On the Noodle Road

by Jen Lin-Liu

  In the morning, we arrived in Taiyuan, the capital of Shanxi Province, where we changed trains. While Chairman Wang and I went to buy tickets for a local train, Chef Zhang waited just outside the station with our luggage. There he stood with arms crossed, donning dark sunglasses and a tough-guy smirk, but he was as jittery as a tourist in Tijuana. “There are all kinds of bad guys around here,” he muttered when we returned. “People will bump into you and blame you for it to start a fight. People like to take advantage of me because I’m small.”

  Chef Zhang remained tense until we’d jostled our way back into the station and found seats in the waiting room. “The one thing Shanxi people are, though, is resilient,” he said proudly. “In the winter, we eat nothing fresh for months. We have to dry our green beans, pumpkins, and eggplants. But make no mistake, in Shanxi, everyone can eat, especially these days. There aren’t any beggars.”

  Just moments later, a middle-aged woman wearing a ratty plaid shirt knelt in front of him, clasping her hands and lowering her head. He looked at her from head to toe.

  “You’re normal!” he said, his brows furrowed. “Go home and farm your land.” She slunk off. Chef Zhang huffed. “It’s not like she was missing an arm or a leg. I’ll give money to those people any day.”

  Chef Zhang’s lack of sentimentality was the legacy of a difficult childhood. His parents, impoverished and with too many mouths to feed, gave away Chef Zhang and an older sister. A girl would eventually be given to another family, anyway, when she married, the thinking went. And though Chef Zhang was lucky enough to be born a boy, he was son number four—an unlucky number. A childless uncle and his wife adopted Chef Zhang and his sister, but life in the new household wasn’t much easier. Their adoptive mother died when the chef was six, and he barely remembered her; his uncle, a shepherd, was kind but poor, old, and infirm. After the sister left home, Chef Zhang became the caretaker, raising pigs, tending his uncle’s flock of sheep, and gathering wild plants from the mountains. After learning how to make noodles from his neighbors when he was eight, he often made the dish for his father and himself.

  As we neared his hometown, Chairman Wang asked how he felt about coming home.

  “I don’t feel much,” he said.

  She persisted. “Surely you must feel something?”

  He shrugged. “I haven’t lived here for so long. I’m a vagabond. I experienced too much bitterness when I was young. I associate this place with sadness. I don’t have feelings for this place.”

  • • •

  Sentiment or no sentiment, I’d assumed we’d see Chef Zhang’s family before we did anything else.

  “Nah,” he said. “My wife is at work and my children are in school. Let’s go for some noodles.”

  The train had dropped us in Wuxiang, a new township near Chef Zhang’s village. He had moved to Wuxiang in his teens to work in a coking factory and stayed there through his twenties, marrying and starting a family. In his early thirties, he set off for Beijing on his own to make more money. Each time he returned, he found the place so changed that he could barely recognize it. Since his last trip, Wuxiang had a new square and many more apartment towers. And none of the restaurants looked familiar anymore. A stranger in his own town, he didn’t know where to eat.

  Bounding down the street, with Chairman Wang and me trailing behind, he accosted a pair of construction workers squatting on the sidewalk, hunched over bowls of noodles.

  “Where’d you get those?” he asked eagerly. They pointed to an alley in the distance full of noodle shops.

  Chairman Wang rejected the first two eateries that Chef Zhang suggested because they looked dirty. We settled on a third that to me looked no cleaner. I poked my head into the kitchen. The chef, with lean, muscular arms, used a flat iron with a handle to push gobs of dough through a large grater suspended over a wok. (Thousands of miles later, I would learn that Italians and Germans used a similar method to make a pasta called spatzli or spaetzle.) After draining the noodles, the chef divided them into bowls and topped them with a sauce of stir-fried tomatoes and scrambled eggs. We garnished them with chili sauce and black vinegar, another wheat-based specialty of Shanxi. Slightly sweet and fragrant, the vinegar reminded me of a light balsamic, and I’d often seasoned salads with it in Beijing.

