by Jen Lin-Liu
She looked at me sympathetically and asked if there was anything she could do. But I also noticed a little smile doing battle with her motherly expression. She leaned forward in her seat. “So you still think all the food is safe?”
I shook my head wearily and returned to my room, where I developed a case of chills and sweated through my sheets. “I’m fine!” I called out to my in-laws when they later knocked on my door, as I hid under the comforter. But I did let the housekeepers in later. They’d heard the constant flush of the toilet, and they sympathetically held out rolls of toilet paper when I weakly opened the door. Later, another staff member came knocking, jovially declaring, “I have tea for your diarrhea!”
So yes, I could admit it: sometimes mothers-in-law knew best. And yet, I wasn’t going to change my eating habits. I couldn’t. While it wasn’t as valiant as dodging bullets as a war correspondent, reckless eating came with the territory of being a food writer.
• • •
I never established whether what I’d contracted had been food poisoning or an airborne virus. We suspected the latter when Craig came down with a similar ailment a few days later, after which my father-in-law succumbed to it. The only one who managed to avoid the bug was Caroline, which I attributed less to her careful eating than to the powers bestowed upon mothers-in-law in Central Asia.
I recuperated at Antica, our charming bed-and-breakfast, under the care of the two sisters who ran the place. The house had belonged to the family for four generations. The younger sister, Aziza, told me that their great-grandfather, a textile merchant who’d traded with Persia and Europe, had become successful enough to buy the sprawling home with more than a dozen guest rooms. A beautiful courtyard featured fruit trees and an herb garden. Grape trellises hung over a set of dining tables. Under a covered area near the tables was a desk where Aziza took care of the books. Nearby, her older sister, Oyti, ran the open-air kitchen. The pair looked as different as two sisters could. Aziza was petite with curly hair and a dark olive complexion. Oyti looked European, with a fair complexion and a stocky build. Their frail parents were usually around, strolling in the sunny courtyard or resting in the shade on a divan.
Aziza ran the place smoothly, taking care to be friendly and helpful, doling out a wealth of recommendations to guests. I admired her for more than just her business acumen. In a country where most people feared speaking out, she railed against the government’s program to force teachers and students into the fields each fall to harvest cotton, which was just ripening as we traveled through. A single woman, she had also been smart enough to avoid the obligations that came with a Central Asian marriage. She had managed to even avoid cooking, leaving that to Oyti, venturing into the kitchen only to check on things. “I can do many things but I can’t cook,” she said, feigning remorse.
I was impressed with Oyti, too, especially after she showed me a number of Uzbek specialties that at last warmed me up to the cuisine. Oyti—the nickname means “elder sister”—had gone through a traumatic divorce that had also separated her two children. She’d taken her daughter while the ex-husband gained full custody of her son. What made it more painful was that her ex had opened a competing guesthouse just around the corner. They didn’t speak, and her relationship with her son was distant. Instead, she found solace in the family she and Aziza had formed with their mostly female staff. When I was sick, the sisters had the staff bring me nang and a delicious, sweet blend of black tea leaves, crystallized sugar, pomegranate seeds, quince leaves, and fir twigs. It reminded me of the desert tea I’d sipped in Xinjiang, but this one had special antibacterial powers, the sisters told me. “Sometimes you will see the gypsies at the market burning the twigs for luck,” Aziza said.
Some of the ingredients were optional, Oyti noted.
“No, they’re not,” Aziza argued. “Especially when the tourists are in bad shape!”
From hearing the sisters talk about the tea and other dishes, I learned why Uzbek food tended to be bland. Spices and seasonings, which I saw at the markets but not in the food, were generally reserved for medicinal or cosmetic uses, as they had been for centuries. The vision-impaired consumed saffron in soups to improve their eyesight, while diabetics consumed dried barberries to regulate their insulin levels. Elders spiced their tea with cinnamon to help their kidneys. Parents washed their infants’ hair with basil for healthy locks.
