by Jen Lin-Liu
The path I’d chosen had some risks. Over the previous couple of years, Tibetans and Uighurs in western China, discontent with the government, had launched a string of riots, some deadly. Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan were two of the world’s most despotic states. Iran, controlled by a strict ayatollah and an ultraconservative president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, was notoriously hostile to America and Americans. Although Turkey was tourist-friendly, conservative Islamists were gaining power and its Kurdish population was growing restive. Few of the countries I would visit were friendly to journalists; Turkey imprisoned more reporters every year than did any other country in the world, Iran was the runner-up, and China came in third place. I had to remind myself that even though I’d navigated the People’s Republic as a writer for years, the government still ruled with a heavy hand—especially in the country’s west.
The trip would be daunting in other ways. All the expertise I’d acquired in China would be of little use in Central Asia and the Middle East. I’d assumed at first that the Silk Road would take me through the Arab world, but it turned out that it ran mostly through places inhabited by Turkic people and Persians, who, while largely Muslim, didn’t consider themselves Arab. And I’d never spent much time in Muslim areas, aside from jaunts to China’s western hinterlands and a couple of Southeast Asian islands. I also worried about my identity, which caused me enough headaches in China and America. In the Muslim world, how would they receive a Chinese-American? Perhaps it would be wise to say I was something other than American, but would it be prudent to lie? And anyway, I didn’t wish to be anything else. As for being a woman, I knew in certain places like Iran, I would have to cover myself from head to toe.
While I contemplated all of this, Craig proposed a plan that would involve him in some of the journey: He’d stay in Beijing while I traveled through China but would join me before I crossed its western border. We would travel through Central Asia and Iran together—places that were less familiar and potentially more dangerous. He wasn’t sure about Turkey and definitely didn’t want to go back to Italy—he’d had enough four-hour-long meals to last him a lifetime.
My husband was the only person I knew who could make going to Italy sound like torture, I thought with a grumble. Plenty of partners would have jumped at the opportunity to take such a trip! Couldn’t he just come along and be grateful for the experience? But another part of me understood he wasn’t so keen on more China travel, having spent so many years there, and beyond that, he just wasn’t excited about tagging along. It was generous of him to want to come on parts of the trip for my benefit. And the prospect of having some time together was enticing. But then again, what if he was only coming for my safety? Wasn’t that patronizing? Did he believe I lacked common sense, that I couldn’t hack it without him?
I pushed the questions to the back of my head as I went on with my preparations, visiting embassies in Beijing for my visas. I read up on the countries I’d visit. I browsed cookbooks, my mouth watering in anticipation of ashlyanfu noodles in Central Asia and fesenjun stew in Iran. One afternoon, I stopped by the cooking school I’d founded to chat with the chefs. A couple of years before, when I had little idea that our transient, bi-continental lives were about to begin, I’d founded this little venture as a hobby. To my surprise, it had grown into a full-fledged business. With so much time away from Beijing, I’d shifted responsibilities to the kitchen’s manager, a peppy recent college graduate from Boston named Candice. When I was in Beijing, though, I checked in regularly.
As I walked through the alleys, past the busy imperial cheese shop, and through the gate of the courtyard where the cooking school was located, an idea came to me. Why not invite the chefs, my two closest Chinese friends, along for the first bit of my journey? Chef Zhang was from Shanxi, a province west of Beijing famous for noodles, and Chairman Wang had lived there in her youth.
“You want us to come with you?” asked Chef Zhang when I proposed the idea. He and Chairman Wang were prepping in the small but airy open kitchen that looked out on two large tables for communal dining. They were opposites, both physically and personality-wise, but nevertheless got along well. Chef Zhang was short and stocky, a migrant from the hardscrabble countryside. What he lacked in physical stature, he compensated for with a can-do attitude that made him seem both manly and younger than his years. Chairman Wang was a tall, big-boned Beijinger with a grandmotherly disposition. Different as they were, they agreed on one thing: my overland journey seemed unwise. If I wanted to travel, couldn’t I afford a plane ticket? In fact, most Chinese had that reaction when I told them about my plans. Duo lei, they clucked. How tiring.
