![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
tresfoyleIn August of 2016, my closeted self and two cis girls aiming for teaching degrees arrived at a small metropolis in Guangdong province that I won't name, to preserve a modicum of anonymity. Our university had a standing arrangement with a man named Mr. Zhou, a Hakka guy who'd made a modest fortune in the American Midwest and, as I eventually learned any Hakka guy who makes a modest fortune far from home has been expected to do since time immemorial, had committed a generous fraction of his wealth to giving his hometown a collective leg up. The nature of the arrangement was straightforward: my university would send a couple of English teaching interns to one particular high school a few hours' bus ride out from the hometown in question, and Tuesdays and Thursdays we would roll out there and provide what scant insight into the English language we could to several dozen elementary schoolers. The remainder of the week, we'd belong to the high school, providing valuable language exposure (one would hope) to several dozen more teenagers, half of them visibly brain-fried by preparation for the college entrance exams.
To be perfectly honest, we were dogshit educators. I don't know if any of those kids came out better prepared for the gaokao after we were done with them. I don't know if anything can truly outfit you for throwing yourself into the open mouth of the technocratic machine designed to judge how much social and intellectual merit your arrangement of biomass has accumulated, aside from being born into money. Knowing full well that we had no idea how to give these kids a meaningful advantage and realizing that we were honestly barely supervised despite the preparatory weeks of this undertaking spent marinating in warnings about how suffocatingly monitored and policed we should expect to be, we decided that at the very least we could give them a chance to catch their breath and fuck around a bit—with a faint veneer of English language learning.
We spent maybe an afternoon every week assembling lesson materials. Teaching ate up no more than two hours or so out of any given workday. We had nothing to grade and nothing to log; we wouldn't have even known where to look. There were papers to write for our nominal bosses on the other side of the planet, but they were scant and frankly required trivial effort.
All this is to say that we spent the next four months with shocking amounts of time to ourselves, limited fluency in Mandarin, Hakka, or Cantonese, relatively few overlapping interests, and a completely foreign city to navigate.
We did a lot of food tourism.
Not long after we touched down in Hong Kong right at the start, the vice-head of the American side of the project, a seasoned traveler and easily one of the most charismatic men I've ever met, pointed out a Hui noodle shop. He explained that wherever we were, we should keep an eye out for these places: open-faced storefronts, men in taqiyah and women in headscarves, noodles being made by hand right out front where everyone can see. He was a vegetarian; these places were a godsend because they by necessity didn't treat pork like a seasoning. That the food was also divine was a convenient bonus.
Once we were settled in to the campus that would for the next four months be the center of our lives, we immediately took his advice to heart and went on the prowl. My coworkers, being quintessentially stodgy white Midwestern girls, had decided to take up vegetarianism for the duration after one surprise encounter with pork foot and a meal that I am pretty sure incorporated red panda. I, being at least fractionally myself, was frustrated with the attitude but all too pleased to join in the hunt for a Hui noodle joint to call our own purely for the epicurean opportunity. I had somehow gone my whole life not knowing about halal Chinese cuisine or the people who made it (though I had read in passing about Uyghurs, first in my history books and then in the news)—how could I turn down the learning experience?
The place we found was on the other side of the river and a ways beyond, spidering off from the route we took to the bus station. We smelled it before we saw it and knew instantly that we'd found a winner. They sold no beverages, and obviously no booze; we'd pop in to the corner store next door and bring over sodas. It was a nice break from the ceaseless stream of cheap Tsingtao that underscored most of our dining experiences, even if I had acquired the taste for it before very long. That first time, my coworkers got some kind of egg and tomato dish the vice-head had recommended; I sprang for the niu rou hui mian.
I've come to understand that spicy beef noodle soup is something of a widespread cultural treasure. Taiwan's got a pretty good-looking variation. So does Sichuan. Google "niu rou hui mian" and you'll see a lot of iterations on the formula: soup greens (usually bok choy), lovely pale hand-pulled noodles (sometimes even a proper set of thick knife-cut noodles with the ragged edges), slices of pickled radish on occasion, fatty cuts of beef, and always that rich scarlet broth, heavy and velveted with numbing spice if they're doing the job remotely correctly.
In my experience they never actually call it niu rou hui mian. They just about always leave out the "hui"—I had understood that part to just mean "braised," but I suspect there's more to it. Fittingly, every example you can find online falls short of the thing I experienced that fateful evening. No other example I've seen mixes the la mian with the dao xiao mian, in turn keeping beautiful company with the thin glassy mushrooms, which themselves invite the wood ear and straw mushrooms. None of them cut the beef quite so fine. Most importantly, none of them get the funk of the broth right: the earthy, heady note to go with the ma la, the most perfect expression—in my experience anyway—of mainland Chinese cuisine's love of a good bitter note's power to really complete a flavor.
