On the Noodle Road

by Jen Lin-Liu

  I asked Malika if she liked to cook. She laughed. “Even if I didn’t like it, what could I do about it?”

  She told me her job was extra busy around this time of year because the new school year had just begun. I asked if many women in Xinjiang worked, given that many Uighurs continued to be devoutly Muslim. Malika said her situation wasn’t unique; although Uighur women traditionally hadn’t worked outside their homes, nowadays most were employed, like most women in China. The majority of Uighur women I met, though, stuck to a traditionally female profession like nursing or teaching. “The local imam declared a while ago that it was okay for women to work,” Malika said. But women still faced certain restrictions, like a socially enforced dress code that pressured them to wear head scarves, shirts with sleeves that at least covered their elbows, and skirts that hit below the knee. Pants were frowned upon.

  “What do you think of those rules?” I asked.

  “Islam is loosening up. It’s much less strict than it used to be. The imam declaring that women can work was a big step. Anyways,” she added, “if my husband made enough money, I wouldn’t have a problem not working!”

  But that wasn’t the case, so every morning Malika dropped off her children with her retired father, fixed their lunch, and dashed off to work. After finishing the school day around six in the evening, she and her husband met at her father’s home, and she started the evening chores while the men watched television. Only after dinner did she bundle up her children so that she and her husband could drive them back to their apartment a few miles away. As she spoke about her daily routine, I was struck that it didn’t sound so different from the lives of American friends who’d recently become parents.

  Malika asked about my journey. How long was I traveling for? Where was I going? And when would my husband join me?

  As I explained where I’d been and where I was going, she suddenly interrupted: “You know, I really admire you. You’re so free and independent!”

  As I’d traveled west from Beijing, it felt as if I was drifting farther from the familiar. After Xi’an, I’d met a Han noodle maker who’d furtively told me her marriage was arranged. In the Tibetan region, Isabel and I had mostly socialized with her male friends. In Xinjiang, more women covered their hair with head scarves, sometimes even their entire faces with burqas. My conversations with women became briefer. I often felt more comfortable with their husbands or brothers or fathers. Now, in this small Uighur village, having found a woman who was instantly at ease with me, spoke so directly, and admired what I was doing, I could not think how to respond.

  So instead of saying anything, I stood closer to her, and she to me. Elbow to elbow, we finished cooking. Her son flung a pile of flour into the air, which landed on him like a cloud of desert dust. Occasionally, she shooed her daughter away from the fire. Inside, she had several hungry men waiting for dinner.

  • • •

  The truth was, I was afraid of becoming Malika, a wife burdened with household duties while also juggling a job. But that was the farthest thing from my mind when Craig formally proposed, six months after I’d impulsively blathered that I would marry him. We were at a restaurant set in a fruit orchard on the outskirts of Beijing. We’d just finished a weekend of hiking along the Great Wall, and as we strolled among the trees after a hearty dinner, he unexpectedly paused, pulled out a box with a ring, and asked me to marry him. Through my sobs, I blubbered, “Yes.”

  We married in San Diego, in a small park overlooking the Pacific, before our closest family and friends, and I wept just as I had when he’d proposed. We said our vows, including the one I’d suggested, to put our relationship before our careers. And after a honeymoon on idyllic Kauai, we settled into our new life as a married couple in Beijing.

  Where, after finishing my first book, opening a cooking school, and planning a wedding, I suddenly felt empty. Let down. I had nothing monumental on the horizon. And the realization hit me: almost overnight, it seemed, I’d gone from being a single, independent woman to a wife.

  Yikes, a wife. After the wedding, the word sounded so patriarchal, so foreign, so not me. I felt guilty. This was what I’d wanted, wasn’t it? I was married to the man of my dreams. How could I be unhappy? But wife conjured the image of the dissatisfied woman that Betty Friedan had described in The Feminine Mystique, who, in my version, wore hair curlers and a robe and yelled at neighborhood cats from a second-floor window of a sprawling, lonely suburban home.

