by Jen Lin-Liu
As I would see in other places along the Silk Road, it was the food that made the neighborhood come alive. I initially thought that visiting Xinjiang during Ramadan was a stroke of bad planning. But, as I learned at Nur’s, the holiday highlighted the importance of food, making clear the contrast of life with and without sustenance. In the mornings, the Kashgar neighborhood where I stayed was languid. The baker sat listlessly in front of his hearth, slowly baking large round pieces of nang. Wafting from the oven was a scent that reminded me of freshly baked pizza, making me realize it was the dough, not the sauce or the toppings, that provided pizza’s essential fragrance. The scent went to waste in the alleys as the sun rose; the nang the baker stacked on his table remained untouched. The butcher stared into space next to a lamb carcass hanging from a hook, the price per kilogram written on a changeable placard. At an open-air general store, tea leaves and spices sat in crates undisturbed as the day grew hotter. In one supermarket near the bazaar, most of the aisles were empty of customers except for the drink aisle, where fasters sometimes parked themselves and gazed at cans of Coca-Cola and pomegranate juice as a test of will.
In the late afternoon, the neighborhood began to stir. Vendors appeared on the streets, setting out wicker baskets neatly stacked with flat yellow figs, unloading melons from the backs of trucks, and opening large vats filled with homemade yogurt. They heated up griddles and ovens, preparing to make Russian-style crepes, called blini, and savory breads. After a long, hungry day, shoppers began to arrive, the slow trickle of customers quickly growing to a torrent that swept along motorbikes, dogs, and children. By dusk, the chaos reached fever pitch, the vendors shouting prices and flaunting their wares as shoppers, getting more famished by the second, jostled in messy queues.
Craig and I were drawn to one stand with a very long line of people holding out money and waiting in hungry anticipation. They had gathered in front of a tonur that was producing something that looked like cinnamon raisin bagels. When I got a little closer, I saw that the bread was indeed shaped like a puffy bagel, but without a hole, and it was not raisins that flecked the surface but little brown bits of lamb. People were buying them, but as it was not yet sundown, they abstained from eating the fresh buns.
Anticipation was building. Scattered around the neighborhood were little stands set up by the community that offered free slices of watermelon and bread at sundown. We turned a corner and ran into the biggest wok I’d ever seen. It was larger than a kiddie pool and filled with bubbling rice pilaf. Every so often, the chef circled the perimeter of the wok, pouring in broth from a kettle. The pilaf glistened with carrots and lamb, and the scent of cumin and onions wafted in the air. The chef said he’d been cooking since two in the afternoon and, now, just as the sun dropped below the horizon, he doled out large ladlefuls of the pilaf. Everyone had brought their own cups and plates for the food, which anonymous donors sponsored every night during the month. Someone offered us a plastic bag and into it went a ladle of rice pilaf, a dish I was growing more familiar with by the day.
“Allah says that if you do good deeds during Ramadan, you will be rewarded seven hundred times in your afterlife,” the chef said.
• • •
In Kashgar, Craig and I fell into a pattern that was an adaptation of our life together in Beijing. We would have breakfast together, and then we would pursue our separate work. I would go off for a cooking class or an excursion, and Craig, who’d gotten a few magazines interested in Silk Road articles, would go out to report or stay in to work on his book. In the late afternoon, we would meet and take a walk and settle in for dinner, usually at a restaurant. This became our routine, or as much of one as we could construct on the road.
After breakfast one morning, I met with a beret-wearing Uighur guide named Elvis, who offered to arrange cooking classes for me. “I know a woman who is a very good cook,” he said in a nasal voice. “But we’ll see if she’s willing to cook for you.” He was a pessimistic fellow. The guiding business wasn’t going so well, he said. The crackdown on Uighurs had scared many tourists away.
I asked him how he’d ended up with a name like Elvis. He told me there was a better-known Han Chinese guide in the city, named John. He wanted to be more famous than John, so one foreigner he’d guided recommended that he name himself Elvis.
