Author: Alex Shen

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Alex Shen, Final Research Paper

Final research paper on Suzhou noodles:

The reasons behind the popularity of noodles in Suzhou

Alex Shen

 

My final paper for this course is also on the noodles of Suzhou, specifically, about the reasons behind the seemingly unusual passion of people of Suzhou for noodles. Since I have been dealing with noodles this whole course and have written several essays or conducted project on noodles of Suzhou, I might as well dig deeper in this direction and take my own comprehension for noodles to another level. I used the phrase “seemingly unusual” because noodle, or wheat, have never been and never will be the main source of food for the southern part of China, instead, rice is the everyday food for people here. Noodles can be found anywhere in the south, but it never acted as a major food source or dominated the dining table. However, as far as I know, the city of Suzhou consumes noodles no less than any other cities in the north (it is estimated that people of Suzhou consume five hundred tons of noodles on a daily basis), which is quite hard to explain given the facts above. A famous writer from Suzhou once wrote in his book “Epicure” that “the first thing came to my mind after I woke up was to go to Zhu Hong Xing for a bowl of noodles”, which also shows how much love people of Suzhou have for noodles and how common and routine it is to have noodles for breakfast in Suzhou. So, this paper will be me trying to understand the reasons for this phenomenon by conducting a fieldwork to one of the noodle restaurants in Suzhou, while deepening my comprehension of noodles of my city of Suzhou.

 

To be able to talk about noodles between the north and the south, I first need to go for the history of it. It is believed that wheat was introduced to Xinjiang, China about four thousand years ago, and was already ubiquitous throughout the entire China after about another thousand years. The wisdom of Chinese people quickly helped them invent flour, which was made by grinding wheat into white powder. Because of the climate difference between northern and southern China, wheat was cultivated in the north whereas rice in the south. It was the Song dynasty when China’s economic center shifted to the south around the city of Hangzhou. All the business men from the north swarmed to the south, bringing their own food with them, and caused a prosperous diversity of food in the southern area.

 

This was the story of noodles being introduced to the south, and noodles rooted here ever since. Next, I will try to analyze why noodles could stay here and thrive to become one of the main food sources of people of Suzhou. In order to do so, I conducted fieldwork to a noodle restaurant in Suzhou. The place is called Lu Zhen Xing, a famous noodle brand in the city. My father is a friend with the owner of this brand, and he introduced me to him and provided me the chance to conduct this fieldwork. This fieldwork is different from an interview in that I didn’t sit down with the owner and did some Q&A. Instead, I asked the owner for permission to stay in the restaurant for a whole day to observe. I could wander the kitchen, dining place and the cashier in order to fully glean all the information I needed. After the day, I concluded some reasons I thought was crucial to the popularity of noodles in Suzhou: the good taste of the noodle dish, the dainty of the food and the process of enjoying it, and how the cultural and economic factors of this region affected people’s decisions.

 

The kitchen was the first place I observed. Through the process of making the dish, noodles and toppings are separately prepared. First, we need to put the noodles into the carefully prepared soup, and then precisely fill the bowl of soup with how much noodle the customer needs. Finally, the toppings are put onto the top of everything and the noodle can be served. During the whole process, there were several important points that were decisive to the good taste of the noodle: the soup and the noodles. The toppings were already made and extraneous to some extent compared to the former two. The soup is made from stewing big and chicken bones, finless eel, shrimp and snails together for three to four hours, and rich flavor combined with clearness will be the signs for successful and authentic soup. I knew that some customers have the tendency to arrive early for clearer and more fresh soup, which people of Suzhou call “the first bowl of soup”, so I arrived at the restaurant at 6am that day to hope to be able to ask the them the reasons for coming so early and, fortunate enough, caught up with the first customer. He was a man in his fifties, wearing clothes that looked like a school teacher to me. His answer to my question was that he always starts his day early and a bowl of noodles with freshly made soup would wake him up and better prepare himself. The restaurant owner also told me that the only thing Suzhou noodles had in common with northern noodles it that they both put the noodles in a big bowl(usually southern noodles uses smaller bowls), because the soup of Suzhou noodles is so good that customers just cannot have enough of the soup after finishing the noodles. The noodles are also hard to make—-each customer has his or her own preference for both how the noodles should be cooked and how much noodles they want—–this sets up a challenge for the noodle handlers, that they must be experts in cooking the noodle to perfection and precisely dredge up the amount of noodles asked by the customer. To become a qualified noodle handler, one must go through each stage of learner, intern, and finally handler, which would take up to years to for this process to be finished.

