On the Noodle Road

by Jen Lin-Liu

  Beshbarmak was Kyrgyzstan’s most important dish and, as one that was used for greetings, carried the same symbolism as Uighur polo. And just as Chinese had renamed polo when they saw locals eating it with their hands, the Russians, after seeing Kyrgyz eat the dish without implements, called it “five fingers,” the literal translation of beshbarmak. To make it properly, a family purchased and slaughtered an entire sheep. After boiling the animal, the hosts bestowed various parts upon guests, depending on their age and relationship to the host. It was a dish that caused friction between the generations in her family, Gulzat said. While Roza and her parents insisted on preparing the dish whenever important guests came, Gulzat and her husband argued that it was too expensive a formality. Given that Craig and I were ignorant of the tradition, Gulzat had been able to convince Roza that slaughtering a sheep wasn’t necessary, and the mother-in-law had contented herself with cooking a few pounds of mutton. She did, however, include one important part of the sheep—koiruk, the fatty tail of a special breed that had two pom-pom-shaped rumps. It was the sheep’s most expensive cut, a prized delicacy. Eating the fat gave women a good complexion, Roza told me.

  As the noodles cooked, Gulzat kneaded still more dough, for baked pastries. All the while, her toddler, a spunky two-year-old named Aybike, bounced on a sofa in the kitchen, vying for her mother’s attention. As the food simmered, Gulzat’s husband, Joldon, and Craig arrived and moved the large prep table into the living room where we would eat. Joldon was a clean-cut man of medium height with a laid-back air. Like Gulzat, he was an academic, a political scientist, and he ruefully admitted that he did none of the cooking. That was the domain of his mother and his wife.

  Still, Gulzat and Joldon agreed, Kyrgyz women had it better than most women in Muslim countries, a result of the Soviet and nomadic past. Communism had made women as educated and gainfully employed as men. Roza had earned a master’s degree and worked as a magazine editor until she retired. And Gulzat had a career that rivaled Joldon’s in prestige.

  “There’s something about Kyrgyz culture that makes things less conservative,” Joldon said.

  “Traditionally, we have lived in circular yurts that are hard to divide,” Gulzat added. The freedom and independence of living outdoors also meant that Islam did not take a strong hold. “Also, it isn’t easy to have more than one wife when you’re a nomad.”

  I’d noticed the mild Muslim influence in Kyrgyzstan. The day Gulzat invited me over happened to be Eid, the holiday that marks the end of Ramadan, but the family didn’t celebrate it, nor had they fasted. That was the case for most Kyrgyz. The national drink, koumiss, contained alcohol, and almost everyone we met drank beer and vodka. And while pork was not common, both Gulzat and Joldon had tried and liked it.

  After Gulzat and Roza finished the cooking, we sat down at a table crowded with dishes. I started with the beshbarmak, using a fork, a new Kyrgyz custom. The sheep’s tail fat tasted like the juicy blob of fat on a rib-eye steak. Beshbarmak seemed to be one of those dishes, like turkey on Thanksgiving, that was eaten for tradition’s sake rather than for taste. Better was the gyulchetai, which, with its tender pasta squares and fresh dill and parsley, rivaled the noodle dishes I would later have in Italy. The raisin scones Gulzat baked were delicious, and a marker of Russian tradition.

  Why didn’t Gulzat think she was a good cook? The food had been excellent, I told her. “Well, it’s not that I’m not a good cook. I just don’t like to cook much,” she said with a shrug. But when she did, she attacked the duty with her serious, type A personality that guaranteed a good meal.

  • • •

  Like other aspects of the Kyrgyz capital, Bishkek’s dining scene was cosmopolitan. Along with the Italian trattoria, Craig and I came across a Mexican cantina, European sidewalk cafés, and several hamburger stands reminiscent of In-N-Out Burger. As Gulzat showed me the capital’s various offerings, she noted that the nomadic lifestyle, more open and less wedded to tradition, had also made Kyrgyzstan the most international part of Central Asia.

  I was most interested, though, in Kyrgyz food, which was inherently international; after all, we were at the crossroads of nomadic, Russian, and Chinese culture. I’d seen the nomadic influence during our hike, in the delicious cream, yogurt, and salty yogurt balls, and at Gulzat’s in the hunks of mutton and sheep-tail fat. The Russian influence, from more than a century of colonization, showed in the blini, the beer and vodka, and the cheeses and sausages.

