The Turk Who Loved Apples (33 page)

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 in 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?”

S
asha 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.

That Jean and I had come this far, family-wise, should, I guess, have been counted as a triumph. A few years earlier, I had been the guy Jean was supposed to give up—a non-Taiwanese non-doctor persona non grata. But Jean and I and our relationship had leapt the hurdles her family put in our way. Soon after the two-year marriage moratorium began—and one day after we moved into a new apartment together—Jean relocated for work reasons to Columbus, Ohio, which had a dearth of eligible Taiwanese men for her to date. I, meanwhile, stayed in New York, and she and I took turns visiting each other every few weeks. We were both a bit lonely, but this distance felt normal, too. My parents had occasionally spent time apart, when my father was on some teaching trip or another, and Jean and I had dated only six weeks before she'd left for France. To be in love and apart—was that really so terrible?

After a little over a year of this, I, too, decided to flee New York, and embarked on the Southeast Asia trip that would turn me into a travel writer. As I bounced between Vietnam, Cambodia, and Thailand, Jean and I wrote each other daily e-mails and even managed to rendezvous for a few days in Hong Kong, where she'd been sent on business. All the while, the clock kept ticking on the family-mandated waiting period, and Jean and I remained as emotionally close as ever.

By the time we reunited in New York, in early 2006, marriage was a foregone conclusion. I think Jean just happened to mention it to her parents over the phone one evening, and that was that. They
had said they would try to accept me, and they would. Jean's brother, Louis, was himself getting married in March, and we—along with my family and a couple of my friends—would be there to celebrate it, and to announce our engagement, which in some Taiwanese families is as important as the wedding itself.

The Gross family's March expedition to Taiwan went remarkably well. Nice hotels. Several whole-family meals, during which our parents made polite, even friendly, conversation. (Steve was his usual self. “How do you say
explode
in Chinese?” he asked at one lunch.
Bao cha!
) A two-day trip to hike Taroko Gorge and eat rustic Taiwanese mountain food. Strangers offering my parents directions on the streets of Taipei. All culminating in a huge wedding, where close to four hundred people—friends, family, coworkers, parents' friends, and assorted important people—gathered in a luxury hotel's ballroom to celebrate Louis's marriage (to a sweet Taiwanese woman named Charmiko) and my and Jean's engagement. Speeches were made by the fathers (my dad was introduced by a retired judge, who recited his entire résumé), and then the four of us younger folks, plus Jean's and Charmiko's parents, went table-to-table, toasting the guests with grape juice poured from an empty French wine bottle. (With at least thirty-five tables to visit, real wine might've been a bad idea.) Finally, Louis and Charmiko cut a slice from their wedding cake—a cardboard fake, as it turned out. In Taiwan, symbolism is sometimes more important than dessert.

From there, it was a swift waltz to our own wedding, a smaller affair, on the beach in Cape Cod, six months later. But Jean's family's seeming acceptance of me had not yet alleviated my anxiety. I was still not Taiwanese, and though I'd finally found good work as a writer, I wasn't going to be making doctor-level cash anytime soon, if ever. I had mild nightmares of Jean's father, the neurosurgeon, sneaking into my bedroom at night to operate on my brain and rid me of whichever lobe made me love his daughter. There had to be, I thought, some way of making her family not only accept
me, however grudgingly, but understand and embrace me as truly one of their own. But how?

A couple of days before our wedding, I stumbled on a potential solution. Our families had gathered in Truro, not far from the tip of the Cape, and Jean's relatives—her parents, brother, aunts, uncles, and assorted cousins—were staying at a pair of adjacent houses we'd rented for them. In all, they totaled fifteen people, and their first night on the Cape, they needed to be fed—a job that fell to me, and which I attacked it with relish. This, I realized, was a way to demonstrate that although I might be American, and although I'd probably never make the kind of money needed to “take care” of Jean, there were at least some situations and challenges I could handle. Dinner for fifteen? Adapting local ingredients to suit Taiwanese palates? Putting it all together in a reasonable amount of time, and in an unfamiliar, ill-equipped kitchen? That I could do.

Watched over by Jean's mother's cousin's girlfriend, I chopped and sautéed onions and garlic, grated lemon zest, seared chunks of Portuguese chouriço, cranked open cans of crushed tomatoes, and finally added to the simmering sauce several dozen well-scrubbed littleneck clams—all to be served over perfectly al dente spaghetti, alongside a simple green salad. As the family gathered to eat at two long tables, I congratulated myself: I'd found just the right dish to appeal to the Taiwanese relatives' sense of familiarity (they get red-sauce pasta) and their craving for seafood as a signifier of a special meal. And it was pretty good, too—the kind of thing I'd make at home, even if this version needed perhaps a bit more salt, maybe some clam juice. The point was, I'd gotten it done, and her parents had seen me get it done. I was not completely incompetent!

But whatever words of praise or thanks they offered were not enough for me. The wedding itself went smoothly and enjoyably—no missteps, no embarrassments, no hurt feelings—but it felt like a formality. Jean's parents had agreed to accept me months earlier, so the ceremony was really just the ratification of their decision. What
I wanted was something deeper: full acknowledgment of the effort I was making to be a part of this family.

Yes, I was insane.

At the same time, I didn't pursue it. Over the next two years, I did nothing at all, and in that time, relations between us were normal. Jean's parents even gave us a chunk of money to help buy an apartment in Brooklyn (okay, so I'm not that keen on
total
financial independence), and while they voiced some initial concerns about my name being on the mortgage as well, we told them it would be hard for a married couple to get a loan otherwise. And that was that.

Only when Jean became pregnant did I realize I had another opportunity to prove my dedication. I was, I knew, a failure in many ways. After ten years with Jean, I still spoke little Chinese, and soon I'd be bringing our daughter up in New York, far from the family and their linguistic and cultural influence. Jean would do what she could, but I wanted to participate, too. And what I could do was cook. I needed, I decided, to learn to make the dishes that Jean herself had grown up on—the soups and stir-fries that A-Mui had made for the Liu family for more than thirty years. Someone, after all, needed to carry on the family's culinary traditions, and it might as well be me.