On the Noodle Road

by Jen Lin-Liu

  “Mei wenti,” David said, using his favorite Chinese expression, which means “Not a problem.” He called to Craig’s mother to pass the rope. Donning a pair of gloves, he swung it around a tree jutting from the steep ridge and, holding both ends, stepped around the impassable bit in the blink of an eye. Caroline and Craig navigated the section with the same confidence. They turned to pass the rope to me and waited expectantly. Mustering up the courage, I gingerly followed, my legs shaking. The few steps seemed to take an eternity, but finally I made it across and stopped to wipe my brow. Until that excursion, I had no idea that gloves and ropes were standard hiking equipment.

  Despite the hiking, I got along well with Craig’s parents and I was happy they’d flown halfway around the world to see us. And it seemed only appropriate to have my mother-in-law around, given the status of matrons in Central Asia.

  One night shortly after they’d arrived, however, we went out without Craig’s parents to attend a stranger’s wedding. We’d gotten invited on the fly, when I called up the head of Uzbekistan’s chapter of the international organization Slow Food, to which I belonged. “What are you doing tonight?” Marina asked over the phone. “Would you like to come to a wedding?” She spoke conversationally, as if we were long-lost friends, even though we’d never met. I’d initially thought the Slow Food connection explained her friendliness, but nearly all Uzbeks showed us the same hospitality.

  Marina herself would be late to the wedding, so she arranged for her mother to pick us up. We prepared a cash gift and dressed in our best clothes, still wrinkled from our backpacks. At the appointed hour, the mother, an equally friendly woman of Ukrainian heritage, whisked us in her small sedan to an enormous hall in a park, where the wedding was already under way. “Who’s getting married?” we asked, en route. The groom was the son of a successful melon farmer who was also a Slow Food member, she told us.

  On the surface, it almost could have been a wedding in America. Hundreds of guests were gathered in a hall filled with round tables. Dapper men in suits and raven-haired women in pretty dresses danced to a live band with a disco beat. The bride and groom sat before everyone, she in an off-the-shoulder white wedding dress, he in a tuxedo. Next to them was an enormous tiered cake. Young girls in miniature wedding dresses pranced around the hall. As in much of America, and many other countries, the aspiration to become a bride began early.

  And as at most American weddings, the food wasn’t particularly good, though you could say Asian and European culture were represented, with a little Americana thrown in. Waiters served bowls of manpar, a soup reminiscent in name of mian pian, the Chinese noodle squares I’d adored in China’s Tibetan areas. The content of these bowls also approximated the Chinese dish, though not as successfully: the doughy squares were brittle and floated in a watery soup. Communal platters of Russian foods, including salads of beet and potato, rye bread, cheese, cold cuts, and fruit, sat in the center of each table. And after the waiters cleared the manpar, they served up plates of fried chicken with limp French fries. This was washed down with orange Fanta and Coca-Cola, two soft drinks I saw all along the Silk Road, and for the more Russified, vodka and red wine from the republic of Georgia. Oddly, the enormous cake went untouched.

  While the wedding aspired to Hollywood, one element struck me as completely out of sync: the expression of the bride. As the groom glowed, she gazed downward for the entire evening, looking solemn and distressed. This was a custom, a guest told me. Uzbek brides were supposed to appear demure, modest, and chaste, and looking happy was antithetical to that.

  A few days later, I attended a post-wedding party for another bride. This bibi sayshami took place several days after the wedding, at the groom’s family home, where Uzbek newlyweds typically live after marriage. A female mullah sat cross-legged on the floor, singing and offering her blessings. During the breaks, the mother-in-law’s relatives and friends, sitting in a circle, gossiped and ate at the women-only ceremony. The bride, bowing before her elders, looked just as gloomy as the one at the wedding. She wore an elaborate medieval-looking headpiece and a velvet dress, like the one Gulzat and her mother-in-law had given me. On the walls hung dozens of other outfits all selected by the groom’s family, which she’d wear during her first forty days of marriage. On the floor, the host had laid out snacks of dried nuts and pastries while the main dish simmered in the home’s courtyard: plov, the rice pilaf that seemed quite popular in Central Asia.

