On the Noodle Road

by Jen Lin-Liu

  Sometime after I first checked Wikipedia and before meeting Lu, someone changed the entry, deleting the entire paragraph and replacing it with the following:

  In 2002, archaeologists found an earthenware bowl containing the world’s oldest known noodles, measured to roughly 4000 years BP through radiocarbon dating, at the Lajia archaeological site along the Yellow River in China. The noodles were found well-preserved.

  I was curious to find out what had really happened. Had the noodle dissolved? I asked Lu.

  “Yes, that’s right. Zao jiu meiyou le! Early on, the noodle was no more!” he admitted, in a tone no less jovial than the one he’d used to describe the noodle’s beauty.

  Lu hadn’t been at the archaeological site, nor had he seen the noodle intact, he admitted. And he didn’t know anything about the altered entry. “That’s very strange. I don’t know what happened,” he said earnestly. I presumed his innocence, given how readily he’d owned up to the noodle’s demise, but the additional details he provided only made the noodle more suspect: the excavation team consisted only of a graduate student and a farmer. After discovering the noodle, they placed the bowl back over it and shipped it to Beijing by train. Upon the noodle’s arrival at the university, the staff arranged a meeting with one of the academy’s leaders and—with great fanfare—lifted the bowl to reveal its contents: tiny yellow shards embedded in dirt.

  Lu said the weight of the bowl had crushed the noodle. “This often happens with food we find at archaeological sites. Sometimes we find a bottle of wine and uncork it and the vapors disappear, the liquid dries up,” he said.

  The professor was part of the forensics team that had studied the noodle’s crumbled remains. He tested the noodle dust and established it was made of millet, a substance more brittle than wheat. He spent months trying to plausibly justify how the noodle was made and how it had held up for thousands of years. (That accounted for the discrepancy in the date of discovery in the Wikipedia entry—though the noodle had been found in 2002, it took until 2005, after testing, theorizing, and publicizing the results, before the news reached the pages of Nature.)

  The region where the noodle was found was famous for hand-pulled noodles, like the ones advertised at the corner shop. But that variety—long, thin, and chewy (again, my mouth watered at the thought of those strands)—required a gluten-based substance like wheat, which did not undergo mass cultivation until later in China’s history. Lu’s best guess was that this noodle had been pushed through a press. Yet there was no evidence of a press, and I still remained doubtful that any noodle—made of millet, wheat, or anything else—could survive for so long.

  Lu agreed to show me what was left. We took an elevator to another floor and entered a small laboratory that held a safe. The safe contained a plastic bag. The bag contained a test tube. The tube contained a fleck of yellow.

  “You see, this is all we have,” he said regretfully. “It’s a very tiny thing. I can’t say for sure that the Chinese were responsible for bringing noodles to the West, but I can be very sure that no one will find a noodle that is older than this.”

  • • •

  From Lu Houyan’s office in northern Beijing, I took a taxi to the city’s heart, where my husband and I kept an apartment. It was early in the summer of 2010, and Craig and I had just arrived back in the capital, the eastern terminus of the Silk Road. Northern Beijing—and the city as a whole—was not particularly pleasant. Gray smog often shrouded the sky, so opaque that you could only make out the faint outlines of buildings just blocks away. Cars clogged the wide, impersonal streets and the highways ringing the city, with gridlock increasing by the day as thousands more vehicles were added to the roads. Hundreds of characterless clusters of towers and weirdly shaped, twisting skyscrapers had sprouted up across the city. Construction cranes rose over the rare vacant patches of land, reserving space for the frivolous pet projects of famous architects.

  Yet Craig and I had carved out a niche away from the development. We lived in the hutong, a small, human-scale patch that urban planners had managed—so far, at least—to save from the bulldozers. The word hutong referred to the alleys that ran through the oldest neighborhoods of the capital, so narrow that cars moving toward each other, in slow games of chicken, often got stuck. The alleys ran past gray-brick, single-story residences called siheyuan, or courtyards, referring to the gardens enclosed by crumbling residences, once grand and occupied by imperial officials and the wealthy. The neighborhoods were the oldest in Beijing, dating back seven hundred years to the Yuan Dynasty, when the Mongolian conqueror Genghis Khan had built a capital out of a desert basin and expanded his territory all the way to Eastern Europe. Craig and I took sunset walks around Houhai Lake, created several hundred years before for royalty. We often looped past the fifteenth-century Drum and Bell Towers, used as guard and signaling stations when important guests entered the gated city.

