On the Noodle Road

by Jen Lin-Liu

  Craig, always the journalist, got out of his seat and attempted to make conversation with the waiters, more with hand gestures than with words. A waiter pulled out his cell phone and dialed a number. Within a few minutes, a man who spoke fluent English arrived and introduced himself. His name was Harun and he was a tour guide. (This was a repeating pattern as well, and it played out across the region: waiters and bellhops, for a tip, speed-dialed enterprising guides whenever clueless people like us blew into town.)

  We invited Harun to sit down, and a waiter, unprompted, brought him a glass of hot milk. Harun, like most of the town, was Kurdish. Kurds were not so different from Turks, he told us. “We look the same, we eat the same,” he said. The chief difference, he said, was language. Some Kurds were still disgruntled with the government and wanted their own homeland, he allowed. But things were getting better. “The government treats us more equal now. We have Kurdish radio and television. And they give a lot of welfare money to the poor.”

  Harun offered to take us to a nearby village for lunch. He seemed amiable enough, and we had no itinerary beyond breakfast, so we agreed. Walking through town to his car, we passed by signs that reminded us of the East: the bakers made bread that was round and nang-like, and the butchers seemed to sell mutton and lamb exclusively, rather than a range of meats as in Istanbul.

  “I eat sheep ten times, beef one time,” Harun said. “Cow does not have a good taste. If I don’t eat sheep, I’m not happy.”

  We climbed into his shabby minivan and drove around beautiful Lake Van. A haunting Christian church that Armenians had built a thousand years before sat on a lone, rocky island, reminding me of the troubled history between that ethnicity and Turks; toward the end of the Ottoman era, the military had forced more than a million Armenians out of eastern Turkey, and many had died, in an event that Armenians labeled genocide and the Turkish government had yet to address.

  We passed a sign with an arrow that pointed to Iran. After making a turn onto a narrow, muddy road, we drove for another few miles past cement-block homes before we arrived at a small village nestled in rolling hills covered with snow. It was early April, but winter still.

  This was Kayala, Harun told us, and it brought to mind what my Istanbul friends had said of Van: “But there’s nothing there!” We followed a dirt footpath to a ramshackle dwelling in which a woman boiled a pot of milk on a stove in a bare room, while watching two children. The walls and floor of the room were made of dirt.

  Harun poked around the village, looking for friends. One had gone to Istanbul, the villagers told him, while another had gone to Van for the day. As we trudged up the muddy path, we ran into someone Harun recognized—the village imam, a lanky man named Nezmettin. He didn’t look like imams I’d seen elsewhere; instead of a long, flowing robe and long beard, he was dressed in sweatpants, a worn sweater, and a wool cap. He was also a beekeeper, he said. He jotted down the name of his website, and asked if I would be kind enough to promote his product.

  “Maybe you would like to sell my honey in China?” he said.

  I asked for a sample. Unfortunately, he said, he’d run out and wouldn’t have more until summer. He pointed to a shed by his home where we could hear bees buzzing. In twenty days, after the snows had melted, he’d open the shed and the bees would pollinate the blooming wildflowers and return to make the sticky fluid that Nezmettin would appropriate and sell to the world.

  “Honey is good, especially for us men,” Harun told Craig with a nudge. The imam listed the benefits: honey prevented arthritis, kept one’s weight in check, and boosted virility. He ate a spoonful every morning and night, he said.

  Nezmettin was apologetic about the village. Early summer was really the best time to visit, he said. Not only was honey plentiful, but the sheep produced their sweetest-smelling milk then, after grazing in the spring grasses. In June, the villagers made cheese, and each household bought as much as four hundred pounds and buried it in their yards, taking out a chunk at a time to savor it slowly throughout the year. “It’s like wine. It gets better with age,” Harun said. But since we were at the very tail end of the cycle, there was little left to enjoy.

  Just as we’d concluded we’d come at the worst time possible, Nezmettin asked if we wanted to stay for lunch. But wouldn’t we be an imposition, given the lack of food? “No, no, it’s fine,” the imam said, waving us into his home.

