The Turk Who Loved Apples (32 page)

These calls were gratifying. At last, I could give older-brotherly advice on a topic we both held dear! But at the same time, I was frustrated. Shouldn't he know how to braise a rabbit by now? Had he really never grilled a steak, or eaten Sichuan peppercorns? I had figured these things out myself over years of trial and error. (Okay, I've never braised a rabbit, but I know how!) Why shouldn't he do the same?

To me, this illustrated a fundamental difference between us. I was independent, and willing to face failure as a possible outcome of my quest for knowledge and experience. Steve, as brilliant as he was, needed to have the world explained to him. He would not pick up on the unspoken expectations of life unless someone pointed them out to him. (A projection of my own anxieties? Perhaps.) Time and again, I saw my thesis proved: One January, for instance, my mother and I embarked on a speedy cross-country road trip—we were delivering Jean's Volkswagen Jetta to Nell in Seattle—and after two or three days of driving, we approached Minneapolis. I called Steve to let him know we'd arrive soon, and to make dinner plans, and he asked, “So, where are you guys staying?”

Mom flipped out. She had assumed Steve and his wife, Tara, would put us up in their new, fairly spacious two-bedroom apartment. I had, too. We were family, right?

This, however, took Steve by surprise, not because he had some fundamental objection to us staying with him (although he was worried there wouldn't be space) but because the assumption—that family stays with family—was alien to him. Maybe it had just never happened before (our family small, such random visits uncommon), but his reaction made it seem as if we came from entirely different planets.

Our mother, in a tone of unconvincingly restrained fury, told him that if we had to stay in a hotel, we should forget about having dinner together. Steve, to his credit, understood how serious this was and invited us over, and a fairly pleasant night was had in the end. But it did nothing to bring me and Steve any closer.

So it went until the fall of 2010. One evening that October, I was having drinks in Brooklyn with two old friends, Lauren and Nathan, when Nathan told us about his wife's father and his siblings—how they were all old, and had failed to maintain ties with each other, and were now facing death and regretting the distance they'd allowed to grow between them. It sounded awful, and it sounded familiar. I searched my memory for moments of happiness and cohesion, times when Steve and I had accomplished things together without rancor or manipulation, and my memory turned up blank. We had nothing whatsoever. All I could remember were the miseries I'd heaped upon him, and I felt like a truly shitty brother. I'd had a few beers by this point, but my epiphany was sobering: I needed to do something about me and Steve, this brother who, despite our decades of bickering, I loved, and wanted to share my dwindling supply of important secrets with. And what I needed to do was equally obvious—we would have to take a trip together.

“D
o 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 didn't. Jean had only just stopped crying. We'd get to comedy soon enough. For the night, tragedy reigned.

“Y
ou 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.