The Turk Who Loved Apples (34 page)

In October 2008, two months before Jean was due, I flew to Taipei—solo. I'd been to Taiwan now more times than I could count, but this was nerve-racking. This time I'd be alone, without Jean to translate or to act as a buffer. It would be just me and her parents and our pidgin conversations—and my instructor, A-Mui, who spoke not only no English but no Mandarin either. Instead, A-Mui spoke Taiwanese, a dialect understood by more than two-thirds of the island's citizens. Today, almost everyone in Taiwan also speaks Mandarin, but A-Mui was from another era. Orphaned in the 1940s, when Taiwan went from Japanese colonial rule to briefly rejoining China to being run by the fleeing Nationalist army, A-Mui had been adopted by a farming family in central Taiwan—not a place where
educating girls was foremost in anyone's mind. Taiwanese was good enough.

Instead, Jean's mother told me in a mix of English and Chinese, A-Mui learned to cook, and was engaged to marry the family's son, A-Hang. The marriage, however, was not to her liking, and after several years, sometime in the late 1970s, she fled to Taipei, where thanks to a neighbor's recommendation she connected with Jean's family. She'd been there ever since.

And now A-Mui was getting ready to retire. She was in her late sixties, shaped like a large pear, and her sense of taste was fading. A recent soup, I'd heard from the aunties, had come out comically salty. Now she was preparing to move south, where she'd bought land with her earnings. (She'd also managed to send two kids to medical school.) Hearing A-Mui's biography, I felt a weight on my shoulders. This wasn't just some experiment I was engaged in; A-Mui's legacy was in my hands.

The weight, however, evaporated when I met A-Mui each morning at 6 a.m. for our daily trip to the market, a damp concrete underworld where blowtorch-wielding men singed the hairs off pigs' feet and purple, yard-long dried squid reconstituted in plastic tubs of water. I loved it, and although A-Mui and I could barely communicate, I knew she could tell. Her scratchy voice cackled with laughter as she explained my presence to the meat and vegetable vendors she knew so well, and her eyes twinkled—yes, twinkled!—when she looked over to check on me.

By 7:30, we'd return to the Liu family home, our arms laden with plastic bags full of pork and chicken, tender bamboo shoots and leafy greens, blocks of tofu and sheaves of scallions. And then, after a quick breakfast of egg pancakes and fresh soy milk, I'd collapse back into bed—and miss out on all of A-Mui's prep work: the washing, cutting, shaping. By 11 a.m., she'd shake me awake and lead me into her kitchen, a small, hard-tiled space with two burners, one sink, and a fridge. As she assembled dish after dish—deep-fried pork
chops marinated in fermented rice paste, sesame oil chicken, braised pigs' feet with peanuts—I'd take notes, amazed at her practiced efficiency. Five dishes at lunchtime came out in around twenty minutes. I'd like to see what she could do with Portuguese sausage and some clams!

In the afternoon, I'd rest, or ride the subway across town to take Chinese lessons with a private tutor. And in the evenings, I'd meet up with friends—Jean's schoolmates or the various people I'd met on Taiwan visits over the years. One frequent companion was Jean's cousin Vince, a six-foot-tall dental surgeon whose enthusiasm for food nearly matched my own. He'd tracked down a restaurant serving the most authentic udon noodles outside Japan's Sanuki Province, and he lavished geeky attention on his home espresso machine, rhapsodizing about different beans and roasts like a San Francisco barista.

Actually, he lavished almost as much attention on me. We went out regularly, for spicy, aromatic beef noodle soup, for
lu rou fan
, a classic Taiwanese dish of stewed ground pork over rice, or to wander the city's many night markets. And although he was generally my guide in this, his hometown, I never felt chaperoned, like a visitor, but rather embraced, unexpectedly. What had I done to earn Vince's kindness? We only saw each other once every couple of years, and yet our interactions had a surprising ease. Over coffee one day, I asked him why he'd chosen the English name Vince when his Chinese name, Yu-Wen, could so easily have become Ewan, like Ewan MacGregor. His reaction was exaggerated, a clownish facepalm; he'd never thought of it, he said, and besides, back then no one had ever heard of Ewan MacGregor. It was a small moment, a flash of light humor, but it was the kind of thing that had always been difficult with Steve—my question would have been read (and maybe intended) not as inquiry but as criticism. So, was this how brothers were supposed to get along?

At the same time, I saw in Vince a kind of sadness. Not that he was lonely, exactly—he had his own friends in Taipei, of course.
But I sensed something missing, a void only partially filled by coffee connoisseurship and noodle hunting. Jean pointed out that among her generation of cousins, all of whom had grown up together, he was almost the last still living in Taiwan. He'd been applying for postgraduate fellowships in the United States, but so far had no luck. And so maybe my presence meant something to him, a new tie to the world beyond the small island, and a family tie to boot—a new peer.

The thing is, I wasn't at all sure of my place within the family, and Vince's acceptance of me was unnerving. How was I supposed to react? At one of the night markets, the great one on Raohe Street, with an elaborate temple at one end and crammed with some of my favorite vendors (ooh, that pigs'-blood-and-sticky-rice popsicle!), I finally worked up the nerve to ask Vince the question I'd been dying to ask.

