The Turk Who Loved Apples: And Other Tales of Losing My Way Around the World

by Matt Gross

  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.

  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.

  Country 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.

  The 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.