  We removed our shoes at the door and stepped into a humble yet comfortable living area that contained a television with a satellite feed, a modern-looking stove for heating, and a small sofa. Nezmettin invited us to sit at the round, low table on which Central Asians and Turks traditionally ate meals, although the custom had largely disappeared in Istanbul.

  In the kitchen, the imam’s wife and sister, unfazed by the unexpected company, began to prepare lunch. They invited me to watch as they cooked a version of menemen, the Turkish omelet we’d eaten that morning, this one made with tomato paste, onions, and wild greens that grew beneath a walnut tree in the yard. They used sunflower oil, a contrast from coastal Turkey, where olive oil was the staple. They remained in the kitchen during our visit, only coming out to the living room to serve the food: heaping dishes of tomato-and-cucumber salad, stewed chicken in tomato sauce with French fries, and plain, creamy yogurt. The ubiquitous flatbread was propped up like old LPs on the table. Like the bread we’d seen in Central Asia and Xinjiang, it was baked in underground tandoor ovens, Harun said, going on to describe breads that reminded me of the East. Lavash, he added, was stockpiled just like cheese. The thin bread, which I’d first encountered in Iran, was dipped into water or tea before eating. “That makes it very good for war times,” Harun said solemnly.

  Also gracing the table was the imam’s precious honey. He kept a reserve for his family, and I could see why. Still embedded in the comb, the dark, viscous liquid had bits of pollen suspended in it. The comb crumbled like good pastry and the honey was tangier and sweeter than any I’d ever tried. The taste lingering in my mouth, I began thinking about ways I could peddle it, as Nezmettin had requested.

  I asked what accounted for the honey’s intensity. The imam replied that he didn’t adulterate it. “Some beekeepers give their bees sugar to make the honey sweeter.” And the flowers helped, the imam said. It was a shame we wouldn’t see the rainbow of flora that would soon blossom—the greater the range, the more complex the honey. It turned out that the secret to good honey was also the key to many distinctive dishes across the Silk Road: the more cross-pollination, the better.

  After we’d finished everything, the women reemerged with helva, a common nougat-like sweet, and cake made with honey and walnuts. We lingered over cups of black tea. As the imam laid out a carpet for Harun to pray on—he’d missed one of his prayer sessions while driving—I wanted to give praise to Allah, too, for the bounty of food we’d enjoyed in this impoverished village, even at the tail end of winter.

  • • •

  All along the Silk Road, locals had showered us with amazing hospitality. In Xinjiang, I’d been treated like part of Nur’s family; in Central Asia, strangers had invited us to weddings and mere acquaintances had slaughtered a sheep for us; Iranians saw beyond politics and had been eager to make friends.

  Even so, the Turks outdid everyone. Selin and several of her friends had put me up in their homes and hotels without asking for a penny, and they’d treated me to dozens of meals in Istanbul. But city folk had the means to afford such generosity. It was a surprise to show up unexpectedly in one of Turkey’s poorest places and receive the kind of welcome and sustenance we’d experienced in Kayala.

  It seemed that Turks were always ready for guests. I grew to understand that the massive volume of Chinese food that Selin and her friends had wanted me to cook was not a sign of gluttony; it was a sign of charity. My stingy quantities hadn’t allowed for the possibility that a guest might bring more friends, or that neighbors might come kn
ocking.

  My Turkish friends explained that the hospitality was related to their country’s unique history and its position on the Silk Road. For centuries, outsiders and their exotic goods had passed through Anatolia en route to Asia and Europe. Turkey had once been part of the Holy Roman Empire, and Istanbul (then known as Constantinople) its eastern capital. Turks, according to the mythology, were also guests in their own land, since they’d originated in Central Asia and migrated to Anatolia more than a thousand years before. As far back as the thirteenth century, Turks had set up a system of wakifs, religious charitable organizations dedicated to feeding travelers across the country. At these soup kitchens, visitors could receive a meat dish, rice and wheat soup, vegetables like spinach and turnips, and helva for dessert. A spread of butter, cheese, and flatbread awaited those who arrived late in the evening.

