Chapter Two
That June I had turned twenty-five, a fact I welcomed without any particular emotion, perhaps because Apple’s birthday had passed just a month before, and she had driven herself into such hysterics over what she termed her “descent into hagdom”
that I resolved to indulge as little as possible in any self-pity that might arise.
Twinges of disquiet occurred only when I compared my life thus far to my favorite historical figures.
Cixi seized power at twenty-five; Einstein had completed the annus mirabilis papers in which he described the special theory of relativity for the first time.
Then again, Napoleon Bonaparte at twenty-five was languishing unemployed in Paris, and only made his name on 13 Vendémiaire, a couple of months after turning twenty-six.
So maybe I still had a little time.
In general, though, I was sanguine about birthdays and new years’ eves, which for Apple were essentially marked-off days in the calendar during which she would sink for hours into existential malaise, or toska, as we called it, after discovering the word in Nabokov.
For me the changes in seasons were much more harrowing reminders of the passage of time, even the jollier ones, like the transition to summer from spring.
I was also happy to distance myself from the “early twenties” phase of life, when I had been beset by comments—they appeared triply as encouragement, reassurance, and warning—that I should binge drink and take as many drugs as I could, that I should lack a clear grasp of my personal finances, that people in general would not have very high expectations of me, morally or professionally, and that life would never be as good or as bad as it was then.
I understood that such ideas must be helpful for some in their twenties, many of whom seemed to revel in the sanctioned adolescence, but they did nothing for me.
Rather than consolation I felt an oblique pressure to perform incompetence, and had on some occasions murmured along as companions commiserated and bragged about their ignorance of the tax system and the stock market, when in fact I filed my taxes without incident, enjoyed researching ETFs in which to place my savings, and had always kind of liked filling out forms.
I was looking forward to twenty-six as much as Apple dreaded it.
Twenty-six felt like it was really out of the danger zone.
When it came to love, too, I had often been out of step, but found that as I aged, the distance between cultural expectations and my experience of reality began to close.
The people who knew me, at least, grew used to my abstention from dating apps, my disinterest in casual sex, and my relative lack of a romantic history. I had the one “big ex,”
and that was something everyone could understand.
Of course there had been missteps with Paul, but I had, I believed, learned from them. To be in love was to be destabilized, that was what I had learned, and, until the day I met Hoang, I had established a happy equilibrium of habit, solitude, and friendship.
On the evening of the mid-autumn festival, two weeks after my first encounter with Hoang, Raymond, Xinwei, and I were eating mooncakes.
The fourth resident of the apartment returned just as we were unwrapping the pastries, and Xinwei asked him to join us, but he politely declined, explaining that he had sampled a mooncake once while vacationing in Hong Kong and found it disgusting. He didn’t use the word “disgusting,”
but he mimed sticking his fingers in his mouth to induce vomiting.
It was true that mooncakes were something of an acquired taste, but I was surprised he had such strong feelings, because their flavor was quite mild.
They were stodgy and calorific, like most of the food he ate, and pretty to look at, which no one could find fault with, although they were not very sugary or very salty, and so perhaps failed to excite the vulgar American palate.
People often said mooncakes looked better than they tasted, but I thought their taste was roughly commensurate with their appearance.
I had, however, always believed their name to be superior.
Mooncake, yue bing: in English as well as Mandarin it was a substantive word, one that filled and satisfied the mouth.
Even better was the way Raymond said it, in Cantonese: yut beng, a bouncy, bountiful word, the snappy yut tumbling into the drawn-out beng , which twanged like the echo of a plucked bass string.
Xinwei had arranged the mooncakes in concentric circles on one of the collapsible tables in the living room, placing a classic lotus paste and salted egg yolk in the middle, with mini mooncakes of various flavors, some archetypal, some outlandish—red bean, green tea, snow skin, ham and nut, durian, lava custard, lavender, English rose, passionfruit cheese—encircling the cen tral, larger one, like Ptolemy’s model of the universe.
We spent some minutes waiting for Xinwei to capture a photograph of the arrangement that satisfied her, and then we began to eat.
“When’s the last time you were home for mid-autumn?”
I asked Xinwei in Mandarin, thinking that perhaps she would grant a dispensation from our intricate language rules for the occasion.
She shrugged and offered me a wedge of red bean, which always made me think of winters in Beijing: warm dessert soup in white bowls and the smell of coal in the frozen air. I expressed some of this to Xinwei, and she asked me if I planned to go home for the spring festival. I said I wasn’t sure.
“I don’t like going back on holidays either,” she said.
I nodded sympathetically. “Too much pressure? Family can be tough.”