  One day, after I’d heard Craig say “wife” on the phone, I asked him if he could call me something else. “Um, okay,” he said, not sure whether to laugh or be alarmed. Could I suggest an alternative? But I wasn’t anything else—I was a wife, even if he called me partner or spouse or even airen, the nice-sounding Chinese word that literally means “lover” but refers to spouses. I couldn’t go back to the carefree days of being a girlfriend or a fiancée, with the optimism, the unburdened promise that those words carried.

  And then other things I’d thought I wanted before the wedding, like changing my name, began to seem more complicated. I’d figured that I’d change my last name legally but continue using my maiden one professionally. I’d gone through the legal process once before; as a child I’d changed my given name from Ching-Yee to Jennifer—an indication of my identity struggle. But officially going from Lin-Liu to Simons would be entirely different in China, a country where married women keep their maiden name and where the process would take months and involve bureaucratic nightmares. Then I realized changing my name would also mean changing my signature, which seemed bizarre. All the credit card slips, the checks, the books I’d signed as an author would be forever different. And finally I had to admit to myself the biggest reason of all: having no part of my name be Chinese, as conflicted as I was about my identity, seemed just too strange.

  These struggles were exacerbated by the turmoil of trying to figure out our lives. Just months after we married, Cox Newspapers folded its foreign bureaus, ending Craig’s job. He went back to freelance writing, and soon after he was awarded the yearlong science writing fellowship at MIT, in Cambridge, Massachusetts. It was a path I’d supported, and I’d offered to come along for most of the year. But when it actually came time for his fellowship to begin, I panicked. I was not just a wife; now I was also becoming a trailing spouse. What would I do about the cooking school? What about my writing career in China?

  Craig had hoped I’d spend most of my time in Cambridge and thought that we could use the year to plot a new course. After spending almost a decade in China, he wanted a new challenge. But, for plenty of reasons, I still wasn’t quite ready to leave China. So I spent the year bouncing between opposite sides of the world. In Beijing, I worked at the cooking school and wrote freelance articles. In Cambridge, I took classes at Harvard and read in the libraries. And in my spare time, I cooked.

  Though I was a food writer and a trained chef, I didn’t cook at home often when we lived in Beijing. China’s cheap and delicious selection of restaurants made going out too easy. But in the States, restaurants were expensive, so cooking was the default. Plus, in my image of an idyllic American marriage, eating a home-cooked dinner was a nightly ritual that families were supposed to engage in. It seemed the very foundation of domestic life.

  Aside from occasional trips to the Chinese supermarket across the Charles River, I discovered to my delight that there was a Whole Foods nearby, chock-full of organic produce, glistening herbs, and fresh seafood. Craig and I made weekend trips there on our bicycles, filling our knapsacks with groceries whose price tags outraged Craig. (“Whole paycheck,” he would mutter as we pedaled away.) During the week, I spent my late afternoons and early evenings in our little apartment kitchen, cooking. But instead of enjoying the ritual, I began to resent it. Craig occasionally would pad in to help wash vegetables or do a little chopping, but then he would just as easily slip out into another room. And there I was, feeling like I was ch
ained to the kitchen, monitoring several bubbling pots and staring at a cutting board heaped with half-minced vegetables.

  One evening, as Craig was fixing himself a drink and settling into a plate of cheese and crackers and I was at the stove, I dissolved into a flood of tears. I didn’t like doing all of the cooking by myself, I sobbed.

  Craig pointed out that I always wanted to decide the menu. I was tyrannical about making everything from scratch. I considered the kitchen my domain. And I refused to order in cheap takeout, insisting that we live up to some Norman Rockwell ideal of domestic life.

  But in my revised version of it, the husband contributed equally to the cooking. It wasn’t that I wanted Craig to slave away at the stove alone, either; I envisioned cooking as something fun we could do together.

  “You know me well enough,” Craig said. Cooking wasn’t something he considered fun, he reminded me. But seeing me in such a state, he gave me a hug and relented: if home-cooked meals were what I wanted, he would try to be supportive and contribute more.

