by Matt Gross
And that’s okay, even if sometimes it’s frustrating. When I now think of my trip to Tunisia, I still can’t quite put together a coherent internal narrative of my time there. It doesn’t gel. But the article I finally wrote for Afar does. And it does so by both embracing and stripping out the complicating factors.
The story begins with the taxi driver who declared, “All the women of Tunisia are my wives!” But instead of presenting it just as comedy, or as a way of showing how easy it was to talk to people, I focused as well on its clichéd quality—the way he was embodying the “stereotypically Muslim male chauvinist point of view.” But was it what he really felt? Or just the role he took on around tourists, who might have expected exactly that kind of sentiment to come from a cab driver?
And in the course of describing this interaction, I began to realize that I, too, could choose a stereotype to lead myself through the story. And the one I chose was that old standby, my favorite crutch: gastro-tourist. Yes, I wrote about Tunisian food, and my pursuit of it from the shores of the Mediterranean to the depths of the medina. With Abdelaziz, the curly-haired carthageois counter-cliché, I ate salade méchouia—a platter of roasted peppers, hard-boiled eggs, olives, capers, shredded tuna, cucumbers, harissa, and more, all mixed together and scooped up with fresh baguettes—and feasted on grilled fish and delicate brik. I got in taxis and asked to be taken to the best roast chicken in town (which is how I met Kamel and became Tom/Tarek). And one day, on my own, somewhere in the medina, I devoured half a roasted lamb’s head, brains included, and discovered that hidden away at the base of the tongue, where you might never expect to find it, was the sweetest, most tender meat of all. It was, I wrote, “like Tunisia itself, so instantly and easily enjoyable that the clichés and counter-clichés fail to matter, and you must admit to yourself that some things are simply good.”
Chapter 9
Jiggety-Jog
On Leaving Home, Coming Home, and Seeking My Proper Place in the World
What had I done? It was the middle of August, I was sitting in a rented house in Truro, and I was going crazy. Just a few weeks earlier, I’d been in Ho Chi Minh City, immersed in stimulation—the arrhythmic bleat of mopeds, the aromas of charcoal and melting fat, the guileless interrogations of random Vietnamese people. I’d been living a life I’d never imagined, working as a journalist, coming home to close friends, learning how to navigate not just a new language and culture but a new world of my own making. I had a motorbike, I had air-conditioning, I had freedom and independence. What I didn’t have was a professional future, and so I’d given up everything else. Roughly two weeks shy of the day I’d moved to Saigon, and just before my birthday—a birthday I could have spent surrounded by those wonderful new friends!—I’d boarded a Cathay Pacific flight bound for home via Hong Kong.
But now what had I done? Those first weeks back with my parents in Virginia were terrible. I had no car, no friends, nothing to do. This was a sensory deprivation tank, solitary confinement. And even when my family assembled for a week’s vacation on the Cape, my mood did not improve, despite the sunshine, the clean air, the seafood, the peace. I was filled with hate. I hated this staid, boring place. I hated my parents for bringing me here. I hated America for not being Vietnam, and for barely even having Vietnamese food. I hated the prospect of spending the next nine months in Baltimore, a city I hated. And I hated myself for having made the decisions—on my own, independently—that led me to this position.
Without telling anyone, I walked out the front door and down the road to the center of south Truro. My brown leather boots clomping on the pavement, I marched past the overpriced grocery store and turned left onto the road that led underneath the highway. On I walked for I don’t know how long, stewing as I went. The worst part was that I knew this fury and frustration were simple reverse culture shock, the awkward and painful re-familiarization process that many long-term travelers go through. I was a textbook case: Friends and family wanted to hear about my travels, but they couldn’t really understand (it seemed) what it was like for me over there; I felt like I had no place or purpose here; and I worried that expressing my disappointment would make me seem whiny and ungrateful. I’d had this amazing experience—why couldn’t that be enough?