  The wakifs were an outgrowth of Sufism. I learned more about this mystical offshoot of Islam in the Anatolian town of Konya where I visited the tombs of Mevlana, a poet who founded Sufism, and Ates Baz Veli, his chef. The graves were the most important shrines in Turkey, and the only places in the country where I felt the need to wear a head scarf. That it was mid-April but snowing the day I visited only added to their mystical quality.

  At Mevlana’s shrine, a peaceful compound where the poet had lived and was buried, I visited the kitchen, one of the more important rooms. Sufism is probably best known to outsiders for its whirling dervishes, who wore fezzes and gowns and spun in circles to reach spiritual enlightenment, but here I learned that they had another, equally important duty: cooking. During Mevlana’s time, a dervish’s education began in the kitchen. Initiates prayed and fasted for several days in the kitchen foyer before taking on duties that included grocery shopping, washing dishes, and cooking. Once a disciple graduated from the kitchen, he was permitted to eat in the dining room with more senior members. Cooking provided a pathway for living: you started out “raw” and ended up “ripe” or “well-cooked.”

  Not far from Mevlana’s shrine, in the suburbs of Konya, was an unassuming tomb to his chef, Ates Baz. I traveled there by taxi, with a driver named Abdullah, and I thought he was lost when he turned down a side street lined with modest houses that petered out into an empty field. But there it was, a narrow brick two-story shrine with a pointy roof. The humble building was one of the country’s most popular attractions. Ates Baz, my driver explained, wasn’t just any chef. One day, Mevlana had instructed him to make a particular dish, but midway through cooking, Ates Baz ran out of wood. As a sign of devotion, he stuck his leg in the fire to feed it. Fortunately, Mevlana intervened before the cook self-immolated and promptly elevated him to his second-in-command.

  Not long after we arrived at the tomb, a bus pulled up, and dozens of women from Istanbul disembarked, each carrying a small plastic bag of salt. They placed the bags in a basket near the shrine, exchanging them for sacks left by other pilgrims. The salt was regarded as holy. “It cures depression,” said the gatekeeper, an elderly woman whose family had looked over the shrine for more than two centuries. “Maybe it’s psychological,” Abdullah said with a shrug. On the way back to town, though, I noticed my driver was counting beads. I asked what he thought of Sufism. “It is very hard to say,” he said. “How do you define a Sufi?” Ataturk had stamped out the dervishes, and Sufism had become more of a philosophy than a religion. But the idea that cooking and hospitality were sacred had endured.

  • • •

  Craig and I discovered that traveling across Turkey by bus was incredibly comfortable, in accordance with Turkish hospitality. Bus stations had ample seating and plenty of tea, served by mobile vendors. (Tea, always sipped from small tulip-shaped glasses, even on the go, was so common that the country often seemed to be one giant teahouse.) Buses were punctual, and the attendants were more attentive than the average American flight steward. In their button-down shirts and ties, they served a range of complimentary drinks and snacks, and they passed around bottles of lemon cologne to freshen travelers’ faces and hands. The food at rest stops was made with care and included a range of delicious stews, the Turkish pizza called lahmacun, and kebabs. I would take a Turkish rest stop over the ones that line I-95 any day.

  Traveling in the Kurdish-dominated east had its moments of tension, though. At one bus station, a friendly tea vendor asked us how we liked “Kurdistan.” Every so often, police pulled over a bus, examined everyone’s identification, and threw open the luggage compartment to inspect bags at random. On one bus ride, it happened three times. They were looking for separatist-minded Kurds, some of whom they suspected were terrorists. But compared to our paranoid experiences in Turkmenistan and Iran, eastern Turkey was relatively relaxed, and we got through the Kurdish area without incident.