We were standing on line, waiting to buy
hu jiao bing
, a wheat-flour bun stuffed with sweet ground pork and lots of black pepper and baked in what looks like an Indian tandoor. The wait was long—thirty minutes, at least—but Vince looked patient and happy as we inched forward. This, I knew, was my time.

“Vince,” I said, “can I ask? What does the family think of me?”

He looked down at me quizzically, as if trying to figure out if this was nonsense or a serious question. “Well,” he finally said, choosing his words with care, “you're just . . . part of the family.”

Part of the family? Really? I knew what Vince meant, that I was already in, that the family had accepted me, that there was nothing more to be done, and that there would be no big moment for me. No payoff, no hugs, no quiet, emotional moment at the end of this trip, during which Jean's mother, her eyes welling up, would thank me for my effort, and Jean's father would apologize for having once considered operating on my brain to make me give up on his daughter. Vince's statement was it—the only climax I'd ever hit in Taiwan. And now there was nothing left to do but sit on the steps of the
temple, watched by carved stone dragons, and eat our sweet, peppery pork buns, together.

C
ountry cold is different from city cold. City cold, at first bracing, reminds you in minutes that you're surrounded by buildings—heated buildings, draft-proof buildings, buildings where you can remove your thick gloves and fake-furred hat and armored parka and expose your tender skin to the air. City cold is manageable, but it's rarely welcome.

Country cold invigorates. When you stride across a landscape of ice and snow, sucking frosty air into your lungs, you are in a world without recourse. This is all there is, and the layers of fabric clinging to your body and wicking away moisture are your only building now. You are alive, the cold reminds you, and you must do what you can to stay that way.

That, at least, was what went through my mind as Steve and I set off on snowshoes through the Laurentian Mountains an hour or two outside Montreal. The pork and duck and beer and wine had all been fine, but this was why I'd eaten them, to insulate and energize in preparation for a long slog across the hardpacked snow of Val-David's nineteen miles of trails.

“Unabashedly happy” was how Steve described my mood, and he was right. Out there, I felt free in a way I hadn't all week, as if the city, with all its complexities and choices, had hemmed me in. In Montreal, I'd been the travel expert, who knew how to find the best restaurants and quirkiest neighborhoods, and who could be responsible for our minute-to-minute happiness. I'd been my brother's keeper. Now there were no more choices to make—right or left, perhaps, but forward by default, deeper into the pines and drifts where our shared exertion might bond us once and for all.

For a while, we shared the trails with others. Kids cavorting around a heating hut, couples glancing at maps near walls of ice. But
thirty minutes in, the crowds disappeared. Splinters littered the snow around a broad tree trunk, evidence of woodpeckers. The chirp of chickadees echoed in the white-and-gray emptiness. We marched and marched, and when we began to sweat from the effort, we shed our coats and scarves and let the fresh, frozen air rush over our skin. At a picnic table, Steve and I paused for lunch: wild boar sausage, a magnificently subtle goat cheese, fresh bread from a Val-David boulangerie, and, most important of all, a bottle of good Québécois apple cider. It had taken a while to find the cider; we'd bought it the night before after a long quest that had led us through several small towns in the Laurentians, where a liquor store with a decent selection was surprisingly difficult to find. It had been puzzling—this kind of cider was a specialty, so shouldn't it be everywhere? And finally, we'd found a big wine shop, and I'd selected this bottle, and now here we were at last, the Gross brothers, with our typical feast and a fine drink to cap it with. I swigged from the bottle. Fruity but dry, with hard and tiny bubbles. Perfect.

I handed it to Steve, and he sipped politely, but that was it. It's all yours, he said. I don't really like cider.

The fury that welled up in me at that moment was nearly impossible to contain. Why? Why couldn't you have said something last night? What's wrong with you? I must have begun to sputter angrily, and an image flashed through my head—the cider bottle upended, the liquor cascading like orange soda over Steve's head—but I managed to control myself. I drank another swig and asked myself: What's wrong with
you
? Here Steve and I had the cold and the quiet and the trees and each other—and a nice picnic spread—and I could enjoy none of them, but only because I wouldn't let myself. Or rather, because I so desperately cared about how Steve felt, and what he was enjoying, and how, we were trapped. He didn't want or need such attention, and I resented feeling compelled to give it.

And so, with a deep breath of cold air and a supreme effort of will (and maybe another glug or three of cider), I changed my mind.
No longer would I care—this world was too beautiful for such pettiness—and by not caring, I'd show how much I cared.

We packed up and marched on through the woods, and I didn't care. I felt light. When Steve came across a couple with three dogs, and cooed like a schoolgirl, I let him. When he spoke French to the couple, who were clearly Anglophones, I said nothing and smiled. If he was happy, I could be, too.

We marched on, and our snowshoes crunched out a rhythm I suddenly recognized. It was a Paul Simon song from
Graceland
, the album our parents had played incessantly on road trips for years. I pointed this out to Steve, and we sang together in the quiet woods:

I know what I know

I'll sing what I said

We come and we go

That's a thing that I keep

In the back of my head
.

T
he Tropic of Cancer neatly bisects the island of Taiwan. Above it stretches a dense urban fabric—the ports, factories, homes, and businesses of Taichung and Taipei. Below it, by coincidence, the island starts to feel truly tropical, the air warm and damp, the mountains and ocean close at hand.

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.