Stewed and Cubed Improvisation

I'm going to tell a story. Bear with me if you like, it does evolve into something. It's not just a rambling narrative of the events leading up to Christmas.

Two days before Christmas, my parents held a holiday party.

We arrived almost a week before that, loud and happy - as happy as you can be when your mother is sick - hugs at the airport, promises of a renovated bathroom (no more fighting over who gets to go first!), a prediction of snow, on our way to get a real tree, with real tree smell and pine needles and everything. We'd decorate! There'd be a party on Saturday at a friend's and a party on Sunday at ours, then Christmas.

Of course several issues threatened to bring the whole thing down like a cat latched to a flimsy curtain - some health issues in the immediate family that I won't disclose in full, but I can reveal that basically, my mother will soon be back in chemotherapy, on a different drug. That brought a lot of stress and uncertainty to the holidays. And with it...medical bills.

My parents are having the downstairs bathroom re-done, to make it usable for the first time in years. The work was almost not finished in time, and while it was going on, the well pump broke. We had to have that replaced along with paying the expected renovation bills.

Then, the furnace motor went. It started making an odd sound on Friday, and by Saturday morning it was dead. We found a tech who would come fix it, but the part had to be ordered and wouldn't be in before Christmas. That meant no heat up to and on Christmas Day. Whoopty-freakin'-do. Also, waiting for the tech (who was actually great, this wasn't his fault) on Saturday meant our planned Christmas shopping trip was cancelled. No, I did not get all of my Christmas shopping done, but in the end it didn't matter. At least we have a fireplace.

So...far less money than expected, no heat, medical problems, and the party was on Sunday. I was set to help clean and to cook a few dishes on the day itself, and I'll be honest, I didn't really want to do any of it in a cold house when I was already stressed. To be more honest, I wanted to cancel it.

But Mom, the one who was so insistent we would have a good holiday, was adamant that we had to soldier on. Intractable, even. I did not share her enthusiasm and, as a further confession, did not even try to pretend to. I did, however, agree to woman up and just do what needed to be done if she was so immovable on this. I figured I'd be cleaning in my coat, scarf and gloves (I was right, except for the gloves).

My husband said "this is like one of those Lifetime holiday specials in which the family is subject to trial after trial and problem after problem until the whole house goes up in a ball of flame" (which would have been warmer, anyway, and with all the blown fuses from our many space heaters, seemed to be a distinct possibility. I say: good riddance). "...and at the end, on the eve of the holiday, the family learns the true meaning of Christmas."

Me: "Fuck the true meaning of Christmas, I want heat."
Friend: "You know, Jenna, in those specials, the cynical one always has the biggest change of heart."
Me: "BAH HUMBUG."

For the record, I want Mom to be well more than I wanted heat, but "I want heat" was a funnier thing to say, and since there is no star in this chaotic entropy-verse I can wish upon, hoping it's the eye of a nonexistent God, that will make that happen without the help of modern science (and I do pray to modern science), I may as well say what I please.

So leading up to the party I busied myself helping - I managed to get out of the house to do Mom's Christmas shopping so she could clean. Win-win. Then I came home and started making my various dishes, cold hands and all. One dish - muhammara, which I make regularly - exploded in the far too small blender (no, the tiny food processor is not big enough, and I have no idea why anyone thought we could make hummus, babaghanoush and muhammara, three blended dips, in it in an hour or so). Someone else finished it. I admit I pulled the brat card - you want muhammara at this party, well, this is a disaster, you want it, you finish it, I'm done with it.

What I did make and finish was my beer-stewed beef cubes, which can be prepared as a stew, casserole, toothpick'd appetizer or something you eat with bread or over rice. It's a stew of herbs - mostly dill, but also rosemary, garlic and thyme - beef cubes, beer, grainy spicy mustard, shallots, some butter, and some additions (I'm fond of bell pepper, mushrooms and walnuts personally). Grumble bells, grumble bells, I grumbled all the way to the stove - which had to be lit with a lighter, the pilot was acting up - and started working. I cut the melting butter with olive oil to make the whole thing a tad healthier (ho ho ho, as though that's possible), gently toasted the herbs along with salt, pepper and paprika and added shallots into the fragrant, frothy pan. and browned the beef. Some people began to arrive. My junior high school music teacher was there, some family friends, some of my sister's friends (none of my friends live in the area anymore), a girl who commented that it smelled "gross" (whatever, girl, it's delicious). I dumped in the bottle of beer and mixed the whole thing together. I left briefly to set up some Christmas music on my iPhone. I added a generous dollop of hot, grainy apple cider vinegar mustard and mixed that in. I adjusted for flavor (good ways to improve top notes in this recipe while keeping it rounded is to add orange juice, orange zest or apple cider. For bottom notes, add some toasted nuts, beef boullion, well-toasted paprika or use a darker beer.

