On the Noodle Road

by Jen Lin-Liu

  After the Mongol era in the Ming Dynasty, noodle products became increasingly popular and spread over China. Enduring types of fresh noodles—like hand-rolled ones that resemble fettuccine and spaghetti—were invented. Innovations over the next few centuries included sauces with tomatoes, which originated in the New World, as also occurred in Italy. Chinese began drying noodles later than the Italians, and it was only in the early twentieth century that instant noodles, like the ones Chef Zhang served his uncle posthumously, became popular in China. Although instant noodles originated in Japan, the Chinese are now the world’s leading consumers of them. While all types of dried noodles can be found in China nowadays, fresh noodles remain a strong tradition in the north—and in the west, as I discovered on my journey.

  • • •

  Chef Zhang had displayed a tinge of sentimentality at his uncle’s grave that he hid when it came to his more immediate family. When we’d dined with them the night before going to his village, he and his wife had barely spoken in our presence, although she’d doted over Chairman Wang and me. With Chef Zhang in Beijing, the couple had spent much of their marriage apart. The wife had spent one summer in the capital, when Chef Zhang had his own noodle shop, but otherwise, they saw each other for only a week or two each year. Around the time Craig and I began dating, Chef Zhang had offered his opinion on marriage. “Don’t do it,” he said. “It’s too much trouble.”

  The arrangement between Chef Zhang and his wife was typical in China—to make a decent living, families often split up. Chef Zhang’s situation was better than most. His wife took care of the children, unlike in many families, where the husband and wife both migrated for work, sometimes to separate places, leaving their children with grandparents. In those marriages, the union was often just practical: the goal was to produce children who would eventually care for their parents, in line with Confucian ideals. Sometimes rural parents still arranged marriages. Feelings might grow along the way, but not necessarily. Work often took precedence over family cohesion.

  My parents’ marriage was an amalgam of East and West. They’d met and fallen in love in college in Taiwan, where they’d grown up, and went to the United States together to pursue PhDs. My father made an early compromise, giving up an opportunity to study at the University of Pennsylvania to attend Northwestern near Chicago with my mother. They’d married in graduate school but in the typically unsentimental Chinese way. My father hadn’t proposed—a visit to America by my maternal grandfather had instigated the wedding. Given how rare such occasions were, my mother’s sister suggested that this would be a good time for my parents to marry, if they were thinking of tying the knot at all. My mother—in a touch of Western romanticism—donned a hastily procured white wedding dress for the visit to city hall.

  A few years later, as they were finishing their PhDs, they gave birth to me, their first child, and we moved to California. Thereafter, my parents made their careers their priority. My father, a physicist, changed jobs numerous times, moving to universities in Los Angeles, Santa Barbara, and Cleveland, while my mother and I lived in San Bernardino County, east of Los Angeles, where my mother worked as a neurobiologist. When I turned seven, we reunited under one roof in San Diego, where my father had found a new job and my mother took time off after my brother’s birth and later restarted her career.

  Around the time I graduated from college, Confucian traditions called my father back to Taiwan. Ever since he’d left for America, his parents had hoped he would return to live with them, a duty often expected of eldest sons. (He was the eldest of five children.) As his parents got older, that responsibility weighed more on him, and he went to work in Taiwan. My mother stayed behind in California to continue her career. This arrangement produced tension sometimes, I knew, but they were still a couple, and still saw each other regularly. They’d somehow made it work.

  Early on in my marriage, however, my father had warned me not to follow his and my mother’s example. He worried about the time I would spend apart from Craig on the Silk Road.

  “Are you sure you want to do this? It’s not good for either of you,” he said when he visited Craig and me in Beijing before I left for my journey.

  “Why not?” I said lightly. “You and Mom are always apart.”

  “That’s different,” he said, clearing his throat. And then, abruptly, he blurted out, “When are you going to have a baby?”

  “Oh, Dad!” I said, evading the question. Neither of us was good at sharing personal matters. It was the first and last time he asked. Even though I knew he wasn’t pleased with the idea of my embarking on a journey for months (as he hadn’t been pleased, at least initially, with my previous adventures in cooking), he grudgingly accepted the idea and wished me well.