  Chef Zhang looked as ravenous as a child before an ice cream sundae. He slurped the strands with delight. “I love the way they slip down my throat!” he said. Chairman Wang broke her fast tentatively, then picked up speed. The noodles, made of ground wheat, sorghum, and soybeans, had a slightly thicker texture than pure wheat noodles and were immensely satisfying after our long journey. Chef Zhang demolished his bowl in a matter of minutes. Though he wasn’t passionate about most food, he truly loved noodles, like no one else I’d ever met. He never tired of showing guests at the cooking school how to make them, and whenever we went out for a meal, they were the first thing he looked for on the menu.

  In the evening, we met up with Chef Zhang’s wife, Yao, and their three children. A skinny woman who spoke Mandarin with a thick country accent, Yao shyly linked arms with Chairman Wang and me as we walked through town, the teenagers at our sides. When I’d first talked to Chef Zhang about his family, he’d owned up to having two children, the government-permitted number in rural areas. Later, when it came out that he had a third, he explained simply that he had no choice but to break the law because the first two were girls. It wasn’t that he didn’t like girls, but they would run off and get married; who was going to take care of him when he was old? So he and his wife had tried again and gotten lucky. They’d avoided a fine by registering the boy with another family. Now about to enter high school, he was the spitting image of his father, with the same pumpkin-shaped head, large round eyes, and quick, easy smile. The elder daughter, just about to finish high school, was pretty and playful, while the younger had strands of gray in her hair already, perhaps from a lifetime of worry that she’d be given away like Chef Zhang. She was the most industrious of the three and had won a considerable scholarship with her good grades, which pleased her father immensely.

  We went to a restaurant that would have looked ordinary in Beijing but was the town’s most luxurious. We sat in a smoky private room where a handful of waitresses attended to us. The two noodle dishes stood out in an otherwise lackluster meal. The first one was a large bowl of cold buckwheat noodles that reminded me of Japanese soba, flecked with sesame seeds and cucumber slivers and doused with the province’s trademark vinegar. And after a number of stir-fries, we ended the meal with thick bands of oat noodles clustered like a beehive and steamed in a bamboo basket. We separated them with chopsticks and dipped them into black vinegar and minced garlic. Their appealing nutty flavor and chewiness made me reach for more.

  The next morning, a minivan took the chefs, Chef Zhang’s younger daughter, and me up the winding road to his village. Pushang straddled a ridge of beautiful red canyons, with terraced emerald fields and trees that were green and leafy from summer rains.

  The van dropped us off at the muddy path to Chef Zhang’s cousin’s house. The cousin was away but had arranged for his wife to host us. Chef Zhang’s cousin-in-law, whom he called Saozi (the title for the wife of an elder male relative), was making noodles in the kitchen. She had the standard short coif and red cheeks of many peasants. Dusting off her hands, she said hello before resuming her rolling, pressing out a gigantic sheet of dough made of wheat flour with a pin as long as a baseball bat. She stretched her arms in a V and pushed the weight of her petite frame onto the counter as she rolled. Once the dough was thin enough, she folded it into S-shaped layers the same way I’d seen Andrea do in Rome and used a knife to cut long strands, sprinkling the noodles with cornmeal to keep them from sticking. She served the boiled noodles with a hearty stew of eggplant, tomatoes, and green beans cooked over a wooden fire.

  None of the noodles we had in Shanxi came with meat, an expensive
luxury. Chef Zhang explained that the area was so poor that few homes had refrigerators, including his cousin’s. Perhaps the poverty and the paucity of the ingredients explained the local ingenuity with dough: the noodles themselves had to supply the variety.