  We loved the intimacy of the hutong. Familiar faces greeted us everywhere: nosy Lady Wang loitered in our apartment complex courtyard, bouncing a feathered ball on a badminton racket and pestering us about when we would have a baby. We exchanged hellos with the local cobbler, a middle-aged woman with rosy cheeks who sat in the alley with her old sewing machine. We stopped for the latest gossip from the stocky, ageless Manchurian who stood outside his small teahouse.

  I could chart my whole history in Beijing through these lanes. After living in Shanghai for several years, I’d moved to Beijing’s hutong in 2004. The cooking school where I’d learned the basics of Chinese cooking was on an alley that jutted north from Peace Boulevard, a large avenue that bisected the district. One of my cooking mentors, Chairman Wang, lived a short bicycle ride north, on Flower Garden Hutong. After I’d fallen in love with Craig, we’d moved to nearby Little Chrysanthemum Hutong, into a rare apartment building with several floors. In our home, I fell into my routines as a writer, working at a desk on the second-floor loft and taking breaks on our rooftop balcony that looked out on the neighborhood’s trees, birds, and the sloping gray-tiled courtyard roofs that repeated themselves like waves of an ocean. Just one lane south, in a courtyard home on Black Sesame Hutong, I founded a cooking school of my own.

  But Beijing was no longer home. Since 2008, Craig and I had been spending more time in the United States, for our wedding and honeymoon, and then for a fellowship he had been awarded at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Before he left, we downsized from our duplex apartment to a tiny one around the corner. While Craig was in Boston, I’d spent the academic year bouncing between China and America, trying to figure out where I belonged.

  Not for the first time, I felt caught between East and West. The struggle had begun when I was a child growing up in a 1980s Chinese household in a not-so-diverse part of Southern California. I’d wanted blond hair and didn’t understand why we didn’t go to church. Food-wise, my tastes were Western. My favorite dish—maybe not coincidentally, it seemed now—was spaghetti with meat sauce. It was one of the few Western meals my mother could make; growing up, I didn’t like Chinese noodles, or any Chinese food for that matter. Later, when I attended Columbia University, I tried to embrace my heritage by studying Mandarin and spending a summer abroad in Beijing, even as the undergraduate curriculum emphasized the Western canon. And only after a number of years in China, writing about the country and learning how to cook its food, did I think I’d reached some kind of equilibrium.

  But while I’d built a life in China and felt more comfortable with my heritage, as time went on, it became clearer that I’d never blend in seamlessly. Sure, I could pass as a local, with my Asian appearance and the fluency I’d gained in Mandarin. But I remained firmly American, and with my American husband I settled into the lifestyle of many foreigners living overseas. After a period of being enamored with all things local, we’d begun living as if we were back home. We formed friendships with many compatriots, most of them journalists, like us. We passed over
Chinese newspapers (which censorship made rote and boring anyway) for The New York Times and other American publications. We went to the movies for the latest Hollywood blockbusters. And when it came to food, I was no longer content to eat just Chinese, a cuisine I’d immersed myself in for years. We shopped at a foreign market called Jenny Lou’s and dined at new restaurants that served everything from Vietnamese to Spanish to South American, a reflection of how international Beijing had become.

  But whenever Craig and I were back in America, I found that I didn’t quite fit in there, either. I missed the commotion of Beijing, what Chinese call renao: the loud restaurants, the feeling that things were fluid and always changing, the feisty exchanges between locals on the street. In America, the choices at the supermarket—the vast aisles of processed foods, the multitude of shampoos, the freezer section of microwaveable dinners—frankly bewildered me. I preferred the Chinese supermarket and filled our kitchen with soy sauce, tofu, and chili oil. Turning on the television and seeing shows glamorizing the Jersey shore and Manhattan housewives was truly alienating. (“Who’s Snooki?” I asked my friends, to their immense amusement.)

