Cooking and eating in China

Serve the People, Jen Lin-Liu

I put this book on my list after reading Jen Lin-Liu's On the Noodle Road, an account of traveling the Silk Road to research the history of pasta.  I learned from it that the author ran a cooking school in Beijing, and I expected that to be the focus of this book.  Instead, it is about how Ms. Lin-Liu learned to cook herself, and her travels around China exploring regional cuisines.  She interviewed the people she met, working and eating in restaurants, not just about their food but about their experiences in the major political events of the 20th century, including the Cultural Revolution of the mid-1960s.  In the process, she created a portrait of life in the China of today (or at least of 2008, when the book was published).

Jen Lin-Liu is Chinese herself, born in the United States to parents who immigrated from Taiwan.  After college, she moved to China, first to Shanghai and then to Beijing, working as a freelance journalist.  Living in China highlighted the tensions she had felt growing up Chinese and American. 

I straddled the expatriate bubble and the Chinese world outside it, not quite belonging to either. So it was in China, ironically, that for the first time I felt the urge to call myself a Chinese American.  It was the first time I had to seriously grapple with issues of race, identity, and where I fit in . . . It was the alienation I felt that led to my rabid obsession with Chinese food.  I imagine my subconscious thinking went something like this: if I can't connect with the people, at least I'm going to connect with the food.

But Ms. Lin-Liu also had to grapple initially with Chinese food as cooked and served in China, "menus [that] were full of items with beautiful, ornate names but arrived in the form of innards, claws and tongues," with "flavors that felt too chaotic, too intense."  As she began adjusting to (and then craving) the food, she also began to write about it, and to want to cook it herself.  This led her to a cooking school in Beijing.  Most of her fellow students were male, and they were studying for a certificate that would help get them work.  Cooking was seen as a low-status job.  For decades the authorities had assigned people to become cooks, who had no aptitude or interest.  Food shortages had made restaurant work even less appealing, both to cooks and customers.  This was slowly starting to change, with the relaxation of government controls and the development of private enterprise.  Beijing in particular was becoming a city of restaurants, many of them staffed by immigrants from rural areas.

After intense study, including sessions with a private tutor, Ms.Lin-Liu easily passed the cooking exam and earned her certificate.  But she found that it was not a passport to a good job. Instead, she began taking restaurant work wherever she could find it, overcoming resistance to hiring an unskilled foreigner, talking her way in by sheer persistence.  She worked at a noodle stand in an industrial food court that was open ten hours a day, seven days a week; and at a high-profile and expensive destination restaurant in Shanghai, serving a new type of fusion menu. Along the way she talked to cooks and customers, honed her skills, and collected recipes.  She also ate in a variety of restaurants, bringing both a cook's eye and a food critic's palate to the food she was served.

I knew going in to this book that the "Chinese" food I grew up with is very Americanized.  One of my college roommates was born in China, and she was pretty blunt about the "Chinese" food available in our small college town.  I learned a lot about food in China from this book, though I find hard to keep all the regional cuisines straight (or the regions themselves).  Personally, I found some of the food described rather disturbing, particularly the visit Ms.Lin-Liu made with friends to restaurants serving animal genitalia and dog meat, not to mention the discussion of cooking a civet cat. The recipes included are much less exotic, but since most are meat-based I don't plan to try them.

In addition to its food, I learned more about China itself in this book, including its geography.  I am embarrassed to admit that I needed an atlas to find Shanghai and Hong Kong.  (On my mental map, I had Hong Kong up near Taiwan.)  In the acknowledgements, Ms. Lin-Liu mentioned Peter Hessler and Evan Osnos, who for many years wrote on China for The New Yorker.  In fact, I have Peter Hessler's book River Town, about his stint in the Peace Corps, on the TBR stacks; I should move it up.

Traveling the Silk Road, in search of noodles and much more

On the Noodle Road, Jen Lin-Liu

The subtitle of this book is "From Beijing to Rome with Love and Pasta." It opens in Rome, where the author had traveled with her husband Craig from their home in Beijing.  In a pasta-making class that she attended, and in restaurants across Italy, she found surprising "parallels and similarities" between the Chinese food that she had spent many years cooking and studying, and the food of Italy that she was discovering.  She began to investigate the history of pasta, particularly the myth that Marco Polo brought noodles from China to Italy in the late 1300s.  (Lin-Liu also related a second myth I hadn't heard before, about a failed attempt to re-create China's meat-filled bao buns: "But he couldn't remember how to fold the dough, and Italy ended up with a second-rate mess-of-a-bun called pizza.")