 

I called the toppings “extraneous” compared to soup and noodles not because they are not delicious, but because they were made ahead. However, the huge variety of toppings is equally astonishing: bamboo shoots, stewed pork cutlet, deep fried and smoked fish, crab meat, spicy pork, duck and so on. All the different topping can satisfy customers with different tastes, providing important freedom in choosing the food they like. Making the topping is also arduous. For example, there is one topping that in order to prepare it, one needs to pan fries the head, body and egg of river shrimps together in order to make a dish, which would take several hours to finish. I mentioned the process of making the noodles and the challenge behind it to emphasis that only through such arduous and professional process of making the noodles can it taste so good, thus attracting the long-lasting love of people of Suzhou for it.

 

The good taste of the noodles of Suzhou can be easily understood as one of the reasons behind the popularity of noodles in Suzhou, since delicious food is always welcomed, but the rituals when eating it and the daintiness of this dish need to be further explained. After the observations of the first-arriving customers and the morning preparation of soup and toppings for the day, I went home for a nap and went back at lunch time. People of Suzhou usually choose to have noodles for breakfast or lunch (we don’t usually have it for dinner), and I sat at the cashier near the entrance of the restaurant to observe the customers, specifically how they ate their noodles. People of Suzhou have a lot of rules and rituals when eating the noodles, among which some might sound strange and inexplicable. Some of the rules or preferences were mentioned above, like asking for specific amount of noodles and how the noodles should be cooked. Others like whether to have abundant soup, choice of having green onions on top, or to drop some vinegar or spicy oil to enrich the flavor are all options to personalize the eating process. I personally like to have less soup, harder noodles, no green onions, and some sliced ginger immersed in vinegar as a side. I saw one elderly customer have so much preferences that the cashier had to write it down on a paper and pass it to the kitchen so that his demand could be perfectly met.

 

These were just the options that one can choose, there are also other rituals or rules that people of Suzhou like to follow. The preciousness of the noodles of Suzhou is that it reached a perfect balance between being a common dish in terms of the price and staying dainty at the same time. People of Suzhou have always had a reputation for living a fine or exquisite life, and noodles of Suzhou is a perfect annotation to that. Even the noodle is not expensive and cannot be considered fine dining, people of Suzhou, especially the elderly, like to put on proper cloths for a visit to a noodle restaurant early in the morning. After sitting down and being served a cup of tea, customers can call the servant and express his or her preferences for noodle. This is crucial because otherwise the chef would cook the noodles based on his choice. When the noodle is served, first put in the seasoning or sauces like spicy oil or vinegar to highlight some of the flavors that each individual customer like. Then, stir the noodles so that it can be evenly immersed in the soup, meanwhile put the topping into the soup as well because the toppings are usually cold. Although these rules for eating noodles may seem irrelevant to enjoying the noodles, there are things that you do not know why but still do it anyway. Even if you are new to this city and unfamiliar with the rituals and rules for having noodles in this city, you will get proficient with it because you will be surrounded with people doing it every time, every day you go into a noodle restaurant. Nine out of ten people of Suzhou would say they do not know the reasons why if you ask them why they should follow the rituals, but I guarantee that ten out of ten people would follow them when eating noodles. That is the interesting part of our rituals, that they are fascinating and somewhat quirky at the same time—-one would enjoy following them but at still sometimes ask themselves why they should do it and reach no conclusion. However, the reason behind the rules are not my primary concern, but what is expressed or masked behind the very behavior of doing them. I think it should be reasonable to say that when doing something that is mainstream with certain degree of delicacy, one would feel somewhat honored and grow more passionate in doing so. If at first the noodles came to Suzhou and after justification of it to better serve the taste of people of Suzhou, rituals are just as important as taste later on to hold this enduring passion.

