On the Noodle Road

by Jen Lin-Liu

  Han Chinese, Uighurs, and other minorities (some of whom eventually died out) had tussled over the area since the time of Christ. Early in the twentieth century, the Uighurs, with help from the Soviets, had established an independent nation for several years, but that was crushed by the Communist Red Army in 1949. For decades since, pockets of the population had agitated for independence from China, in a movement akin to Free Tibet. The East Turkestan Islamic Movement, as it was called, was not well known in the West, because the Uighurs lacked a charismatic leader like the Dalai Lama, and Islam didn’t appeal to Western sensibilities like Buddhism. In recent years, tensions between Hans and Uighurs had exploded. Deadly riots in Xinjiang broke out the year before I visited, and additional unrest followed my departure.

  So even more than other ethnic minorities, many Uighurs saw the Han Chinese as occupiers, colonialists. Though Xinjiang was officially called an “autonomous zone,” not a province, the Uighurs had the least freedom of any of China’s minorities. While the Hui were allowed to practice Islam with relative freedom, and the Tibetans were unofficially permitted guns, when it came to Uighurs, the authoritarian government exerted a heavy hand, carefully monitoring their religious and educational institutions. So paranoid had the Chinese government become that they’d cut off Internet access for the entire region for nearly a year. While it had been restored shortly before I arrived, it was painfully slow, and, as in the rest of China, many sites were blocked. In recent years, the government had created incentives for Han Chinese to migrate to Xinjiang, as they’d done in Tibet, to overwhelm and dilute the local population.

  Aware of the tensions, I’d spent considerable time preparing for Xinjiang. I’d hired Nur as my Uighur tutor, figuring the language would be helpful from China’s western border to Turkey, an area that was linguistically and culturally related. Having taught Uighur to other Americans, he’d become acquainted with expressions like “’Sup, dog?”—a greeting he liked to use on me. Nur’s hobby was linguistics, and his hero was Noam Chomsky. His glasses often drooped low on his thin nose, and he tied a belt around his skinny waist to hold up his pants. His complexion seemed to indicate he spent too much time in the library. In all those ways, he defied the stereotype Han Chinese held of Uighurs, whom the Hans saw as uneducated and menacing, even potentially terrorists.

  When I was in Beijing, we met at my apartment for lessons, and when I was in America, we conversed over Skype. Nur began by teaching me the Uighur alphabet, the loops and scrawls of which were Arabic, and he coached me in basic Uighur pronunciation. It was more similar to English than Chinese but still difficult. We moved on to grammar and vocabulary, concentrating on food terms, and within a few months I could say some important things: I am a chef and food writer. I like noodles very much. I may look Han but I’m also American.

  During our lessons, Nur would occasionally say something intriguing about how he ate back home. He told me about noodle soups that resembled Chinese ones. It was a rite of passage for boys to learn to slaughter sheep, he mentioned. He described the tonur ovens in every yard as being large enough to roast a whole sheep. And during one lesson, he’d invited me to visit him in Lop that summer.

  Shortly after my flight touched down, Nur arrived at the airport, disheveled as usual. After saying hello, he surveyed the one large backpack next to me and asked, “Where is your husband?”

  When we’d made arrangements, Craig hadn’t come up. I later realized that Nur, like most people in the region, simply assumed that because I was a married woman, I would be traveling with my husband. Nur had taught me that the Uighur word for husband, yoldishim, also means “walking the same road.” But I didn’t realize that it was an expression taken literally. And in fact, my traveling alone posed an inconvenience. Locals would automatically assume that he and I were involved, even if I was Han Chinese and ten years older, not to mention a couple of inches taller and probably heavier. Thankfully, though, the locals were polite and hospitable and not overly intrusive (not that I would have known otherwise, given my limited Uighur).

  We climbed into the backseat of a small car. Nur’s brother-in-law was at the wheel and his five-year-old stood on the passenger side, unconstrained by a seat belt and poking his head out the window. Before we went home, Nur said, we had to register my arrival at the police station. It was a regulation that applied to all foreigners in China, but in practice I’d rarely followed it, having learned that it often invited more hassles than it was worth. Halfway to the police station, Nur came to the same conclusion. “I forgot that you look Chinese! Everyone will think you are Chinese,” he said with a chuckle. “The police will never find you here.” That was not reassuring, though; Han Chinese was exactly what I didn’t want to be in these parts, and while Nur saw beyond my exterior, I wondered if others would.