  Craig made an effort, but I could tell that he would rather be doing something else, and often I would just shoo him out and relieve him of the tasks he reluctantly undertook. Much of the time, I still found myself alone in the kitchen, sometimes grumbling to myself. I was beginning to realize that I was conflicted by what had become my livelihood. Now that cooking had become a monotonous domestic chore, a duty that had been imposed on me, I wasn’t loving it so much. I was confused, though, as to who was doing the imposing—was it Craig, was it society, or was it simply me?

  • • •

  I’d truly enjoyed my stay in Nur’s home. Each morning, I conversed with Nur and his father in my feeble Uighur while eating a breakfast of nang and tea with them. I took walks in the surrounding countryside, flat farmland where houses sat on roomy, irrigated plots and young children played in the sand. When Malika returned from work, we cooked, chatting as we chopped and stirred. But there was one thing that bothered me.

  “I don’t think they bathe here,” I whispered to Craig on the phone one night.

  “Why don’t you ask about it?” he suggested.

  “Don’t be silly!” I said. I didn’t want to ask about bathing, lest I embarrass my hosts. As in many homes I’d visited, I didn’t see any running water. In the mornings and evenings, I brushed my teeth and washed my face in the courtyard, beneath a low spigot. Calls of nature were answered in the outhouse. Malika washed dishes with water that came from a metal drum. So I made do with a wet towel wipe-down every evening. My hair felt a little greasy by the third day, but I discovered no difference between three-day and five-day unwashed hair. Bizarrely, everyone around me seemed to remain fairly fresh. Maybe the arid climate helped?

  Finally, on the day I was to leave, I asked Nur, “Can I, uh, wash my hair?”

  “You mean, you want to shower?” Nur said. “I’ll prepare some hot water for you.” As I conjured an image of my scrawny host engaging in some backbreaking task of heating and hauling buckets of water, he walked down the hall, pushed open a door, and flipped a switch. Behind the door was a white-tiled room with a perfectly modern shower. It was, in fact, the most luxurious shower I’d seen in weeks.

  “So sorry!” Nur said after I emerged. An impish smile spread over his face. “I forgot to tell you about the shower. Why didn’t you ask?”

  Nur’s absentmindedness also created plenty of drama around my departure. I’d decided to fly back to Urumqi and from there continue my journey west. Nur had arranged for Malika’s husband to take us to the airport. (Nur would fly to Urumqi with me and then continue on to Beijing.) When the appointed time came and went, he called his brother-in-law. He was still more than an hour’s drive away, he told Nur. They finally worked out that Nur had stated our departure in Beijing time, the official time that all of China ran on, while Nur’s brother-in-law thought he’d meant the unofficial local time, three hours behind, on which most Uighurs ran their lives.

  With just an hour before our flight was supposed to leave, we had no time to wait for Malika’s husband. So we ran. We ran through the sandy streets of Nur’s village, my backpack strapped to me and a knapsack slung over Nur’s back, while an uncle, carrying a suitcase on his head, and Nur’s father trailed behind us. Once we turned out of the village, we ran some more, on a side street that led to a highway. On the side of the highway, we tried to hail a taxi. But none were free. One occupied taxi slowed down, seeing the frantic expression on our faces. After Nur explained the situation, the passengers—a woman and two children—generously climbed out and Nur, his father, and I hopped in, waving good-bye to the uncle and profusely offering our thanks to the strangers as we puttered off. The driver, though, went at a leisurely pace—“I think this driver is a little chicken,” Nur said—and twice we were stopped, by roadblocks the police had set up to monitor locals. We got to the airport twenty-five minutes before our departure time.

  At the security gate, we slowed down for a moment and said good-bye to Nur’s father. “I’m sorry Nur didn’t take care of you better. But you’re like a daughter to us and please come back and visit again,” he said. Before we boarded our flight that would take Nur far away from his family for months, possibly even more than a year, Nur’s father embraced him tenderly and handed him his knapsack. Inside were a dozen rounds of nang.