 

One last reason for the popularity of noodles in Suzhou is due to the economic and cultural uniqueness of this part of China. Suzhou is in the Yangtze river delta area of China, located in the south-eastern part of China, where Yangtze river meets the East China Sea. This area was one of the first to be open to the world after the time when China shut the world off for several hundred years. So, people of this area have something unique: the ability to absorb what is from outside and take it as our own after some modification. When Song Gao Zong, the emperor of China, fled to Hangzhou back in Song dynasty, he quickly fell in love with the southern part of China, about which a poet wrote that he was mistaking Hangzhou to be the capital of China. So along with him, many officers and business men came to the south, some of them to Suzhou. According to data from Fudan University, 75% of immigrants to Suzhou were from Henan province, where noodles is considered the first choice of food. So these business men and officers, due to their distinguished identities, didn’t yield to the food customary here in Suzhou, but on the contrary, brought noodles with them and even influenced people here. As I mentioned before, people here can accept new culture quickly, so did they do with the noodles. They swiftly took this food in and started making it their own food. And the nature of business men in the DNA of people here helped them start noodle industries: there are traceable records of noodle restaurants in Suzhou back to at least three hundred years ago. In 1757, the city of Suzhou already had its first noodle association.

 

After both digging deeper into the history of noodles regarding Suzhou, and observing the noodle restaurant for a day, I now have a better understanding to why the noodles can become so popular in Suzhou. Not only did people here make it so delicious, but also there is now culture related to it, which is masked by the rituals and rules of eating it. And making it possible for everything to begin, the open-mindedness of people here played a crucial part, that it made people of Suzhou accept noodles at the first place.     

 

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Noodle narrative, Alex Shen

Noodle Narrative

Alex Shen

My interviewee is my neighbor’s mother, and I went to her house to conduct the interview. She is now 45 years old and is a mother of two sons. She is an accountant and cooks dinner for her family every day after she comes back from work. Because it was pretty late that night, she couldn’t show me her way of making noodles, which was a shame. 

My second question(the one after introduction) was to ask her how frequent did she eat noodles, and had that frequency changed over time. She said she used to have noodles for breakfast every morning, which is quite common among people of Suzhou. And because there are so many famous and authentic noodle restaurants in Suzhou, she used to go out for noodles every morning before work. And when I asked her did she still do that now, she said she rarely have noodles for breakfast now, and instead, she would have juice, cereal, yogurt, and fruit. She explained that it was due to the shift of her concept for healthy eating, and noodles contain too much starch which is unhealthy when exceeded a certain amount. 

I found this question interesting particularly because it shows how the concepts of eating among Chinese people are shifting from merely seeking good taste to maintaining good health, especially as the standards of living are boosting along with the growth of economy in China. It is a great example of people’s eating habit changing with the development of a country’s economy. Humans always think about fulling their stomachs before considering the quality of the food they eat. China used to be in such poverty after the Qing dynasty until recent decades, and it is no doubt that more people would join this rank and start to eat healthily than just seeking delicious food. 

I also asked her about her awareness of the difference of noodles in different regions of China, especially between the north and the south. She was well aware of the fact that noodles are much thicker and wider in the north, while southern people enjoy thinner and longer noodles immersed in good soup. She concluded that this difference was the effect of difference in characteristics between northern and southern people, which results from difference in economy, climate, history and so on. In class we talked about the southern and northern pasta of Italy, and China is just bigger, broader than Italy, with greater difference in humanities, climate, environment and so on. Even a nuance would cause great difference in eating habit, and it’s not surprise that there are so many different kinds of noodles in China.