  But the food became even more interesting when Kyrgyz cooks fused Chinese and Russian ingredients. Gulzat told me that Dungan restaurants had become so popular that they were now a part of mainstream Kyrgyz culture. Though the Dungan meal we’d eaten with Hans and Jane had been disappointing, I was willing to give the cuisine another try.

  Gulzat took me to a restaurant buried in the narrow alleys of Dordoy, an enormous wholesale market where Chinese goods still went west overland. Fatima, the head chef, had dark hair and small eyes, a stout body, and a white head scarf that reflected her Muslim beliefs. I tried a few words of Mandarin on her. She shrugged. She knew a dialect of Chinese that I couldn’t understand, and like everyone else in Central Asia, she spoke mostly in Russian.

  In her kitchen, an all-female staff rushed to fill orders—a refreshing sight, given the male-dominated restaurants I’d seen so far. Dungan restaurant chefs were mostly women, Fatima said. “We work harder than men!”

  A dedicated laghman chef rolled out dough. The sauce for the hand-pulled noodles bubbled next to a pot filled with beef goulash. Another chef filled an order for a Chinese dish, stir-fried beef atop steamed rice, which ended up on the counter next to a Russian dish, beef cutlets with mashed potatoes. Certain menu items blended both cultures, fusion food that had come from decades of cross-pollinating cultures rather than the harebrained notions of cocky chefs in New York or London. One of the most delicious was ashlyanfu, which blended traditional wheat noodles, sometimes called ash throughout Central Asia and Iran, with the almost transparent strands made of starch from beans, corn, or sweet potatoes that were popular in China. The starchy strands’ Mandarin name, liangfen, sounded like lyanfu. Fatima mixed the ash and the lyanfu with a stir-fry of minced vegetables and scrambled eggs. She tossed in the traditional Chinese seasonings of chili oil, vinegar, and soy sauce. And then the clincher: freshly minced dill, an ingredient completely foreign to Chinese food but one that was ubiquitous just across the border.

  The noodles thoroughly mixed, Fatima ushered us out of the kitchen and into the busy dining room. On each long communal table was a combination of accoutrements that could be found nowhere else: tea in a large thermos, a bowl of sugar, a small bin of rye bread, Chinese chili oil in cupcake tins, and black vinegar in plastic bottles. Gulzat gave chopsticks a try, fumbling around with them before giving up and picking up the usual European flatware. (Chopsticks appeared with noodles only in Kyrgyzstan and disappeared entirely when we crossed into Uzbekistan.)

  A pair of men sitting next to us inquired about my provenance.

  “She’s from America,” Gulzat told them.

  “But she doesn’t look American,” one of them said.

  “Her background is Chinese,” Gulzat explained.

  “So why does she think she’s American?” the other replied.

  Rather than argue, I focused on the noodles before me. The mutt of a dish worked, the chewy wheat noodles contrasting with the slick, gelatinous starchy strands that I’d learned were not considered noodles in the East. I devoured the entire dish, which was at once comfortingly familiar and yet enthralling with the addition of dill. In other dishes, I’d noticed that the fusion had produced some oddities—for example, dapanji, or big-plate chicken, the spicy stew of chicken and tagliatelle noodles I knew from China, had somehow morphed into the name for a beef stir-fry. But I decided all could be forgiven when, at the end of the meal, Fatima brought us a plate of golden fried wontons with
sour cream. It was a combination so simple, yet so completely ingenious and mouthwatering that, with Gulzat’s help, I devoured the entire plate. It was the crowning reflection of a cuisine that had straddled Asia and Europe for eternity.

  • • •

  Craig and I ate twice more at Gulzat’s home. Each time, I learned a little more about Kyrgyz culture. One evening, I cooked for Gulzat and her family, who were eager to try a few of my Chinese dishes. As I prepped and stir-fried, Gulzat took prodigious notes, while Roza occasionally popped into the kitchen. “She told me to take careful notes so I can prepare a meal for her friends,” Gulzat said.

