On the Noodle Road

by Jen Lin-Liu

  With at least Karma’s and my hunger sated, we piled into the car and drove to Rebkong. I sat in front with Karma while Isabel lounged in the backseat, drinking a plastic cup filled with vodka, which she’d bought at a grocery on the way. We followed the Yellow River, which ran strikingly clean and glistening blue in this rural area. The river rushed through a winding narrow valley, framed by dry mountains with sharp ridges that splintered and separated like fingers. We passed through villages where new low-rise cement buildings were painted pink and where all the men wore doppi, Muslim skullcaps. In the center of each village was a green-domed mosque decorated with a crescent moon like a weather vane. Karma explained that Tibetans and Huis lived in separate villages, just as they sat at separate tables in the restaurant. The farther we drove, the greater the proportion of Tibetan villages.

  Halfway to Rebkong, Karma wanted to stretch his legs. “Do you want to eat more noodle squares?” he asked, pulling over at a small line of shops by the road.

  Sure, I said. Isabel groaned from the backseat.

  In the restaurant’s kitchen, a trio of Hui women wearing lacy black head scarves stood around a large wok, holding long, flat strands of dough in their hands and ripping them in a quick, rhythmic fashion into boiling water. As the noodle squares were brought to our table in a light mutton broth, Karma extolled their benefits. “Other noodles are heavy and sit in your stomach for too long. But because these are softer and ripped by hand, when you eat them, they feel like feathers in your stomach.”

  “Is that so? After I eat just two pieces, they feel like they’re congealing in my stomach!” Isabel said skeptically, with a chuckle. She picked her way through a piece of boiled mutton sprinkled with coriander and chili sauce as spicy as if it had been made with habaneros.

  We got back in the car and drove farther into the hinterlands as dusk fell, the first stars appearing in the sky. The villages became increasingly Tibetan, with white stupas and colorful banners replacing mosques. We whizzed past a sculpture of the Buddha carved into the side of a hill, signaling our impending arrival in Rebkong. Karma turned into a narrow alley that led to a village and pulled up at a brick compound to drop us off. Isabel, half-drunk, fumbled in the dark for her keys, unlocked the door, and invited me into the wooden bungalow she called home.

  • • •

  Since the last time I visited, Isabel had moved from her apartment in town to a three-room cabin she’d designed herself in a village nearby. When I woke the next morning, she was padding around the main room, drinking coffee and making breakfast. She used mo, the round bread disks I knew from Xi’an, as English muffins, halving and toasting them. We ate them with fried eggs and tomato slices while sitting on her wooden patio, looking out onto a pear orchard in her large sloping yard. The “hut,” as she called it, had broadband Internet, on which she could watch live tennis and listen to the BBC news, but no running water. She went to a friend’s home in town once a week to shower. She’d had her contractor build a seat lined with orange felt in her outhouse, so she didn’t have to squat.

  Even with few modern amenities, the hut was pleasant, and with the sun shining on the patio, I could see how Isabel could feel at home there. “Every morning, I look out, eat my to-mah-toes, and watch my fruit trees grow,” she said as she sipped her coffee and let out a trademark chuckle. “You could say I’m pretty contented.” She kept busy. In addition to tending to her two “sons,” she worked on philanthropic projects. She’d helped set up a community center in Rebkong and raised money for the education of Tibetan girls.

  After breakfast, we decided to go into town. We locked the bungalow and walked to the main road, atop of which the farmers had laid the wheat they’d just harvested, taking advantage of cars that whizzed by to thresh the grain. It occurred to me that the wheat that went into the noodles and bread I’d been eating all across China had been run over by car tires. But before I could think much about it, a crackling sound like a gunshot went off. We both jumped. “Was that a gun?” I said. Isabel nodded. Tibetans still kept arms, even though China didn’t officially allow its citizens to own them. “Don’t worry,” she said, trying not to sound too nervous. “They usually just shoot them up in the air.”