Her younger son just had his 13th birthday last month, and when I asked her what she did for him(outside the interview), the first thing that came out was making him birthday noodles. This was also mentioned in the interview, that birthday noodles is a sign of longevity, with the noddles that’s thin and long. These noddle-related cultural aspects show that noddles is such an important part of Chinese culture that it has become an indispensable item both in material and cultural life of Chinese people. 

 There are all different kinds of noodles in different places in China, and they each represent a city: Zhajiang noodle for Beijing, Dandan noodle for Sichuan, and Hot and Dry noodle for Wuhan. Noodles become an intermediary in China, one that people use to communicate, to make friends with, and to reveal social identity with. Noddles can represent one’s hometown in China, and the most famous Chinese noodles can represent China globally. 

To conclude, noodles is an important dish to my interviewee, and she has her own opinions regarding noodles and Chinese society. I think noodles Chinese noodles, just like Italian pasta, will become more better known to the world and become an ID card for China. 

https://youtu.be/fUf2vy0X6UU

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Alex Shen Journal #4

The bowl of noodles engraved in my soul

 

Noodles of Suzhou, please don’t seize to shine in my heart!

All the wanderers have come back to your bosom, and all the ingredients are ready to serve.

Fresh flour made of wheat mixed with egg and water;

Fish, chicken, pig bones and beef stewed thoroughly to make the soup, with a touch of black peppers to better the seasoning;

A table spoon of Shaoxin wine, with Chinese five spices that enrich the flavor;

Bamboo shoots, fried fish, pan fried eel, pork cutlet; all the toppings that goes upon the thin and long noodles, with a sprinkle of green onions.

Noodles with hot Biluochun tea, cold green bean soup, and sweet and sour plum juice that make my summer a dream come true.

 

1.I chose The Summons of the Soul from Chu Ci by Qu Yuan.

2.The title, summons of the soul, and the content shows that it is a poet that reflects the writer thinking about food of his hometown, which reminds me of my own experience when I am studying abroad.

3.Through reading and imitating this piece, I learned that Qu Yuan is from a place with rich produce of agriculture. His hometown must be rich and that people don’t really worry about food. Through his poet, it’s obvious that people of his hometown are considering about the beauty and that only happens when food is plenty. Also, I think people of Qu Yuan’s hometown must have lived a peaceful life before, but is now experiencing trouble.

4.Through my own writing, I now have a better understanding of the noodle tradition of Suzhou, and the whole process of making it. It becomes more obvious that the noodles mean much more than a dish to the people of Suzhou, but a bond that keeps the people close to our deepest food culture. In the hot summer days, we like to have a bowl of noodles for breakfast, along with sweet and sour plum juice to cool us down. Noodles came to Suzhou after the economic center of Chine moved to the south east, so this dish being so popular now is also a sign of the prosperity of Suzhou. People of my city don’t have such a rapid life pace like that of Shanghai or Beijing, and they have time to enjoy the noodles in the morning.

5.I think in the piece that I imitated shows the deepest love from Qu Yuan to his home, and the love is expressed through food. It feels like that his hometown is no longer what it was like in the poetry, but he has the strongest belief that things will be just like before, and his strong faith moves me with his expression of the food of his hometown. As for my piece, my DNA is that no matter how tough life becomes, or how far away I am from my hometown, the food of my hometown will calm me down and give me hope. Through food, my family and my hometown give me the strength I need to overcome any barrier. My love for noodles of Suzhou is in my soul, and the hope and strength is in my DNA, to make me stronger and be ready for all the challenges.