I was instantly obsessed. That spot became a sort of refuge for me. On my low days a trip to the Lanzhou-style noodle house always buoyed my spirit. Obviously the soup was a principal factor, but with time I came to really appreciate the place as a whole. The family that ran the place seemed to enjoy having me around, occasionally as a bit of a photo op, but never in a way that made me feel like an unwelcome spectacle. I was already palpably aware of how foreign my body was. My dysphoric cocoon of shaggy bohemianism would occasionally frighten and upset small children in public places, but at the noodle house, being so visibly marked as Not Han meant I had something in common with the staff and some of the clientele, in a broad sense.
As my time on the mainland wore on I became increasingly sensitive to what I perceived as a sort of ambient callousness, a contempt for anything one could construe as smaller, weaker, lesser than oneself. I don't think it was anything exceptional; just more obvious in a cultural context that wasn't mine. At the same time, my mother was chasing me to file an absentee ballot in the vain hope that my finger on the scale might end up being electorally relevant, terrified as she was (as we all were) of a Trump presidency and clinging fast to the idea that Hillary might stand a chance with a campaign driven almost wholly by fear of the alternative over any actual political message. Shortly before that came to a head, I'd been glued to the news cycle around the political crisis in South Korea—all that business with the prime minister's private shaman and the disappeared journalists. Somewhere in there a very dear friend of mine became an early victim of the thing social media does to trans women that ever make anything resembling a mistake, and I, fool that I was, took for granted that the people who had turned on her were right. I knew that when the plane touched down in O'Hare in December, I would not have escaped the landscape of cruelty I felt stranded in—only returned to a part of it where I recognized the landmarks.
On a particularly bad day, in the grip of these thoughts, I went to the noodle house, and ate my niu rou hui mian, and spooned in a bit more lao gan ma, and watched as the older man who often ran the register hug his nephew or his grandchild. He picked him up and bounced him on his knee. They spoke warmly to each other—about what, I have no idea. I realized I hadn't seen an interaction like it in what felt like a very long time. I'm not sure I've seen one quite like it since, either. Obviously, I have to acknowledge that this reflects more about my own decisions about what facets of other people's lives I get to see than anything else, but a personal truth is a truth regardless.
When I came back to the States, I knew that my odds of finding anything that reproduced the taste of niu rou hui mian were slim to none. In Shenzhen, on the way home, we'd found a Lanzhou-style noodle spot that was pretty good but not really quite on the level, because you can find anything in Shenzhen. I suspected that was the last hurrah for hand-pulled noodles for me. The flyover states are full of strange culinary holdouts and well-kept secrets but something this singular, this tied up in such a specific memory, seemed impossible to reproduce. Maybe in Chicago, I thought, but Los Angeles or New York is more likely. And when do I expect I'll ever be there?
It didn't stop me from trying, though. I found a place that at least knew what it was trying to do in St. Louis, to my surprise; they did a pretty decent knife cut noodle. In Carbondale, IL I stumbled on a hole-in-the-wall spot that served a spicy noodle soup with hefty cubes of gorgeously fatty beef and pretty good bok choy in a stainless steel bowl wider than my shoulder span, and I made my best effort to drain it, and left happy but no closer to the real thing. Sadly that spot is no more, though, like nearly every good restaurant in Carbondale. If you're ever in Columbia, MO, there's a place called Bamboo Terrace that does it better than anything in Columbia has any right to, and they do a curry crab rangoon that will change your life. After I moved to Chicago I figured I'd make the occasional foray into Chinatown until I either ran out of options or found something near enough to the real thing to settle for, and while I did find some candidates there they were all too overproduced, too much like a chain restaurant's approximation.
And then a couple weeks back my husband and I ran an errand out around Argyle, and, feeling like a late lunch, we turned up a place near the stop called YooYee. They specialized in handmade noodles, and had generous Sichuanese and Xinjiang-style offerings. Obviously we had to give it a shot. I kept my expectations low, the way I'd learned to.
I knew just from the smell. The first mouthful was the moment when the fleeting ambiguity of mutual recognition hardens into certainty as you and someone you'd assumed was a stranger lock eyes and realize that you've changed ensembles and hormonal regimes and stopped wearing that awful hat, but that you are, in fact, both still yourselves. And then one devours the other. I felt, for the first time after ten years of hunting high and low, chemically tethered to the last fond memories I have from before the Horrors started in earnest.