I hoped to have Chef Zhang along in his home province, given that he was a noodle maker, I told him. And it would be good for him to see his wife and children, who still lived there. And wasn’t Chairman Wang curious about the village where she’d been sent during the Cultural Revolution? She’d labored in the fields and worked in a coal mine for years before returning to Beijing, her hometown.
“What about the kitchen?” Chef Zhang asked.
I hadn’t thought that far. “We can close it for a few days,” I said. “You guys need a break.”
Chef Zhang agreed quickly; heck, for him, it was a free vacation. (I’d offered to pay for their transportation.) But the contemplative Chairman Wang was uncertain. She had a husband at home whom she needed to take care of. Only after he gave the trip his blessing did she agree.
And so, with almost everything finally in order, I packed. I limited myself to the essentials, which I stuffed into a large green backpack. I whittled my wardrobe to eight items, plus a lightweight scarf I could drape over my head and two pairs of shoes. I brought a few toiletries, minimal makeup, and extra contact lenses. The heaviest items were electronics: a Kindle, a mini-laptop, a camera, an iPod, and a phone. I brought Chinese tea and spices as gifts. Optimistically, I packed a bathing suit, forgetting momentarily that I would be traveling through some of the world’s most landlocked regions (and most conservative, when it came to women’s dress). I contemplated bringing my cleaver, but thought better of it.
In my last week in Beijing, Craig took me out to my favorite restaurants. We had our favorite spicy stir-fries at a neighborhood Sichuan hole-in-the-wall and ate Chairman Wang’s juicy pan-fried dumplings at the cooking school. My father flew in from Taiwan, where he lived, and joined us for drinks on the top floor of the Park Hyatt and Peking duck at Duck de Chine. After he left, Craig and I went to our favorite Italian restaurant for a taste of what I’d encounter months later, at the end of my journey. In a stylish dining room, we chowed down on Neapolitan-style pizza, risotto balls, and Italian-style charcuterie. “I’m going to bet this is the best meal you’ll have in weeks. I bet you’ll even miss my one-pot pasta,” he joked.
We stopped at the grand opening of a ceviche eatery nearby and ran into a new intern from my cooking school. With a good number of drinks in her already, the Brit wrapped Craig and me in a bear hug. “I thought you’d already left for the Silk Road!” she exclaimed, adding that she’d just finished reading my first book, a memoir about learning how to cook in China. Turning to my husband, she asked, “Is it true what your wife wrote about you? That you could eat a pill every day in place of food?” And then to me: Wasn’t that a deal breaker? How had we managed to stay together? “I had a relationship that broke up over that very issue. I took my African boyfriend back to Europe and all he wanted to eat was shrimp and rice!”
Craig gave her a wry smile and patted me on the shoulder. I made a mental note to tell my cooking school manager to vet our interns more carefully, and shortly thereafter we left and went home—or at least, what counted as home for the time being.
2.
On an August evening cooler than most, I set off from the cooking school with Chef Zhang and Chairman Wang. We wound through the tight, labyrinth-like maze of the courtyard and out through the large wooden door and grand entryway, into
the darkness. “You’re leaving?” a neighbor called out. “Yilu shun feng.” The phrase is usually rendered as “Have a good journey,” but the literal translation is more poetic: “Let the wind move you on the road.”
As we walked through the hutong, Chef Zhang gazed with amusement at the bloated backpack on my shoulders. An impish grin spread over his face. Only soldiers donned such things, he said, or foreign tourists who stayed at nearby hostels. He carried a small knapsack, while Chairman Wang pulled a compact valise on wheels behind her. Chef Zhang was dressed casually in a pair of slacks and a polo shirt, while Chairman Wang wore an elegant dress called a qipao she’d sewn herself. Her poofy gray hair was in tighter curls than usual, an effect of the dollar-kit perm her husband had given her just before the trip.