  On the street, we boarded a beat-up minivan that operated like a bus. Dangling from the rearview mirror was a picture of the Dalai Lama. The Chinese government had deemed the Tibetan leader an evil demagogue intent on splitting Tibet from China and banned his image. But even so, Tibetans adored him and still hung his picture everywhere. On the way to town, we passed a large monastery called Longwu Temple, the entrance of which was decorated with enormous prayer wheels that pilgrims spun as they circumambulated the compound. Later, when I went inside the gates, I saw more illicit photos of the Dalai Lama displayed within the temple’s dark rooms.

  We hopped off the bus in the center of Rebkong, where I was struck by the colors. Monks on motorbikes drove around town clad in deep red loose-flowing gowns, the extra fabric thrown over one shoulder. Tibetan men on the street wore purple, green, or other bright colors, in contrast to the drab gray and black that Chinese men favored in the east. Shops sold shiny, flowery cloth for women’s gowns. Even the mops in the hardware shops were colorful, made from pieces of bright blue and leopard-print material. The sun’s rays, intensified by the altitude, seemed to make everything even brighter.

  Next to a shop selling colorful sportswear was the restaurant that Isabel had bankrolled for her first “son.” Wanma was sitting at a table by the window, smoking and chewing on stir-fried yak with bell peppers when we arrived. He had a reddish complexion, small eyes, and rumpled hair. He barely stirred as we sat down, not bothering with the usual greetings of the region. “He’s not complicated like Karma,” Isabel had said of him. “I worry about him less.”

  As Isabel and I sipped tea, Wanma told me how he’d come to open the restaurant. He wanted to open an Internet café initially but learned that China’s censorship laws made it too risky, so instead decided on selling Han Chinese stir-fries, the kind that Isabel liked. It was moderately successful, but one day the Han chef up and left, and a replacement proved difficult to find. So Wanma put the women in his family in charge of the kitchen, and they began serving what they ate at home, with a few tweaks. (Tibetan men didn’t cook much, he admitted.)

  Though I didn’t know much about Tibetan food, I knew it wasn’t like the light vegetarian fare served in overseas Tibetan restaurants in cosmopolitan cities like New York. Few Tibetans, at least here, were vegetarian. Even monks, who were supposed to adhere to a no-meat diet, were often omnivores, going to little cafés near temples to indulge in yak-filled dumplings.

  Wanma’s wife taught me a few dishes. A pretty woman with a porcelain doll’s round face and eyes, she described the food she cooked as yuanshi, which means “sticking to the original” or, less flatteringly, “primitive.” We began with a common Tibetan dish called momo. The yak-filled dumplings, eaten as snacks during and between meals, seemed to riff off of several Chinese dishes made of dough. The name suggested a link with mo, the bread disks of Xi’an. She used the same dough as is used for Chinese dumplings and rolled it into the same thin circles. She placed a dollop of ground yak meat, minced onions, salt, and pepper in the center of the circle and wrapped the dough around the filling, pinching the edges together while slowly spinning the dumpling to form a navel-like indent atop it, like a Chinese steamed bun. That likeness continued as she placed the dumplings in a steamer to cook them. Hot out of the steamer, the dumplings were pretty good. The thinness of the skins reminded me of Shanghai soup dumplings, a refined coastal dish, but—perhaps this was the Han imperialist in me—I couldn’t help wishing that the filling was pork rather than yak.

  But this was yak country. The livestock was native to this high-altitude region, where pigs and vegetables were scarce. Wanma had the kitchen make a new plate of the stir-fried yak with green peppers that he was eating when we arr
ived, and I was pleased to find that it tasted like steak fajitas. The chefs also sliced yak thinly and grilled it in an iron pot over hot rocks, before dipping it in salt, cumin, and chili oil—seasonings that weren’t traditionally used in Tibetan food but were becoming more common as Tibetans began to mix more with Hui and Han Chinese.

  I found it harder to get used to the more traditional staples of Tibetan cuisine. Creamy yellow yak butter was ubiquitous, used not just for eating but for candles and sculptures in monasteries. It was even added to tea. But to me it tasted like gamy butter from cows, aged in a cave for months, and dissolving it in tea didn’t help. Yak butter tea was often mixed with ground barley, a grain that grew well on the Tibetan Plateau, to make a dish called tsampa that was light and portable, perfect for nomadic life. But I was certain its portability rather than its taste made it popular—when I gave it a try, my mouth was coated with a sticky substance that tasted like a dry, unsweetened energy bar.