  “I don’t usually attend these ceremonies,” Lola, my Uzbek translator, told me as we sat down.

  “Why?” I asked.

  “Because once they know I’m not married, they will make my life very difficult.”

  And just as she predicted, not long after the event was under way, the ladies began their inquiry. How old were we? Were we married? Did we have children?

  One woman looked miffed when Lola told her I had been married for almost two years but was not yet a mother. “Why don’t you have children?” she asked, aghast. “Your husband must be unhappy with you!”

  When Lola told them she was twenty-three and unmarried, they demanded her phone number and address. They’d been looking for a woman her age for the mullah’s nephew, who’d just graduated from law school. Lola didn’t even bother telling them she wasn’t interested—there was no point. She grumpily tolerated their questions: Was she a student or did she have a job? What did her father do for a living? Did her mother stay at home? And wait a moment . . . why was she twenty-three and not married? Finally, it all became too much for her and we decided to flee before the main course arrived. I had a feeling the next opportunity to eat plov would come up soon enough.

  • • •

  I learned more about Uzbek marriages when I took cooking lessons in a Tashkent home. The man of the house, Murad, was middle-aged and of average build, with a domineering attitude that reminded me of Al Pacino’s character in The Godfather. Even though he didn’t cook, he was always present at my lessons, lording over them while his dark-haired wife, Shaista, did all the work. They had two grown children and lived in a pleasant single-story house around a courtyard that reminded me of Uighur homes.

  The food, too, reminded me of Xinjiang. In fact, Uighurs and Uzbeks, both sedentary, Turkic-speaking people, were more culturally and ethnically linked than other ethnicities in the region. We began with something Shaista called manti, the name of which sounded similar to manta, the dumplings I’d learned to make in Kashgar. Manti was also a filled pasta dish, Shaista said. She started by mixing together minced beef, ground cumin, black pepper, onion, and salt before moving on to the dough. In a large bowl she combined warm water, salt, flour, and one egg and kneaded it into a smooth mound. She flattened the dough into a large, thin sheet with a long, narrow rolling pin—the longer the pin, it seemed, the more experienced the noodle maker. Shaista swiftly rocked the thin baton back and forth, folded the dough over itself, and cut it into three-inch squares. She took a square, added a generous dollop of filling, and brought diagonal edges together to form a loose box.

  The dish had crossed the continental divide. The fillings’ seasonings were identical. Though Shaista had used beef, she said lamb and pumpkin were just as often the main ingredients, as they were in Xinjiang. The dough was the same, except for the egg, which linked manti to Italian pasta. While the folding method varied slightly, the dumplings were roughly equal in shape and size. They were both steamed and served with dairy (clotted sheep’s cream in Xinjiang, thick yogurt at Shaista’s). And, following protocol, I ate them both with my hands.

  After a lesson one day, Craig and his parents came to the house for lunch. Murad did a double take when he saw my fair-skinned husband and in-laws. “You two are married?” he asked as we sat down on a divan in their courtyard. “Do you love each other?” His wife, who emerged from the kitchen every so often but did not sit with us, was also curious.

  “Sometimes,” Craig answered drily. />
  Murad was confused because parents arranged most marriages in Central Asia, my translator explained. Despite the mixing that had gone on in Eurasia for centuries, it was apparently still uncommon for people of different ethnicities to marry. The few East Asians in Central Asia were mostly of Korean descent, and they stuck to themselves.

  Aside from providing cooking lessons, the Uzbek couple also offered up rooms in their sprawling home for tourists. Occasionally, when the rooms were full, backpackers set up their tents and slept in the yard. During one lesson, Murad commented that he’d seen the strangest thing that morning. Two European men were washing their clothes in the yard while their respective female partners were still asleep in the tents. What was that all about? He’d never seen men do housework. And even worse, the women had been resting!