I stewed it all together and added the vegetables in order from longest-cooking to shortest (carrots first, then bell peppers, then mushrooms, like that). Really, you can add almost any vegetable. You could throw spinach, cauliflower, squash, potatoes, whatever into there. You might even be able to get away with lentils, Brussels sprouts or zucchini. You can add any herbs as long as you've got dill. You can change the type of mustard or beer. A pilsner and a light, hot English mustard will produce a very different dish from a winter lager with a mottled dijon. You don't even need to use beef, although I hold that a red meat is best. If you make it as a stew you can add butter squash late for chunkiness, or early so they'll disintegrate into the casserole and add more base flavor. In a casserole, I slather fat, soft breadsticks with mustard and place them on top at the very end - it's done when the tops crisp - but you don't have to.

In short, you can improvise. You can do whatever you want. The end product's just got to come out alright.

Finally, I made this dish for my in-laws (fresh dill, butter squash in a casserole with breadsticks), and it was quite different from the one I made for my parents (dried dill, no butter squash, mushrooms, in a stew). In the end, it was the same dish. It was still me. Each time, I improvised. I didn't know the squash would disintegrate, but it came out OK.

I realized as I was cooking it that that's really all we do - we improvise. Mom gets cancer, and we make do. We do what we can, we research, we plan, but in the end, we kinda make it up as we go along. We fight, we make up, and we know we always love each other, even though it's too easy to revert to adolescence when at home, and yes, parents can be just as annoying to adult offspring as those same offspring were as teenagers. The furnace breaks, and we improvise. I huddle under blankets and offer to go Christmas shopping for Mom so she won't have to (NICE WARM SHOPPING MALL), and Brendan does whatever he can, including shoveling snow with a garden spade, to help ease the stress on my chaotic and stressed-out family. Grandma L. calls every day, even though it accomplished nothing other than to stoke her worries.

As an expat, I improvise. As an expat with a parent battling cancer, I improvise. I do the best I can - even when "the best I can" basically means I decide to stay in Taiwan and visit from there, because I can make more money to enable me to visit there than I could doing the same thing at home (and yes, I am experienced and certified, it's not as though I teach kiddie English for $590/hour), and do something I enjoy rather than selling my soul for an office job. I save money as well as I can, I visit in the winter even though I hate the cold, and I try to be supportive even as I'm fighting the impulse to act like a teenager, slamming doors and proclaiming that I hate everyone and nobody loves me anyway waah waah. (I didn't do that, but I kinda wanted to. I don't hate everyone, though). It's cheaper and easier to visit in January, between Christmas and Chinese New Year when work is dead, but I visit at Christmas because it's important. I don't always make these decisions in advance. I want to cancel a party, but I don't 'cause Mom wants it to happen. So I improvise and dance around my bad mood and cold fingers. I made a dish I didn't even really want to make that night, in that cold kitchen.

Life as an expat is a life of improvisation - with an unknown audience, in an unfamiliar theater. Life as an expat whose mother has cancer is a life of improvisation, cubed. You stay abroad and you stew in it - I should be home, I should be there, but I can make the money I need to be supportive here, and anyway here is where I want to live. My life is also important, but I feel selfish for even thinking it. You come home and you stew in it - everyone's emotional, everyone's stressed, you love them but you really want to slam that door. You just want people to acknowledge that it sucks that it's so cold, but instead you get "it's not that cold", "it's fine", "the fire's warm", "the fire makes it pretty OK, don't you agree?" No, you don't agree, it is that cold, can we all please just stop pretending? So you improvise, you stew in it, and you go to the mall.

I even asked if we could just go to Grandma's for the whole deal. Nope...we had to have Christmas at home. That's fine, it's what Mom wanted, but deep down, I wanted heat, and no I did not think the fireplace would be sufficient. We stayed, we improvised. We woke up on Christmas morning, achy, just wanting it to be warm for Chrissakes.

We woke up to snow - a white Christmas, indeed. We started a fire, I made a hot coffee cocktail with cream and Irish Mist and dunked Christmas cookies into it. We opened gifts and it was fun. It was that cold, but we could basically ignore it. I'd like to say I dropped my cynicism and it was all lovely and Christmas special-y, with a soft-focus and white portrait filter, but it wasn't. It was fine, but mostly, we improvised. I was happy to be there, but no, it wasn't rose-tinged and perfect.