  The poverty was even more apparent in the dwellings—which were, in essence, caves. They were built into the sides of the village’s steep hills, like the homes on Greece’s Santorini, if you swapped the Aegean coast for the red loess plateau of northern China. The inclines were so sharp that occasionally I found myself walking atop the roofs of homes below. Chef Zhang’s childhood dwelling was abandoned—one of millions of homes across China left empty as people sought their fortunes in the cities. Fewer than half of the caves were still occupied, though the ones that were had certain modern comforts. The home of Chef Zhang’s cousin, for example, had a facade of white bathroom tiles, a common sight across China. Inside, a row of rooms had windows onto a yard where chickens clucked. Only after examining the home carefully did I notice the telltale signs. Drop ceilings hid the curvature and the kitchen in the back was dark, windowless, and cold—the perfect place for storing food. Caves had other benefits, Chef Zhang said. Construction and materials were cheap. In the winter, the homes stayed warm, and in the summer they stayed pleasantly cool. It was good that the dwellings didn’t depend on air-conditioning—cost aside, the electricity was down the day we visited, which often happened in the area. Nobody knew when it would come back on.

  So we took a walk to the center of the village, where there were a few general stores and, to my surprise, a large Catholic church, not unlike the ones that dotted Italy. Noodles, it turned out, weren’t all China had in common with Italy. Catholicism had a long history in the Middle Kingdom, stretching back to the 1500s when Italian Jesuits like Matteo Ricci traveled overland to China. Chef Zhang told me that before he was born, an Italian priest had lived in the village, but nowadays locals ran the church. His guardian uncle had visited the church often as a young adult, for meals that the nuns handed out to the poor. At dinner the night before, I’d noticed the bracelet of an elderly family friend who’d dined with us. Etched into a tile on the bracelet was an icon of the Virgin Mary. For some reason, the religion seemed to have stuck more in Shanxi than elsewhere in China.

  Chef Zhang, though, was a Buddhist. On a visit to the local graveyard, I saw his spiritual side. As we walked along a narrow path that cut through a slope of soybean plots, Chef Zhang explained that this visit was the most important part of his trip. At the top of the hill overlooking the valley, Chef Zhang stopped before a dirt mound; it lacked a tombstone and was covered with overgrown brush. Beneath were the remains of the uncle he considered his father. He laid a stack of bread rolls before the mound and lit sticks of incense. He kneeled and kowtowed three times as cicadas chirped. I’d never seen the chef so solemn and serene. He pulled a thermos from a bag and tossed its contents on the grave: more noodles, this time the instant variety, a staple for even the departed in this region.

  • • •

  Noodles are the mainstay of the cuisine of China’s north—a region stretching from Beijing in the east, through Shanxi, and beyond Lajia in the west, where the alleged four-thousand-year-old noodle was found. A culinary Mason-Dixon Line runs across China; north of it, abundant wheat fields feed the population. Home cooks and professional chefs alike are skilled at making handmade noodles, dumplings, and flatbreads, and freshly made noodles can be found everywhere, from humble stalls in the back alleys to fancy restaurants in five-star hotels.

  Below the line is rice country. Noodles are common in the south, too, and are eaten on birthdays to symbolize a long life, as they are in the north. But rarely do southern cooks make them from scratch. When southerners make dumplings, they usually purchase premade wrappers. On one visit to southern China, I was forced to make dumplings with a soy sauce bottle because I couldn’t find a rolling pin. And wheat flour was such a novelty that the sack I purchased there, with an excessively high gluten ratio, produced rubbery, inedible wrappers.

  The wheat-rice line also creates different flavors in the cuisines. Shanxi vinegar, made of wheat, has a unique sweet-sour balance quite different from the lighter southern vinegars, which are usually made of rice. Chinese are so rooted in their diets that when southerners visit the north, they often have trouble eating the rustic, hearty cuisine, with its strong flavor of leeks and garlic and its heavier sauces; the reverse is often true as well. Beijingers complain they can’t get full on rice—only noodles will do. Chairman Wang and Chef Zhang, for example, had no interest in eating dim sum, even though it was now readily available in Beijing; to them it was as foreign as Western food. Yet it is southern Chinese food, with its light, delicate flavors and reliance on steaming, braising, and roasting, that has made its way more widely around the world, via strong immigrant networks.