  Later, I asked Shaista what she thought the role of an Uzbek woman ought to be.

  She hesitated before saying, “Family is the most important. Everything else is secondary. Uzbek women live selfless lives, thinking about their husbands and their families before themselves.”

  • • •

  I met more brides at Tashkent’s Mashhura School, a cross between a girls’ finishing institution and an adult education center. I’d learned of the place from an Uzbek woman I’d met in Beijing while planning my journey. When I contacted the school, the administrators invited me for a visit. Before showing me around the school, though, the school’s accountant, Maruf, and several other staff—all of whom seemed to be men—treated me to a meal nearby. In the kitchen, a chef stirred a delicious-looking sauce for laghman, another noodle dish—the hand-pulled variety—that crossed over from China. My mouth watered in anticipation, but it was not noodles I was treated to when we sat down. Over a meal of tea and that familiar dish of plov, they told me that the school was named after the woman who founded it. The school offered some vocational classes, like tailoring, makeup artistry, and word processing, aimed at women looking for work in a rather old-fashioned job market. But the main focus seemed to be preparing women for marriage. Cooking classes were the most popular, since a wife’s most important duty was to feed her husband and the rest of the family. The administrators offered to let me sit in on the classes if in return I would give the students a lesson in Chinese cooking.

  In the classroom I sat next to students who ranged from wide-eyed teenagers to women in their mid- to late twenties who appeared already jaded by marriage. They all dressed in long, conservative skirts and dresses. Some wore heavy makeup. The sessions reminded me of the cooking school where I’d learned to cook in China, if you swapped out the men preparing for professional chefdom with women who were, or aspired to be, housewives. The teacher dictated the recipes in a monotone. The women copied down the recipes. The teacher demonstrated the dish while everyone watched silently from their desks.

  International cuisines—or at least what Uzbeks thought of as international—were part of the curriculum. I’d seen some dishes on Uzbek menus with names like “Canadian meat” and “Mexican salad.” The Canadian meat was no more than a steak, and the Mexican salad had only a sprinkling of chopped tomatoes and cheese. In one class, a teacher demonstrated “Chinese meat,” sliced beef stir-fried with the Central Asian staples of onions, black pepper, and cumin. Even so, the unmarried students hoped improving their culinary repertoires would help them land good husbands. The process could be competitive. Bachelors and their family members often scrutinized a prospective bride, even interviewing her neighbors, relatives, and friends to evaluate her chastity, obedience, and talents.

  When it was my turn to teach, I was flustered. The students sat silently and expectantly, the older ones raising their eyebrows. I was exactly the wrong person to teach them how to be good Uzbek housewives, what with my independence and wanderlust. I’d decided to cook kungpao chicken, and nervously began chopping leek, ginger, and garlic on a cutting board. As I prepped, I inquired about the board, which was slightly concave.

  The students explained that the boards had warped from the volume of carrots they had to cut. “And if we’re angry at our husbands, we chop even harder!” one woman piped up. “And the more curved the board is, the angrier we are at our husbands!” said another. The room, eerily quiet just minutes before, erupted in laughter.

  I mentioned that I’d heard a lot about the qualities of good Uzbek wives but hadn’t heard much about the attributes in a good husband. “What do you look for in a man?” I asked.

  The class stirred and mumbled among themselves before one student replied sullenly, “We don’t have any good men. They’ve all gone abroad to work!”

  Others protested. “No, that’s not true. We do have good men!”

  “Do husbands have to make money?” I asked.

  Of course, that went without saying, the women unanimously replied.

  Another student volunteered her thoughts. “What I look for is someone who doesn’t put his mother above me.” That garnered a number of nods but a couple of smirks that said, Was that really possible?

  Our conversation was interrupted when Maruf, the accountant, stopped by to check on the class. Everyone fell silent as I stir-fried the chicken, added the seasonings, and displayed it on the table.

  “Wow, that was fast,” a student said, as everyone huddled around. “Uzbek cooking takes much longer.”

  “That’s strange you added sugar,” another observed. “We don’t add sugar to our cooking.”