We did what we had to do, and for as long as I live abroad and my mother has cancer, we'll continue doing what we have to do, and we won't always know what that is until it happens.

Mustard Cubed Beef

I was going to include a recipe for my beef cubes, but anything I could put on here is something you can add your own flourishes to without much problem. Even I change it up. So...here's a rough outline of the recipe, but the scant information is deliberate:

Melt some butter in a pan with olive oil, on low, add lots of dill, some rosemary and some thyme along with chopped garlic, salt, a red chili if you like, maybe some orange zest, maybe some paprika. Add chopped shallots, and then beef. Brown. Add a can of beer - dark is great, but pilsner or ale would be fine. Mix and add a few dollops of mustard. Add other vegetables - carrots, chopped bell pepper, mushroom. Add walnuts if you like, or any other vegetable that you think would work. Cook, add cornstarch to thicken if needed. Or cook as a casserole with potatoes, squash etc. with mustard-slathered sliced bread at the bottom, and mustard-slathered breadsticks on top (add breadsticks 15 mins before it's done, it's done when they crisp and brown slightly on top). If you make as a casserole, still brown the beef in the herbed butter, but use more shallots.

The Best I Can

from here

Those of you who are my friends on Facebook know that I'm currently trying my hand at a windowsill potted herb garden. I bought two kinds of thyme, rosemary, basil, sage, two kinds of mint, catnip, a raspberry bush, bergamot, tea tree, verbena, chamomile, two kinds of lavender and oregano. This in addition to the plants already out there: two orchids, a huge bougainvillea, a small poinsettia and two plants I can't identify that the former tenant left us along with aforementioned bougainvillea.

I'm not much of a gardener, but I try to check them every day and add a bit of water whenever the soil looks too dry or they look a bit wilted, and am cautiously beginning the task of learning how to add fertilizer - which kinds, how much and how often. I'm not very good at it, but generally speaking, I've been able to keep my plants more or less alive. I figured it would be like expat life - a bit shaky at first, a few brown leaves and wilted stems here and there. Then it would get a little easier and require less watchfulness. Then a bit easier after that, and then something approximating normal and natural. Living in Taiwan has become like that. Most things do. Gardening should follow that paradigm too, no?

Not many of you know that my mother is an excellent gardener. Growing up we always had fresh produce mixed among the staples from the grocery store, herbs growing like weeds, profusions of flowers and a landscaped front and side garden. Lilacs would perfume the breeze blowing into the kitchen window. I loved it, even as I chided my mother for doing things like running outside in a rainstorm brandishing a knife because "I need to get a squash for dinner!" I felt, growing up, that all she had to do was look at those plants and they'd just sprout for her, like fecund, green little servants. She knew exactly how much and how often to water them and while she had failures, she had enough successes that we didn't notice.

But all of you do know that we're currently dealing with a serious family illness, and now I feel I can say that the illness we're facing is my mother's. I'm going to reveal a bit here, not because I'm generally in the habit of talking about family illnesses but for two other reasons: first, it will help you better understand what I'm going to write below; and second, this might be useful for anyone reading who is dealing with the reality of living on the other side of the globe while a close family member faces illness, and the reality of how to approach expat life in such a situation.

So, basically, my mother has cancer, it's not the kind you can "cure", it's metastasized, and while chemo is working for now, eventually all cancers become immune to any available chemo drug after it's been used long enough on the patient. She's healthy now, and things are basically OK...for now...but as you can probably extrapolate from the above information, it's not going to be OK forever, and not even necessarily for very long. The only bright side is that it's not one of those "you have six months" types of cancer.

While, of course, my mother's health is first priority, it does raise the question of what we should do.

My sister has a cram school job that she doesn't even like and a pre-furnished apartment - although she adores Taiwan - and she's 25. So, when she's ready, she can chuck the job and move back home without any major or long-term life consequences. My career is here, my cat is here, my entire social life (except for a smallish group of good friends in DC, New York and Boston whom I've hung on to) is here, my wage earning potential and strongest employability is, if not here, then in a country where English is not the native language. I'm thinking of this also in terms of disposable income. I could possibly find work in the USA, but would have significantly less to spend after taking care of the essentials, and disposable income is, honestly, a very useful thing to have when dealing with a family illness and the reality of visiting often.

After a long conversation with my parents - perfectly ready for my mom to say "please come home as soon as you can", and perfectly ready to act on that, because she's my mom and we're now talking years, not decades - we all agreed that for now, we'd stay.