She frowned. “No. Too expensive.”
Apple showed up later in the evening, bearing mooncakes handmade by her mother, who had baked them at home in the suburbs and then driven fifty minutes to Apple’s apartment to drop them off, along with two hundred frozen dumplings, a sixteen-pack of single-ply toilet paper, and a large leek. Apple burst through the front door, hurling the container of cakes in my direction. As I caught it, she withdrew the leek from her tote bag and lobbed it at Xinwei, who lacked a sportsman’s reflexes and yelped as the vegetable bounced off her small frame.
“Sorry,”
Apple said, scooping up the leek and handing it to Xinwei. “I have no idea how to cook this, but I thought you might want it.”
“Thank you,”
Xinwei said, rubbing her collarbone and looking displeased. She appraised the leek and perked up a little bit when she noticed its heft and its thick healthy leaves.
I popped open the lid of the mooncakes Apple had brought. They were plump and round, the color of ivory, and dotted with red.
“Taiwanese style,”
Apple said, “I think.”
Apple dropped herself into a free chair, drew her legs up against her chest, rested her heels on the edge of the seat, and balanced the English rose mooncake on her left knee, pulling out her phone to take a picture. She was tall and gangly, with impressively foldable limbs. Sometimes she reminded me of a baby giraffe, sometimes a swan.
“Your mother made this?”
Xinwei asked, nibbling a cake.
“Yeah, they’re kinda gross, right?”
“No!”
Xinwei looked horrified and turned to me for help.
I shrugged and smiled in a manner I hoped would show that I understood she had not been implying the mooncake was gross, and had in fact been lining up a compliment, and that I agreed with her that Apple was being rude about her mother.
I tried to do all this without Apple noticing.
Interacting with them at the same time was a challenge.
When Xinwei and I were alone, she thought me pitiably white-washed, but when Apple was around, I was a fellow Chinese to whom she looked for moral support, to interpret and shield her from Apple’s blaring Americanness.
I had to provide this without seeming to undermine my loyalty to Apple, even in cases where I was on Xinwei’s side.
I felt guilty, like I was betraying Apple, but at the same time I didn’t want to cause strife by alienating Xinwei, who could be just as strident.
By now I was versed in this balancing act, and neither of them saw me sending sympathetic signals to the other.
Apple began to tell us about her day at work. She said the HR department had discovered it was mid-autumn and distributed mooncakes to everyone in the office, but since they had only purchased a small amount, each person received a wafer-thin slice, resting on a paper napkin, and accompanied by a plastic fork. Then a paralegal asked Apple what other activities Chinese people did for the occasion, and Apple, sensing an opportunity, told him it was tradition to give red packets of money to your colleagues.
“And then he was like, isn’t that Chinese New Year? And one of the HR ladies was like, actually it’s called Lunar New Year, and I was like, anyway , with the new year it’s married people giving them out, but for today, it’s the younger ones giving money to the older ones, so for example, you, Justin, should be giving me money. And then somebody else started reading out from Wikipedia like, ‘It doesn’t say anything here about blablabla,’ and I was like, my parents are Taiwanese, it’s a local custom. Justin smelled a rat because I’m always picking on him but I honestly think I had the rest of them. Not that it mattered because they’re all older than me, except for Justin. And they’re so cheap. You guys would not believe how stingy lawyers are.”
“But why do you lie to them?”
Xinwei asked Apple in Mandarin. I thought it was funny that when it was just me and Xinwei alone, we spoke Chinese, but with Apple, whom she regarded as American, she spoke English, except when Apple did something of which Xinwei disapproved, in which case she moved to Chinese, assuming the role of disciplinarian mother.
“Why not?”
Apple said, in English, consciously or unconsciously reprising her own role of defiant daughter, one of whose characteristics—she had told me—had been a refusal, growing up, to speak the mother tongue.
“You shouldn’t lie,”
Xinwei said, and got up and began clearing plates and glasses while Apple continued her story. “We can cook this with the lap cheong,”
Xinwei said to Raymond, holding the leek.
I couldn’t speak Cantonese, but I understood all the food words.
My phone buzzed on the table: a message from my father.
An animated red lantern danced across the screen.
The lantern smiled toothlessly and wished me a happy mid-autumn festival.
I sent one back, along with a picture of Xinwei’s moon cake formation.
It was the next morning in Beijing.
I wondered if he was alone, if he had eaten any mooncakes, and if he had plans for the day ahead.
I checked his WeChat profile.
The night before, he had posted a picture of himself smoking a cigarillo.
He was outdoors, and the moon was a white glare above his head.
