A rooster crows. Li Jinlan rises in darkness from an earthen bed in her village farmhouse. She starts a fire, and sips a warm bowl of milk. Then she picks up a worn, wood-handled cleaver, and starts cutting seed potatoes to ready for planting.
Living high in a ravine in China’s rugged Shaanxi province, Ms. Li is one of the most well-connected women I’ve met. Not in the modern sense, but in an ancient, earthy sense.
It’s her bond to the land.
Why We Wrote This
Deep in rural China, a Monitor writer learns to cook authentic handmade noodles, gaining a new understanding of country life in the process.
She tills it, nourishes it organically, and tends its verdant sprouts. She harvests its bounty – from corn and potatoes to peppers, bok choy, and tomatoes – feeding herself and her husband from their small plot.
Ann Scott Tyson/The Christian Science Monitor
Ms. Li and her spouse, both in their 80s, make their home in a cave dug out of the same, silty yellow loess soil. They sleep on an earthen bed, or kang in Chinese. She climbs a steep hillside nearby to gather branches and twigs for kindling to stoke a wood-burning hearth that warms the kang.
“Was the kang too warm last night?” she asks on a spring morning during one of my visits. Wearing a padded jacket and traditional cloth shoes, she carefully tends the fire, knowing just when to stir it, and how much wood to add.
Nothing is wasted in Ms. Li’s humble home.
She sweeps the floor with a broom she fashioned from straw, gathering every last twig to burn. She makes tea from wild herbs. Any leftover garden cuttings or kitchen scraps go to feed their chickens and a cat.
Ann Scott Tyson/The Christian Science Monitor
Propping his cane on the wooden chicken coop, Ms. Li’s husband slides open the door, letting a dozen hens run flapping and clucking across the dirt yard. He collects some eggs for her to scramble together with chives from a neighbor’s garden.
Ms. Li and other villagers share some of what they grow on their small, terraced fields, and no one goes hungry.
It wasn’t always this way.
Born in 1945 during the Chinese civil war, Ms. Li and her family were destitute. Lacking any schooling, she married young. She raised five children in the 1960s and ’70s, when Mao Zedong’s radical policies unleashed famine. They survived by eating corn husk buns and boiled weeds such as sow thistle.
“That was good food back then,” Ms. Li recalls.
Ann Scott Tyson/The Christian Science Monitor
While recent decades have seen vast improvements in China’s overall living standards, progress has been slower in remote areas like northern Shaanxi. China’s rural residents on average have less than half the income per capita of city dwellers.
Rural areas are also aging rapidly, with millions of elderly empty-nesters like Ms. Li and her husband living alone, “left behind” in villages after their children migrate to cities and towns. Ms. Li’s village now has only about 10 families, compared with some 60 when her children were growing up.
In a culture that stresses filial piety, she and her neighbors often compare notes on which children are taking care of their elderly parents, and which aren’t. She explains how one widower’s son, pressured by his wife, refuses to care for his father. “This kind of thing is quite common,” she says.
Despite the hardship of shouldering most of the farm work, given her husband’s frailty, Ms. Li has no desire to move from the village – the ancestral home of several generations of his family. And she can’t imagine leaving the cave for a concrete apartment high-rise.
Ann Scott Tyson/The Christian Science Monitor
“Our cave is warm in the winter, and cool in the summer,” she says. It may lack modern conveniences like running water or a flush toilet, but the couple has an outhouse, and can dry their waste to use as fertilizer.
Much like farmers around the world, Ms. Li is proud of her garden-to-table existence, and the self-sufficiency it shows. Plus, she likes the taste of her simple, hearty, farmhouse fare.
“I can’t eat the food in town,” she says. “I’m not used to it.”
After thinning out her corn seedlings, and helping her husband repair a hoe, she ducks into the cave’s kitchen.
“Let’s make noodles tonight!” she says in her lilting, Shaanxi twang.
Eager to learn, I volunteer to be sous-chef. With no recipes, Ms. Li’s dishes must be gleaned firsthand. She mixes flour, water, and a pinch of salt, kneads the dough for about 15 minutes, and then lets it rest.
Ann Scott Tyson/The Christian Science Monitor
Next, using a long, tapered rolling pin, she rhythmically rolls the dough, sprinkling it with ground millet flour to prevent sticking. When the dough is a very thin circle, she folds it into 3-inch pleats, and then slices it rapid-fire with her cleaver. Gently separating the cut noodles with her fingers, she slaps them a bit on the breadboard and leaves them in a tangled pile.
Finally, she plunges the noodles into boiling water, cooking them for only three or four minutes. Once drained, she serves them alongside a spicy homemade cucumber salad. “Take a bite of cucumber, then a bite of noodles,” she suggests, tucking her bob of silver hair behind her ears as she eats.
After dinner, she dips a big ladle into a tall ceramic jug holding water, rinses our bowls, and wipes them dry. She feeds the cat a bowl of scraps, combs her hair, and climbs onto the kang to relax.
The village is quiet, apart from the rustling of leaves and, from time to time, the bell of a goat grazing on the hillside above the cave.
Whenever I make these noodles now, I think of Ms. Li with admiration, and savor every bite.
