by Jen Lin-Liu
But most of Samarkand’s allure had disappeared long before we arrived. From the 1500s on, traders began to bypass Eurasia, opting to move goods by sea. In the 1800s, British and Russians battled for control over the no-man’s-land. The Russians won out. They brought their vodka and blini and sausages, and planted cotton everywhere, turning bland cottonseed oil into a staple. The decades of heavy-handed Soviet and post-Soviet rule further diminished Samarkand’s allure. In recent years, the Karimov government had bulldozed old neighborhoods to build a downtown district where rows of new storefronts sat empty. They’d also spruced up the Registan, a trio of fifteenth-century madrassas that was the country’s biggest tourist draw. It had been renovated so overzealously that it was as authentic as a castle at an amusement park. In the blue-tiled buildings with tall spires where young men had once studied mathematics and Islam were a series of tacky gift shops. In front of the Registan, where old travelogues had described a bustling market, sat a soulless, empty square.
To add to that, Samarkand, like the rest of the country, had a dismal food scene. Somehow the bounty and beauty of the bazaars did not translate into a vibrant cuisine. Much of the food reminded me of Uighur cooking. I’d been touched when Nur’s sister Malika had made rice pilaf on the western fringes of China, knowing that she’d cooked it as a token of appreciation for an honored guest. But little had I known that the dish would stalk me from Malika’s all the way to the border of Iran, with hardly a variation on the litany of rice, mutton, carrots, and onions. Once in a great while, a cook would break the orthodoxy and throw in a few chickpeas or raisins. “We never get sick of plov,” Murad of Tashkent told me. “We never say, ‘Oh, no, not again, no plov tonight.’” But as our time in Central Asia went on, that sentiment expressed exactly how I felt. Even Craig, who could survive for days on saltines and peanut butter, began turning up his nose at the dish. Our only solace was that, given the number of times we’d been served the pilaf, we ascertained that we were very, very important guests.
The more meals of plov I ate, the less convinced I was of the theory that noodles had originated in Central Asia. I’d been enthralled with the gyulchetai noodles that Gulzat had cooked in Kyrgyzstan, but it was unlikely that Kyrgyz had invented the staple, because nomads didn’t have a tradition of raising wheat or other crops. And in the rest of Central Asia, many of the noodles—the laghman, manti, and manpar—sounded and looked like offshoots of Chinese ones. As we pushed west, the steamed manti dumplings took on a gristlier filling and the hand-pulled laghman noodles became coarser and were served in more watery soups.
And few Central Asians subscribed to the theory that they’d invented noodles themselves. Also, few knew the story of Marco Polo bringing noodles from China and Italy, and nobody related any homegrown tales or legends about noodles in its place. Some Uzbeks believed that Uighurs, whose cuisine they knew from the occasional eatery, were the inventors of noodles. Though Uighurs back in China had denied that credit, they had served as go-betweens for Han Chinese and Central Asians, and given the likeness between Uighur and Central Asian noodles, perhaps the Uighurs, after learning them from the Hui and the Han, had transmitted them westward.
It seems that Chinese were eating noodles earlier than Central Asians, since the first recorded mention of noodles in Central Asia appeared centuries later than it did in China. The Book of Victory, by a Persian historian named Sharaf ad-din Ali Yazdi, describes how Tamerlane ordered his troops not to make noodles during a war in the late fourteenth century. It was also noted that Turco-Mongolians, who’d first arrived in the territory with Genghis Khan’s armies, primarily ate noodles. Also around then the Florentine merchant Pegolotti wrote of how Central Asians made a noodle dish called burhani. Cooks sliced dough into small pieces and punched each with a hole, then placed them in a pot of water. “When the water boils, they add sour milk and eat it,” concluded the description, reminding me of the medieval noodle preparation in the Mongolian encyclopedia. Perhaps Mongolian conquests, nomads like the Kyrgyz, Dungans escaping religious persecution, and Uighur traders had all played a role in spreading noodles.