Caption, in English, accompanied by a thumbs-up emoji: “moonlight sonata.”
As far back as I could remember, my father had been obsessed with Beethoven.
The trips to art museums were Disneyland compared to my father’s pilgrimages to Bonn: a city so boring it might have been designed by God as punishment for humanity’s sins.
I realized with some surprise that the last time we had talked on the phone had been my birthday, back in June—three months past.
I’d asked him what Beethoven was doing at twenty-five, because I was collecting data points to compare with my own life.
“I don’t know,”
he’d said.
“I think he was probably drunk somewhere.
You should try it.” Perhaps it had been too long since we spoke, but he was a hard man to pin down.
I didn’t mind; our relationship had improved considerably after I lowered my expectations of him and learned to meet him at his level.
Apple’s story, which seemed to have no resolution, and might not even have happened, as sometimes she just liked to let off steam by making something up—she called them her “bits”
if anyone questioned their veracity, but otherwise gave no indication whether what she was saying was true or false—petered out, and she and I headed to the fire escape so she could vape in the open air.
The last time she had come over was the day of the eclipse, and she must have been thinking of it too, because when we were outside she asked me, “Still in love?”
I shrugged.
I didn’t feel like discussing Hoang with her anymore.
Sometimes I hesitated to share things with Apple, because of how easily they became jokes, but usually I ended up telling her anyway.
In general I was reluctant to describe my emo tional experiences to other people.
There was something about the journey from private interior to outside world that corrupted them.
Vocalization diminished meaning: I grew conscious of how my words might sound to the person hearing them, and I was never satisfied with the impression.
For example, for the whole day between saying goodbye to Hoang and telling Apple about him on the fire escape, the world felt open and alive, small moments were permeated with immensity, and I was alert to color and sound.
I walked down the street buoyed by new and exciting feelings of boundlessness and potential, floated through the rest of the afternoon at work, and laughed out loud on the bike ride home, feeling the wind and the sun on my face and seeing many trees that could have been birches and parks that may have sheltered fugitive mice.
When I tried to convey this to Apple, we just ended up arguing about whether we thought Hoang was Korean or Vietnamese.
Apple said she knew a Korean guy named Hwang, I said I thought Hwang was a last name and anyway he hadn’t looked Korean at all, Apple said it was racist to say that someone could look or not look Korean, I said it wasn’t.
I hadn’t told her his full name, which might have settled the disagreement, because I knew she would immediately google him to look for pictures and other biographical information, and I wanted to spare him and myself that kind of scrutiny, which I knew would inflict further retroactive damage on my experience of the world that afternoon of the eclipse, which depended, I think, on its ineffability.
“Hello?”
Apple said. I had been silent for a while.
“I was just trying to remember the last time I was home during mid-autumn.”
“And?”
“I can’t remember.”
“You should come back with me for Thanksgiving. We’ll have hot pot, and then after dinner we can drive around and guess the market value of all the mansions.”
“That sounds fun.”
I said. “How’s your mom?”
“Annoying. She started talking about the midterms in the car, it was giving me hives. She’s the one who brings it up but she won’t even tell me who she’s voting for.”
“Why not?”
“She says I criticize her too much. I told you how she votes, right? Obama the first time, then Romney, because she liked his hair, then Trump, because taxes? I honestly don’t know who’s worse, her or my dad. He won’t even register to vote because he thinks it’ll increase his chances of getting jury duty. He got mad at me and Steve when we first voted because we ignored his advice, and literally made us promise not to complain if we ever got called up for jury duty. Meanwhile all I want in life is to be selected for a jury panel.”
“What’s your ideal case?”
“Celebrity attempted murder. It has to be attempted. I don’t want anyone to die, because I want everybody involved to be present at the trial. And I want a Kardashian in the mix. Obviously I’d lie in the screening interview and say I’d never heard of them.”
Clouds parted above us, revealing the round moon, dull and flat in the light-filled sky. Seeing it reminded me that there was a dark sky park somewhere in Pennsylvania, promising unobstructed views of the Milky Way.
“Do you think your roommates like me?”
Apple said.
I nodded.
“Do you think it was okay that I gave Xinwei that leek?”
I nodded again.
After another moment Apple started telling me about the toilet paper her mother had dropped off with the mooncakes, how she appreciated the gesture but resented that her mother refused to stop giving her toilet paper, because it would be a dereliction of maternal duty, but also refused to purchase double or triple ply, because she thought it indicated improvidence and houseguests would cast negative judgment on a person who stocked their bathroom with such luxuries.
I was content to look out at the shadowy walls of the buildings on either side of the empty lot, swing my legs back and forth over the fire escape, and listen to Apple talk.