Lin-Liu found that there are many conflicting theories about where pasta was first developed, and how it spread.  But most theories place its history in areas adjacent to "the seven-thousand-mile-long network of trade routes that connected Europe and Asia known as the Silk Road."  It wasn't a single road, of course, but "a tangle of overland paths that undulated through Central Asia and the Middle East before reaching Italy via the Mediterranean Sea."  Lin-Liu decided to travel the Silk Road herself:

I'd go to Rome again, but journeying overland this time, starting from my longtime residence of Beijing. In contrast to previous explorers, I would pursue a culinary mission: I'd investigate how noodles had made their way along the Silk Road; document and savor the changes in food and people as I moved from east to west; learn what remained constant, what tied together the disparate cultures of the Silk Road, and what links made up the chain connecting two of the world's greatest cuisines.  I would seek out home cooks, young and old, to see how recipes had been passed down and learn not only their culinary secrets but their stories as well.

There are two other elements to this story, personal ones, hinted at in the subtitle.  As Lin-Liu prepared for her travels, she was facing a question of identity.  Born in America to Chinese immigrant parents, she grew up in a Southern California community with few Asians, feeling always marked by differences.  She moved to China after college, working in journalism and studying the country's food before she opened a cooking school in Beijing.  In China, where she could blend in with the population, she still felt thoroughly American, yet when she returned to America, she "didn't quite fit in there, either."  She felt like she could not answer the simple question, "Where are you from?"

So as much as this was a sensory journey from East to West, I wanted also to explore what it meant to be "Eastern" or "Western" in a more conceptual way - I wanted to discover where the ideas converged and conflicted. Traveling through cultures that straddled the East and West, I figured, might reconcile what I'd felt were opposing forces in my life; maybe I would find others who could relate to my struggles.

At the same time, in the early days of marriage, she and her American (non-Asian) husband were working out their balance as husband and wife, and trying to decide if they wanted to stay in China. Craig had also worked there for years and was currently researching a book.  He couldn't drop his work to travel with her for several months, nor was he as interested in food and cooking as she was.  Friends questioned whether it was wise to spend so much time away from him, a concern her husband shared.  Despite some reservations, Lin-Liu decided that this trip was too important to her to give up.

Her carefully-planned route took her west from Beijing, traveling through communities of China's minority populations, like the Muslim Hui and Uighurs, and into Tibet.  Along the way, she found markets and restaurants, investigating local dishes, particularly the noodle-based ones.  She visited private homes whenever she could, finding a warm welcome in many kitchens with the cooks, and she also took classes in any cooking schools she came across. (In return, outside of China she was often asked to demonstrate Chinese cooking.) This was the pattern she would follow as she moved into Central Asia, crossing Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, and Turkmenistan, before venturing into Iran.  (Her husband joined her on these legs of the trip.)  After a short break, she then picked up her trip again in Turkey, before moving on to Greece and ending in Italy.

I enjoyed this book very much, starting with Lin-Liu's description of life in Beijing, an increasingly cosmopolitan city where she and Craig lived in a small close-knit community.  Her book is divided into sections, covering the different parts of her travels, each of which includes recipes for some of the dishes she learned.  The section on her travels in Central Asia was particularly fascinating, since this is a part of the world I know very little about.  I was also very interested in her travels in Iran and Turkey, given the current situations in those countries. Wherever she went, she found that cooking was primarily the women's responsibility, outside of restaurants at least, and spending time with the cooks gave her a chance to assess the place of women in those societies and in Islam.  She found that cooking schools could be an important source of income, but also an opportunity for women to gather in a safe and private place.

Strange to say, the least appealing aspect of this book for me was the food itself.  I am not a complete vegetarian (due to a fatal weakness for bacon), but I do not eat beef or lamb (let alone mutton), the bases for most of the recipes included from China and the Muslim areas.  At least Lin-Liu skipped the recipe for the yak-filled dumplings she ate in Tibet and the lamb's brains in Tehran (of which she wrote that one bite was enough).  I did note the recipe for Turkish karniyarik, or split-belly eggplant.  I'm trying to figure out what could replace the ground beef in the stuffing.  I am a fan of Turkish food, which has some wonderful vegetarian options. After reading this book, I'm also determined finally to try a Persian restaurant that a friend has been recommending for some time.  And I'm looking forward to reading Jen Lin-Liu's previous book, Serve the People: A Stir-Fried Journey Through China.