The People Around Us

家人、朋友、伴侣、同事——还有那些说不清的信任、争吵与和好，它们每天都在你身边发生。

The Table Where Everyone Sits

There is a table in my mother's kitchen that seats eleven, and on a Sunday most of them are there.

My mother is sixty-eight and cannot cook for eleven people any more, so my aunt does the cooking and my mother does the hosting. In our family, hosting means sitting at the head of the table, saying that there is far too much food, and moving the plates around so that everybody can reach them. She has done this since her marriage in 1996 and she does it with such a calm manner that nobody has ever thought to thank her for it.

The rest of the family arrives in a rough order. My father would have been the first, but he died in the winter of 2019 and the empty chair at the end is still his, and nobody has ever moved it. My brother comes with his wife and their two children. My sister comes with her daughter, who is seven and believes she is the hostess. I come with my own wife and our son, who is five and mostly interested in the meat. My grandmother comes last, by taxi, and complains about the stairs on the way up. My uncle and my aunt drive three hours and stay two nights, and my uncle complains about the food and my aunt complains about my uncle.

My cousin Yan comes on a motorbike and does not eat meat. She is thirty-four and writes poems, and she was originally going to be a lawyer, like my uncle, and then she was not.

I am the one who introduces people. It is not a special skill but it is mine. When a new boyfriend comes to the table, or when my grandmother has not seen my wife for a while, somebody has to stand up and say who he is and why he is here, and then say the name a second time ten minutes later because nobody heard it the first time. An introduction at our table is never short. My mother repeats the name, the job, and the town, and the town is the part that everybody actually uses.

We speak for four hours. The talk is conversation in the plainest sense: nobody is performing anything. My brother talks about money, my sister talks about her daughter, my aunt talks about food and my uncle talks about court dates. Every few minutes somebody will discuss something that has nothing to do with anybody in the room, and then everybody joins in.

That is the real function of a family table. People who know each other too well have stopped asking questions and have started comparing notes. You hear about your cousin's new job, your mother's knee, your uncle's loan and what he is paying on it, and the branch of the family that nobody mentions at the table, which is small enough now to be a joke rather than a scandal.

What comes out of that kind of meal is not information. It is a feeling of belonging that is difficult to describe and easy to notice when it stops. My son, who is five, has already worked out that if he wants the last piece of fish he should ask his grandmother, because she will pour it onto his plate while telling everybody that it was going to waste.

I do not think my family is unusual. I think most families are like this: a group of people who saw each other at a hard time and chose to keep coming back anyway. That is a relationship, and it is held up almost entirely by repetition, which is why it survives years in which nobody is feeling generous.

My grandmother is ninety-one. Her hair is white, the backs of her hands are brown, and she laughs in this liquid way that has not changed since I was a tiny child. She is the only person in the family who will say out loud, and literally, what everybody else is only thinking.

She is also the only one who is never in a hurry. I have learned more about how to be a relative from sitting next to her than from any book.

Somewhere in the middle of the meal she will lean across the table and put one finger on my wife's arm. It is a small gesture that means: you are one of us, I have decided, and we are not going to discuss it.

What People Are Like

There is a short list of qualities I keep for people, the way you keep a note about a friend's allergy. My wife says I do this and that it is a symptom of not trusting my own memory. She is probably right.

My wife's character is steadier than mine. She does not change her mind at four in the afternoon, and she does not need to be in a good mood to speak politely to a stranger in a queue. Her personality has one complex shape to it: she is slow to like people, and then almost impossible to shift. I have watched her do this to four different colleagues and I never once had a chance to stop her.

Her identity is not something she discusses, but I have noticed it anyway. She is a daughter of a small town, a mother of one, and a person who counts things. Her mental life, if you asked her, is private, and the privacy is not cold. It is just hers.

I am the opposite. My emotions arrive late and leave early, and I never learned to hide them well. When something moves me I get loud, or I go quiet, or I leave the room to stand at the sink. I have been told that I am sensitive. My wife says it kindly. My brother says it as an accusation.

Honestly, I think I am more sensitive to other people than to myself. I detect a change in a room before I know what changed. I know which of my friends had a bad day by how quickly they say hello, and I know it from the inside of the ear rather than from the face.

I admire people who can be alone and not suffer from it. I cannot. I have never been alone for more than nine days without becoming slightly unwell. But solitude, which is not the same thing, I have learned to enjoy in short periods — a train in the morning, an evening with the door shut, the first hour of a holiday before anybody needs me.