  The morning Chairman Wang and I left the village of Pushang, Chef Zhang and his younger daughter accompanied us. As we bumped along in the van that snaked down the rolling red hills to Wuxiang Township, he pointed out all the caves embedded in the canyons. When we reached town, Chef Zhang revised what he’d said on the train. It was true that he didn’t miss his home when he was away. But it wasn’t that he didn’t feel anything. “I miss the people,” he said. “When I retire, I’ll go home and live on the farm. I have two acres of land—that’s plenty to grow all I’ll need. I’ll buy an electric three-wheel cart and take my wife to town to go shopping every once in a while.”

  • • •

  While Chef Zhang thought about retiring with his wife, Chairman Wang relived her past as she and I visited Yuanqu, the village where she’d been sent to do manual labor during the Cultural Revolution. Yuanqu lay only a hundred miles to the southwest of Chef Zhang’s village as the crow flies, but the area was so mountainous and the roads so bad that we had to take a bus, a train, and a private taxi to get there.

  Chairman Wang had been one of millions of students whose lives had been upended by Chairman Mao Zedong’s campaign to reverse the country’s social order. She’d planned to study medicine but had missed out on college because Mao had closed all universities and sent students to the fields. But despite the hardships, Chairman Wang had fond memories of tilling the land; when she spoke of it, her tone reminded me of how Craig reminisced about his time in the Peace Corps. “We ate idle meals,” she’d once told me wistfully, an idiom that means something like “Those were the days.”

  Since the time Chairman Wang had left, Yuanqu had grown considerably wealthier, more so than Chef Zhang’s village. The flatness of the land allowed farmers to grow more crops and to use machines for harvest. And the villagers had found a new source of income from an ancient product, the very thing that had inspired trading between China and Europe centuries before: silk. Barns were filled with endless shelves of silkworms, collectively creating a loud crackle as they munched the mulberry leaves that fueled their production of the threads.

  The renewed demand for silk—which China exported to the world—changed not just the farmers’ routines but also their eating habits. When Chairman Wang had worked in the village, it was so poor that even wheat was a luxury. The students had mainly farmed sturdier millet and corn to make noodles, porridge, and buns. Despite her fond memories, the mere thought of millet still made Chairman Wang want to retch—she’d eaten so much of it in those years. Now the wealth produced by the silkworms meant that the villagers could afford to buy, rather than grow, their staples. And so we were greeted with rice, not noodles, in each home we visited.

  Instead of learning more about noodles, I was treated to a history lesson. During the night we spent in the village, Chairman Wang was lost in a reverie of memories, repeating many of the stories about the Cultural Revolution that I’d heard while cooking with her. Even after seeing the place, I still found it hard to believe that she’d been sent to this village and had been forced to stay in the area for eight years before returning to the capital. A Communist official had simply dropped the students in the village and left them to
fend for themselves, I learned. The farmers had treated Chairman Wang well (she’d been the hardest worker among her peers), and officials had rewarded her by allowing her to leave first. Other students had languished in the village longer and one young woman had been involved in a torrid affair with one of the married men we’d come across, my cooking mentor told me.

  The next day, I said farewell to Chairman Wang at the train station. Our good-bye was short—my matronly friend was anxious to get back to her husband. “I’ll see you in a few months!” she said as she wheeled her bag away. I, in contrast, felt a little more sentimental: my two cooking mentors had been central to my life in China and to my culinary path, and I was glad to have had them with me for the first leg of this new adventure. But after I saw Chairman Wang off, I wondered if I’d also invited the chefs along for the company: I realized I was now continuing west, into the unknown, completely on my own.

  3.