Whatever was in the tea helped, along with a dish called atala. It was a typical breakfast, but the sisters rarely served it because foreigners didn’t like it. But I was intrigued by this ancient wheat dish that preceded noodles. In a hot kazan, Oyti heated a cup of cracked wheat flour with a bit of oil, mixing constantly, allowing it to clump. The flour browned and turned pasty. She added a little water and a generous amount of sugar and stirred until it became dark and sticky like caramel. She took it off the heat and let it cool slightly. I had a taste. It was like a gooey cream of wheat, rich yet simple, and gentle enough for my delicate stomach.
As my health improved, I sampled more of her cooking. She made delicious pumpkin pastries. Finely diced pumpkin and onions were mixed with salt, sugar, cumin, and black pepper. She wrapped the filling in long strands of pastry dough, crisscrossing it so that it resembled the lacing of a bustier. The hot oven melted the sweet-savory filling and crisped the exterior. I reached for several more, my appetite suddenly fully awakened.
The bed-and-breakfast had been so comforting that I was reluctant to leave. It felt like home, being under the care of the sisters and with my in-laws around. But Caroline and David packed up and headed home, leaving Craig and me to prepare for Turkmenistan and Iran. I felt a pang of sadness as I thought about the untethered life, far from family, that Craig and I would return to—for the rest of the trip, and perhaps beyond.
On our final day in Samarkand, the staff, who didn’t usually cook anything but breakfast for guests, made us an afternoon meal of you-know-what. Aziza was aware that I found plov tiresome but wanted to show me a more creative version. I volunteered to go to the bazaar. When I returned, Oyti was battling with the stove—it was Sunday morning, and because families cooked more on the weekends, the gas supply in the neighborhood was lower than usual. She finally got the fire going and prepped the ingredients in the order they’d be added to the kazan. If a cook was adept, Oyti said, she wouldn’t have to prep anything but the meat ahead of time, using the spare moments as the dish simmered to chop and add the other ingredients.
The dish looked appetizing enough when it was done, with pomegranate seeds, radishes, and whole heads of garlic decorating the rice. Craig helped set the table. “Are all American men like that? Is he always that helpful at home?” the staff asked. Another inquired, “Where did you find him?” Aziza said a prayer after the meal: “Thanks be to Allah for bringing everything to us. We are grateful for this food, for those who grew it, and for those who brought it here. Omin.” They each ran a hand over their face in a downward motion, a Central Asian gesture of prayer.
The result of Oyti’s labor was delicious. The pearly pomegranate seeds gave the rice a festive look and tiny bursts of sweetness, while the radishes added bite. The garlic cloves had dissolved like butter, and slices of quince had softened like baked apples. I made my peace with plov.
• • •
The food got steadily worse after we left Samarkand and moved across the rest of Uzbekistan. As the miles ticked on, the nang became smaller and drier. The pomegranates paled. Even the bazaars became less attractive and more ragged—rather than taking time to carefully arrange their produce, vendors haphazardly dumped stunted fruits and vegetables atop crumpled blankets on the ground. In Khiva, a walled trading post Disneyfied for European tourists, we had the worst noodles of the trip. Limp green strands sat underneath a flavorless mush of mutton, tomatoes, and potatoes. Even after I seasoned it with a good amount of salt and paprika (the inexplicable stand-in for pepper), it was still inedible. I looke
d longingly at the imported junk food that lined the shelves at a dusty little shop, then broke down and forked over the cash for an expensive canister of Pringles.
In this wasteland, Craig and I celebrated our second wedding anniversary. With culinary and recreational options slim, I suggested that we focus the evening around a bathhouse, an age-old Oriental tradition that extended across China through the Middle East. We’d heard that one in particular, in the historic town of Bukhara, was good.
My first warning should have been the staff—hairy men lurked at the entrance, wearing nothing but shower caps and loincloths. They sullenly handed us thin sheets and ordered us behind a curtain. After we emerged with the sheets wrapped around us, they corralled us into a dungeon-like corridor choked with steam. “Stand here!” one masseuse barked. The vapors smelled faintly of urine. Next, while Craig remained in the main corridor with one masseuse, another therapist led me to a separate chamber. “Lie down!” he snapped. Face down, I went onto a hard marble surface. He commanded me to remove my sheet, an order I resisted. “Suit yourself,” he replied, and promptly dumped several buckets of scalding water over me. With a rough cloth, he proceeded to sand my arms and legs down, so forcefully that enormous dark clumps of dead skin rolled off, leaving me as red as a boiled lobster. Then he applied a scrub of honey and ginger over my raw skin that penetrated and stung my pores. More torrential buckets of water followed, this time icy cold. “Jen?” Craig asked tentatively from the main room. I limped back to find my husband as bright red and ruffled as I was. We almost slipped on the wet floors as we exited, just as an enthusiastic group of topless Italian women traipsed in. That was our first and last bathhouse of the trip. So much for a romantic anniversary.
