BROTHERS FOREVER
A family reunion in Taiwan brings two brothers together precisely when togetherness was needed the most
I’d had a quietly terrible year. It began when I stuck around my college town after graduating, working small jobs and watching my friends move away. My only definite plans involved hanging out with my girlfriend and applying for graduate school in the winter. Both evaporated. After misinterpreting my girlfriend’s thoughts on my leaving the next fall, I decided not to apply. Months later, we broke up.
By fall, instead of going to school, I had a small millennial crisis, cemented in a town I had less and less reason to live in. I felt soured, more critical, more demanding, more distant, less patient. I was changing, but in limbo, as though I’d lost a part of my old self without gaining its replacement.
I wanted to talk through my year of small loss with my brother Josh, the person who understood me like no one else did, but I had lost him, too—at the end of that summer, he and his partner Kelsey had moved across the world. He was in Taiwan.
Only a few months later, my parents planned a trip to Taiwan and asked me, jokingly, if I’d like to join them. Although I had no money and couldn’t afford to miss work, I felt desperate to see Josh. I said yes, and a few weeks later, I found myself soaring above the navy-blue ocean and mint-green fields surrounding Taipei, and then later heading for Taichung. Through the plane’s
window, I drank in the stepped rice fields, vertical cement homes, and in the distance, the mountains.
When I was a boy, mountains reminded me of dinosaurs, now they reminded me of Josh. In the summer of 2016, Josh, my other brother, Daniel, and I road-tripped across Canada, mostly to visit National Parks and hike as many mountains as we could. We hiked as though consumed, like hiking was a sport at which we could win. In our nomenclature, we called this “blasting it,” and Josh, with his unmatchable pace and knees rising so high they seemed to knock against his chest, was the expert.
Walking from the van into the school where Josh and Kelsey worked, I felt the cool whoosh of air conditioning and heard the sound of shrieking kindergarteners fresh out of class.
“Josiah!” Josh exclaimed, coming down the stairs. We hugged. He smelled salty and sweet, layered and rich, like the outside air. I let him go and we looked at each other.
“Bye, teacher Josh!” a pile of kids called out. Josh said goodbye to them and told me he had some paperwork to finish up, and that we could catch up a bit later.
The next day, we took a city bus northeast to Dakeng, an area approaching the mountains that had hiking trails. As we rode, I thought about the previous night’s dinner, how tasty the Hakka food had been—and how disorienting the conversation. Josh and I had touched on shared topics, mutual interests, the ephemera of our lives, but nothing really meaningful stuck. We hopped off the bus and I thought perhaps today something would.
BLASTING IT
At the trail’s entrance, there was an endless row of vendors lining an asphalt path that grew to a steep incline. Josh burst out on in front, weaving around shoppers as the path snaked up the mountain, and I pushed to keep up while the others fell behind.
Our climb was wordless, our conversation limited to the patter of our shoes. I found the rhythm in his lunging steps and tried to mimic his stride. Blood surged in my ears and my muscles twitched in my
wrists. I was blasting it. We were blasting it.
At the top of the hill, we stopped. My breath crashed in and out of me like the tide against the shore. I began talking, telling him that life had been hard without him. I told him that it felt like all the people I loved were moving on or moving away. I told him I felt like I was changing, but in ways that didn’t feel good, that it felt like I was losing my ability to be with other people, to be accommodating, to be patient and that I was spending more time in solitude, reading and resting with art. I felt, I told him, like I was losing a part of myself.
He paused, then said he missed talking about movies we’d been watching or music we’d been listening to, that he hadn’t found that in Taiwan yet. He told me he missed the depth of our conversations, missed being understood so easily. He told me Taiwan was great in so many ways, but that the distance hurt him. He told me that change was best approached not with fear, but courage. He told me he believed in me.
As we walked back down the mountain, we dissected The Joker, My Name Is Asher Lev, and Nick Cave’s new album, our tone shifting between pinched sarcasm and wide-eyed earnestness. He said he was taking up Mandarin. I told him I was still working on English. Our conversation drifted, weaved, returned, just like it used to. We approached the trail’s end as dusk settled, and I realized that we’d had the sort of conversation we couldn’t have had with anyone else.
Kelsey and my parents were sitting at a picnic table. “We got some hibiscus tea,” Kelsey said, proffering a bottle of red liquid. As I drank, tasting its sweet, straw-like flavour, I saw Josh’s fingers tapping at his phone. When I passed him the bottle, he passed me his phone, open to a note with Mandarin characters. “Evidence of my practice,” he said.
“What’s it say?”
He said the words I needed to hear, words that didn’t eliminate the pain of the past year, and didn’t cause me to stop changing in unfamiliar ways, but gave me peace as I blasted it into a more settled adulthood.
He looked at me and said, “You are my brother, and you are good.”