  After saying good-bye to Chairman Wang, I boarded a bus to Xi’an, the ancient capital that had spurred the silk trade with Europe. I was looking forward to the ride because it would give me my first glimpse of the Yellow River. Though I’d traversed it on my earlier travels, I had no memory of it. The waterway has great symbolic value to the Chinese, however. It’s the second-longest river in China, after the Yangtze, and locals consider it the cradle of their civilization, with evidence of human activity dating back thousands of years. In fact, many Chinese believed that noodles had emerged from this river region as well. For my chef friends, the waterway had other culinary significance. After I crossed it and continued west, Chef Zhang had told me, “The noodles will be totally different.” Chairman Wang made a connection of a different sort. “It’s so polluted, it’s like a stew,” she said flatly. “Actually, no, it’s thicker. It’s like sesame paste!”

  The bus was so uncomfortably hot and crowded that I dozed off, a skill I’d acquired to adapt to moments of unpleasant travel. I only woke a few hours later, when the bus arrived in Xi’an. Darn, I thought, as the passengers and I pushed and shoved our way off the bus. I’d missed seeing the Yellow River once again. But, as Chef Zhang claimed, the noodles were totally different as I followed the river west. In Xi’an I would taste an appetizer called ganmianpi, thick slices of wheat noodles steamed and plunged into cold water to remove the starch, then tossed with bean sprouts and chili oil. In the Hexi Corridor, a narrow passage of desert between two mountain ranges where Marco Polo had noted an abundance of wheat, I’d sample spaghetti-like strands made with egg yolks, like Italian pasta, and topped with thin slices of donkey meat that tasted like corned beef. Further west, in the region of Xinjiang, I’d enjoy dapanji, or big plate chicken, a dish of spicy chicken stew flavored with green peppers, chilies, and star anise. After much of the poultry was eaten, the waiters slipped long, thick, tagliatelle-like noodles into the stew to soak up the gravy, giving the dish a second incarnation.

  Between Xi’an and Xinjiang, though, there was the city of Lanzhou. The town had the distinction of being one of the world’s most polluted metropolises, and the river was indeed the thick brown pool Chairman Wang had described. Even so, I was enthralled. Lanzhou was the home of hand-pulled noodles, the dish I’d wanted to treat Lu the geologist to at the outset of my journey in Beijing. (Coincidentally, Lanzhou was near Lajia, the place where researchers found the supposed four-thousand-year-old noodle.) The artistry involved in making hand-pulled noodles was stunning. I arrived in Lanzhou by train early one morning and made a beeline for the kitchen of a Muslim eatery called Mazilu. A dozen men pounded, kneaded, and pulled gobs of dough, each thumping their respective mounds against the counter. They stretched the dough and folded it in half before twirling it around itself like a dance partner, spinning it into the shape of a super-long French cruller. They wrapped the increasingly stringy dough around their hands to make a loop and stretched the dough as far apart as their arms would go. Through a set of motions that looked like a child’s game of cat’s cradle, they effortlessly spun a pile of strands as thin as angel hair and snapped them into a vat of boiling water. After the chefs cooked and drained the noodles, they added them to bowls of long-simmered beef broth, topping the bowls with a dash of chili sauce and crumbles of beef.

  Locals ate the dish for breakfast. And even though it seemed like an odd way to start one’s day, I was eager. It was infinitely better than the lukewarm plain rice porridge or leftovers that most Chinese had for breakfast. I lifted a tangle of strands with my chopsticks, carefully pausing for a moment to inhale the rich broth, scented with ginger, cardamom, and cinnamon. (On my previous trip through the region, I’d burned my tongue on these noodles in my impatience to try them.) Doing my best slurp through puckered lips (a Chinese skill I’d never quite nailed), I was rewarded with the fine, slippery texture of the wispy strands. I’d tried hand-pulled noodles elsewhere in China, but none had come close to the refinement of the dish in its place of origin. It was a result, some chefs said, of the local water, echoing what New Yorkers said about bagels. Even if noodles hadn’t been invented nearby, they had surely reached their highest refinement in this arid inland region.

  As I moved westward, I would discover that China’s ethnic minorities claimed many noodle dishes as their own and may have helped transmit them farther afield. If the four-thousand-year-old noodle hadn’t dissolved, in fact, the discovery would have confirmed not the Chinese as the inventor of noodles, but rather a small minority called the Tu, who inhabited the area four thousand years before through the present. (When I’d asked Lu the geologist about the possibility of attributing the invention of noodles to a minority group, he laughed nervously. “That’s very sensitive,” he said.)