But noodles aside, I didn’t see much Han Chinese culinary influence in Central Asia. With few Dungans or other ethnic Chinese populating Uzbekistan, the East Asian influence was largely left to ethnic Koreans, whom Soviets had deported from their homeland during World War II. At the bazaars, Koreans sold a freshly shredded carrot salad tossed with garlic and vinegar, a dish they’d improvised after arriving in Central Asia. But however delicious, it, too, became repetitive.
Of all outsiders, Russians had the biggest imprint on Central Asian food, the influence becoming more pronounced in Uzbekistan. Meals often began with mayonnaise-laden salads bearing fanciful names like “Lady’s Whim” and ended with shots of vodka. Food quality aside, the atmosphere of the eateries bothered me. Because restaurateurs built establishments to accommodate weddings, dining rooms tended to be cavernous and full of large, round dining tables. Few invested in decor because occasionally the police conducted sweeps and inexplicably shut down restaurants that didn’t meet their mysterious standards. A few eateries pirated the look, feel, and taste of McDonald’s, filling the demand for Western products in an area devoid of international franchises. Hamburgers and fried chicken seemed to have an appeal that had so far crossed every border.
I was all the more grateful, then, to reunite with Fara, who’d returned to her home in Samarkand to teach at a local branch of the Mashhura School. She introduced me to her cousin’s chaikhana, a traditional teahouse that was a refreshing change from the echoing restaurants most Uzbeks, bafflingly, preferred. Her cousin Alisher had converted part of his home in a quiet alley into a charming outdoor dining room featuring raised divans atop which elderly men lounged, drinking tea and dining. Caged birds chirped pleasantly in the covered patio. Even here, though, I could not escape the ubiquitous plov.
Alisher eagerly summoned me to the pilaf, cooked in front of the restaurant in a kazan as large as the ones I’d seen in Xinjiang during Ramadan. He began to explain how it was made. I didn’t have the heart to tell him or Fara that I’d already seen it cooked a dozen times, so I mustered the energy to pretend I was fascinated. Like most Samarkanders, Alisher insisted that his plov was totally distinct from that served elsewhere. The only difference I could see was that he had scattered a few whole chili peppers along the edges of the kazan. Alisher went on to explain that Samarkand plov was less salty than Tashkent plov, as well—Samarkanders couldn’t understand why Tashkenters made such salty plov! But the most important difference—and this was key—was that in Samarkand, the ingredients were cooked in layers rather than in a haphazard mix. The meat sat at the bottom of the kazan, atop which lay the carrots and the rice, each layer undisturbed like a giant plov parfait.
While the rice simmered, Alisher seated us and brought a procession of side dishes that I was thankfully able to make into a meal itself—an onion salad, fried eggs, and beef sausages. Fara told Alisher where I was from, which prompted a conversation about the United States. While Fara desperately wanted to go, Alisher did not.
“What would I do there?” he said. “All my work, my family, is here.”
“I don’t know what I’d do, but I just want to leave this place,” Fara murmured, keeping her voice low so other diners wouldn’t hear.
“But Samarkand is beautiful. You can go to the mountains, you can see the old historic sights,” he said.
“But there are so few opportunities here,” Fara argued.
He agreed. “It is true that much depends on connections.”
“It’s just not easy to make enough money to make ends meet,” she added. But there were other reasons she wanted to go, things that she couldn’t quite express.
The sound of a collision in the alley interrupted the conversation. We went out for a look. A wedding procession had come to a halt as one car had rear-ended another. The drivers hopped out to
examine the dent. They exchanged a few words before getting back into their cars and tearing off, kicking up a fine dust outside the teahouse.
“I had a fancy wedding once,” Fara said wistfully.
While Alisher went to check on the plov, Fara explained why she wanted to leave for America so badly. Not long before, she’d gotten a divorce. She hadn’t told me when I first met her because no one at the school knew; divorce was taboo in Uzbekistan.
She’d never wanted to marry her husband in the first place, she continued. Before her wedding, she’d been in love with someone else. He was tall and attractive, with thick eyebrows and dark hair, and worked as an exporter, often flying to Dubai for his job. She’d met him through friends and liked that he was more modern than most Uzbek men. He didn’t want to control her, and he didn’t mind if she wore pants.