  Sure, there were things I loved about America. I relished being close to family and friends. I could breathe crisp, unpolluted air. I enjoyed the endless discussions about politics, a topic that Chinese tried to ignore. America had grown more multicultural—we had a biracial president, even. But still, every so often, someone posed the question that had irked me since childhood, an inquiry that seemed more legitimate after I’d been away for so long: “Where are you from?” When Craig and I explained that we’d lived in China for almost a decade, we might as well have said we’d been living on the moon.

  So as much as this was a sensory journey from East to West, I wanted also to explore what it meant to be “Eastern” or “Western” in a more conceptual way—I wanted to discover where the ideas converged and conflicted. Traveling through cultures that straddled the East and West, I figured, might reconcile what I’d felt were opposing forces in my life; maybe I would find others who could relate to my struggles.

  While Craig had never had to wrestle much over his identity, he knew I did, and he was sympathetic. And he’d felt physically caught between East and West, too; neither of us was ready to commit more years to China, but we weren’t ready to move back to America, either. But that didn’t mean he was ready to take off with me for more than half a year. What, he asked, would the journey mean for us? Had I thought about how it might impact our relationship, or his life in general? He reminded me of what I’d made a point of writing into our wedding vows, just the year before: we would put our relationship before our careers.

  But the meaning of what I’d written was now muddled. Did it mean we had to be together? In which case, he would have to put our relationship before his career but I would not? Or I should give up my fantasy journey to stay at his side? Did my vow rule out going it alone? I felt guilty, but why? Wasn’t I justified in wanting to do something for myself, even if I’d taken the vows of marriage?

  And it wasn’t just my husband who brought up these questions. What did Craig think of the trip? my girlfriends asked. Was he going to come along with me? asked one. I was indignant—would they have posed the same questions had I been a man? When I read travelogues by V. S. Naipaul, Paul Theroux, and Bill Bryson, their partners rarely came up; it was a given that they would play the role of the supportive, if somewhat impatient, wife at home.

  But I didn’t necessarily want my husband waiting at home. Craig’s fellowship was about to end. Having embarked on a transient life already and still free of children, office jobs, and mortgages, we had freedom. I wanted his company, particularly given the length of the trip. I wanted to share the experience of seeing a region we knew next to nothing about. I wanted him along for all the memories I would accumulate, to view the desert sunsets and the ancient architecture of legendary trading posts, to sit down and taste the dishes laden with history, to converse with the cooks I’d meet.

  But it was complicated. Craig had just signed a contract to write a book about China and the environment; he wasn’t sure how much time he could spare. The longest we’d traveled together was a few weeks at a time, and although we got along on those trips, we had different priorities. Craig was a hiker who would happily trek through jungles or forests, pitching a tent and bathing in lakes and rivers; even the Amalfi coast hadn’t been arduous enough for him. My idea of vacation, on the other hand, involved good food, culture, and cities. Food—my passion, my livelihood—was a major sticking point. Although my husband gamely helped me seek out that off-the-map eatery that served the best local dishes or accompanied me to the trendy restaurant of the moment, he didn’t make food a priority. The first time he’d cooked for me, he proudly made me something I dubbed “one-pot pasta”—boiled broccoli tossed with penne and sprinkled with Parmesan cheese from a shaker can. Sure, in Italy he’d surprised me with the gift of a pasta class—and willingly taken it with me. But that was a rare instance of enthusiasm he’d shown for cooking, and I knew he’d done it solely for my benefit. Half a year of eating and cooking along the Silk Road was as enticing to him as six months of climbing snowcapped mountains would have been to me. And if I was immersed in cooking, eating, and research for months, I wondered, what would he do? He didn’t like to idle. Would he tolerate the endless meals? How would his being there color the reactions of people I met? How professional would it be to show up for meetings with my husband in tow?

  When I turned to my girlfriends, I got contradictory advice. One warned that it would be bad to spend so much time apart, especially so early in our marriage. Our relationship would only be able to grow if we were together, she said. Another was just as adamant that I go it alone, an assertion of my independence and autonomy as a writer. Both arguments resonated.