I turned off the main road to the beach, and soon the cute shingled houses vanished, and I was in a more densely wooded area with few cars. No one was walking to the beach. No one knew where I was. I was alone. I kept going and going, and I didn’t know where this would end. It didn’t matter. With every step, my mind calmed. This was what I needed—this relentless momentum, the sense that I was going somewhere, even if I didn’t know my final destination. Birds chirped and black flies buzzed my head. Sand flecked the edge of the road. Onward, the sweat beaded on my lower back. I wasn’t deluded enough to imagine myself an explorer here, as if that could compensate for my stupid choices. I simply craved movement.
Midway up a hill that I would later learn led to the eminently swimmable Great Pond, I stopped. I’d come far enough. The anger had been dealt with. My family might start to wonder where I was, and I didn’t want them to worry. I turned around. It was time to go home.
Everybody wants to go home. Everybody always has. From the Israelites and Odysseus to every ethnic, political, and religious group today, humans have been searching and fighting for the one place where they can finally settle down, where they belong—the place that is theirs, and theirs alone. Even modern-day nomadic communities are not true wanderers. Their homes simply span a broader swathe of earth, and their journeys are determined by regular, often seasonal constraints. No desert bedouin treks into the boreal forest or midwestern plains. Most people know where they come from, and where they hope to be.
Not me. Early on in my adult life—after I’d been asked, one too many times, “Where are you from?”—I consciously gave up on the concept of home. It was a question that maddened me. Was I from Massachusetts, and if so Concord or Amherst, and if not, then Brighton or Williamsburg or Baltimore (none of which I was ever going back to)? “Where are you from?” As casually as it was intended, it left me open-mouthed, my brain working frantically to come up with a brief but accurate answer.
And the answer was that it didn’t matter. Other people, I knew, had grown up under even more itinerant circumstances—in military or diplomatic families, for instance—but even so, I’d moved enough. “You people,” my mother’s mother, Grandma Rosalie, whose Plymouth Acclaim I would one day inherit, said after another of my family’s relocations. “You’re like Gypsies!”
So, fine, we were Gypsies. I was a Gypsy. I would move and move and move, knowing who I was but not necessarily where I was from, and I would never pin my identity and my future on some fantastical, unrealizable idea of home. It would be easier this way, I thought, although I’d probably sound pretentious when I answered “nowhere” to “Where are you from?” I would simply be where I happened to be, for as long as fate decreed. “Home for now” would be the closest I ever got to “Home.”
I don’t doubt this attitude helped me when I began traveling overseas. Despite all the lonely and awkward days in Vietnam, I never once felt homesick, never once wished I was with old friends in Baltimore or back skateboarding in the Williamsburg bowling alley ditch. I’m not even sure I ever wished I was elsewhere, only that my Saigon life could be better, fuller, cheerier. Had I grown nostalgic and dreamed of Baltimore, I wouldn’t have lasted as long abroad as I did.
When my travel-writer traveling commenced several years later, this lack of attachment was an unquestioned strength. My trips could be lengthy—three weeks, say, or three months—and they took me away from my wife, my friends, my things. And while I certainly missed them (Jean in particular), I did not ache for them, thanks to Facebook and Skype and the ease of buying prepaid SIM cards in every new country, and I did not regret my circumstances. How could I when I was driving across the Oregon desert or sipping tea in the Himalayas? Here was where I wanted to be, where
ver here was.
Sometimes, “here” happened to be a far-flung neighborhood in New York. One day in September, soon after I’d returned from my 2007 road trip across America, Jean and I were contemplating a trip to visit friends on the Upper West Side, when Jean explained that to do so she’d first need to put herself in an Upper West Side frame of mind (whatever that was). In other words, she needed to mentally prepare herself for the geographic and cultural shift. What’s more, she claimed this was how most normal people behaved. I told her I’d never found such adjustments necessary—I could just go.
“There’s something wrong with your brain,” she said.
That may be, but whatever was wrong with my brain rendered the constant transitioning of my life a nonissue. At the end of every Frugal summer, having been away from New York for three months, I always expected that I’d never want to leave again. With disconcerting ease I’d immerse myself in the habits of home, catching up with Jean and my friends, cooking dinner, watching TV, waking up and not immediately packing my bags. This was vacation! Infinitely more relaxing than racing across continents on a tiny budget, afraid I wouldn’t learn enough or have the right experiences to craft compelling stories. Here at home, no one cared whether I could put it all into sixteen-hundred words of clever context.