Craig accompanied us to the street, where we flagged down a taxi for the train station. My husband and I had stood on this corner many times to hail cabs at the start of numerous trips. Often we’d left together—for work, for vacations, for our wedding. In the last year, with Craig on his fellowship, we’d spent more time apart, and it seemed that with this journey the trend was continuing. I gave my husband a hug and a kiss, hoping that he indeed would join me in a month, as promised. I felt torn between apprehension at leaving my responsibilities and exhilaration at the prospect of a new adventure. Also, I was hungry—hungry for the spicy, hearty flavors that I remembered from my previous journey west across China. Already I was dreaming of bowls of super-thin, chewy noodles pulled by hand, and stir-fried noodle squares in a sauce that reminded me of an arrabbiata. Would they be as good as I remembered? And what about beyond, how would those noodles evolve? And what other delicious dishes would I discover?
I wasn’t going to taste any of his food, Chef Zhang told me after we boarded the train to his home province and slipped into our compartment. Sipping a warm bottle of Yanjing beer and munching on peanuts, he warned me that he wasn’t going to cook on this trip. This was, after all, a vacation.
“You mean you never cook at home?” I asked.
“Nope. The women do all the cooking,” he said, taking a swig. The train gathered speed, gently rocking the cabin. “Unless it’s an extenuating circumstance.” Even in Beijing, he didn’t cook for himself, he said. He could whip up dinner from the ingredients in the cooking school fridge. But after a long day of work, he usually went out for noodles or a grilled flatbread called bing.
Chairman Wang’s cooking duties extended beyond the business. Her husband was a terrible cook, she said, so she usually made him a meal in the morning before she left for work. She told us how once, when she was away, he’d bought noodles at a market and tried to make a sauce. To thicken it, he threw in a white powder that he thought was cornstarch but was actually baking soda. “He kept on adding more, and didn’t understand why it didn’t thicken, until the sauce erupted like a volcano!” She howled with laughter, then sighed. This time, she’d spent hours making everything he’d eat while she was away.
I hadn’t prepared anything for Craig. Preoccupied with the packing and last-minute details, I hadn’t even thought about it. What was in our fridge? I wondered. Maybe a tub of yogurt and some eggs. But he would be fine, I assured myself. There were plenty of cheap, tasty restaurants nearby, and friends happy to meet for an impromptu night out. And, who knows, maybe my absence would even motivate him to cook.
While I was excited about sampling the food on the road, Chairman Wang feared the poor hygiene of many restaurants and rarely ate outside her home and the cooking school. On the journey to Shanxi—which began in the evening and lasted until the next afternoon—not a bite of food passed her lips. When I suggested a snack of steamed buns at one point, she made a face. “Don’t you know better than to eat steamed buns from random stalls?” In a recent scandal, Chinese journalists had found steamed buns adulterated with ground cardboard. So maybe it wasn’t the safest snack. But still, I was curious how she was going to survive the week.
Once we arrived in Shanxi, I tried to drum up excitement about going to a local market. Both chefs looked at me unenthusiastically. “It’s the same as the market in Beijing—what’s so interesting about that?” they said, nearly in unison.
The chefs saw cooking as a livelihood, not a passion. While Chairman Wang occasionally liked trying new foods (she particularly enjoyed a blue cheese I’d once given her), neither was adventurous. Like most Chinese, they stuck almost entirely to their own cuisine. Once, when I’d asked Chairman Wang if she thought of cooking as a talent, she shrugged. “Being a cook is like being a car mechanic,” she said.
The chefs and I had an unusual relationship, to say the least. Our friendships crossed boundaries of generation, nationality, and circumstance. Chairman Wang was in her mid-sixties, just a few years older than my mother, but the history she’d lived through seemed to add to her years. Her title came with her from the vocational cooking school where she’d taught for years—she had been the school’s zhuren, the chairman or director. It was a fitting name, given the authority she exuded.
At the vocational school, cooking was taught to young working-class men at desks, through rote memorization. Chairman Wang was the only teacher who obliged my request for practical, hands-on instruction. She taught me privately, beginning with the basics: how to mince ginger, garlic, and leeks, the three essential seasonings of northern Chinese cooking, before moving on to more advanced cleaver skills. At the markets, she explained how to select the best cuts of meat and how not to get cheated by vendors (bring your own scale, she said). We stir-fried traditional jiachang cai, home-style dishes like lamb with leeks, and she let me in on the secret ingredient in her sweet-and-sour shrimp: ketchup. She coached me through the arduous national cooking exam and celebrated with me when I passed.