  I really wanted to like Tibetan food. But sympathetic as I was to the Tibetan cause, I couldn’t get behind the cuisine.

  I told Isabel as much, and she laughed. “I’d give it two stars, at best.”

  • • •

  On this second trip to Isabel’s, we didn’t have any late nights like the last time. I certainly wasn’t up for it, given all the travel I’d done. And in any case, since Craig and I had become a couple, staying out late had lost its allure. Rather than battling crowds at a bar or nightclub, I much preferred to cozy up on the sofa at home with my husband and a movie.

  Craig and I had met a couple of years before we’d started dating. Mutual friends introduced us when we happened to be having breakfast at the same restaurant. Not long after, we became colleagues when he joined the Beijing bureau of Newsweek, which I wrote for from Shanghai. After I quit the magazine and moved to Beijing, we’d unknowingly competed for a spot as Asia bureau chief of Cox Newspapers, which we’d only discovered after I lost the job to him. Even so, we began socializing more. In fact, I’d always felt a spark with Craig, but given our busy travel schedules, we only managed to meet up once in a while, usually with other friends. Over time, I learned that our paths were similar. We’d both grown up in the American suburbs (though he’d grown up on the opposite coast, in Massachusetts), and after college, we’d both come to China as American ambassadors of a sort; Craig had volunteered in the Peace Corps while I’d been on a Fulbright. Both of us wanted to pursue journalism after we finished our programs, and we’d opted to freelance rather than work our way up through steady journalism jobs. Eventually we’d both landed jobs as part-time correspondents for Newsweek. He tackled serious topics like the environment, while I mostly wrote features. As a colleague, he was industrious and generous with contacts. As I got to know him personally, I discovered that while he was idealistic and contemplative, he also had a private, mischievous sense of humor.

  I was in the midst of my Chinese cooking adventures as we were becoming better friends, and on the day I passed the national cooking exam, he brought over a bottle of wine to celebrate. That evening, on my apartment balcony, in a gentlemanly, old-fashioned way that was becoming more rare among my peers, he asked me out on a date.

  Given how jaded I’d become, I was surprised that I fell for Craig as quickly as I did. I’d been immersed in writing a book, content with singledom, and not expecting to settle down anytime soon. But for whatever reason—maybe it was that initial spark, maybe it was the trust we’d built over a couple of years of friendship, maybe it was something more instinctual, a faith that he inspired—I dove in headfirst, without a bit of hesitation.

  Once we started dating, we traveled together on impulse. We marked our first month by climbing Mount Fuji. Weeks later, he flew down to meet me in Shanghai, where I’d been interning at a restaurant. Within our first year together, we’d traversed a good amount of Asia and discovered how well we traveled together. He accompanied me on assignment to Bali, where I was charmed to discover he was incapable of lounging by a swimming pool; he’d rather be canoeing in bays or hiking up volcanoes. At one resort, he convinced the hotel staff that he knew how to sail a catamaran, only to admit after we’d pushed out that he’d done it just once before. When the wind picked up, he promptly capsized us, sending me into gales of soaking-wet laughter. Appropriately, it was in transit—on the Star Ferry in Hong Kong Harbor—that I told him I’d marry him. He hadn’t even asked, he’d only inquired, in general, whether I was interested in having children some day. But already I’d fallen deeply in love and wanted to spend my life with Craig.

  At Isabel’s, I recalled something she had said to me on my last visit: “You remind me of a younger version of myself.” Now, in my newly married state, she reappeared as a vision of how my life might have turned out. Though Isabel had remained steadfastly independent, a trait I admired, I was starting to see the consequences of her inability to settle down.

  One afternoon we met her defrocked monk friend for tsampa at his restaurant, a copy of Wanma’s nearby. Though the ex-monk had gotten married and had a baby since I’d last seen him, he acted like a carefree bachelor. He drove Isabel and me up a mountain where he and his friends put away dozens of bottles of Yellow River beer and loudly sang Tibetan folk songs. I found myself feeling sorry for Isabel, who was growing old alone and spending her day with an ex-monk who should have been with his wife and children.

