On the Noodle Road

by Jen Lin-Liu

  At the bed-and-breakfast we stayed in before the hike, we met an American couple in their seventies. Hans and Jane arrived late one evening, the headlights of their hired car shining through the living-room window. The car waited while Jane, in a brown vest and hiking boots fitting for a war correspondent, bargained with the innkeeper. I was impressed with her boldness. It was past nine and there weren’t many guesthouses in this forlorn little town.

  After they settled in, we struck up a conversation with the couple. They’d just come from Tajikistan, where they’d taken a weeklong trip on the Pamir Highway, one of the region’s most scenic drives, which runs along steep mountains dotted with villages and lakes. We invited them to join us for dinner the next evening at a nearby home occupied by Dungans, the ethnic minority known as the Hui in China. The minority had migrated to Central Asia after a Muslim rebellion in the 1800s, and their descendants were a sizable minority in Kyrgyzstan. I was intrigued to learn that Dungans had brought many of their dishes with them. But while the Dungan family served us delectable fruits, nuts, and pastries, the main course was lackluster—the hand-pulled noodles were unpleasantly thick and floated in a watery sauce. And then there was the trouble with the seating.

  In what I was learning was typical for Central Asia, dinner was served on a low table set on a raised platform on one side of the living room. Jane, Craig, and I slipped effortlessly onto the platform, placing our legs beneath the low table. But Hans squatted precariously, legs trembling. “What’s wrong, Hans?” Jane asked loudly. “I—can’t—sit!” he said finally. Our hosts moved us to a Western-style table nearby. Many Westerners, it turned out, had the same problem.

  Hans also had trouble hearing. So Jane did most of the talking, telling us that her husband had been an accomplished neurosurgeon who’d practiced in Boston, not far from where Craig grew up, while Jane was a teacher. After retirement, they split their time between San Diego, where I’d lived in my youth, and Sydney. But most of the time they were on the road, visiting their grandchildren and seeing the world. Jane reflected fondly on their younger years, even when they’d struggled before Hans had settled into his career. She gushed nostalgically about trips she’d taken to China. She told us, too, about a trip to Nepal she would take later that year, not with Hans but with a girlfriend, a several-week-long trek on the Annapurna circuit, which piqued my husband’s curiosity—he’d always wanted to do that very hike. Despite the difference in their physical abilities, she and Hans seemed to get along well, and it was encouraging to see a couple whose adventurous spirit hadn’t diminished with age.

  After dinner, I asked Jane what she thought was the key to a happy marriage.

  She paused for just a second before she said, “Always support your partner’s dreams and ambitions.”

  And with that, I braced myself for a week of high-altitude hiking with my mountain-loving husband.

  • • •

  In the morning, we drove to the trailhead with our large support crew. Our guide, a recent college graduate named Anarbek, told us we would travel over two twelve-thousand-foot passes in the coming week. He and one of the porters were ethnic Kyrgyz, with features that seemed a blend of Han Chinese and Tibetan. Meanwhile, the cook and the other porter had the fair skin and light hair of their Russian ancestors. As it turned out, the large crew would come in handy—I hadn’t quite wrapped my head around the challenges of the hike.

  The trek began leisurely enough. We ambled through a valley that cut through red sandstone cliffs and stopped for refreshments at a nomads’ yurt. A pair of sisters paused in milking cows to bring us mugs of thin, milky koumiss, cow’s and mare’s milk fermented for days until it became slightly carbonated and alcoholic. It was the national drink of Kyrgyzstan, even given to babies, and a tradition old enough to have appeared in Marco Polo’s travelogue.

  Polo had likened the beverage to a fine wine, but I had another reaction. Craig snapped photos of my response: an undeniable look of horror spread over my face as I took my first sip. I’d never ingested anything quite like it. The koumiss evolved from sweet to sour to salty on my tongue, and it was not wine that it tasted like, but some kind of moonshine, spiked with soda water and spoiled milk. It was “complex,” I said to my host, hoping she’d interpret my grimace as a smile. Thankfully, Anarbek finished off my mug and filled his large water bottle with the liquid. “It’ll give me strength for our hike,” he said. Evidently koumiss was to Kyrgyz what Gatorade was to Americans.