  It wasn’t always easy living with her mother-in-law, she added. As I’d seen in western China, mothers-in-law exerted full control over Central Asian households. (And actually the tyranny of mothers-in-law went farther back East, and was part of Han Chinese culture, too.) Gulzat and Joldon lived with her not out of tradition but because they couldn’t afford their own apartment on their small academic salaries. But still, it meant that Gulzat was subject to the same rules as other daughters-in-law. Roza was kinder than most matriarchs, Gulzat allowed, sharing the cooking and housekeeping responsibilities most of the time. But when Roza invited her friends over, Gulzat was expected to cook, to demonstrate her obedience.

  I asked Gulzat what the situation was when she invited her friends over for dinner.

  “I never have friends over,” she said, adding that it would not be considered appropriate. “You’re a special exception.”

  Gulzat’s own mother believed in the same rules, she said. When Gulzat had lived in Massachusetts, her mother had visited and they’d gone to a dinner party. The host did most of the cooking, while the host’s son and daughter-in-law socialized. Gulzat’s mother was floored. “What is going on?” she asked her daughter. “Is the daughter-in-law playing an evil trick on her mother-in-law?”

  For our last meal at her house, Gulzat prepared the largest feast yet, with Russian specialties like pickled herring and plates that were local but reminded me of the far-off Mediterranean: batter-fried eggplant slices, and tomatoes and onions sprinkled with basil, all ingredients common in Central Asia. Gulzat also served a nomadic dish of boiled horsemeat, which Marco Polo had written about in his diaries. It was less exotic than it sounded and was, in fact, rather unmemorable.

  Over the meal, I asked Gulzat and Joldon how they’d met. They told me they’d studied at the same university and dated for two years before they married. Or actually, Gulzat said, correcting herself, before she was kidnapped.

  “Kidnapped?” I asked.

  Bride kidnapping was a tradition that often preceded a Kyrgyz wedding, they explained. On the day of the wedding, the suitor’s deputies would accost and blindfold the bride-to-be and whisk her off to the ceremony. The groom’s family would have the meal, bridal wear, and gifts ready. The groom and his friends and family usually plotted the kidnapping and the wedding without the consent or consultation of the bride, although her parents might be part of the scheme. Sometimes, in fact, the suitor could be a complete stranger. Gulzat noted it wasn’t unusual to hear of women, even educated, worldly ones, who’d been victims of this barbaric-sounding tradition. In villages, the situation was often worse and could involve violence.

  Gulzat’s case was less extreme. She and Joldon had spoken about getting married for months before the wedding, and she’d expected the kidnapping. Joldon added that if he hadn’t carried out the custom, they would have been forced to go through a formal, Western-style engagement and wedding, which would have taken longer and been more expensive.

  Gulzat, in fact, had gotten impatient waiting for Joldon to abduct her, the way that women get antsy for a formal proposal. “When are you going to kidnap me?” she’d impatiently demanded several times.

  But she was still caught off guard when Joldon’s relatives showed up one morning, blindfolded her, and forced her into a taxi. “I didn’t have any control over the situation,” she said. She cried on the way to her wedding. But that was one of the hallmarks of the tradition—a crying bride was an auspicious sign.

  At the end of the meal, Gulzat and Roza presented me with a gift—a beautiful dark red satin gown, an outfit that a Kyrgyz bride would wear in her first days of marriage. “I’m going to miss having you around,” Gulzat said, giving me a hug. I was touched by the gift and the hospitality. But as we left Kyrgyzstan, I wondered how she’d fare with her mother-in-law.

  Months later, I received a note from her saying that she and Joldon were moving to—of all places—Italy. Joldon would further his studies in Florence, and they’d finally have a place of their own.

  6.

  I was sorry to miss Osh, a Silk Road post with an alluring bazaar in Kyrgyzstan’s south, but we’d heard that after a spate of ethnic violence, the government had imposed martial law and turned it into a ghost town. So we decided to fly on to Tashkent, the capital of Uzbekistan.