  My parents, of southern Chinese heritage, raised me on rice. My father distinctly remembers eating fresh northern noodles for the first time as a teenager. They were so heavy that he found them indigestible. That was pretty much the same reaction I had when I moved to Beijing. Each time I ate noodles, I felt as if I’d been presented with a bottomless bowl of endless strands. No matter how much I slurped and chewed, I could only get halfway through. But after many years in Beijing, I’d come around to the northern way of eating. Going gluten-free would have been sheer torture.

  My upbringing in the West had shaped my understanding of noodles, a word that Alan Davidson in The Oxford Companion to Food sums up as “a difficult term.” I thought of noodles as stringy, starchy things covered in sauce or floating in soup. In the West, noodles couldn’t be classified as a dish, but they weren’t just an ingredient, either. Chinese, by contrast, defined noodles, mian, as part of a broader food category called mian shi, or flour-based foods, that had evolved over many centuries and included bread. A defining characteristic is not their shape but that they are made primarily of wheat flour. Some edibles I’d previously thought of as noodles are in fact considered something else: glass noodles, usually made of pulverized mung beans, are called fensi (powdered slivers), while rice noodles are called mi xian (rice strings). Neither is mian. But mian could be almost any shape, like flat disks in the case of dumpling wrappers, or wide rings, as I’d seen in Shanxi.

  The more I studied the history of noodles, the more I realized how linked they were to wheat. Wheat originated farther west on the Silk Road, in the Middle East, and arrived overland as early as four thousand years before. But it seems from historical texts that Chinese only began eating noodles around the third century AD, making it a relatively new staple, compared to rice, which Chinese have consumed since at least 2500 BC. In their earliest recorded mention, noodles are described in a third-century dictionary as being made of wheat flour. They came in a variety of shapes, including tortoise shells and scorpions, and were cooked in broth. Soon, poets began to wax lyrical about the pleasures of eating noodles. The third-century poet Fu Xuan describes noodles as “lighter than a feather in the wind . . . fine as the threads of cocoons of Shu [a reference to Sichuan Province] . . . as brilliant as the threads of raw silk.” Another poet, named Hong Junju, details the noodle-making process:

  He kneaded the dough to the right consistency.

  Then he would drop it into the water

  In long strings

  White like autumn silk.

  In half a bowl of soup,

  We would gulp them down all at once.

  After ten bowls in a row,

  A smile would come to the lips . . .

  Around the sixth century, Chinese began to cultivate wheat widely in the north and invented a specific word for noodles, mian. Officials wrote of how noodles in broth were eaten during summer festivals and were thought to ward off evil spells. Dumplings dating back to this period were uncovered in a tomb and are displayed at a museum in Xinjiang (I saw the dumplings later in my trip). Noodles became a part
of everyday and ceremonial life. Poems from the Tang Dynasty describe “noodle broth banquets” to celebrate the births of sons. Guests were welcomed into homes with fresh noodles.

  During the period of Mongol rule, noodles spread southward, as some Chinese fled south. Noodles began to appear on restaurant menus in central China, and preparations became more complex. Chefs folded radish juice into dough, turning noodles light pink; added ground dried lily bulbs to dough for a sweet, nutty flavor; and began tossing noodles with sesame paste. Doughy strands were often served with Chinese chives, vinegar, sugar, and pickles. A recipe for a Muslim noodle dish called tutumashi was important enough to be mentioned in the Mongol court’s encyclopedia of food, called A Soup for the Qan and written by a doctor of Uighur descent. In the recipe, pellets of dough were soaked in water, molded into thin disks, and boiled, then flavored with fermented milk and basil—ingredients that were rarely found anymore in modern China.