Most important, Chairman Wang had taught me how to make dumplings, a dish popular throughout China but best in Beijing. After kneading flour and water together, she rocked a thin rolling pin back and forth over silver dollar–sized disks of dough, flattening them into ultra-thin wrappers as soft as fine leather. In went the carefully calibrated filling, around which she pinched and sealed the dough. My favorites were lamb with pumpkin, and pork with fennel—combinations that seemed somehow Western, though in fact they were both common in Beijing. Boiled or pan-fried, her dumplings were the best I’d ever tasted.
Chef Zhang was in his mid-forties and had come to Beijing fifteen years before to find work. He’d ended up in kitchens not because he liked cooking but because that’s where he had an in. In the cutthroat Chinese restaurant world, Chef Zhang was one of the few chefs who’d allowed me into his kitchen. As an intern at his noodle stall on the city’s outskirts, I’d learned to make the hand-rolled noodles that were kindred spirits to Andrea’s fettuccine in Rome. But his specialty, knife-grated noodles, was unique to China: ribbons of dough flew off his pastry knife into a wok of boiling water. After a boil and a bath in cold water, the noodles were topped with a delicious pork belly sauce that the chef caramelized and braised until it glistened.
I’d written about the chefs in my first book. By the time I’d finished it, however, they’d become much more than sources and subjects; they’d become intimate friends. When Chef Zhang’s noodle shop went out of business, he stayed with me while he looked for work; when I was bedridden, Chairman Wang brought me home-cooked meals.
I’d been inspired to open the cooking school after fellow expatriates told me that they, too, wanted to master Chinese dishes. Beijing then had few, if any, recreational cooking schools for foreigners. So the chefs and I began teaching friends in their kitchens, bringing along pork belly, soy sauce, and my collection of woks and cleavers. As the demand for classes rose, I rented two rooms in a courtyard mansion subdivided among many tenants, just a block away from where Craig and I lived. With Chairman Wang’s help, I renovated the space into an open kitchen.
It so happened that around this time, the professional cooking school where
Chairman Wang had long worked closed and Chef Zhang was unhappy in the job he’d found after his noodle shop folded. So I hired them, not only to teach classes but to cook the nightly dinners, modeled on parties I threw at home. We attracted a steady stream of expatriates and tourists, and over two years received several honors—far exceeding not just my expectations but those of the chefs, who still couldn’t quite believe that foreigners were willing to pay good money to learn what was seen in China as a lowly trade.
As the business was growing, I decided on the Silk Road journey, which posed a dilemma: Could I spend six months away from the cooking school without it falling apart? Leaving the kitchen, though, would give me a way to regain some balance in my professional life. I’d always seen myself as a writer, not a cook or an entrepreneur. I decided to trust that the kitchen—like my marriage—would adapt.
It also gave me a way to regain some balance in my relationships with Chef Zhang and Chairman Wang. Mixing friendship with business was more common in China than anywhere else, but still, I was uncomfortable when Chef Zhang persisted in calling me “boss” even though he knew it irked me—I suspect because it irked me.
As the train hummed west, we climbed into our respective bunks. Before drifting off to sleep, I wondered what Chef Zhang’s laojia, his ancestral village, would look like. The concept of laojia had endured in China, and perhaps had become more important in the last few decades, as Chinese left their countryside homes en masse for the cities. When Chinese asked where my laojia was, I always paused. Though I was born in Chicago, my family had moved to California. But neither was the right answer. They wanted to know where I’d come from, from time immemorial before the migration of my ancestors had begun. And even that was complicated. My mother was born in southern China, just months before the Communist Revolution, and her family fled to Taiwan. My father was born in Taiwan but considered Fujian Province, across the strait in mainland China, his laojia, because his ancestors from eight generations before had come from there. By contrast, Chef Zhang didn’t have this laojia issue; he knew exactly where he was from. Before his generation, the people of his village had stayed put, farming the same land for centuries. But the move to Beijing attenuated Chef Zhang’s ties to his home.