But then, after a few weeks of this holiday in Bizarro World, I’d find myself eager to get moving again, almost as if I were allergic to staying put. The restlessness was a slippery phenomenon. It didn’t build gradually over those weeks, nor did it come on suddenly, an epiphany over a cheap beer at the Gowanus Yacht Club. It’s more that I began to realize my wanderlust was always there, and had never gone away at all. I’d been ready to depart at just about the moment I arrived.
And then I’d make plans to leave.
Every part of departure pleased me. The night before, I’d decide which clothes to bring (including, of course, a pair of pants I’d never wear), and which tools and accessories (headlamp? water-purifying tablets? portable speakers?), and what to put everything in: the rolling duffel, the hefty backpack, the black leather weekend bag, the oversized tote? I enjoyed waking up early to catch 8 a.m. flights, and riding the A train or, sometimes, if the budget allowed, a car service to La Guardia or JFK. That half-hour or so of nothingness on the streets of New York—Atlantic Avenue still asleep, the BQE my own private highway—allowed me to relax and to focus my excitement on the adventure ahead. Waiting for the AirTrain at Howard Beach in winter, I’d look out on the frosted reeds and icy pond just below the tracks, and in summer I’d watch the waterfowl dip into this overlooked patch of green. I was leaving this all behind, but leaving was the only way I’d ever see it.
The uncommon joy of the departure found its parallel in the return. Early in the morning, my flight would glide over the wetlands of Jamaica Bay, the just-risen sun casting silver pools through the inlets. At midday, my flight—its landing happily delayed—might circle Manhattan, the lines and angles of its skyscrapers stark in the clear October sun. At night New York was a field of light, the streets of Brooklyn and Queens marked in dotted lines that extended to the edge of my vision; I’d search the angles of Flatbush and Atlantic and try to pick out my own dark little corner. We’d land, and I’d endure the slow-motion hassles of passport control and baggage claim, but then I’d be in a taxi—always a taxi, I’d earned that luxury—mounting the Kosciuszko Bridge, gridded gravestones below, the skyline closer than I’d ever thought home could be. In the next month, I might see them a hundred times, but never notice them once, not until I’d put ten thousand miles between us again.
Instead of being at home at home, I was at home everywhere else. The process of arriving, setting up camp, and exploring took on a rhythm that my New York life never had. In late 2009, I followed video directions on my iPhone to a spacious apartment I’d rented in Shibuya, one of Tokyo’s churning epicenters of fashion, nightlife, and foot traffic. Then I drank a coffee, had a shower and a bath in the voluminous tub, and stepped outside to look for the first of what would amount to nearly thirty bowls of ramen that week. Around me rose a forest of towers, and I could communicate with almost no one, and I could read but a handful of Japanese kanji, and even then I knew only their Chinese equivalents. I’d spent a little time here before—Japan had been my first stop after the 2007 road trip—but this was still a foreign place, unfamiliar and new.
But it didn’t feel foreign. As I walked down the street toward Shibuya Station, I was as relaxed as I would have been on St. Marks Place. I was exploring, and I’d always been exploring. Back when I’d lived in Manhattan’s Lower East Side, I used to take the opportunity, one weekend night every month or two, to walk almost every block and just see what was going on. New hotel? Synagogue collapsed? There was no project involved—I wanted only to see and to know, and that was what I was doing now in Tokyo. And ah! Here was a ramen shop—not on my list, but I had to start somewhere. I walked in, sat at the counter, pointed to something tasty-looking on the laminated menu, and prepared myself to slurp. Wait, “prepared”? I was born ready to slurp.
And in a similar way, my Lower East Side strolls were not preparation for my trips abroad, home-based experiences I could translate into new contexts in Playas del Coco or Ouezzane. Rather, the overseas explorations came first, and the exploratory walks in New York merely recalled that foreign behavior, allowing me to exist at home (such as it was) exactly as I had abroad: with a clearly defined purpose.