Then he talked about my name. “Did you know that Jen means ‘the devil’ in Uighur?” he said with a laugh. Every so often, as I learned Uighur dishes and he translated by my side, he would brighten. “After you learn these dishes, you can invite your friends to your home and have a Uighur party!” he’d say.
Elvis introduced me to his friend Hayal, who lived in the old quarter. In her late fifties, she was a regal woman with auburn hair, a rosy complexion, and a beak-like nose. She wore flowery frocks that flowed to her ankles, and covered her hair (but not her face) with a head scarf of light brown mesh. She lived in a beautiful walled-in compound on Uzbek Lane, named such because the alley’s inhabitants, including Hayal’s family, had migrated from Uzbekistan more than a century before. (Uighurs and Uzbeks are ethnically and culturally similar and have moved between China and Central Asia for centuries.) Though the two-story home was built around a courtyard, like other homes I’d seen in China, it felt more European with its rosebushes and fig trees. As in Nur’s home, the grandest room was for guests. I spent most of my time there, and on the airy porch before it, where Hayal taught me Uighur noodle dishes.
She began with chuchura, small dumplings that reminded me of wontons in soup. As in many places on the Silk Road, the dumpling filling was lamb, or more accurately, mutton, the meat of a mature sheep. She called for her daughter-in-law, a pretty woman named Ana, who appeared in the room with a large ax that Hayal used to hack apart the meat. She separated the gristle, fat, and a large bone and boiled them in an electric rice cooker with tomatoes, onions, and radishes to make soup. With a knife, she minced the tender meat for the filling. The meat was so fresh that it didn’t have the gamy smell I associated with mutton. She chopped up coriander stems and onions and added them to the filling, seasoning it with black pepper, ground cumin, and “a little salt,” as the Uighur woman described it, dumping in two heaping spoonfuls.
The wrappers were made with flour, salt, water, and egg—making them more similar to Italian pasta. The rolling pin Hayal used, which was larger in diameter than Chinese ones and came with handles, also reminded me more of the West. She rolled out the dough into a thin sheet and cut the sheet into two-inch squares. She took a wrapper, added a tiny dollop of meat to the center, folded it in half, and pinched the two opposite edges together. The dough was so pliable that, like fresh Chinese dumpling skins, it didn’t need to be moistened at the edges before being sealed. After we finished wrapping, she added the dumplings to the soup, along with leftover scraps of dough, and boiled them for a few minutes before serving the dumplings, the scraps, and the soup together. The mutton fat had made the broth smooth and silky, and there was just enough filling in the chuchura to impart flavor but not take away from the tender wrappers. Hayal was indeed an excellent cook, as Elvis had claimed. It was prescient that she had started with chuchura as well—I would continue to see replicas of this dish as I went west, all the way to Italy.
Another day we made manta, Uighur steamed dumplings. The name sounded like Chinese mantou, steamed bread buns, but manta were stuffed like Chinese dumplings, albeit with a higher proportion of meat to dough, a reflection of the importance of meat in the Uighur diet. Hayal placed a pound of marbled mutton on a wooden cutting board and minced it with a curved blade. It was not just meat that gave manta its distinctive taste, but fat—she pointed at the white streaks on the mutton and said, “Without fat, the manta won’t be delicious.” After finely chopping the meat, she mixed in the same flavorings as for chuchura—minced white onion, ground cumin, black pepper, and a generous dose of salt—the main seasonings of Uighur food, as important as ginger, leek, and garlic
were to northern Chinese food.
Hayal ordered her daughter-in-law to roll out the wrappers, using the same dough as for chuchura. Ana rolled out a wrapper to about the size of a Chinese dumpling. The mother-in-law grabbed the pin from her daughter-in-law. “You’re doing it wrong!” she growled before flattening it into a larger, thinner disk. She placed a large spoonful of meat in its center and pinched together the edges at the top so that the dumpling was shaped like a shoe and the folds resembled laces threaded together. After the manta were steamed, Hayal served them with clotted sheep’s cream. Gone were the vinegar, soy sauce, and chili oil that garnished Chinese dumplings; in their place entered dairy, the first I’d seen of it other than yogurt. The dumplings were hearty and rich; just a few were enough to fill my stomach.