They still leave out the mushrooms, and they don't mix the la mian and the dao xiao mian, and they load the bowl with sesame seeds to give it this odd but not unwelcome woody note, and I'm pretty sure you need a little tomato to really perfect it, but they got the funk right. Nobody ever gets the funk right. It is my moral obligation to tell you that if you are ever in Chicago and have some time to spare with access to the red line you must eat this soup. It's seventeen dollars and for what it is that's a steal. Maybe it can't be to you what it is to me, but if it can do to you what that same brain chemistry-altering thing that that first bowl of niu rou hui mian did to me—and I think that it might—the world will be a little kinder for it.
To be perfectly honest, we were dogshit educators. I don't know if any of those kids came out better prepared for the gaokao after we were done with them. I don't know if anything can truly outfit you for throwing yourself into the open mouth of the technocratic machine designed to judge how much social and intellectual merit your arrangement of biomass has accumulated, aside from being born into money. Knowing full well that we had no idea how to give these kids a meaningful advantage and realizing that we were honestly barely supervised despite the preparatory weeks of this undertaking spent marinating in warnings about how suffocatingly monitored and policed we should expect to be, we decided that at the very least we could give them a chance to catch their breath and fuck around a bit—with a faint veneer of English language learning.
We spent maybe an afternoon every week assembling lesson materials. Teaching ate up no more than two hours or so out of any given workday. We had nothing to grade and nothing to log; we wouldn't have even known where to look. There were papers to write for our nominal bosses on the other side of the planet, but they were scant and frankly required trivial effort.
All this is to say that we spent the next four months with shocking amounts of time to ourselves, limited fluency in Mandarin, Hakka, or Cantonese, relatively few overlapping interests, and a completely foreign city to navigate.
We did a lot of food tourism.
Not long after we touched down in Hong Kong right at the start, the vice-head of the American side of the project, a seasoned traveler and easily one of the most charismatic men I've ever met, pointed out a Hui noodle shop. He explained that wherever we were, we should keep an eye out for these places: open-faced storefronts, men in taqiyah and women in headscarves, noodles being made by hand right out front where everyone can see. He was a vegetarian; these places were a godsend because they by necessity didn't treat pork like a seasoning. That the food was also divine was a convenient bonus.
Once we were settled in to the campus that would for the next four months be the center of our lives, we immediately took his advice to heart and went on the prowl. My coworkers, being quintessentially stodgy white Midwestern girls, had decided to take up vegetarianism for the duration after one surprise encounter with pork foot and a meal that I am pretty sure incorporated red panda. I, being at least fractionally myself, was frustrated with the attitude but all too pleased to join in the hunt for a Hui noodle joint to call our own purely for the epicurean opportunity. I had somehow gone my whole life not knowing about halal Chinese cuisine or the people who made it (though I had read in passing about Uyghurs, first in my history books and then in the news)—how could I turn down the learning experience?
The place we found was on the other side of the river and a ways beyond, spidering off from the route we took to the bus station. We smelled it before we saw it and knew instantly that we'd found a winner. They sold no beverages, and obviously no booze; we'd pop in to the corner store next door and bring over sodas. It was a nice break from the ceaseless stream of cheap Tsingtao that underscored most of our dining experiences, even if I had acquired the taste for it before very long. That first time, my coworkers got some kind of egg and tomato dish the vice-head had recommended; I sprang for the niu rou hui mian.
I've come to understand that spicy beef noodle soup is something of a widespread cultural treasure. Taiwan's got a pretty good-looking variation. So does Sichuan. Google "niu rou hui mian" and you'll see a lot of iterations on the formula: soup greens (usually bok choy), lovely pale hand-pulled noodles (sometimes even a proper set of thick knife-cut noodles with the ragged edges), slices of pickled radish on occasion, fatty cuts of beef, and always that rich scarlet broth, heavy and velveted with numbing spice if they're doing the job remotely correctly.
In my experience they never actually call it niu rou hui mian. They just about always leave out the "hui"—I had understood that part to just mean "braised," but I suspect there's more to it. Fittingly, every example you can find online falls short of the thing I experienced that fateful evening. No other example I've seen mixes the la mian with the dao xiao mian, in turn keeping beautiful company with the thin glassy mushrooms, which themselves invite the wood ear and straw mushrooms. None of them cut the beef quite so fine. Most importantly, none of them get the funk of the broth right: the earthy, heady note to go with the ma la, the most perfect expression—in my experience anyway—of mainland Chinese cuisine's love of a good bitter note's power to really complete a flavor.
I was instantly obsessed. That spot became a sort of refuge for me. On my low days a trip to the Lanzhou-style noodle house always buoyed my spirit. Obviously the soup was a principal factor, but with time I came to really appreciate the place as a whole. The family that ran the place seemed to enjoy having me around, occasionally as a bit of a photo op, but never in a way that made me feel like an unwelcome spectacle. I was already palpably aware of how foreign my body was. My dysphoric cocoon of shaggy bohemianism would occasionally frighten and upset small children in public places, but at the noodle house, being so visibly marked as Not Han meant I had something in common with the staff and some of the clientele, in a broad sense.