Meanwhile, her parents began to bother her about getting married. She kept the relationship a secret, since families usually arranged marriages and he hadn’t proposed. He promised to, after his work slowed down. But for whatever reason, he continued to put off a proposal, saying that he needed more time.
Tired of waiting, Fara gave her boyfriend an ultimatum: she’d have to consider offers of marriage when they came up. One day, two women came knocking on her parents’ door. They were the mother and aunt of a nearby bachelor. The man had often seen Fara walking in the neighborhood and proclaimed his love for her through his relatives. Weary of her parents’ pressure and impatient with her boyfriend’s stalling, she agreed to meet him.
The new suitor was okay, in Fara’s estimation. “He didn’t drink much, he had a decent job, and he was kind,” she allowed. They went on several dates, usually outings to parks or gatherings with relatives. And before she knew it, without her consent, in the same manner that brides were kidnapped in Kyrgyzstan, the families had agreed upon a date and place for the wedding. No wonder Lola, my translator, resisted introductions to prospective suitors. Once an introduction was set in motion, the wheels often turned so quickly that a woman was no longer in control of her future.
Worse yet, the prospect of losing her didn’t spur Fara’s boyfriend to action. There was no way to stop the impending marriage. “I felt like I was in a trap I couldn’t escape,” she said, tensing up as she recalled the wedding.
After getting married, she moved in with her husband and his family and was soon left alone with her mother-in-law when her husband took a job in Russia, a common pattern among Uzbek men. Her mother-in-law quickly turned her into a slave, making her clean and cook meals for the household, which included another son and his family. The tasks kept her busy from the early morning until late at night. At the end of each evening, her mother-in-law expected Fara to give her a massage, and she was only permitted to bathe and get ready for bed when everyone else had retired. The matron forbade Fara to wear pants or leave the house without a head scarf. When Fara’s husband sent money back home for her, the mother-in-law withheld it.
Fara had wondered about her mother-in-law before the marriage. “I knew something wasn’t right,” Fara said. Though she was polite enough, there was something phony about her, something Fara couldn’t quite trust. Fara had always noticed her large hands. One day, after Fara had moved in and tensions grew between the two, Fara said that her mother-in-law lifted up her hands and said, “My hands are made for hitting. When I hit you, you’ll never get up.”
Even after Fara became pregnant, her mother-in-law still demanded the same duties of her. Fara began to resist, resulting in many arguments that continued after she’d given birth prematurely to an underweight girl and her husband returned from Russia. One day, the fighting turned physical: her mother-in-law hit her. Worse, her husband watched. And then they locked her in a closet for several hours.
Fara fled to her parents’ home and filed for a divorce. It wasn’t an easy decision, despite the abuse. Divorce carried immense social stigma—she would be seen forever as “damaged goods”—and it cost a small fortune. Thankfully, her husband consented; if he hadn’t, the divorce wouldn’t have been possible. His parting words were, “I love you. But I love my mother more.” And once the divorce was final, he renounced any responsibility for his child. When Fara and her daughter, now three, ran into him in the neighborhood, he ignored them.
After the divorce, Fara fell into a deep depression. She sat for months at home before a friend recommended her for a job at Mashhura. When I met her, it had still been less than a year since the divorce, and the experience remained raw.
Two things had sustained her, she told me: the Koran and her dream of America. “Whenever my heart turns cold, I read the Koran and it makes my life bearable,” she said. Her dreams of the West were more complicated: she admitted that she wanted to see her first boyfriend, who now lived in New York. They’d recently reunited on one of his visits home, and their connection was every bit as strong, she said. They’d continued to keep in touch after he returned to the United States and she held out hope that she’d be able to move there someday, even after she learned he had a wife and daughter. All I could do was cringe and wish her the best. Another thing you could find across cultures besides fried chicken and burgers, I thought, was women who fell for the wrong men.
