On the Noodle Road

by Jen Lin-Liu

  • • •

  I learned about the Hui minority in Xi’an. The City of Eternal Peace, as it is sometimes called, is one of the few in China where the original city walls still stand. History looms large in Xi’an, which is famous for the Terracotta Warriors, sculptures dating from the third century BC that depict the armies of Qin Shi Huang, the first emperor of a unified China. One resident told me that the construction of the subway was going slowly because every few yards of digging yielded a new archaeological find. Because ancient emperors in Xi’an instigated the silk trade with Europe, some historians say that it, rather than Beijing, should be considered the eastern terminus of the Silk Road.

  The Muslim quarter is the city’s oldest district. The local government had turned the area’s main thoroughfare into a pedestrian walkway lined with historic residences painted ruby red and jade green, giving the area the generic look of many newly renovated tourist traps across China. But behind the facade, the quarter lived up to its name. Nestled in a maze of alleys was a mosque that dated back to the eighth century AD. Inside, students in white skullcaps recited Arabic prayers in unison. Women with the occasional European feature—freckles, hazel eyes, or long noses—bicycled past, their colorful head scarves fluttering in the wind. The Muslim quarter had been the center of Xi’an since the eighth century, when the city was the largest in the world. Back then, as many as a third of its residents had been foreigners.

  The Muslim quarter was also the spiritual capital of the Hui, one of the largest minorities in China, with a population of almost ten million. Some academics argued that the Hui shouldn’t be considered a separate minority, but rather Han Chinese who’d converted to Islam generations before. But the Hui I met were insistent that their identity was distinct, like that of Jews; it was not mere religious adherence that set them apart from the Han. They were often biracial, the descendants of Hans who’d intermarried with Arabs, Persians, or Turkic people many generations before. I also learned that the Hui were further split into two camps: the “land” Hui who lived in or around Xi’an, where contact with Islam had come overland via the Silk Road, and the “sea” Hui in coastal China, where the religion had spread via maritime routes.

  Aside from hand-pulled noodles, the Hui had other distinctive dishes. Ground lamb replaced ground pork in steamed soup dumplings, and sweet rice porridge was flavored with rosewater. But most intriguing was what they did with round bread disks made of wheat flour and baked in coal-heated tin drums. The bread, which nowadays was called mo, had gone by the name tu-tur-mu.

  In my research, I’d learned that bread was the predecessor of noodles. It made intuitive sense, though I’d never quite linked the two in my mind. Historical documents show that China’s tradition of noodles grew out of bread. Archaeologists have found evidence in ancient cake-like breads that the Chinese have been baking for more than two thousand years. (It seemed a historical accident that bread was associated with the West while noodles were associated with the East.) And, unlike the four-thousand-year-old noodle, there were documents to back up this find: Chinese breads began to appear in records between the fourth and second centuries BC. The word bing surfaces in a fable of Mohist philosophy, a rival of the Confucian school. The story tells of a wealthy landlord who steals the bing made in a neighbor’s kitchen, despite his fortune. Descriptions of noodles began appearing alongside mentions of bread in the third century AD; the first noodles were called tang bing, or “soup bread,” and until the sixth century, the word bing was used interchangeably to describe both bread and noodles.

  As with Chinese noodles, it took me a while to understand the allure of bing. Bing was a more encompassing concept than what we thought of as bread in the West; it wasn’t just something you used to make a sandwich or slathered with butter at the start of a meal. At first, I didn’t quite understand the enormous queue that formed every morning in my Beijing neighborhood for mantou, steamed buns made of refined white flour. But the longer I lived in the hutong, the more I craved starchy bread snacks like mantou and jian bing, a grilled savory crepe-like pancake cooked on a griddle, brushed with egg, chili oil, and barbecue sauce, sprinkled with coriander and leeks, and folded into a multilayer gluten feast. The longer I lived in China, the more I debated whether I should spend my calories at the wet market on shou zhua bing, a flaky, shallow-fried disk that reminded me of Indian roti, or at a stand around the corner that sold piping-hot zhima bing, little baked rolls made with a tahini-like sesame paste and sugar.

