skinned, Abdelaziz was obsessed with ancient Carthage, and as we sipped coffee at the hilltop Café des Nattes, in Sidi Bou Saïd, a seaside suburb of blue-trimmed whitewashed homes, he told me how he’d mined Carthage’s legends and heroes for his thrillers, apparently earning a reputation as Tunisia’s Dan “The Da Vinci Code” Brown. Then we climbed into his Mercedes and drove past the old Punic seaports of Carthage, now a well-to-do suburb. Carthage was Abdelaziz’s passion—and probably, he said, laughing, the reason he’d never married.
That day and the next, I hung out with Abdelaziz, meeting the owners of five-star boutique hotels and former national soccer heroes, drinking wine with his friends in modernist condos, and going on lunch dates with his glamorous female friends, one of whom flirtatiously asked what I, the New Yorker, thought of les tunisiennes. Uh, how do you say “flummoxed” in French? (And where was my brother when I needed him?)
Okay, now this seems promising: a quirky “Carthaginian” who seems to embody modern Tunisia. Where did he lead me? What strange adventures did we get up to together? Well, problem there: After a few days, the relationship with Abdelaziz fizzled. Suddenly, he was hard to get a hold of—I’d text and get no response. I wasn’t sure if he was avoiding me—was my French that bad? should I have said something clever about les tunisiennes?—or if he simply had other things to do, but without a local contact I felt untethered. I e-mailed other members of A Small World, heard nothing back. I considered CouchSurfing, but felt overwhelmed by the dozens of Tunisian members. Which of them should I contact?
At a loss, I turned to Twitter, hoping to plead for suggestions or meet new friends, but Twitter was blocked. Oh, right: Tunisia, for all its beauty and ease, was also a police state, run for twenty-seven years by President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, whose face gazed down from billboards all over Tunis.
“I bet his hair hasn’t grown a bit grayer over the years,” I’d said to Abdelaziz as we drove past one.
“On the contrary,” he said, “it’s gotten blacker!”
So, politics? If only I’d known that within six months, a vegetable seller in a small Tunisian town would set himself on fire, kicking off the region-wide revolutions (and quasi-revolutions) that became the Arab Spring, I’d have delved deeper, sought out persecuted bloggers, uncovered the nasty, honest underbelly of this vacation paradise. I’d have had something serious to discuss with Abdelaziz, who in post-revolutionary Tunisia became the head of the country’s Republican Party, which was less about American-style antifederalism than about secularism and the free market. On one of our lunch dates, he and his blond friend had counted women in headscarves on the street—only three, but that was too many for him, and a marked change, he said, from a few years earlier.
But with only four days here, how deep could I get into Tunisia’s complicated politics? Afar magazine had assigned me just one thousand words for this story—hardly enough space to describe the setting and craft a couple of meaningful scenes, let alone discuss the plight of Tunisia’s working classes in a sagging economy, the suppression and potential rise of Islamist factions, and the dicey position of any nominally secular state in the greater Middle East, especially if I couldn’t always get Abdelaziz, my most politically involved contact, to meet up with me.
Depth of any kind felt out of my reach. With no proper assignment, I felt unfocused and unsettled—in part because I was quite literally unsettled. After spending my first night at the weird exmuseum in Tunis proper, I’d moved to a cute little hotel in Sidi Bou Saïd, the Bou Fares, which
meant that if I wanted to go anywhere outside the village I needed to hail a taxi or wait for the commuter train. And I did this a lot—there always seemed to be somewhere else I needed to be, the Carthage National Museum, or a restaurant serving lamb’s head in the Tunis medina, or an interior design boutique in another suburb.
There were pleasures in this, of course. The conversations with taxi drivers were amusing. One was terribly disappointed when I told him I did most of the cooking back home—a woman’s job, he said, insisting I marry a Muslim woman, or maybe four of them, one to cook, another to keep house, another to be pregnant, and the last to sleep with until she gets pregnant, after which they’d all rotate duties.
“How many wives do you have?” I asked.
None, he said, then added: “All the women of Tunisia are my wives! Except my mother and my sister. But all the rest are my whores!”
I loved it, this weird interlude on the road from Tunis to Sidi Bou Saïd. But it was, I told myself, only an interlude—it didn’t matter, it didn’t count, certainly not compared with what would happen once I stepped out of the cab. Perhaps, I often wondered, I should instead have made a beeline for the desert—to have sought out Luke Skywalker’s old home near Tataouine. That at least would have given me some narrative structure on which to hang my observations of Tunisian life. But here in transit—and I always seemed to be in transit—I was merely skimming the surface of things. How could I shape these random moments into a story that made sense to my editors, my readers, and myself? And if I couldn’t, well, then I was nothing more than a goddamn tourist.
As far back as I can remember, I’ve always hated tourists. As a teenager in Williamsburg, Virginia, I saw them everywhere—driving slowly on the Colonial Parkway, wandering in poorly dressed packs up Duke of Gloucester Street (Dog Street, to us locals). They were omnipresent, always in my way, stupid as hell. We called them “tourons,” a portmanteau of “tourist” and “moron.” We hated them most of all because we depended on them. The town ran on tourism—Colonial Williamsburg, Busch Gardens, and Water Country USA. Tourists slept in Williamsburg’s hotels and ate at Williamsburg’s restaurants, from Taco Bell to Mama Steve’s Pancake House to fancy-pants joints like the Trellis.