Confidence is a performance, at least in my family. My grandmother has enormous confidence and no idea that she has any. My uncle has the confidence of a man who has never once been wrong, and everybody at the table is so polite that nobody has told him. He once announced an outcome in a case before it happened and was right, and since then it is considered part of the family story.

My own confidence is basically a habit of behaviour. I arrive early, I say hello first, and I pretend to have understood. On the basis of thirty years of this, people assume I know things. I have stopped correcting them.

We argue about honesty in my family more than about anything else. My mother says that honesty between relatives is like a rough road: necessary, slow, and mostly avoided at night. My brother says she means keep the peace. My wife says my mother is right and that the peace in question is not worth the price.

There is an unusual custom in our house about praise. If one of us does something well, we are not allowed to mention it. If my son draws a good picture, it goes on the fridge and nobody says a word. My grandmother believes this is modesty. My aunt believes it is that we do not want to say anything out loud in case it stops.

The Argument About the House

The argument happened in March, over a phone call on speaker, so all eleven of us heard it.

The cause was simple. My mother wanted to sell her house. My brother wanted to keep it. My sister wanted to keep it and thought my brother wanted to sell it.

The origin of it was older than any of us. My parents married young, in a flat with two rooms, and my mother has never forgotten that my father promised her a garden. My father is dead. The garden is a strip of earth behind the garage with a rose in it that nobody waters. That strip is the entire basis of the argument.

For six weeks the family was in conflict. My uncle, who is a lawyer, sent three messages that nobody wanted to read. My aunt tried to arrange a meeting and everybody declined, one after another, in a way that was almost elegant. My grandmother refused to take a side and said, in front of everybody, that she was tired of the concept of inheritance, which she called unhealthy, and which made my brother so angry that he hung up on her.

My wife was the only one who stayed calm. She is good in conflict the way some people are good at swimming — not fast, just without fear. She asked my brother one question: what are you actually afraid of? He said he was afraid of the house being destroyed. She said, then let's talk about the house, not about your father.

That took nine days and two meetings, and then my brother apologized. Not to my mother — he had said nothing to her that needed it — but to my grandmother, and to my sister, and to me, in that order, which is the order he himself decided, and which I thought was very honest of him.

He said sorry and he meant it, and then he insisted on one condition, which was that my mother could not make any decision without asking all eleven of us first. We agreed. That is how we run things now. It is a strange restriction and it has saved us more than once.

I want to be clear about one thing: our family does not fight well and it does not apologize well either. We are not like that. We are Chinese and we are over fifty and there is a barrier between us that has nothing to do with language. We can discuss a colleague's marriage for two hours and we cannot tell our mother that we are tired.

My father was the only one who crossed it. He had a way of saying an uncomfortable thing roughly and then immediately making a joke, so that everyone could laugh and nobody had to answer. I have tried to copy this. My attempt every year is to raise one hard topic before the fish comes out. It does not always work. Sometimes the argument just stops, and we all eat.

If you want to see what an unhealed conflict looks like after thirty years, watch two sisters talk about their mother's kitchen.

The Work of Caring for Somebody

My mother had a bad winter two years ago. Nothing dramatic — a fall, a small operation, three weeks in a hospital bed and then two months at home with a stick.

I went there every weekend for four months. This is not a heroic story. It is a description of what care actually consists of.

You accompany her to appointments. You learn the names of the drugs, and you learn that the drug that helps at night is the one that upsets her stomach in the morning, and you learn to watch for that. You sit there while a medical person explains something in a way that uses eleven words you know and forty you do not, and then you go home and look it up at one in the morning and mention it the next day as a question, not a fact.

You clear the table on a schedule. The arrangement is not glamorous: medicine in a box on the table, one for morning and one for evening, and a pen next to it, and a line on the sheet every time. It is a system, and systems are what comfort actually is. Not flowers. A system.

My mother hated the pen. She said it made her a case. I said it made her safe, and I said it in the wrong way, and she was upset for a whole evening about something that had taken me four seconds to say.

This is what I know about helping: the help you give and the help they receive are not the same size, and the gap between them is where most family conflict hides.

The word for the opposite of that gap is assistance, and assistance is something you should offer in a form that can be refused. My mother wanted me to come on Wednesdays. I came on Wednesdays and Saturdays for a month, until she encouraged me, in her way, by saying my wife must think I was terrible at my job. She was right. I went back to Wednesdays.