  Still, it was a gift, and I showed my gratitude by offering the sisters a handful of dried apricots. In return, they produced something that resembled a Ping-Pong ball. “That’s kurut,” Anarbek explained. “It’s dried yogurt. It’s very portable and good for hikes.” Expecting it to taste like the dried yogurt that covered raisins, I eagerly popped the kurut into my mouth. My mouth puckered instantly from the acid, and my tongue was coated in a chalky substance that reminded me of a Pepto-Bismol tablet. Tucked into my backpack was a chocolate bar, but I decided to halt the trading then and there, not willing to cede it for another surprise.

  The food the cook prepared that night was only marginally better. He’d brought many water-heavy vegetables like cabbages and tomatoes that I’d never lug on a hike, along with forty pieces of nang, as important to Kyrgyz as it was to Uighurs, and copious amounts of Russian smoked cheese and beef sausages. Dinners usually consisted of simple renditions of dishes we’d tried in Xinjiang, like rice pilaf, now called plov, or soups like borscht with boiled dried pasta. He cooked with a heavy cast-iron kazan. (No wonder two porters were needed.)

  The food was why I was lukewarm about hiking and camping; I never felt fully satisfied. I hadn’t hiked much before Craig and I met, and I’d never camped. (My father was skeptical of the activity, like many Chinese—why subject yourself to the pain and hardship?) But with Craig, I gamely trekked through the Sierra Nevada and pitched a tent on the coast of Maine. It was only after we married that Craig found out the truth. On the second morning of our honeymoon, he roused me at eight in the morning for a hike on the Na Pali Coast Trail. Though I’d agreed to it enthusiastically some days before, that morning I was reluctant and bleary-eyed. He prodded me into the rental car and drove us to the trailhead. As we ascended the slippery path, my new sneakers becoming caked with mud, I could no longer hide my ill humor.

  “But I thought you liked hiking,” Craig said.

  In my defense, my enthusiasm hadn’t been a charade. It was just that I’d been falling in love and would have done anything he’d asked. Over time, though, I developed a grudging tolerance—and later even a secret fondness—for my husband’s hobby. But always a stubborn one, I never readily admitted to enjoying it, of course.

  In any case, despite the terrible food, I was beginning to enjoy our Kyrgyz trek. The mountains were just as beautiful as Yosemite and they didn’t come with the crowds—in a day’s worth of walking, we usually came across just one group of hikers or a nomadic family. At night, we camped in valleys surrounded by alpine forests and drifted into slumber with our sleeping bags zipped together. After noisy, chaotic China, the mountains restored us and helped reset our tempos to a slower beat.

  On our second morning, we peeked out of our tent to find white covering the valley.

  “It snowed?” I asked, aghast.

  “Frost,” Craig said, his face aglow. “Just frost.”

  So it wasn’t as comfortable as the five-star hotels I liked. But I couldn’t begrudge him his happiness, as he stared out of the tent and sipped his instant coffee with pleasure. He was more at home here than he seemed elsewhere on the road, and that made me content as well.

  After I’d forced smiles through many miserable meals, in the middle of our hike one afternoon, we came across a nomad simmering a kazan full of milk outside his yurt. He strained the liquid through cheesecloth and poured it through filters that turned it into thick cream. He invited us into his tent for a s
ample.

  We crossed our legs underneath a table low to the floor and dipped pieces of nang into the creamiest of creams, better than the fresh ones I’d bought at specialty markets and whipped into stiff peaks, and superior even to the crème fraîche that topped desserts in fancy French restaurants. The nomad also treated us to bowls of yogurt that reminded me of the crème brûlée–like yogurt I’d eaten in the Tibetan region of China.

  The cows that had produced the amazing dairy, though, were conspicuously absent. It turned out that they were grazing freely in the mountains and would wander back on their own, or a shepherd would later round them up. The cows’ freedom to roam created such luscious cream and yogurt, Anarbek explained. “Different pastures and different grass give the cream a special taste,” he said. This unexpected gem in the middle of our hiking trip felt like an affirmation that Craig and I, with our differing interests, were as compatible as I’d hoped.