That, I think, explains how comfortable I felt in countries and cities and situations seemingly designed to discomfit a traveler: I had something to do—a cultural phenomenon to understand, a money-saving strategy to test, a difficult journey to undertake, the lay of the land to mentally map. In Osaka, a city obsessed with takoyaki—battered balls of octopus slathered in mayonnaise and other sauces—I had to find the best. And in Sadec, in Vietnam’s Mekong Delta, I was tracking down traces of Marguerite Duras, who’d lived (and loved) there eighty years before.
In New York, where I had permanent lodging and access to all my possessions, I had the freedom to do whatever I chose, but that freedom bred confusion and laziness. I could do anything, but what? And why? And couldn’t I do that later? I’d be back here eventually, right? Naturally, there were some constraints. I had to write my articles and pitch new ones and go shopping and cook dinner and wash clothes. But those were flabby errands, infinitely delayable, inconsequential when compared with walking from Vienna to Budapest, a 160-mile trek that left my feet shredded with blisters, my back and knees buckling, my psyche in tatters. Every step was torture, and yet I couldn’t give in—this was the route taken by one of my idols, the war hero, polymath, and travel writer Sir Patrick Leigh Fermor, who’d trekked from Rotterdam to Istanbul in the 1930s. Now that was a life with purpose! And I had to measure up to his example, blisters or no blisters, in cozy pensions or under starry open skies. Every morning I’d awake knowing exactly what I had to do, whether I wanted it or not: put one foot in front of the other, again and again, until I just couldn’t walk any more. What might happen along the way was yet to be determined, but the structure was there, and it told me one thing only: Onward!
“Would you like to know your name?” Regina Kopilevich asked me in a courtyard café in the old town of Vilnius, Lithuania. A pile of folders and papers on the table lay before us, promising to answer, perhaps, the mystery of my family’s origins. Regina, a multilingual genealogist of Russian Jewish extraction, looked at me eagerly, her blue eyes wide.
Her question was a funny one. When you grow up with a name like Gross, you never forget it—no kid at school will let you. Early on, I’d had to learn to embrace my Grossness, to understand its many meanings—large, excessive, a dozen dozen—and to shrug off insults with a yawn. “‘Matt is gross’? Seriously? That’s the best you can come up with?” Gross dominated my life, just as it had edged out three other, duller grandparental names: Chadys, Goldman, Miller. Gross was all that remained.
But I ha
d, in my twenties, started to hear rumors—via my father and his father, Samuel Gross—that our name had once been different. Grosshüt, they said, was what it had once been, back in the old country: “big hat.” I imagined an ancestor of mine who wore his big hat so often that whenever he walked down the street, people would say, “Hey! Here comes Mr. Big Hat!” Or maybe it was a reference to the wide-brimmed hats that my Orthodox Jewish ancestors wore—although why, of all the big-hat-wearing Orthodox in their community, my ancestors got the name was unclear.
This was, historically, unsurprising. Millions of immigrants to this country had their names changed on arrival, whether by accident or intentionally, by authorities or by their own assimilationist selves. But in my family, this was surprising, as we had virtually no stories at all about life in the old country. We didn’t even necessarily know which country was the old country. Russia, they sometimes said when I asked. Or Poland. Same difference—Russia controlled that whole area, including what would become the Baltic states. It was as if our family did not exist until the great-grandparents’ generation arrived on this soil.
The only story I’d ever heard about our past was that my great-great-grandfather on my mother’s side had had twelve children and had died when his beard got caught in the family’s mill. His son, the one who came to America, took the last name Miller.
But on my father’s side, nothing. For years we didn’t even know where precisely they’d originated, not until my father dug up my great-grandfather Morris Gross’s World War II draft card on Ancestry.com and saw his place of birth listed as “Marijampolė, Lithuania,” a town near the Polish border. All we had beyond that was this vague allusion to a former name—a name that Regina now offered to reveal to me.