Hayal was more observant than Nur and his family. She rose every day at six to read the Koran. Even as she taught me how to cook, she abstained from eating. She told me that Islam taught that guests were sent from God; that was why she’d invited me into her home. She saw it as her duty to accommodate me. But her hospitality had limits; she would not allow me to touch any meat in her home because I wasn’t halal, which meant I often sat by idly as she worked.
As Hayal was teaching me how to make rice pilaf one morning, her sister came by. She entered the courtyard as a giant blob, her head and face covered by a thick brown burqa, her body enveloped in a long black robe down to her ankles that reminded me of a nun’s habit. She lifted the burqa, folding it behind her forehead once the door was safely closed. The first time I’d visited Kashgar, the coverings had startled me. They had seemed so backward, so oppressive—I couldn’t quite understand how women would submit to walking around town so veiled, particularly in the heat of summer.
The sister watched as Hayal and I cooked, smiling nostalgically. One of her sons had recently gotten married, so she no longer had to cook. “Now my daughter-in-law does all the cooking!” she said with a cackle.
Hayal groaned. Her own daughter-in-law was useless, she said. She’d been wrong in thinking the girl would be a good match for her son. “Sometimes I have to call her three times before she comes over. And she barely knows how to cook!”
Ana was within earshot. It also didn’t seem to matter that Hayal had a maid, a young teenage girl from the countryside whom she treated with equal disdain, or that Ana had just had a baby and was supposed to be resting, on leave from her job as a nurse. (“I can’t wait to get back to work,” Ana whispered to me in a furtive moment.) During my lessons, as the hired help sat by listlessly, Hayal fired off a litany of orders at Ana: bring the ax, bring the knife, bring the water, roll the dumplings, take the cutting board and knife away.
I asked Hayal’s sister why she wore the veil.
“It protects me from the evil eye of strange men outside the home,” she said. I’d heard about the evil eye from other Uighurs—a bad spirit that lurked, sometimes in another person whose gaze could inflict damage should it fall upon you.
“Does your husband make you wear the veil?” I asked.
“He prefers that I wear it,” she said, but she made it clear that the driving force was her own desire to protect herself.
I asked if any of her daughters wore the veil.
“No,” she said, glancing at my capri pants and long-sleeved sweater. “They wear the same things as you. I hope one day they will wear the veil, too, but they will have to choose for themselves.”
She turned her attention to the fig tree in the courtyard. “It looks sick,” she said. “Somebody must have given it the evil eye.”
“We must pray to bring it back to health,” Hayal agreed.
• • •
I was praying for my own health a few days later, when my digestive tract went haywire from all the changes in my diet. When I told Craig I was going to see a traditional Uighur doctor, he was skeptical. He didn’t believe in traditional medicine. I was agnostic but was willing to give it a try.
As at most Chinese hospitals, privacy was a foreign concept at the Uighur clinic. The door to the consulting room remained open throughout my visit, and people waiting for their own appointments watched as the doctor poked and prodded me. At one point, a woman barged in and asked the doctor to write her a note for her employer. (“It would be nice if you could say I was sick for five days,” she said.) Fortunately, the doctor didn’t require me to undress.
“Stick out your tongue,” he said. I obliged, hesitantly. “Stick it out farther!” he commanded. I did my best to channel my five-year-old self. He winced, as if the sight confirmed his worst fears. “You have a lot of yel.”
“What’s yel?” I asked, stealing a glance in the mirror. It was an invisible concept, like the evil eye. As he explained more, it sounded something like huoqi, fire-air, a Chinese concept that my grandmother often talked about when I was a child.
The general idea of Uighur traditional medicine, like its Chinese counterpart, and other forms I would encounter along the Silk Road, was of balancing forces in the body—hot and cold, and to a lesser extent, wet and dry—to maintain one’s health. Everything a person ate could be categorized as “hot” or “cold”; though temperature might be one factor, it was more about how the food interacted with one’s body. Individuals were also diagnosed with “hotter” or “colder” dispositions, which could be balanced out by consuming certain foods. Having too much yel, or huoqi, meant that I had too much internal heat, which could cause a range of issues, including pimples, rashes, canker sores, or, as in my case, digestive troubles.