  After we made a U-turn, Nur asked if I was hungry. The question surprised me. Aware that Muslims had just begun celebrating Ramadan, the holy month when observers fasted from sunrise to sundown each day, I’d eaten the lackluster meal on the airplane. Wasn’t everyone fasting? I asked.

  Nur didn’t answer, but a few minutes later his brother-in-law pulled up at a small eatery. I was really okay, I protested, assuming that they’d stopped for my benefit. I tried to halt everyone. The son promptly burst into tears.

  “Well, I am a little hungry,” I said hastily, and with that blessing the son sped into the restaurant, pushing aside the doorway’s beaded curtain.

  Nor was the restaurant empty. At the back of the shop, a Hui noodle maker pulled a hunk of dough. One table was occupied by a mother who sat with two boys, while another was occupied by a lone elderly man with a scraggly beard.

  “That man must be sick and maybe that woman is pregnant,” Nur whispered, explaining that certain people were excused from fasting, including children, the infirm, and women who were either pregnant or breast-feeding.

  Bowls filled with the same hand-pulled noodles I’d eaten farther east appeared at our table, the super-thin, chewy strands bathed in a spicy red broth flavored with turnips and garnished with beef slices. They were almost as good as the ones I’d had in Lanzhou. Grateful for the midday meal, I joined the others in quickly polishing it off.

  The feast continued at Nur’s home. He introduced me to his sister Malika, a pretty woman around my age with a narrow nose, freckles, and light brown hair. He and Malika ushered me to the grandest room of the house, which featured high-domed ceilings and wooden pillars engraved with repeating geometric patterns. It was reserved for entertaining and for putting up guests. Once, when relatives held a wedding nearby, thirty family members and friends had slept in the room. Since I was the only guest at the moment, I had the space to myself.

  Nur invited me to sit on a raised platform that ringed the room and poured me a cup of tea infused with rose, cumin, pomegranate seeds, and weeds from the Taklamakan Desert, giving it an earthy quality unlike any other tea I’d tried; I would drink cups of it every day during my visit. Malika came in and out of the room silently, setting out plates heaped with food on a woven red-and-gold blanket called a meze.

  Meze is also the Turkish word for “appetizers,” which Malika began bringing: grapes and pears plucked from the family orchard, followed by platters of dried fruits and nuts, the almonds as intensely flavored as their extract. A few minutes later she returned with a platter of mutton, barbecued so expertly that the fat had melted away and the skin crackled as I sank my teeth into it. Then a plateful of fried fish appeared, a dish I didn’t expect given we were so far away from the ocean. They were river fish, Nur explained, a sought-after delicacy in this land-locked region.

  It turned out that no one in Nur’s family was fasting. It wasn’t just because they were only moderately observant Muslims. The siblings, all of whom attended or worked for Chinese institutions, were forbidden to fast. At the start of the holiday at the school where Malika taught, the Han Chinese principal had gone around t
he classrooms to offer popcorn to everyone. It was the only time of the year that the administration doled out snacks. “Everyone was forced to eat. Otherwise, they were afraid they’d get in trouble,” Nur said. It was an example of how in such a politically charged place even an innocuous subject like food was sensitive.

  Nevertheless, the assumption was that everyone was fasting, and those who weren’t, like Nur’s family, generally ate in the privacy of their homes during the day. And it was impolite to point out that someone wasn’t fasting—something I did repeatedly the first few days, before I worked out the etiquette of Ramadan.

  • • •

  Nur’s home, behind a gate, was a sprawling series of rooms arranged around a courtyard. The large property also contained a barn and an orchard where pears ripened and walnuts plumped, and beyond that, corn shot toward the sky. Near the barn, the family had improvised an open-air kitchen. Next to the tonur, the beehive-shaped oven that Nur had told me about, a stove sat on a brick platform; the family had turned an old bed frame into a counter.