  Xi’an was known for a couple of dishes that employed the bread disks called mo in novel ways. The Han Chinese population used them to make roujia mo, toasting the bread before halving it and stuffing it with stewed and shredded pork belly, spicy green peppers, and cilantro. It was the best sandwich I’d ever tried. But that dish was off-limits to the Hui, who obeyed the Muslim prohibition on pork. Instead, they used the bread to make a lamb soup called yangrou paomo.

  A local food writer named Bai Jianbo offered to take me out for the Muslim dish. He was a modest man in his fifties, with a bald, shiny head and a Buddha-like smile. When I met food writers like Bai, I was reminded that the profession in China didn’t command the respect and excitement it did in America. In China, food writing was still a fledgling, unglamorous field struggling to free itself from the practice of touting restaurants for pay. Bai had worked as a chef for a dozen years before he’d turned to writing, a shift motivated by a practical reason. On a long trip he’d taken across the country, he discovered how difficult it was for an observant Muslim to eat in China, a country obsessed with pork. He encountered pork stir-fries, pork dumplings, and pork-flavored instant noodles everywhere. “I couldn’t even go to KFC because while they don’t serve pork, their chickens aren’t halal,” he said. That inspired him to write a countrywide guide to Muslim restaurants. After it was published, he moved on to writing a Muslim street snack cookbook and a guide to eating in Xi’an. His latest project was an encyclopedia of Hui cuisine, which he was writing in the spirit of the exhaustive imperial encyclopedias that detailed the intricacies of every dish. He estimated it would take him another six years to finish, and he had no idea who would publish it.

  We arrived at the warehouse-like canteen around noon, just as diners were lining up to fork over a dollar apiece for the dish. The cashier gave us each a large bowl and a disk of bread. Bai and I settled at a table and broke the bread into crumbs in our bowls, a task he took on as seriously as he did his encyclopedia. After a good five minutes, he glanced over. “You haven’t broken them down enough,” he said. I ran the crumbs through my fingers yet again. Though the task was painfully repetitive, I appreciated it more after I learned that Chinese historians theorized that the very motion I was engaged in—the pinching of bread, either cooked or raw—was how Chinese first formed noodles.

  At last we took our bowls to the open kitchen, which looked out onto a bustling alley near the mosque. The chef carved a few pieces of lamb and placed them into each crumb-filled bowl, along with chopped leeks and a ladleful of rich lamb stock. Glass noodles went in, too—I still thought of them as noodles even now that I knew they weren’t considered mian. One at a time, each bowl’s contents were poured into a wok, stir-fried over a roaring fire for two minutes to seal in the flavors, and returned to the bowl. We carried our meal back to the table and garnished the soup with pickled garlic cloves, chili sauce, and coriander. I held the bowl to my face, breathing in the vapors. My initial bite was instantly gratifying, the disparate flavors of the savory broth, the sweetness of the garlic, and the heat of the chili sauce melding together in the bread bits. The bread’s heartiness, in fact, reminded me of that first taste of stuffing on Thanksgiving Day. As I devoured the bowl amid a chorus of slurps echoing in the hall, I broke into a sweat. I recalled how the first noodles had been called “soup bread”—could they have come in this form?

  Bai didn’t know, but he was certain that “the bread is the key to this dish.” As
we got up for a stroll through the Muslim quarter, I thought about the name of the bread. Tu-tur-mu. Why did that sound familiar? I wondered. It was only later that I pieced it together: the name was a derivative of tutumashi, a dish I’d come across in my research—the noodle preparation involving milk and basil that had been mentioned in the food encyclopedia of the Mongol court. Later, I would discover in Turkey that locals ate a noodle dish called tutmaç.