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Alex Shen, journal #2

My name is Alex Shen, and I am conducting this study on my best friend Kevin’s kitchen table. Kevin and I have been close friends for more than 6 years, and I have paid countless visits to his house, but never had the chance to have a dinner at his place. It should be really interesting to observe someone else’s kitchen table other than the one in your own family, because I think it can reveal a lot about a family: family culture, eating culture, relationships among family members and one household’s economic status. So after asking Kevin for permission to conduct this study, I went to his place this weekend, spent an afternoon there and joined his family for a dinner. I hope through this study, I get to know more about Kevin’s family and hopefully make us closer. 

I have always noticed before when I visited his house, that the kitchen table is bigger than normal size, and almost twice as big as mine. What’s more, his table has a lazy Susan in the center which is commonly used in Chinese restaurants but rarely seen in private houses. I imagined that his family uses a big kitchen table because his four grandparents live with them in the same house, but I am still curious about what it’s like to have a party of 7 people having family dinner at the same table every day. It must be so different from my family’s dinner atmosphere because it’s usually just me and my mother, and we just eat for fifteen to twenty minutes and then have a talk after that. I imagine the whole dinner process should be completely different at Kevin’s house.

While conducting this study, I employed several anthropological methods. First is fieldwork. I didn’t just call him or text him to interview him about his kitchen table, but actually went there to experience it myself, and I think it is only possible because I am really close to him, which is unique about my study. I choose to actually be there because I want to get a sense of the function and importance of a big table to a big family by feeling it for myself, not hearing it from Kevin, which would no doubt contain his own point of view. Also, I really wanted to see the transitions of the tables being used before, during and after dinner. Also, I interviewed Kevin before dinner to get a thorougher grasp of the background I need to know, for example, is there a dinner ritual that your family has. What’s more, I used comparison, in which I compared his kitchen with mine. I think through comparison between Kevin’s kitchen table and mine, I will be able to better generalize the function of his kitchen table, and understand the role that table plays in his family. 

I arrived at about 4 pm, and his grandparents were already preparing dinner(dinner began at 7:30 that day). While dinner was being prepared, I sat at the kitchen table and had a talk with Kevin. I asked what type and style of food his family usually eat and is there anything forbidden at the table, and he said that both his parents and both his grandparents are from Shandong province, so they really like to eat green Chinese onion and garlic raw, and that I should never stick my chopsticks upright into the rice bowl, which is not auspicious. When I was talking to Kevin, his father’s mother was at the other side of the table stitching a sweater(but it’s still summer), while talking to Kevin’s mother about household stuff. When approaching dinner time, everyone in the family went to help bring out the dishes. First it’s some wine and glasses, then they brought bowls for rice, all the dishes, and finally the soup. And when we were eating, the lazy Susan served with great importance because there were eight of us having dinner, it would have been possible for everyone to taste all the dishes without the lazy Susan. After dinner, Kevin, his dad, and his grandpa stayed to have some more wine, and Kevin’s mother and grandmother went to wash the dishes. And after all was done, the whole family sat down to talk about each one’s day, work, and me(because I am a guest). And even later than that, the table still served some purposes. Because Kevin’s father’s parents live on the first floor(so “dose” the kitchen table), they spent time reading books by the table before going to bed. 

After the day spent at Kevin’s place, I had a better understanding of their kitchen table. The table serves not only as a place for meals, but also where they have family meetings. The table is usually clean and tidy at non-meal time, and it is not only for food, but also for family gathering. I enjoyed the most when the whole family was talking after they finished dinner. It is a unique family culture of Kevin’s, when they can not only share and reflect on their own about the day, but also enhance the relationship among family members. This is unique to Kevin’s family, because there are 7 people living in that house. At my home, I usually just eat with my mother and have a talk with her elsewhere(her bedroom or the living room), and for most of the time, I will be in my study doing work. So the atmosphere is quite different between our families, which is expressed through the kitchen table. The table is somewhat like a carrier of the love inside the family, and if the family is big, it is more obvious. 