I would not have made this decision without the blessing of my family. I simply would not have. I could not have, as much as I really do want to stay in Taipei. As much as it's my home - really my home. As in a home I like rather than merely tolerate as so many expats seem to. This is the only thing that keeps me from leaping into a pit of "Jenna, you are so selfish". We all agree that this is what's right for my and Brendan's lives and careers, and that visiting every six months, especially for the holidays, is an acceptable solution for now. This is why disposable income is so important: we can afford it. This is why tending to your career is important: I have the flexibility to do this.

And having most of your social network around you is important, too: I know my friends back home would be there when I needed them. My direct experience, though, has been here: and as upset as I have been these past few weeks, I can say that people have come through. All I've really needed recently is a few sympathetic ears (talking about it helps - this is what I learned from the last time we went through this and I was more secretive, and it affected my physical health), and I've gotten them. A friend cut out of work for a few hours to keep me company the day after I found out (I thought I'd be OK, so I hadn't asked my husband to take off work). Another friend, who is generally a difficult fellow in other respects, came through for me in the evening when I still needed company. A few friends have told me their own stories of family illness, reminding me that as horrible as I feel right now - as much as I fight back tears and my stomach sinks when I think of the future - that everyone has a sad story to tell. Nobody gets a perfectly green garden under a perfectly blue sky.

We also agree that the time will come when something may have to change. I don't fear this in terms of the changes it will bring to where I live and what I do (although I can't lie: those worry me too), but more in terms of knowing that when that time comes, it will be near the end. It fills me with tears, weeks after hearing the first bit of bad news, to think that I might reach that time, look back, and regret the decision we've made now. Will "every six months" seem like it was enough? Probably not.

All I can say is that we're making the best decision we can now, for the situation we're in now, and as much as I might regret it, I will at least have this. I'm doing the best I can.

I used to think of the Pacific Ocean as an annoyingly wide but otherwise surmountable thing. Now I think of it as a deep, unending pit of separation. And yet, I'm doing the best I can.

Students and local acquaintances tell me how great it is that I live here, and have this idea that expat life is this magical thing in which all foreigners are rich and happy and having adventures and have better lives. I say nothing, but there's tension right between my shoulder blades. Do they know the price I'm paying to stay? No, because I've chosen not to tell them. But it is a hefty price, and it sits right there in that knot below my neck. The one that hasn't gone away since all this started. And still, I'm doing the best I can.

I'm jealous of my sister - she can chuck it all and move back home. I can't do it nearly as easily and I'd suffer real consequences.

She's jealous of me because she can't afford to go home every six months, nor does she have the job flexibility. She doesn't have the luxury of choosing to stay. Choosing it, for her, brings consequences I can somewhat avoid.

Today dawned cool and lightly overcast - not the interminable dark gray of winter but a lighter, cleaner grayish blue. It was almost welcome after two days of sweating under a hot blue dome. I parted the sheer blue curtains on our living room window to see how my herb garden was holding up.

Well, it wasn't. My tea tree and bergamot are basically withered stalks (although the tea tree has some straggly hope). My raspberry bush and oregano have noticeably dead brown spots. My thyme is completely gone - this surprised me: isn't thyme a Mediterranean plant? Can it not survive heat spells? The other plants are dangerously wilted. Even the mint was very unhappy - I thought you had to basically actively kill mint to get it to die - what gives? My basil looked sad.  The sage was floppy and hanging off the edge of the pot rather than standing up straight. The chamomile is half gone, not looking like anything I want to harvest for cooking. Only the rosemary, orchids and lavender (surprisingly) are soldiering on, and one of the lavenders isn't quite happy.

I gave the whole lot a good watering, and I see some improvement, but all in all I'm worried. Will my plants make it? Will I be able to continue making pastas, drinks, sauteed meat dishes and stews with my own fresh harvest? I'm doing my best, but will my best efforts pay off?

Was I ever guaranteed a happy ending in which all my plants were luscious and green, and Taipei was eternally a great place to live, without having to worry about life back home? Could I ever really have counted on a green life under a blue sky - no brown spots, no bits that didn't quite work out, no issues that could not be resolved satisfactorily despite my best efforts? Did I really think I could do my best and that it would pay off, always, every time?

Finally, what makes me sad as I survey the blasted heath that is my window garden, is that I know deep down I started it in part because it's something my mother would do - not that she'd ever live in the middle of a big city as I so enjoy doing - but that she finds a way to grow plants wherever she is. She'd have the ability to make those plants thrive. I think I was hoping against all rational hope that I'd cultivate that ability too: a little piece of my mother in Taipei that lives on in the green thumb I am determined to inherit, whether it is my rightful legacy or not.

It really saddens me that, so far, I'm failing.

And yet I will continue to water my plants and hope hope hope - because I do not pray - because I'm doing the best I can.