  • • •

  From Xi’an, I traveled west to the Tibetan areas of Gansu and Qinghai Provinces. I’d traveled this area alone before on my first western China trip, in 2005, the year before Craig and I had started dating. I’d lived in China for five years by that point and wondered if I’d ever meet a life partner. The pool of men in China was limited, even if half the 1.3 billion people in China were men; actually more than half, due to the effects of traditional gender preference. But I couldn’t imagine dating someone with whom I couldn’t speak my native language. I suppose I was picky as well. I’d never been the kind of person who “settled,” in any sense of the word. I preferred being alone to being with someone with whom I didn’t think I had a future.

  Being in China also jaded me. In Shanghai, I saw men behaving badly. I met women who’d moved to China with their partners and seen their relationships crumble, as their boyfriends or husbands had affairs, usually with local women. And I thought it was unfair that in foreign journalism, the rigors of the job meant that many of my older female colleagues had gotten used to being alone—getting married or having children would make it difficult to go off and cover breaking news; giving up on marriage and children was the price they had to pay for sticking wholeheartedly to their profession. Meanwhile, most of the male journalists of a certain age married and had children, remaining free to come and go at will.

  In any case, as I approached thirty, I started thinking I might be destined to be alone. Though I’d always wanted children, it wasn’t a pressing concern. I actually enjoyed being single. I liked being able to work, socialize, and travel when I pleased. And I sometimes wondered if I’d ever feel completely comfortable in a relationship. Maybe I just wasn’t cut out for settling down.

  On my previous trip, I’d paused in this Tibetan region to visit an elderly single woman named Isabel. She lived in a small dusty town called Rebkong, famous for its thangkas, intricate paintings of Buddhist scenes outlined in gold paint. Isabel was in her late seventies, with an elegant British-tinged accent from her years growing up in Hong Kong, and long dark hair touched lightly with gray. She wore draping skirts, hand-me-down shoes, and fleece pullovers.

  I’d first met Isabel the year before, halfway around the world in the fancy Long Island enclave called the Hamptons. I’d gone there to visit a friend at her mother’s home, and Isabel—whom my friend called “my crazy aunt”—also happened to be passing through. The aunt was drinking a glass of red wine and watching the French Open. A tennis fan myself, I looked on (Sharapova was pummeling a much weaker opponent), and we struck up an instant rapport.

  As we talked, I learned that Isabel had gone to Columbia University. After graduating, she’d worked for Time magazine as a researcher. She told her bosses she was interested in working as a foreign correspondent but kept getting passed over for reporting jobs, reserved mostly for men in those days. “I kept on watching young men who’d just come out of schools like Amherst get sent into the field,” she said. “It was frustrating. So one day, I just quit and bought a ticket to Asia.” She worked as a freelance correspondent at a time when few women went overseas as reporters. She covered the conflict in Vietnam, at one point working in Saigon alongside a journalist who later became my adviser at the Columbia School of Journalism.

  Though we were decades apart in age, our paths had striking similarities. While at Columbia, I’d worked as an assistant at Newsweek and The New Yorker. I’d also decided not to work my way up stateside, and had gone to Asia to become a freelance journalist. We were both single. We were both of Chinese descent, which motivated us both to spend time in China.

  Isabel asked me how I enjoyed living there. Though she’d lived in New York for the past two decades, she was planning to move to western China in the next few months, she told me. She was tired of America and decided that China was where she’d retire; she’d made a few good Tibetan friends on her frequent visits to the country, and they’d encouraged her to settle in their small town of Rebkong, near the Tibetan Plateau. She invited me to visit once she’d settled.

  I took Isabel up on her offer the following year, while I was in northwestern China on assignment. Again I noticed that she had the energy of someone five decades younger. She introduced me to many of her friends, including a monk who’d recently “defrocked” himself, as she put it, and, free of religious constraints, had become a drinking buddy. We stayed out late at nightclubs with the defrocked monk and his friends, and Isabel slung back bottles of beer—a beverage she ingested the way most people drank water—and shots of scotch. We got back to her apartment so late that the gates of her building had closed (a common practice in China), and I had to scale the high fence to gain entrée for my host.

  Before I left the next morning, Isabel, in her pajamas, gave me a hug and wished me well. She’d added, with a look of fondness, that I reminded her of her younger self.