• • •
The more I learned about mothers-in-law on the Silk Road, the more grateful I was for Caroline. She neither expected nor wanted us to live with her and David. When we went to their house, I didn’t have to cook or clean. She never inquired about plans for children, much less put pressure on me to have them. She treated Craig and me as equals and gave us a good amount of space.
In Central Asia, I also appreciated her presence because it gave me a creative way to dodge questions. When Murad of Tashkent asked me why we weren’t staying in his guesthouse, I feigned regret and told him it was “because of my mother-in-law.” I didn’t have to explain more. When taxi drivers and travel agents pestered me, I said that I would first “have to check with my mother-in-law.” They fell silent. With Caroline at my side, I was armed with a response that no one, not even the most aggressive of touts, argued with.
But as we traveled through Uzbekistan, I discovered one tension point with Caroline. Though she was adventurous in general, she was usually cautious about eating. Like Craig, my mother-in-law didn’t share my degree of passion for—okay, my compulsive obsession with—food. Caroline had read that food poisoning was common in Central Asia. At meals, she invariably pulled out a bottle of hand sanitizer. She avoided raw vegetables. Walking together in Samarkand, she noted with concern that vendors shined round loaves of nang with what appeared to be dirty rags. She winced at the bazaars as I sampled delicious creams and yogurts with my fingers before swaggering to a beverage stand to take shots of mulberry juice.
One afternoon, Craig’s parents and I visited a chaikhana for lunch while Craig went out to report. Like the one Fara had taken me to, this airy teahouse was packed with locals lazing on divans, chatting, sipping tea, and snacking the afternoon away. I ordered a large meal in Uzbek fashion, covering the table with rounds of nang, meat kebabs, various salads, cups of fresh yogurt, and bowls of laghman, the hand-pulled noodles that were still popping up here, far from western China.
We ate the laghman, awkwardly making do with the spoons we’d been given. (Chopsticks had disappeared after Kyrgyzstan.) But Caroline eyed a tomato-and-cucumber salad suspiciously. How could I be sure that the vegetables had been washed in clean water? “I’m not going to have any salad,” she declared.
“Look, I haven’t been sick since I left China,” I said defiantly, though I knew that challenging a mother-in-law was forbidden in Central Asia. I scooped a dollop of yogurt and mixed it with the raw salad. I took a sip of lukewarm tea. “The food is perfectly safe! All the kitchens I’ve visited have been spotlessly clean.” As I recounted some of the eating experiences I’d had—the delicious tea and scones at the yurt camp, the fried wontons with sour cre
am at the Dungan restaurant, and the long, endless meals at Gulzat’s—Caroline began to relax. She even reached over and stabbed a few rings of raw onion before inspecting a mutton kebab. She liked onions, and the meat was well done. The salad and yogurt, though, she still eyed suspiciously. As I crunched away, she looked at me disapprovingly. To Caroline, I was playing a dangerous game of roulette.
• • •
The next morning, I woke up with gas so terrible that I was sure it could be grounds for divorce. Craig reassured me that if my bodily functions were the worst of our problems, we were doing pretty well. He started getting ready for his day, having planned to meet a few contacts, but as I mumbled and moaned, he reconsidered. “Are you sure you’re okay without me?” Of course, I said.
“If you need them, my parents should be around,” he said.
“Don’t worry. I’ll be fine.” I hid a grimace. And with that, he pecked me on the cheek and left.
I rolled over and tried to go back to sleep. The pain went away for a while but then it got much worse. My stomach knotted in cramps as I curled up in fetal position. And then a thunderous sound echoed in my stomach, as if a bolt of lightning had struck. I lurched toward the bathroom.
Somehow, before I’d realized the gravity of my condition, I managed to creep outside to join Craig’s parents in the dining area.
“You missed a delicious breakfast!” David said. “First, we had yogurt and muesli with these very plump raisins—”
“Jen might not be in the mood to think about food,” Caroline gently interrupted.
It was true. I’d never felt so repulsed by the idea of eating. I did my best to look away from the breakfast buffet. Even the innocent Russian blini were nauseating. I could suddenly relate to Caroline’s amoeba-in-a-petri-dish queasiness about everything on the table.