Just before reaching the Turkmenistan border, we stopped at a yurt camp near Ayaz-Qala, the remains of a walled city from the sixth century. We wandered through the ruins, an enormous sand pit divided by mud walls, before settling into a yurt on a concrete foundation: the Central Asian equivalent of a mobile home. The advertised lake where we could supposedly swim was a salt marsh. Tumbleweeds blew in the valley below us. And throughout the day, camels tethered to wooden posts nearby groaned unhappily.
After settling in, we ran into a retired American whom we’d met in Samarkand several weeks before. Jeffrey, sprightly despite being in his seventies, was traveling alone through Central Asia. “You look familiar!” he said, pausing in between the yurts and tilting his head toward us. Since we last saw him he told us he’d done “a figure eight” through Uzbekistan, stopping at the inland Aral Sea, which was drying up due to environmental damage, and Nukus, a forlorn border town. The Aral Sea was “not as depressing as I imagined—it was kind of fun!” Nukus had a great art museum, he added. When I shared my disappointment with the yurt camp, he nodded. “When I first got here, I had the same feeling,” he said. “I thought, what is this place? But it grows on you. And it doesn’t hurt that the bathrooms are pretty clean!”
I was dubious, but it turned out Jeffrey was right on several accounts. We later went to Nukus, which had a good museum featuring priceless modern art smuggled out of Russia. The yurt camp wasn’t so bad; the bathrooms were indeed quite nice. And in the early evening, the place became magical, as the sun went down in the valley, lighting up the sky in pink and orange streaks like a Hawaiian sunset without the ocean.
In the dining yurt, we ate bland rice pilaf with Jeffrey, who asked how my food research was going. I told him I’d been dismayed by the food in Uzbekistan. It wasn’t that the dishes were terrible, it was the monotony of the cooking that bothered me. Why did plov have to be cooked with the same five ingredients? Why were there only a few basic fillings for manti and samsa, the steamed and baked dumplings? Where was the imagination when it came to cooking?
“Well, you know, what you’re describing reminds me of what eating was like when I was growing up in Michigan in the 1950s,” Jeffrey said. The mains at dinner alternated between steak, lamb chops, baked ham, roast chicken, and spaghetti, he said. (As I learned in my research, Italian pasta was relatively new to America, only having been mass-marketed in the 1920s and ’30s.) “When we had spaghetti, my father would uncork a bottle of Chianti, the only wine we drank, and which we only drank with spaghetti,” he added. “I grew up in Leave It to Beaver America, and we were delighted with our food.” On the very rare occasion, they went out for an exotic taste of the East at a humble Chinese restaurant.
I thought about my own childhood in 1980s Southern California. I’d grown up largely on Chinese food, a carryover from my parents’ upbringing, and the standard American fare: macaroni and cheese, hamburgers, pizza, and—like Jeffrey—spaghetti. There hadn’t been much imagination, nor was anyone particularly concerned about it. It was only when I was in my teens and twenties, as America changed and I moved around more, that I was exposed to different cuisines. By the time I left for college, San Diego restaurants, along with those in many cities across America, had begun to change. More ethnic eateries opened, aside from the standard Mexican taco joints and Chinese takeouts. I still remember eating pad thai and gyros for the first time. When I moved to New York, my horizons broadened significantly. I encountered Indian chicken tikka masala, Middle Eastern falafel, and Vietnamese pho downtown; uptown, near my university, I tasted Korean rice cooked in a stone pot called bibimbap, Cuban arroz con pollo, and Jewish bagels. While much of this is hardly considered exotic across a large part of America these days, there was a time, not long ago, when it was.
Of course, I couldn’t hold Central Asia to my standards, which had evolved over years of eating widely, obsessed as I was with food. Talking to Jeffrey was a reminder that I should appreciate what came to me—not that I was going to love every meal of plov that would pop up, but that I might cultivate not only tolerance but respect for it.