  • • •

  When I passed through again, Isabel was still living in this remote Tibetan area. I was excited to catch up with her, even more so after she told me that she’d helped open a Tibetan restaurant near where she lived. We arranged to meet in Xining, the capital of Qinghai Province, a two-hour drive from her home in Rebkong. Arriving by train in Xining (pronounced shee-ning), I glanced out the window and was surprised to find that the sleepy town had developed considerably in the last five years. Like cities in eastern China, it had been consumed by spiraling apartment towers. Shiny new cars clogged the roads. The Communist Party’s plans to “develop the west”—one of its big slogans of the early twenty-first century—were beginning to bear fruit, but the success looked ominous. Thankfully, tucked away in alleys was some semblance of the city’s old self: storefronts sold huge blocks of yak butter, resembling wheels of cheddar cheese, and butchered meats, both mutton and yak, hung from hooks in the open air. Billboards and signs bore Tibetan Sanskrit alongside Chinese characters.

  I’d booked a private room in a youth hostel that turned out to be in a new apartment tower. When I arrived, I found Isabel at the bar, drinking a Yellow River beer. She chuckled when she saw me and rose for a hug. She looked as healthy as the last time I’d seen her, though more wrinkles lined her face and a few more strands of gray streaked her long hair, which hung in a low ponytail.

  That evening, she took me to a restaurant that served southern Chinese food—the food of her heritage, and mine. We had egg rolls and shrimp pastries along with several light stir-fries. The delicate flavors seemed out of place in this region of spicy, hearty food. While I was disappointed not to be eating local specialties, particularly because no noodles were served, Isabel was happy; she disliked the heavy flavors that were typical of the region.

  Several foreign friends who ran philanthropic organizations or were volunteering in the region joined us for dinner, along with a Tibetan man named Karma. He was in his late twenties, had a light goatee, and, like Isabel, wore his long hair in a ponytail. Isabel called him “my son.” I was confused, because on my previous journey, she’d introduced me to another Tibetan man who’d also been her “son.” Isabel explained that since we’d last met, she’d adopted Karma. The two men, she noted, were more like godsons than sons, though, given that both still had living parents. After dinner, Karma, driving a car that Isabel had bought him, dropped Isabel and me at the hostel and disappeared into the night.

  The next day, Karma picked us up and offered to take Isabel and me to his favorite noodle restaurant before we headed to Rebkong. When we pulled up at the eatery, it looked faint
ly familiar—I wondered if it was the one I’d frequented on my last trip. I’d come down with a terrible flu that kept me confined for days to a small room in a smoky, government-run hotel. When I’d mustered enough strength to leave my room, I found a noodle shop across the street and settled in for my first real meal in days. On the table appeared a large bowl of noodle squares stir-fried in a spicy tomato stew. The flat squares, called mian pian in Mandarin, had just the right springiness, and the chili-infused stew, with bits of beef and fresh vegetables, reminded me of an Italian arrabbiata sauce, a hint of sugar balancing the heat and acidity. Though I’m usually a slow eater, I finished the bowl in minutes and ordered a second, which I demolished just as quickly. It wasn’t only my returning appetite that made the mian pian so delicious, I discovered as I regained my health. The noodle squares were simply addictive. Over my weeklong stay, the restaurant became my canteen; I ate there at least once a day, sometimes twice.

  Though the surroundings looked familiar, the restaurant’s interior looked different. In place of the utilitarian wooden tables and flimsy stools I remembered, velvet covered the dining chairs and birdcage lanterns decorated the ceiling. But when I tasted the noodles, déjà vu struck definitively. Like many places in China, this restaurant had gone upscale.

  Though a Hui owned the restaurant and Hui frequented the place, Tibetans also ate here in equal numbers. Tibetans liked noodle squares and considered it their dish, too, Karma told me.

  “Yes, that’s true,” Isabel said, passing up the noodles for a plate of stir-fried green beans. “Mian pian, mian pian! That’s all they eat in this area.” We capped off the meal with bowls of creamy local yogurt sprinkled with sugar, the texture and topping resembling crème brûlée.