  Malika generously offered to teach me her favorite Uighur dishes. We began with polo, the Uighur word for Indian pilau, Persian polow, and Turkish pilaf. In most of China, rice was considered filler, not suitable for guests; indeed, guests who only went to banquets could easily get the impression that Chinese didn’t eat rice at all. But rice pilaf was the dish that traditionally welcomed guests into Uighur homes. It was also served at weddings and when dignitaries passed through town. It was an honor to be shown such hospitality.

  Malika sliced several carrots into matchsticks and diced a few onions. She heated up the kazan, a heavier version of a wok, added a generous amount of soybean oil (the same cooking oil Han Chinese used), and dropped in hunks of mutton. After the meat browned, she added carrots and onions. Then she rinsed several pounds of local rice—a grain that was popping up more frequently in the west. She added it to the kazan, the sweet scent of onions and frying meat perfuming the air as the pilaf simmered.

  While Malika cooked, the men of the household—Nur, his father, and his two brothers—watched while keeping an eye on Malika’s two children, a baby daughter and the son I’d met the day before when Malika’s husband had picked me up at the airport. (Ethnic minorities were allowed to have two children in China.) Nur’s mother had passed away years before, so the burden fell on Malika, the only woman left in the household. She took care of her daughter’s meal first, by reaching into the kazan for a piece of sheep’s liver, now fully cooked. Holding her daughter in her lap, she chewed the liver into bits before transferring them to the baby’s mouth. Then she went back to the kazan.

  “Cooking is a lot of work,” Nur observed.

  “Especially if the men don’t help,” I added. Everyone laughed, with varying degrees of comfort.

  I asked Malika if she cooked every night.

  “I cook every night and morning,” she said. “In Xinjiang, men don’t do anything.”

  Her father, a Mediterranean-looking man with a light olive complexion, agreed. “We men are very lazy! Malika works, making the same salary as her husband, but she also has to work at home. But we very much respect my daughter’s hard work.”

  Nur nodded. “In Xinjiang, it’s a man’s world.”

  But at least one of his brothers brought a ladle of broth from the kazan for Malika to taste. And another made tea. We moved to the guest room. This time it was Nur and his brothers who spread out the meze.

  When the rice was cooked to plump perfection, Malika divided the polo among several plates. I got a plate to myself, while the others were shared between pairs of family members. “We eat this with our hands,” Nur told me. “That’s why the Chinese called it shouzhua fan,” which means “hand-grabbed rice.” He offered me a spoon, but I declined, wanting to eat it the local way. They pushed the rice toward the center of the plate with their fingertips and scooped it into their mouths. The rice packed together more firmly in the center of the plate with every bite, like a giant mound of sushi rice. I marveled at how satisfying the meal was, and how little need there was for such supposed conveniences as a fancy kitchen, baby food, or even tableware.

  • • •

  In our Beijing neighborhood, Craig and I had frequented a couple of Uighur restaurants, arguing over which was better and compromising by going to each other’s favorite. But now in Xinjiang, I realized that neither was authentic. Uighur restaurants were to China what Chinese restaurants were to America: cheap, convenient establishments that reliably offered about a dozen of the same dishes. In nearly every city across China, you could find at least one restaurant where a chef in a Muslim skullcap stood out front, grilling lamb skewers, while chefs inside made noodle dishes. It was Hui, or other Muslim minorities, though, that ran many of these establishments across the nation. I discovered that two noodle dishes I associated with the eateries weren’t Uighur at all. A hand-pulled noodle dish called laghman was probably an offshoot of Hui hand-pulled noodles, la mian, given the dish’s likeness in name and content, Uighurs admitted. And they disavowed another mainstay, big plate chicken (dapanji)—the spicy chicken stew with chewy tagliatelle-like noodles, which they said was also Hui. “We do not traditionally eat spicy food,” explained a Uighur anthropologist I met in Urumqi. Nur’s family and other Uighurs confirmed this. Finding out that big plate chicken was a fraud was like discovering that fortune cookies were not Chinese.