As my time on the mainland wore on I became increasingly sensitive to what I perceived as a sort of ambient callousness, a contempt for anything one could construe as smaller, weaker, lesser than oneself. I don't think it was anything exceptional; just more obvious in a cultural context that wasn't mine. At the same time, my mother was chasing me to file an absentee ballot in the vain hope that my finger on the scale might end up being electorally relevant, terrified as she was (as we all were) of a Trump presidency and clinging fast to the idea that Hillary might stand a chance with a campaign driven almost wholly by fear of the alternative over any actual political message. Shortly before that came to a head, I'd been glued to the news cycle around the political crisis in South Korea—all that business with the prime minister's private shaman and the disappeared journalists. Somewhere in there a very dear friend of mine became an early victim of the thing social media does to trans women that ever make anything resembling a mistake, and I, fool that I was, took for granted that the people who had turned on her were right. I knew that when the plane touched down in O'Hare in December, I would not have escaped the landscape of cruelty I felt stranded in—only returned to a part of it where I recognized the landmarks.
On a particularly bad day, in the grip of these thoughts, I went to the noodle house, and ate my niu rou hui mian, and spooned in a bit more lao gan ma, and watched as the older man who often ran the register hug his nephew or his grandchild. He picked him up and bounced him on his knee. They spoke warmly to each other—about what, I have no idea. I realized I hadn't seen an interaction like it in what felt like a very long time. I'm not sure I've seen one quite like it since, either. Obviously, I have to acknowledge that this reflects more about my own decisions about what facets of other people's lives I get to see than anything else, but a personal truth is a truth regardless.
When I came back to the States, I knew that my odds of finding anything that reproduced the taste of niu rou hui mian were slim to none. In Shenzhen, on the way home, we'd found a Lanzhou-style noodle spot that was pretty good but not really quite on the level, because you can find anything in Shenzhen. I suspected that was the last hurrah for hand-pulled noodles for me. The flyover states are full of strange culinary holdouts and well-kept secrets but something this singular, this tied up in such a specific memory, seemed impossible to reproduce. Maybe in Chicago, I thought, but Los Angeles or New York is more likely. And when do I expect I'll ever be there?
It didn't stop me from trying, though. I found a place that at least knew what it was trying to do in St. Louis, to my surprise; they did a pretty decent knife cut noodle. In Carbondale, IL I stumbled on a hole-in-the-wall spot that served a spicy noodle soup with hefty cubes of gorgeously fatty beef and pretty good bok choy in a stainless steel bowl wider than my shoulder span, and I made my best effort to drain it, and left happy but no closer to the real thing. Sadly that spot is no more, though, like nearly every good restaurant in Carbondale. If you're ever in Columbia, MO, there's a place called Bamboo Terrace that does it better than anything in Columbia has any right to, and they do a curry crab rangoon that will change your life. After I moved to Chicago I figured I'd make the occasional foray into Chinatown until I either ran out of options or found something near enough to the real thing to settle for, and while I did find some candidates there they were all too overproduced, too much like a chain restaurant's approximation.
And then a couple weeks back my husband and I ran an errand out around Argyle, and, feeling like a late lunch, we turned up a place near the stop called YooYee. They specialized in handmade noodles, and had generous Sichuanese and Xinjiang-style offerings. Obviously we had to give it a shot. I kept my expectations low, the way I'd learned to.
I knew just from the smell. The first mouthful was the moment when the fleeting ambiguity of mutual recognition hardens into certainty as you and someone you'd assumed was a stranger lock eyes and realize that you've changed ensembles and hormonal regimes and stopped wearing that awful hat, but that you are, in fact, both still yourselves. And then one devours the other. I felt, for the first time after ten years of hunting high and low, chemically tethered to the last fond memories I have from before the Horrors started in earnest.
They still leave out the mushrooms, and they don't mix the la mian and the dao xiao mian, and they load the bowl with sesame seeds to give it this odd but not unwelcome woody note, and I'm pretty sure you need a little tomato to really perfect it, but they got the funk right. Nobody ever gets the funk right. It is my moral obligation to tell you that if you are ever in Chicago and have some time to spare with access to the red line you must eat this soup. It's seventeen dollars and for what it is that's a steal. Maybe it can't be to you what it is to me, but if it can do to you what that same brain chemistry-altering thing that that first bowl of niu rou hui mian did to me—and I think that it might—the world will be a little kinder for it.