What keeps people going is not a sense of duty. It is being noticed. My brother sent money. My sister sent a phone charger, a good one, with a note that said she had thought of her on a motorway. My grandmother came for one week and reorganized the entire kitchen and told everybody about it for a year.

Attention is the cheapest thing in the world and the one people notice most. I have learned to give it in a way that does not disturb: I sit down, I do not look at the phone, and I let there be twenty seconds of quiet at the start, because that silence indicates that I am not waiting to speak.

To communicate well with somebody frightened is mostly to go slower than you want to. Pause before you answer. Repeat what they said in your own words, badly, and let them correct you. It is not a technique. It is just patience, which is a form of love that does not need anybody to notice it.

And to be honest: some of the time you cannot help at all. You can only reach the person, and then motivate them to do the next small thing, and then be there when they do not do it. In the end my mother did almost everything herself, four months later, with the stick against the wall. The assistance I gave her was mostly the kind you cannot measure. It was worth doing anyway.

Running a House Like a Small Company

My grandmother has a word for a good household, and the word is arrange.

Everything in her house has an arrangement. The good plates are used twice a year and everybody has permission. The good knives belong to my aunt and nobody else touches them, and nobody has ever stopped my grandmother from saying so. There is a list on the fridge of who is coming on Thursday, and it is updated, and it is not negotiable, because the list is the agenda and the agenda is the law.

She says this comes from her mother, who ran a house with nine children and no money. The system has been passed down unchanged for a hundred years and nobody wrote it down.

I find this more and more useful, being an engineer myself. I know why the arrangements work. They work because every single one of them has an owner. My grandmother's household has no item without a name beside it, no rule without the person who will enforce it, and no cluster of tasks without somebody who minds.

The interesting thing is what a factor like that does to the people inside it. In my grandmother's house there is no command structure, but there is a clear rank of who gets to decide what: my grandmother, then my mother, then my aunt, then everybody. My cousin Yan is at the bottom, and she is the only one who is allowed to yield no opinion at all, which she says is the best position in the house.

Range matters too. My grandmother will spend forty minutes on how to fold a tablecloth and not five minutes on what her nephew intends to do with his life, and I have decided that this is not a failure of attention. It is attention correctly range-d.

There is also a lot of charge in a house like that, if you look closely. A raised voice at my grandmother's table is the end of the world, and the reason is not sensitivity. It is credit. Everybody has a standing account, and nothing is said about it, and everybody knows exactly where they stand. That is an arrangement you cannot make with money.

The last thing I want to say about the household arrangement is that most of it is extensive and almost entirely invisible. Maintenance of a family is not a feeling. It is a continuous process of small items, none of them important, all of them necessary, and if you skip three of them in a row you find out within a month that the whole thing was standing on them.

What the People Actually Do

Let me describe the work, because knowing what somebody does is how you get to know them.

My father was an engineer. He constructed water towers, of all things, and the last job he had before he retired was repairing a tank on the side of a hill. He used to bring home prints on tracing paper, thin blue lines on a soft brown background, and I would sit on his knee and follow one line all the way across the paper with my finger until it turned into a circle.

My cousin Yan writes poems. Her work is not a trade and she will tell you so, twice. She has published one collection of poems that nobody bought, and she says the whole thing was successful because she finished it. She has an imagination that other people do not have. I can detect it in her: she looks at a kitchen and gives you three things that happened there, none of which happened.

My wife knows an artist who paints and does not sell, and who has the leather hands of somebody who has been washing paint off for thirty years. He can draw a face from memory in ninety seconds with a slice of bread in the corner of the page, which he says is to make the page ugly first so the face looks better. He is a good man and his work is ugly and he says so before you do, which I admire.

My sister is an athlete who retired at thirty-one with a knee that is now an unusual shape. She swims six days a week, which makes her healthy in a way I find faintly threatening, and she will chase me down a street to make a point. She chased me for two blocks last year about a set of keys. I was fortunate to catch a bus.

My mother was a nurse for thirty-one years, and she still has the hands and the quick eye of somebody who has looked at ten thousand people and decided, in a second and a half, which ones are all right. She can tell that I am tired from the way I put my coat down. She has never once been wrong about that.

My grandmother met my grandfather in 1951 at a factory. She was twenty-two and he was quiet and she was not, and she says this was the entire basis of the marriage and she is certain of it.