  Even so, a new sort of tension was building between Craig and me. With my Silk Road journey more than half complete, both of us had started thinking about the next step. We knew the immediate future: after the Silk Road, we would fly back to Beijing for ten days and then go on to Washington, DC, where a think tank had awarded Craig a fellowship. But beyond that, we had no plans. Bouncing across the Pacific and roaming the world was starting to wear on me, and I suspected on Craig as well. But what alternatives did we have? Did we want to move back to China? Or did we want to settle down somewhere in the United States? Surely, we had to figure that out before we thought about children.

  On the long bus rides across Turkey, we started talking about possibilities. I was still ambivalent about the cooking school; sometimes I thought about giving it up entirely, while other times I imagined throwing myself into it full-steam, building it into something bigger. Freelancing left a lot of freedom. “We could live in Hawaii,” Craig said. “Or the coast of Maine.” But writing seemed unstable, only more so since the rise of the Internet and the decline of traditional publications. So if that wasn’t a good option, maybe something else was, Craig said, bringing up a completely different idea: joining the Foreign Service and becoming a diplomat. Not only had he given the idea some thought, but he’d even brought test materials for the Foreign Service exam and begun studying on the long rides.

  The prospect of Craig joining the Foreign Service was intriguing. It meant that he’d be posted at various American embassies around the world, for several years at a time. It seemed like a natural fit. As a foreign correspondent, he’d written extensively about international issues. He was fluent in Mandarin, a language that had become increasingly valuable. And a career like that, with its stability and benefits, would mean a significant step up from our current lifestyle. We would have comfortable, American-style housing and comprehensive health insurance, both of which we’d lived without in China. If we had children, they would be able to attend good international schools. And it would be an ideal circumstance for me to continue writing. Moving every few years would mean that I’d always have something new to write about.

  But I couldn’t help feeling resistant. If Craig joined the Foreign Service, I would become the classic trailing spouse. I’d never moved anywhere for anyone. Would I have control over where we lived? How would I fit in with the other spouses, whom I imagined as tennis-playing, tailor-visiting ladies who lunch? Would I take up bridge and mahjong and start drinking after lunch out of boredom? I shared my fears, caricatured as they were, with Craig.

  “Well, how about we think about other options,” he said, as we settled into another long-distance ride. One alternative he proposed was that we could work together at the cooking school. “We could build it up and maybe open another one in the United States and split our time between the two.”

  Surely he was joking, I said. He was not, he replied. But he’d never been interested in cooking before! I said. And how would that work anyway? Would he want to work for me? Or I for him?

  It wasn’t about me working for him or him working for me, he said. We would work together. The same way we worked together in our relationship.

/>   But what if there were disagreements? Who would prevail? I asked him. Sure, we’d been colleagues, at Newsweek, when we first met. But we hadn’t been a couple then, and we’d never worked in the same office. And the cooking school was different—I felt possessive of it and wasn’t ready to share it. It was, after all, my cooking school. Working on it together was a concept I couldn’t wrap my head around.

  • • •

  In the central Turkish town of Gaziantep, I met a pair of Sufi sisters who embodied the spirit of Mevlana and his chef. Near the border of Syria, Gaziantep was known for its hearty cooking, which had remained unchanged for centuries. Unlike Mediterranean Turkey, where olive oil, vegetables, and seafood were a large part of the diet, traditional Anatolian cuisine consisted of sheep, butter, grains, and lentils. My guide in Gaziantep was a food writer named Filiz, who promptly took me to her sister’s house for lunch. The sisters, both in their fifties, were very close, and for years they’d lived downtown in the same apartment building, along with their mother. But a few months ago their mother had died, and Ferda and her husband, who together ran a successful plastic-wrap business, had moved to a wealthy suburb. The house, a sparkling American-style McMansion, was the grandest I’d visited on the Silk Road. A large green lawn surrounded the property, and the walkway to the front door was paved with marble. There was more marble on the counters of the eat-in kitchen, which also contained a huge stainless-steel refrigerator and all the other appliances you’d expect in a fancy Western kitchen, plus a Sony flat-screen television mounted on one wall.