  The day before I left, Isabel and I stayed in and made ratatouille. She brought out an electric hot plate designed for Chinese cooking and set it on her patio. She heated a pan and added olive oil she’d brought from overseas, then had me throw in diced tomatoes, eggplants, green squash, and onions. The hot plate had a number of settings that described Chinese cooking methods—I toggled between the “hot pot” and “heat milk” settings, neither quite right for the sauté. She added a dash of red wine, made from local Chinese grapes. She poured sake into shot glasses and sliced up a halal sausage I’d brought along as a gift, squeezing wasabi (another overseas item) over it. She boiled spiral Italian pasta, bought in the same store where she’d procured her vodka, and served it with the stew I’d made. The meal, like the house, was a confusion of many cultures, but somehow it felt comforting.

  As we ate, we talked about the paths we’d chosen. Though mine had diverged from Isabel’s, we still had things in common. After all, I was still traveling alone, asserting my independence, not ready to have children. Isabel told me she’d never wanted children—she couldn’t imagine dealing with a baby.

  But perhaps she had? That would explain her “sons.” Yet what did that mean, when both were grown men with parents of their own, still alive and well? Isabel didn’t get along with Karma’s parents, who lived in the same village. In fact, she had barely spoken a word to them for months, after a disagreement about the house she’d built, on land they’d leased to her. And Wanma and Karma disliked each other so much that they’d once nearly come to blows. The fight was over her, Isabel told me, but I suspected it was also over the money she showered on them.

  We talked about how we were both a mishmash of East and West and how, because of it, we were “screwed up,” as she put it. Like me, she was too Eastern to fit in with the West—but to an extreme. She had never gotten an American passport, she told me, because she was a Communist at heart. She was unusually nationalistic about China, saying that she agreed with Mao’s proletarian policies and didn’t support Tibetan independence, positions that put her at odds with her “sons” and many friends. Yet she was too Western for China. I could see it in her taste in food, her predilection for wine and whiskey, the books that lined her shelves (biographies of human rights leaders like Nelson Mandela), and the sports and news she watched and listened to through her Internet connection. Like me, she couldn’t identify with the average local and never felt entirely at home in China, even though being Chinese was part of her identity. Maybe that was why she’d ended up on the Tibetan Plateau, where she didn�
��t have to confront that every day. And maybe that was what had brought me to these parts of China and beyond—like Isabel, I was still trying to find out where I fit in.

  4.

  On my way to Xinjiang (pronounced shin-jong) by train, my friend Nur called me. I was planning to visit him in a couple of weeks in his hometown of Lop, on the very western frontier of China, where he’d been summering. He wondered if I could come immediately. He’d forgotten that I was planning on visiting him, and he’d inadvertently made plans to return to Beijing for school in just over a week.

  Given how far he was, the only way I’d make it in time was to fly. I was faced with a logistical dilemma: Should I break a rule I’d set, to only travel by land (and sea)? Or should I pass up the opportunity to stay in a traditional Uighur village?

  I decided to scrap the rule. As soon as my train arrived in Urumqi, the capital of Xinjiang, I boarded a plane to Lop, a trip that took two hours but would have taken thirty hours by bus. That was far better than the month the journey took during Marco Polo’s time. From the air, I looked down at the Taklamakan, a melon-shaped desert that took up a large swath of Xinjiang. Millions of years before, the desert had been a large sea. Polo had visited Lop and noted that it was only wise to travel across the desert’s width—“to travel it in the direction of its length would prove a vain attempt, as little less than a year must be consumed.” A string of small towns, including Lop, lined its southern perimeter, but all I could see from my window seat was sand. Nur had told me that on breaks in the arduous bus journey, when travelers stepped off to pray, they washed their hands and faces with the fine sand.

  I’d met Nur, an anthropology graduate student at the Central Minorities University in Beijing, through a friend early on in my trip planning. Nur was Uighur, one of China’s largest ethnic minorities, who inhabited Xinjiang, a large corner of China’s northwest, where the contradictions of Chinese rule were most apparent and bewildering. Uighurs spoke a dialect of Turkish, practiced Islam, and looked Middle Eastern or sometimes downright European. They seemed to belong farther west, but they had coexisted with Han Chinese for more than a millennium, as evidenced by European-looking mummies that had been on display at museums around the world.