  But on our last full day of hiking, the weather turned. As we donned our backpacks, snow began to fall. We passed a nomadic family who’d packed up their yurt and were transporting it, by horse-drawn wagon, in the opposite direction. Most nomads had already left; even though it was only early September, winter was coming on. By noon, we found ourselves in a near blizzard at a lake just below the highest pass of our hike.

  “Ala-Kol crazy!” our cook said, referring to this stretch of the hike. He overtook us, his bloated backpack bouncing behind him as if it were light as a balloon. The lakeside was barely visible in the snow, but I was more concerned with the visibility of my feet, as I tried not to slip on the icy rocky path, lagging farther and farther behind Craig and our guide. It was at moments like this that I wanted to curse my husband’s rugged spirit. I’d had this feeling before, not just on hikes but in large natural bodies of water he wanted us to swim across, or plunge deeper into when we went scuba diving. Why did he always have to push me to my limit?

  Panting and huffing, I finally joined Craig and our guide at the top of the pass. I sighed with relief, until I looked down. If the mountain had been a ski slope, it would have been a double black diamond. On a clear day, the descent would have been difficult, but the snow seemed to make it impossible.

  “Hm,” Anarbek said. The snow was coming down even more rapidly now, and there was no sign of our cook and porters. Had the snow covered their tracks? Or had they slipped off the mountain? Anarbek had mentioned this very spot before we began, when I’d asked him about the most dangerous situation he’d found himself in. On one hike, a two-hundred-pound woman had lost her balance here and had careened down the mountain for several hundred feet; our guide grasped her for dear life and saved her from slipping off the mountain.

  He began taking slow steps across the ridge, digging each foot into the snow and rooting it in the loose, rocky soil beneath. Craig followed, but I decided not to take any chances and instead planted my bottom in the snow, inching along the path they’d created. The incline eventually flattened out and we saw footprints left by our crew. But more challenges lay ahead: we had miles of hiking left as the snow gave way to rain. I wasn’t sure which was worse, now that my feet were drenched to the bone and my raincoat and waterproof pants offered only marginal protection. At a river, I prayed as I shimmied across a log that had been laid over the fast-moving current.

  At dusk, we finally reached a small guesthouse, where we found the rest of our crew relaxing and not looking the least bit tired. We’d traversed twenty miles that day, and more than sixty miles over the week. A driver, thankfully, would pick us up the next day. After we bathed in a grungy pool filled with hot spring water, we sat down to something our cook called laghman even though it bore little resemblance to hand-pulled noodles. He’d thrown ramen and our remaining vegetables into the pot and added packaged spices. But that dinner reminded me of something Craig said about meals after an especially difficult day of hiking: I’d never tasted anything so good.

  • • •

  After a week in the wilderness, Craig and I made our way to Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan’s capital. Though strife had besieged the place just a few months before, it seemed peaceful, even cosmopolitan, with parks and Soviet-style buildings that reminded me of Moscow. The young women looked like extras on Sex and the City, with their off-the-shoulder T-shirts, tight jeans, and stiletto heels. Posters of Gisele Bündchen and other supermodels decorated store windows showcasing fashions you’d expect to see in Paris or New York, and Mercedes-Benz and BMW sedans cruised the streets.

  We settled into a bed-and-breakfast down a quiet alley. Our room was in the cozy attic of a sprawling wooden house that reminded me of a ski chalet, and I was delighted by my first proper bath in a week. The lodge featured a comfortable dining room where every morning the staff set out a Russian-style breakfast buffet with blini, fresh fruit preserves, and creamy yogurt. At breakfast, we met other foreigners, but few, if any, had come to Bishkek on vacation. International officials had come to oversee the upcoming election, diplomats had arrived on hardship postings, and American military contractors worked on a large air base that supported U.S. operations in Afghanistan. One morning, I chatted with one contractor, a middle-aged Midwesterner with a gruff but folksy demeanor. He asked what Craig and I were doing in Kyrgyzstan. I replied that we’d just finished a weeklong hike. “You did what?” he said, his eyes bulging.

  He asked what we planned to do that day. I’d discovered that Bishkek had an international dining scene, I told him, and we were planning to eat at an Italian restaurant that night.