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Alex Shen journal #1

Alex Shen, CHN-370W, assignment 1

I was born and raised in Suzhou, China, where noodles plays an important role in both the culture of the city and people’s routine life, therefor it is no surprise that my favorite dish of all time is the noodles in Suzhou. Both my parents came to Suzhou after they graduated from college, and have been living here since then. For almost thirty years of living in this city, they were adapted to the food here and that is one of the reasons why I can enjoy the noodles. Among food of Suzhou, noodles is one of the most important and famous. There are countless noodle restaurants in Suzhou, which half of the citizens of Suzhou spend their time in them for breakfast. It’s like a tradition, a habit that is owned by all of the citizens. Noodles is also popular in north and west of China, where it is considered the staple food. But unlike noodles in these regions where people favor the texture of the thick noodles, noodles in Suzhou are thin and long, and the flavor of the soup is more important. My father has been a fan of noodles in Suzhou since he came here, and that greatly influenced me, and he is also the one that first led me to one of the noddle restaurants. It’s somewhat like an unspoken “rule” of this city to pass this love for noodles from generation to generation. I still remember that until high school, my dad would take me to school every day, with a stop by a noodle restaurant. It became a daily ritual of our family, and my dad and I could not start a day’s work or study without a noodle breakfast. 

When I tried the noddles here for the first time, I became a fan of it simply because it was delicious. Noodles in Suzhou is quite different from that of the north——it’s thinner, longer, and more smooth. The soup is also important, it’s made from fish and pig bones, combined with soy sauce and other spices. Finally, there are so many kinds of toppings for it——beef, pork, bamboo shoots, fish and so on——I could literally have different kinds of toppings for half a month. So my journey with noodles started because it was so delicious. But as time went on, it became more than that, to a way of my life. I know that it was totally unscientific to say I couldn’t start my day without noodles for breakfast, but it’s a way of saying how much noodles means to me. If I skip a noodle breakfast, I would be constantly thinking about it for the entire day and couldn’t focus on anything. My dad was busy when I was young, so “noodle time” was also the only time I had with my dad every day. It might be strange that the conversations between a father and a son happened mostly over breakfast, but those little conversations actually partly made me who I am today. My dad would always finish his noodles first and then start to talk to me, and since I would still be eating, I listened most of the time while my dad did the talking. He would ask me about school, about mom, about girls I like, and then talk about his own work, although I couldn’t understand a thing at that time. After we finish it and get into the car, we would listen to to the morning news from the radio and comment on them, but mine were naive and straightforward while his were more insightful(I assumed it was since I also couldn’t understand what he was talking about). This kind of daily activity lasted till high school, when I had to get up at 6 am to get to school and only had time for a quick breakfast at  home, but over these years I was able to learn the way my dad looked at things and people, and that helped a lot for my building of values and the way I see the world. Right now I am studying at Emory University, but the first thing I do when I get back home is to go for a noodle breakfast with my parents.

About the history of it. Due the difference in climates, rice was mainly grew and cultivated in south and wheat in the north, so noodles was not a popular type of food in Suzhou until the Song dynasty, when the capital of the country was move to Hangzhou. A capital is always the center of all kinds of culture, so wheat was brought to the south by business men from the north. Because Suzhou was a rich city back then, those business men stayed here to further development. As they grew acclimatize to Suzhou food, they also made people of Suzhou to start growing wheat and consuming noodles. After some modification to noddles, making it thinner and longer, and the soup sweeter, people of Suzhou created their own kind of noodles that it different from any other in China. Right now, noodle consumption in Suzhou can be comparable to that of cities in the north, which could show how much people of Suzhou love noodles. 

Recipe for noodles of Suzhou:

First use pig bones, chicken, beef fat, sugar, broad bean and ginger to make the soup for noddles. Second, make the toppings. There are several most popular toppings, but actually you can make anything you like. Finally, put the noodles in boiled water for two or three minutes and then put everything together.