  But one thing I knew for certain was that I was committed to the trip, whether or not Craig came along. And I knew, in the back of my head, that it wasn’t just my interest in food or even my identity issues that motivated me. It also had to do with the issue I’d been trying to ignore all along: my husband, or, more broadly, marriage. Craig and I had recently broached the subject of having children. They were something we both wanted, in theory. I was in my early thirties and, yes, that biological clock was ticking. But I was hesitant. I still hadn’t figured out what my role was as a wife; was I ready to become a mother? I’d heard the tinge of resentment in the voices of girlfriends who’d quickly moved on from marriage to motherhood. Before I considered having children I wanted—I needed—to do this for myself. I insisted to Craig that, odd as it sounded, the trip was my way of showing that I was serious about our future.

  • • •

  In Beijing, the sounds of the hutong greeted me. Saws whirred loudly and hammers banged as, in a sign of Beijing’s new wealth, workers renovated dilapidated courtyard homes to their previous splendor. The alley echoed with kids squealing and the shuffle of mahjong tiles. Vendors bicycled through, calling out their wares. “Mai-cai-yah! Buy your vegetables!” a woman shouted with the pipes of a Mongolian throat singer, pulling a wagon of produce behind her bicycle. “Da mi! Da mi! Bai mian fen!” another vendor called, hauling a load of rice and white flour. Every so often, a knife sharpener rode through, rattling metal against a board to create a rhythmic clanging as he belted, “Mo dao! Mo dao!”

  One vendor’s call—a deep, muffled murmur—had befuddled me for years. Finally one day, I stopped him and peered into a crate he’d strapped to the back of his bicycle. Tucked inside a white sheet were sheep’s heads, a specialty of the Hui, an ethnic minority. The vendor looked no different from the average Beijinger, aside from his white Muslim cap, called a doppi. Islam had arrived in China along the Silk Road more than a thousand years before, converting many Chinese in its path. The Hui were common in Beijing, and, in fact, they and other Muslim minorities had profoundly influenced the capital’s cuisine. The Muslim dish
es I tasted in Beijing foreshadowed those I’d come across farther along the route. Heads aside, lamb and mutton were everywhere: diners ate thinly sliced tenderloin of sheep simmered in cauldrons, in a dish called hot pot that some believed had Mongolian origins; street vendors roasted skewers of lamb flecked with cumin and chili powder until even the bits of fat were crisp and tasty; dumplings were stuffed with lamb just as often as pork. At the corner shops, smooth, creamy yogurt came in ceramic jars etched with Arabic lettering, defying the stereotype that Chinese disliked dairy. Our neighborhood even boasted a shop that sold “imperial cheese.” The snack, more like a dessert custard than an American or European cheese, had been introduced during the Mongolian reign of Genghis Khan, it was rumored. The so-called cheese was so popular that a line stretched out the shop’s door and far into the alley every day. I’d noticed all of these details earlier in my time in China, struck by how un-Chinese they seemed. But I’d filed them away, along with those various noodle shapes, and only now that I’d returned to Beijing did I begin to think about how they were linked.

  In Beijing, I also began planning my route. The tangle of paths that made up the Silk Road offered endless permutations. I pored over maps for days. Some paths had obvious hazards. I knew, for example, that I wanted to steer clear of Afghanistan, where the American-led war raged on, and Pakistan, which seemed to have little grip on terrorism (during my journey, U.S. forces would covertly enter Pakistan and kill Osama bin Laden). On the other hand, safe Azerbaijan seemed lackluster in comparison to its neighbor Iran, with its intriguing history—culinary and otherwise.

  After much deliberation, carefully weighing my culinary aims against the potential dangers, I decided I would move west through China’s minority-filled regions before crossing into Central Asia via a trio of “stans”: Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, and Turkmenistan. Provided I could get a visa, I would then push on through the deserts of Iran before traveling through Turkey’s diverse landscape. Once I reached the Mediterranean, I would take a boat to Italy. Since the entire journey would require more than six months, I had to budget carefully. Thankfully, the Silk Road offered few expensive hotels, but I also knew I couldn’t go back to the days of sleeping in communal barracks in youth hostels. I would mostly ride buses and trains, reserving hired cars for the most treacherous parts of my trip.