That reminded me of how bread was treated in Central Asia, a lesson I’d learned from an Uzbek baker. After he mentioned he’d once tried Italian bread, I asked him to compare it to his nang. He paused. “In Central Asia, we cannot criticize bread. No bread is bad,” he said. It wasn’t censorship—it was a cultural difference. As in Xinjiang, bread was treated with the utmost respect and never thrown out, no matter how old it got. The baker told me that whenever Central Asians discovered bread on the ground, they picked it up, kissed it, and held it over their forehead before placing it on a table or a counter, somewhere higher than it was found. Those were the Prophet Muhammad’s orders, a reminder that sustenance was sacred. After the journey, at the end of meals out, I would ask waiters to box up leftover bread along with everything else, a request that might have sounded miserly but seemed just right to me.
• • •
We had one more Central Asian country to get through: Turkmenistan, a country that lived up to the caricature of the wealthy desert autocracy that Sacha Baron Cohen created in The Dictator. After we crossed the border, we drove along a road that cut through endless sand for hours until we came upon the first sign of the country’s vast natural gas reserves. In the middle of rolling dunes appeared an enormous bowl-shaped depression in the earth engulfed in flames. As we pitched a tent for the night, we stared agog at the Darvaza Gas Crater. It was as large as a high school running track. Fires burned within its endless nooks and crannies, and from deep in its center, the occasional spiraling fireball shot out. It looked like the gates of hell. Craig walked to its very edge and peered in while I stood yards away. “Don’t get too close! I don’t think this is the sort of place where anyone is going to save you,” I yelled nervously. Our guide had told us that camels and sheep occasionally wandered off the edge. But Craig could barely hear me over the continuous rumble, which got louder as the evening air cooled. In the winter, our guide told us, the fire was so loud it sounded like a rushing train.
A number of friends and acquaintances who’d traveled the Silk Road had told us that the site was too weird to pass up. Few Turkmen knew about it. Pipes jutted from the
edge; natural gas was one of the country’s biggest industries. Had a gas exploration project gone wrong? How long had the fire burned? Had there been an effort to stamp it out? Our guide didn’t know anything. “We have no information on that,” she said, lowering her head. Across Turkmenistan, it would be a common refrain, the answer to nearly every question we posed.
We packed up the next morning and drove through more barren desert. We stopped in a small village devoid of cars, running water, and electricity. But they had natural gas, plenty of it, so the fires of outdoor ovens burned all day. As we walked through the village, its inhabitants pretended not to see us. It was as if we were creatures in some other dimension.
We got back into our four-by-four and, several hours later, arrived in a place that couldn’t have been more different—a tacky, modern city rising out of the desert like Las Vegas. The capital, Ashgabat, was filled with new marble buildings, gushing fountains of water, and soaring gold statues of the former dictator, a megalomaniac named Saparmurat Niyazov. He’d died in 2006, after ruling the country for fifteen years, during which he renamed himself Turkmenbashi—the leader of all Turkmen. During his rule, thousands of Turkmen were jailed, tortured, or exiled for expressing dissent. After he died, his loyal dentist, who was rumored to be his illegitimate son, replaced him in a sham election.
Over the next few days, we toured the capital’s eerie sights. The National Museum was dedicated to Turkmenbashi, with room after room detailing his biography and filled with his possessions. At the National Library, bookshelves were sparsely filled, though there were plenty of copies of a monthly magazine, the cover of each edition featuring the image of the new president. The library’s most important room, under the building’s dome on the top floor, was dedicated to the Ruhnama, a book in which Turkmenbashi spouted his philosophy and rewrote history to his liking. While other books were scarce, dozens of copies of the Ruhnama lined a shelf, along with an enormous model of the work, painted pink. Back on the streets, we walked through a new section of Ashgabat paved with wide thoroughfares and tall new buildings, created from the fortunes of the country’s natural gas bonanza. We approached a local to ask for directions; he, too, pretended not to see us and continued on. Across the country, everyone averted their eyes. Though Sacha Baron Cohen had created farce out of a place like Turkmenistan, what we experienced was more like science fiction.