  After having traveled overland for most of the trip, I found the swift transition from one country to the next jolting. In the Tashkent airport, we scrambled to find money, a phone, and a driver. The ATMs seemed to dispense only bills worth about three dollars each. We used hand gestures and our Uzbek and Russian phrase book to communicate with our driver, whom we’d chosen out of an aggressive throng for seeming more mild-mannered than the rest. The receptionist at the hotel couldn’t find our reservation. When we finally opened the door to our hotel room, we were exhausted. But Craig, as he tipped the bellhop, seemed to have gotten a second wind. Where, he asked, could he find a hamburger?

  “A hamburger?” I yelped. “After all that, you want a hamburger?”

  “I was just kidding,” Craig said. “Can’t you take a joke?” He suggested we take a walk to get a feel for the neighborhood. He would lead the way. “I bet I’ll find some good food for you.”

  The hotel was located in the capital’s center, where the wide boulevards and widely spaced buildings, empty sidewalks, large parks, and plentiful monuments gave the city an imposing, Big Brother feel. It wasn’t an accident. Uzbekistan was one of the most repressive countries in the world. Ever since the country had become independent of the dissolved Soviet Union, one man had ruled. Over his twenty-plus years as president, Islam Karimov had won reelections by a handy margin of more than 85 percent, making the country’s supposed democracy a farce. He’d cracked down on activists and journalists and, in 2005, he was responsible for massacring several hundred people who’d participated in peaceful protests in the Fergana Valley.

  We walked the eerily quiet streets a little on edge, unsure of our surroundings. But as we got a little farther away from our hotel, we saw a large covered structure in the distance from which came a rumble. We got closer and stumbled into an enormous bazaar. The aisles were filled with the most beautiful produce I’d ever seen. Cashews, almonds, and pistachios were carefully arranged in plastic tubes that formed geometrical patterns like the decorative tiles on the facades of mosques. Pristine pears, greenish-red like autumn leaves, formed cylindrical towers. Split pomegranates hung on wooden posts, their pink pearls spilling out of the peel. Even ordinary staples like eggs looked alluring, the white ovals arrayed in perfect squares. Vendors polished tomatoes and lemons. In an aisle full of salads, sellers rapidly chopped purple, yellow, and orange carrots into sticks and shreds behind colorful heaps of jade cabbage and magenta beets. The vendors offered us samples of anything we wished, including a taste of a large watermelon, into which one vendor inserted his knife and pulled out a juicy red rectangular piece. When we affirmed it was one of the sweetest we’d tried, he plugged the rind back in and sold the melon basically intact.

  Along the market’s edge, a row of butcher stalls with cool marble counters sold fresh, bright cuts of mutton and beef that hung on hooks. Just beyond was a small eatery from which a heavenly scent seemed to be drifting. At the front of the shop, we peered into a beehive-shaped oven, s
imilar to ones we’d seen in Xinjiang. Stuck to the inside were buns like the ones we’d tried in western China, but with a drier, more pastry-like dough and a chunk of juicy lamb filling embedded within each. Called samsa, the dish was a cousin of the Indian samosa. It was the closest I’d come to finding the lamb buns I’d loved in Kashgar, the closest Craig would get to a hamburger, and it satisfied both of us immensely.

  • • •

  Craig’s parents joined us in Uzbekistan. When we picked them up at the Tashkent airport, they seemed only a notch less energetic than usual after twenty-four hours in transit from their home in Massachusetts.

  Craig’s parents had lived in Beijing for several years, overlapping with the beginning of Craig’s and my relationship. David had taken early retirement after a career with the lighting company Sylvania, which had moved the family several times. He left their next move up to Caroline, a psychologist. They’d lived in Europe early in their marriage, and the idea of living overseas again was appealing. They’d never lived in Asia, and Beijing was enticing with Craig there. Caroline accepted an offer from an international hospital, and they adapted to Chinese life over five years. They bicycled most places and otherwise used the buses and subways. They’d learned enough Mandarin to get by, and David raised birds and crickets, as did many retired Beijingers. Like Craig, they were adventurous and enjoyed the outdoors. On the weekends, they often went for hikes.

  Not long after Craig and I started dating, the four of us climbed an unrestored part of the Great Wall. As we trucked on at a clipped pace, the wall seemed to get steeper and steeper, the ridge dropping off precipitously on either side. Huffing and panting behind them, I finally caught up, only to discover that we’d reached a point where the path dropped away altogether.