  “Get out of here! Italian? Here?” He chuckled with amusement. He told me that he shuttled directly between the military base and the guesthouse every day. “Oh no, I’m not leaving the hotel tonight. Especially after that crazy redneck in Florida announced he was going to burn the Koran on September eleventh. All hell’s going to break loose if he does that!”

  As it turned out, the Florida pastor backed down on his threat, and even if he hadn’t, I imagine we would have had the same uneventful evening eating the same passable, locally produced cheese and ravioli.

  Kyrgyz food and Italian cuisine had similarities, I discovered, starting with the quantity of dairy and noodles both cultures ate. The Kyrgyz, in fact, ate more pounds of flour per person than any other people in the world, including Italians. I saw evidence of this at my friend Gulzat’s home in the Bishkek suburbs.

  I’d met Gulzat at a talk on Central Asia during Craig’s year in Cambridge. A globe-trotting sociologist, she’d also been on a fellowship. I immediately liked her. She was straightforward and serious, but she didn’t have the typical professorial appearance. Like many young women in Bishkek, she wore splashy dresses, form-fitting blouses, and plenty of makeup on her pretty, angular face.

  Gulzat invited Craig and me to her home for a meal one evening. I went early with her to cook. On the way to her apartment, we stopped at a stand in her apartment compound that specialized in dairy products. Dairy was so vital that most neighborhoods had a little stall like this nearby, she said. She picked up a carton of ayran, a watery yogurt drink, and handed me something that resembled a candy bar: chocolate-covered cheese curds, which I unwrapped and demolished in a few bites.

  Gulzat lived with her husband, their two-year-old daughter, and her mother-in-law in a small one-bedroom apartment. “We’re not very, uh, technologically advanced,” the sociologist said as we made our way up a darkened stairwell. She’d also told me on our way over that she wasn’t a very good cook. “I apologize in advance,” she said. In the apartment’s narrow vestibule hung a replica of a famous oil portrait of an elegant Russian lady that I recognized from the paperback edition of Anna Karenina I’d read in high school. Gulzat introduced me to her “mom-in-law,” a woman named Roza with short, curly hair and a tanned complexion. She was frying boorsok, little squares of dough that she then drained and sprinkled with powdered sugar. “They’re used for greeting guests,” Gulzat said, serving the snack wi
th black tea poured into pialas, handless teacups that resembled Chinese rice bowls. She filled them only halfway, as was the tradition in Central Asia. “It’s considered rude to fill to the top,” she said. The custom kept the contents of the teapot hot and also was a sign that the host would pay constant attention to the guests, refilling their cups whenever necessary.

  After sipping tea, we set to work on the noodles. “Kyrgyz cooking is basically meat and dough,” Gulzat said, a statement that would echo in my head as I traveled farther west. She added a dash of salt to the flour and water before I took over the kneading, my years of noodle- and dumpling-making coming in handy.

  After I kneaded the dough, Gulzat wrapped it in a bathrobe and placed it on a balcony near the kitchen. She lined up the rest of the ingredients she needed to make the meal. “I gather up everything, otherwise I forget to add things sometimes,” my host said. As we cooked, she told me she had been disappointed with the food in America. The yogurt was terrible. The meat didn’t have any flavor. The produce wasn’t fresh. “I tried to buy organic but it got too expensive,” she said, sounding like my husband. In Kyrgyzstan, farms remained small and everything was grown without chemicals. Every family pickled their own vegetables and made their own preserves. She brought in a jar from the balcony and opened it, handing me one of her pickles, which was crisp and just sour enough to make me reach for another. She dropped a spoonful of berry preserves into my tea, which enlivened it with the flavor of summer. “Right now, at my university, the most popular topic of conversation is ‘What did you conserve?’” she said.

  When the dough was ready, Roza sprinkled flour on a wide table and picked up a long rolling pin. The mother-in-law rolled out the dough into a sheet as wide as the table and cut the sheet in half. She sliced half of it into handkerchief-like squares, while she cut the other half into fettuccine-like strips. She set about making the accompanying toppings. She sautéed vegetables, mutton stock, and dill for the squares, a dish called gyulchetai, and she placed boiled mutton and onions over the fettuccine, a dish called beshbarmak.