  Uighurs did eat noodles, but bread—its predecessor—was popping up more frequently. It was baked most often in the beehive-shaped tonurs (a cousin of the Indian oven known as the tandoor) that were widespread across northwestern China. Bread, in fact, was so important that communities in Xinjiang were often dotted with small, noncommercial bakeries, usually family-run, their sole purpose to bake nang and deliver it to nearby homes. I also came across sesame rings called gerde that resembled bagels, hole and all. Some enterprising hoteliers catering to foreign tourists even paired the rings with little packets of cream cheese. (It was utterly surreal to be in China, eating a New York breakfast, watching locals who looked European ambling their way to mosque.)

  To the Uighurs, bread was sacred. “We cannot live without bread,” a Uighur I later met told me. “When we get married, we eat nang with salt water as a tradition. We are not allowed to throw nang away, however old it might be.” I got a sense of how important bread was at Nur’s home. In the mornings, we started the day with pieces of hardened nang, dipped in the earthy Taklamakan Desert tea or milk to soften it, a way of eating it that allowed the bread to sit on the shelf as long as breakfast cereal. One afternoon, Nur, his father, and I went on an outing and his father brought several rounds of nang with him. Any length of travel, even if it was just a few hours, required bread.

  I’d finally left behind the vegetable and meat stir-fries that were common across China. In their place was a bounty of the region’s nuts and fruits, famous throughout the country; in nearly every large city, Uighur vendors on bicycles pulled wagons behind them filled with walnuts, almonds, and pistachios, along with dried apricots, melons, and grapes. The almonds all had that extract-like intensity. Raisins, both the black and golden variety, were so plump and sweet that even a trick-or-treater wouldn’t object to them. Sometimes the fruits and nuts were pressed together with grape molasses called pekmez (an ingredient I would see later in my journey) and eaten as a candy called matang. And the fresh fruit was even better than the dried, particularly the melons. I fell head over heels for the hami melon, a ten-pound football-shaped cousin of the cantaloupe. It had the same ridged exterior and orange-hued flesh, but it was far juicier and sweeter, and crisp like a watermelon. More than once in Xinjiang, I bought a gigantic hami melon just for myself and came shockingly close to finishing it.

  • • •

  The next time Malika and I cooked together, she showed me how to make poshkal, Uighur crepes with Chinese chives. Now that I’d spent a few days in the vil
lage, the cooking was less of an event and the men left us alone. And once I’d gotten over my hesitation to use Mandarin, I’d discovered that Malika spoke it well, allowing us to communicate freely.

  It was around seven in the evening, well before sundown, and the outdoor speakers in the neighborhood were blasting the government-approved news in Uighur. I helped Malika mince a bunch of Chinese chives. Han Chinese often stuffed the long green shoots and scrambled eggs into their dumplings, but I’d always found the vegetable overpowering. They kept popping up along my journey, though, and each time I found them in a new dish, I appreciated them more. Before long, I began to crave them.

  The knife I used was long and thin, perfect for slicing enormous melons but not so convenient for mincing, a less important skill in Uighur cuisine than in Han Chinese. While I minced, Malika made the batter. She wiggled her fingers through the stream of flour she poured, to sift it. She mixed in eggs, water, and salt before folding in the chives. She placed a wok over the fire, opting for the Chinese pan because it was smoother and wider than a kazan. To make each crepe, she added a healthy ladleful of oil, then poured some batter along the inside edges of the wok, tilting the pan to allow the batter to coat it evenly. When it had firmed into a thin sheet, she removed it and started another. Watching the pancakes come off the wok, I noticed they were reminiscent of one of my favorite Beijing snacks, jian bing—wheat-flour crepes cooked on a griddle and served with a sprinkle of coriander and leeks.

  As we cooked, Malika opened up. Ever since her mother had died the decade before, she had taken on the household duties, she said. “I was nineteen. My youngest brother was five. It was very difficult for all of us, but my father found another wife two years later.” I’d met the stepmother, but she didn’t seem close to the children, nor did she live with the family. Nur had told me that she was in the care of other relatives because she was suffering from a heart condition. She’d come to the house once, dressed in a thick smock and counting a string of beads she held in her hand, a tradition shared by Muslims, Buddhists, and Catholics. “Look at how religious she is,” Nur had said with scorn.