  • • •

  After Nur and I parted ways, Craig joined me in Urumqi, the capital of Xinjiang. Over his three-hour flight from Beijing, he covered as much distance as I had in a month. It was around midnight when he arrived at the guesthouse I’d booked. We were used to traveling apart for long periods and reuniting in random cities. But given the distance I’d traveled and all the things I’d seen and eaten, it seemed much longer than a month since we’d seen each other. It felt a little unreal to see my six-foot-tall husband emerging from the taxi to join me in a grungy hostel in this far-flung desert province. But after we embraced, and I felt his sandy brown hair underneath his baseball cap and looked into his bright blue eyes, it felt like he was coming home.

  The next morning, I was excited to have Craig taste some authentic Uighur dishes. But as we left the motel, around nine o’clock Beijing time, we discovered that Urumqi, like the rest of Xinjiang, was still in slumber, with their clocks set three hours behind. The only storefront with its lights on was a Kentucky Fried Chicken.

  “I’m not so sure I want to go in there,” Craig said warily. I was surprised. He was usually okay with KFC, particularly in transit. “You want to portray me as a food neophyte.”

  It wasn’t a baseless accusation. In my first book, along with describing him as the handsome, intelligent man he is, I’d exaggerated Craig’s disinterest in food. He claimed I’d maligned him, and we’d laughed about it. But one day he’d read selected passages out loud, and I had to admit, my words did sound a little unfair.

  But KFC was the only restaurant open at that hour. “Where else are we going to go?” I asked. I promised I would not use his compliance against him. So we pushed open the door to the last corporate fast food we would see for thousands of miles.

  I had mixed feelings about fast food, especially overseas. I disliked the cultural homogenization it represented and the fact that it gave travelers an easy way to avoid local food. But I didn’t object to it for health reasons—how many restaurant meals were actually good for you, after all? And in China, KFC was pretty good. Their fried chicken aside, they’d localized the food. They spiked their chicken burger with spices and served one of the better Chinese breakfasts: egg tarts and soy milk with savory crullers called youtiao. I’d always enjoyed the egg tarts—the crisp and light pastry and the sweet and smooth eggy filling made them as good as ones at fancy dim sum restaurants. But as I sank my teeth into the sweet that morning, I remembered what Bai, the Hui food writer, had said about KFC. They hadn’t taken any steps to localize their menu for Muslim minorities—they catered only to
Han Chinese.

  • • •

  Craig and I spent a couple days poking around Urumqi and its surrounding areas. We visited the museum with the fourteen-hundred-year-old dumpling—though small and shriveled, it was more intact than the four-thousand-year-old noodle. We visited the karez, underground canals that had irrigated desert farmland for centuries. But in general, the area felt little different from eastern China, so we cut our time short and went on to Kashgar, the ancient Silk Road trading post. On the twenty-four-hour train ride, I got a much better feel for the expansiveness of Xinjiang’s deserts than I had on the plane. I said as much to Craig when we were playing cards in the dining car in the afternoon.

  “These are not deserts,” declared one of the Han train conductors, who’d heard me use the Chinese word sha mo.

  “What are they?” I asked.

  She used a word I didn’t recognize.

  “Maybe it’s similar to how Eskimos have lots of words for snow,” Craig said.

  The next day, we arrived in Kashgar, the most Uighur town in Xinjiang. At the western edge of the Taklamakan Desert and near the foot of the Pamirs and the Tien Shan mountain ranges, the city had been a trading post for Central Asians and Chinese for two millennia. The British and Russians had set up consulates in the town in the late nineteenth century as part of their Great Game tussle over the region. Though the British influence had faded, Russians, along with Central Asians, still frequented the city to make deals on carpets, food, and bric-a-brac. But even here the government was doing its best to Hanify the city. They were shutting down bazaars and tearing down old neighborhoods. In their place, modern shopping arcades and towers rose. But still, the remaining parts of the old quarter retained their character. The dusty narrow alleys and the clay exteriors of homes were so similar to a typical Afghan neighborhood that Hollywood producers filmed The Kite Runner there.