The doctor told me to stop showering—exposing my body to torrents of water would exacerbate my problem. (That didn’t sound so difficult, given that I’d just gone a week without a shower.) He recommended that I stop consuming milk as well (not a problem, either, as I am lactose intolerant and avoid milk) and fruit (a little harder, given the delicious produce). And noodles. The gluten in the noodles would work my stomach into bigger knots, he explained. That was a complete nonstarter. There was no way I could give up the dish that had inspired my journey. But I decided not to argue and instead nodded politely.
“We have all kinds of medicine that can help,” he said. “All you have to do is pay between twelve and fifteen dollars and you’ll feel much better.”
“Can I feel better for, say, seven dollars?” I asked. I couldn’t resist. Bargaining had become second nature, having lived in China for so long.
“Sure,” he said, chuckling as he wrote the prescription, which I collected from the pharmacy downstairs.
Back in my hotel room, I unfolded the camping spork that Craig traveled with and sniffed and tasted the various substances. One seemed to be a paste of crushed rose petals and sugar—I imagined it would go quite well on toast—while another was a sugary paste flavored with mint, which I later added to tea. The third jar contained cumin, cinnamon, black pepper, and ginger mixed with a sticky, tarry substance that reminded me of Vegemite, the Australian yeast-based condiment. That jar I could have done without.
The idea of food as medicine was on display all along the Silk Road, and the farther I traveled, the more I wondered how the West had strayed from the idea. Americans could recite the old adage “You are what you eat,” but they’d forgotten what it meant as they chowed down on increasing amounts of processed food.
Still, while the concept in general made perfect sense, the specific principles were hard to apply. Despite being raised by Chinese parents and having lived in China for a decade, I was still baffled by what was hot or cold. Oranges, despite the vitamin C, were not to be eaten when you had a cold, because they were hot. Lychees were especially warming—eat one too many and you’d develop blisters in your mouth. Watermelon was cooling, which made intuitive sense, as did the fact that fried and spicy foods were both hot. But then chickens were hot and ducks were cooling—“That’s because ducks are often in or near water,” one Chinese friend explained.
&n
bsp; Along my trip, I received bewildering advice about which foods cured or exacerbated ailments. On one train trip in eastern China, my fellow passengers—who happened to be randomly conversing about food, as Chinese often do—advised me to eat black sesame if I wanted to prevent gray hair. Chairman Wang warned me never to drink cold water, no matter how hot it was outside, because it was detrimental to my overall health. In Xinjiang, Uighurs told me walnuts would make me smarter and that aloe and watermelon, eaten together, would relieve headaches and eye infections. And black sesame? That didn’t ward off gray hair in Xinjiang. There it reduced high blood pressure. (Maybe it did both.) And, of course, rhubarb cured constipation, something I’d learned in my research.
Confused by all this, I decided to skip food altogether for a day. I approached the challenge with some trepidation. I’d never fasted before. Fasting was only part of Chinese tradition when it was forced upon you—for example, if you were in a famine. Why would a people who had experienced so much hardship voluntarily fast? Many Chinese I knew ate at regimented times every day, preferring to start their lunches and dinners just before noon and six. And they ate heartily, until every last grain of rice was gone. When I dined with my paternal grandmother, who’d almost starved to death during World War II, she often scolded and goaded me until I finished every last speck off my plate.
But it was Ramadan, and what better opportunity to fast—particularly if I could find a partner. Craig, not wanting to interfere with my work, suggested I fast with a local (he wasn’t much of a faster, either). But Elvis wasn’t fasting and anyway his glumness had begun to wear on me, along with his strange superstitions that reminded me of Hayal and her sister. He proclaimed how religious he was, despite not fasting (for health reasons, he said) and didn’t pray five times a day, as most observant Sunni Muslims do. He explained it was okay, though, because he attended five o’clock prayers at the mosque, the time “when the angels come down every day and report to God.”