  Though it was too early in my trip to say who invented noodles, it was fairly safe to attribute the hand-pulled variety to the Hui, a claim most Chinese corroborated. The Hui also made various other noodles that I would discover as I went west, and I’d learn how they and their culinary influence had migrated to Central Asia. Nearly every minority community I passed through had its own noodle dishes—from tiny, obscure groups like the Tu to the Tibetans (who live in western China and Tibet).

  Though I was only halfway through China, the western part of the country seemed like a foreign land. Most people, myself included, don’t readily think of the region at all when they think of the country. In the densely populated eastern half of the nation, it’s easy to think that China is monolithic, made up of a single ethnicity. More than ninety percent of the Middle Kingdom is Han, the ethnic group that is practically synonymous with being Chinese.

  I am Han. And yet before I arrived in the East, I’d never heard of the term. In America, I’d thought of myself as simply Chinese. But not long after I moved to China, I asked a stranger on the street for directions. My Han face, contrasted with my fumbling Mandarin and foreign mannerisms, confused her. “Ni shi hanzu, ma? Are you Han?” she asked, perplexed.

  As my Mandarin improved and I picked up on how to interact with locals, indeed I became more “Han.” But the designation still felt uncomfortable. Growing up in the white suburbs of America, I’d always felt like a minority. I carried that sensibility with me across the Pacific, only to discover that I was now part of the majority. On top of that, the term “Han” was often used with overtones of dominance and pride. China, just emerging from a dark economic and political period of the twentieth century and with a small population of minorities, hadn’t started grappling with issues of race and ethnicity the way America had. The political correctness that had consumed America wasn’t evident in the least. More than once, I heard Han Chinese referring to Tibetans as “wild and uneducated.” Restaurants specializing in Uighur cuisine often featured dancing, an attribute Hans associated with the minority. For a while, the minority theme park in Beijing, a bad idea to begin with, bore an unfortunate translation: “Racist Park.” For all these reasons, I couldn’t quite get used to being considered Han. Even in a place where I looked like eve
ryone else, I was a misfit still.

  But that discomfort took on a new dimension as I headed west, where most of the non-Han population lives. Aside from China’s best-known and most vocal minority, the Tibetans, many other groups are scattered across the largely rural region. Chinese officials have categorized more than fifty other “official” ethnic groups within its borders. Some minorities are more familiar, claiming the ancestry of neighboring countries, like Mongolia, Korea, and Kazakhstan. Others are minuscule in population and have never actively sought to form their own nation, while still others, like the Tibetans and Uighurs, have fought for independence.

  Having been a minority in the United States, I found the cultures existing on China’s fringes fascinating. As I went west, I passed through Tibetan towns with names like Zag Zag, full of mud-brick homes decorated with colorful prayer flags and surrounded by deserts and canyons that reminded me of Arizona. One restaurateur in a town known as “Little Mecca” told me he was Dongxiang, a minority that traced its lineage back to Genghis Khan’s conquests. When I reached China’s border with Afghanistan and Pakistan, the dusty streets were full of European-looking boys with light hair and eyes of hazel, green, and even occasionally blue, part of the Uighur minority.

  But given my Han appearance, I approached western China cautiously. I worried about being lumped into a dominant group that had sometimes trampled over the rights of minorities and taken over their territories. On previous travels in Tibet, my protestations that I was a minority, too—just not in China—had been met with laughter. Uighurs were less welcoming to me than to obvious foreigners, even after I told them that I was American.

  It didn’t help that ethnic tensions had recently intensified. Violent riots had broken out in Tibetan regions not long before, followed by deadly demonstrations in Xinjiang, an area where I planned to spend several weeks. But it was the only overland route into Central Asia, and I could not pass up the chance to sample the unique culinary traditions, some rugged and rustic, others refined and artisanal, that lay ahead.