  “Looks like our kebabs, but so much smaller,” the accountant said. He poked the chicken with a fork and held it up for inspection, then tasted it, nodded, and left.

  The women giggled. “Did you see his glasses?” “Funny.” “What a dork!” More laughter.

  After I finished demonstrating my dish, the teacher took over and began slicing a cucumber, fanning out the pieces as she chopped.

  “Are you thinking about a particular man when you’re cutting that?” one bold woman asked. The class roared again.

  The teacher stared stonily ahead. “Uzbek rice salad,” she declared, reading from the textbook. “Four hundred grams of rice, one hundred fifty grams of water . . .”

  • • •

  One of the women at the Mashhura School stood out. Fara was an assistant teacher for the class I guest-taught. She had come to Tashkent for just a few months to teach, then she’d return to her home in Samarkand, a legendary Silk Road post that was the next stop on my journey. She was a pretty, petite woman with curly brown hair, high cheekbones, and a perfect button nose. Her parents were Tajik, an offshoot of the Persian ethnic group who were Uzbekistan’s largest minority and whose imprint on the food culture could be seen in the dolmas, the meat-stuffed peppers and eggplants that were found from Central Asia to the Mediterranean.

  One afternoon during a class, she made baklava, another dish that extended several thousand miles, from Central Asia to Greece. (Some food experts believe that baklava originated in Central Asia.) But this particular baklava was different from what I was familiar with: it consisted of layers of thick pastry and meringue, rather than the usual crushed nuts sandwiched between paper-thin layers of buttery, syrup-soaked phyllo. While she mixed flour and butter for the dough, Fara turned her attention on me as the rest of the class listened. She asked how I liked Uzbekistan and if the food was to my taste. I complimented the beautiful bazaars and said I’d enjoyed plov a number of times. In turn, I asked her how she’d found her job.

  Through a friend, she replied. She’d recently returned to work after taking a three-year maternity leave, a length not uncommon in Uzbekistan. She’d worked at a bakery as a teenager and enjoyed kitchens. While she only earned about three hundred dollars per month at this job, chefs’ salaries could climb to ten times that at fancy hotels. I found it strange that she had traveled for work alone, especially since she had a three-year-old daughter. From what little I’d gleaned about Central Asian culture, she didn’t see
m typical. And her dreams were actually bigger: she wanted to become an Uzbek chef in the United States, she said. Were there many good Uzbek restaurants in America?

  As I fumbled to reply, she asked me another question, even more difficult to answer: “Do you think you could help me get to America? I would really like a visa,” she said. She waited earnestly for my response as she whipped the meringue. The students, too, looked on curiously.

  “But it’s far away,” I said finally. “What about your family?”

  She shrugged, looking down at the fluffy egg whites. “I can leave them behind.”

  • • •

  We left the wedding parties and the brides-in-training behind in Tashkent and went on to Samarkand. Guidebooks waxed lyrical about the town, calling the former capital of the Timurid Empire “the Mirror of the World” and “the Pearl of the East.” Marco Polo had described it as “a noble city, adorned with beautiful gardens and surrounded by a plain, in which are produced all the fruits man can desire.” At the height of the Silk Road, Samarkand was one of the most cosmopolitan centers in the world, a melding of East and West. It had been a locus for centuries, beginning with the conquests of Alexander the Great, the Macedonian who swept through the region in 329 BC. More than a thousand years later, the Mongol emperor Genghis Khan plundered the city as he and his army galloped west. But only one century after, the homegrown conqueror Tamerlane rebuilt Samarkand into a major capital of a kingdom extending from India to the western fringes of China. Uzbeks I met were enormously proud of Tamerlane. “If he’d gotten any farther, you’d be Muslim!” said Murad, the Godfather-like husband in Tashkent. Throughout the centuries, merchants in Samarkand traded pistachios and saffron from Persia, silk and rhubarb from China. Golden peaches, grapes, and watermelons from nearby orchards were packed on ice and sent to Chinese emperors.