Comfortable silences were a foreign concept to her, one I’d tried to accustom her to, but which she’d fiercely opposed.
She, in turn, learned that sometimes I didn’t feel like speaking; now, if I fell silent, she was happy to take over and talk.
When Apple left I googled Hoang’s full name together with the name of the university.
I couldn’t find him on any social media, and unearthed just one reference to him in a database of scientific journals, where he was listed as a coauthor of a research paper titled “Excitatory synapse formation in juvenile Myoxidae.”
I looked up “Myoxidae.”
Images appeared of tiny, obscenely cute mice, huge-eyed, nibbling blackberries, the fruit like monstrous bowling balls in their small pink hands.
The next day I met Inno for breakfast at a new café in Chinatown that only sold food and drink containing matcha in some form.
Inno was the only person in my life who asked to meet for breakfast, and probably the only one for whom I would entertain such a request.
He carried out his days according to a strict schedule, and if you wanted access to him you had to work within its restrictions.
Sometimes they were temporal, like our breakfast, which would end at ten thirty, when Inno had to return home for his three-hour chess session with a Russian man named Gleb, followed by a pre-workout protein shake, some weightlifting at home, a run along the river, a post-workout protein shake, and then half an hour of logic problems to refresh himself before his weekly reading group, which that month was focused on Spinoza.
In the evening he had dinner at his favorite Ethiopian restaurant with one group of friends and then drinks at a new bar with different friends.
Sometimes his requirements concerned the nature of the hang-out; for one six-month period he refused to meet indoors, and I could only see him if I took a walk with him around the city, the traffic lights dictating our conversation, because he would stop speaking whenever we stood still.
His in-person demeanor belied his odd and exacting habits.
He was cheerful and humorous, and he had a calming presence.
He never made his companion feel rushed, even when they knew the minutes were ticking by until he would leave them to fulfill the next item on his schedule.
He gave the impression that he understood you, so that you didn’t feel you had to explain yourself to him, though naturally you would still be eager to impress him, given his accomplishments, personality, and manner of living.
He was very good at appearing fascinated by whatever it was you were telling him.
He was like this with everyone, but when you were with him you felt that his warmth and attention were especially for you, and had never been bestowed on anyone else in quite the same way.
I considered him a close friend and I knew he considered me one too, but in the years I had known him I had never been able to shake a feeling of deprivation that stemmed from a desire, probably unfulfillable, to be closer.
He was that kind of extrovert whose gregariousness can feel like a barrier to intimacy—like he was so close to everyone he met that it was impossible to differentiate your relationship with him from his relationship with everyone else.
We arrived outside the café at the same time, Inno in workout clothes, his typical daytime wear.
I had reserved a table by the window, from which it was possible to see the fire station and its mural of a green Chinese dragon, bathed in yellow light from the morning sun.
I was looking forward to the waffles, which I had seen in photographs but never tried: mossy golden-green slabs with square wells of syrup and scalloped edges like cartoon hearts.
But as the door clicked softly behind us and the waitress descended, Inno, who had only recently come off his phase of wanting to meet exclusively outdoors, said he had changed his mind and asked if we could instead take a walk.
I got a matcha latte but no waffles, and followed Inno, who had purchased nothing, back outside, but not before glancing longingly at the table I had reserved, which looked simple and inviting, with its sunny aspect and its view of the fire station’s dragon.
We walked east so that we would be able to sit on a bench by the water, with a view of the beautiful teal-colored Benjamin Franklin Bridge.
The latest with Inno was that he had terminated a fling on account of cultural differences.
“He’s so provincial that he didn’t know what a margherita pizza was. He’d never heard the term . I explained it to him, and he said, ‘Oh, you mean a cheese pizza!’ As if I was the philistine,”
Inno sighed and took a sip of lemon water from the reusable liter bottle he carried everywhere.
“Why were you talking about pizza? You don’t even eat pizza.”
“I was telling him that tomato crops emit more greenhouse gas than pork or poultry. Did you know that?”
“That just doesn’t sound true,” I said.
“It is true. Also more than milk, cheese, and eggs. And farmed fish.”
“So if you give up tomatoes, you can start eating sushi again?”
Inno shook his head, solemn. The loss of omakase from his life had tested his altruistic faith more than any of the other sacrifices he had made.
For several months now he had been shaving what he called “the unnecessaries” from his life, by which he meant expenses one could live without.
At first, given his lavish spending, it made sense: he let go of his standing reservation for a table at the nightclub; he downgraded, and eventually canceled, his gym membership; he took the bus instead of the Acela first class to New York.