My uncle is a lawyer and he is the only person in the family who uses the word employment as a threat. He came to Sunday lunch once last year with an announcement: he was retiring. Nobody had permission to know it before the fish, and he told us at the fish, and my aunt was so angry she did not speak for an hour. She has still not completely forgiven him.

There are numerous small jobs inside a family that nobody counts. Someone always knows the doctor. Someone always drives. Someone always notices that a medicine has run out. I have never met a family that was short of alcohol at a moment of crisis, nor one that was short of tea.

A Few Things I Have Learned

Here is what I have learned, in the order I learned it.

I have learned that the concept of a good relationship is not that nobody disagrees. It is that disagreement has a shape and an end. Our quarrel about the house took six weeks and then finished. Most quarrels do not finish; they just pause, and the pause gets mistaken for peace.

I have learned that a premise about other people will do more damage than a lie about facts. If you have decided in advance that your brother is selfish, every piece of evidence you gather will confirm it, and you will find the arrangement quite convincing.

I have learned that assistance and involvement are different. Assistance is help you give. Involvement is how much of yourself is in it. Too much involvement and help becomes surveillance; too little and it becomes a bank transfer.

I have learned that most family conflict stems from the concept of fairness, and that fairness is a concept that everybody defines from their own history.

I have learned that mental energy is a real quantity and that it is internal. You can be a wonderful brother for one evening and have nothing left for the second one, and that is not hypocrisy, it is arithmetic.

I have learned that maintenance beats inspiration in relationships, as in everything else. Nothing improves a family because of a good idea. It improves because somebody keeps doing the small thing.

I have learned that diversity in a family is not extra work. It is extra work, actually — a lot of it — and it is also the reason the table is worth having. Six opinions about how the rice should be cooked is not a problem. It is a family.

I have learned that almost nothing in a relationship is unusual if you look inside it. We think we are special and we are doing what every group of people has done since people lived in groups.

I have learned that most people are not trying to hurt you. They are trying to be comfortable, in their own way, which is usually the wrong way, and which is nearly always about them and not about you.

Finally: I have learned that the people who are good at relationships are not nicer than the rest of us. They are more consistent. They turn up at the same time, they say the same thing, they do not improve on it. My grandmother has done that for ninety-one years, regardless of what any of us did, and I have watched that turn a family of strong personality types into something quite rare, which is a group of people who actually respect each other.

I am sixty-one years into this. It is not a ratio I would recommend and not a method I could teach. It is a creation that my grandmother and my mother and my wife have all been quietly repairing since before I was born.

The table seats eleven. There are twelve of us now. We bring a chair.

Friendship, and Other Arrangements

Families are given to you. A friend is a smaller convention: two people decide, silently, whether they will still be in contact next month, and then they are. There is no contract, no shared roof, and no opposition party. There is only the repeated choice.

Friendship begins in circumstance and survives on almost nothing else. You sit next to somebody on a first day of work, and something allows it to continue — not that you are alike, because you are not, but that you seem to fascinate each other. You discover you share a small vice: he also eats standing up, she also keeps every receipt. It seems trivial. It is nearly the whole thing.

A friendship is flexible in a way a family is not. You can go away for two years and pick it up inside the first ten minutes. A family cannot do that. And yet a friendship breaks far more easily, because nothing drags the two of you to the same table once a year. No inheritance forces it. It runs, for the most part, for the sake of itself.

The guy I think of as my closest friend I met by refusing to say anything at all. There had been a long emotional week. I could read the gaze he kept turning toward the door — that half-second before a man comes back into a room — and I decided to say nothing, and that was the achievement of my twenties, which was doing the wrong thing slower. I did not assist him, I did not react, I did not eliminate the subject by being cheerful, and in the end he spoke, in a low whisper, as if it were a secret on loan.

That is the real phenomenon of friendship: an agreement to be slower than the other person.

Lovers are a different arrangement, and I will be plain about one part of it. Sex is where the arrangement becomes personal, and in a long relationship it is not the part that holds things together. It is the part that makes the rest of it tolerable, and then it is the part that depends on the rest. A lover is somebody who will be present on a Wednesday evening with a cold, which is the actual test. The urge to fix what is wrong arrives in the first year, and leaves in the third, and what comes after it is the marriage.

As for the people who are good at all of this, they are usually the ones who read. I have a cousin who is a poet, and a passage from one of her letters is pinned to my wall:

A family is not a thing you are inside. It is a thing you are standing next to, and you both look the same way.

I have no idea whether that is skill or luck. I have stopped trying to tell the difference.

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