Portrait of an LBX

There are thousands of these little hole-in-the-wall restaurants all over Shanghai, each with an almost identical blue sign adorned at the bottom with Arabic for what I must assume says, “Lanzhou Pulled Noodles” like the much larger Chinese right above it. There are so many, and they’re so similar, that I thought for sure they must be franchised.

“No, our sign is not like brands in the mall,” says Ma Feng, my newest noodle-making buddy says as he points to Cloud Nine mall –  one of the most ungodly big behemoths of commercial culture in Shanghai – across the narrow but extraordinarily busy street from the twenty by thirty foot hole in the wall noodle restaurant. He then explained to me two mysteries about the enterprise I hadn’t understood until today.

First, every single Lanzhou Pulled Noodles in Shanghai is owned by Muslim Chinese – called Hui (pronounced hway) in Mandarin Chinese – from Qinghai (pronounced ching-high) province abutted against Tibet way out West. One reason that’s odd is that Lanzhou is a province away from Qinghai in Gansu. The other reason is that Qinghai is like a cross between Texas and Wyoming – gigantic in size but mostly desolate and very thinly populated. My man, Mr. Ma, told me that it’s more of a style of noodle than a geographic nomenclature, and that the Hui have been pushing into developed Qinghai from Lanzhou, which itself supports tons of Hui, for a long time. As for the noodles, I’m not a big fan, but Ma Feng told me his white hat and sari-clad brethren wrangle down noodles thrice daily. Small wonder they all have the ever-rosy cheeks of malnourishment.

Second, as Ma Feng indicated, there’s a strange understanding between all the owners that they’ll use the same sign and restaurant name everywhere as long as they don’t come too close to one another. God knows what he meant by “too close” since I can get to three of them within 15 minutes walking from my apartment. Given their profound proliferation, I’d imagine “too close” means you can’t walk out of one Lanzhou Pulled Noodles and see another Lanzhou Pulled Noodles across the street – a rule that Starbucks egregiously flouted about a block away from Ma Feng’s restaurant.

Probably the most interesting revelation I made from the whole conversation was the way that Muslim families from Qinghai have formed an organic network in Shanghai for making cash to take back West. Ma Feng has been in Shanghai for only two weeks, having just come here to work for his uncle after getting fed up with another relative’s Lanzhou Pulled Noodles shop in Guangzhou. By the way, he’s 18 years old, but horse-plays with the other five or six young men like a 13-year-old and talks to me with the calm demeanor of a 25-year-old.

As usual, though, my real question was what the hell would drive him to come to this ugly, insignificant corner of Shanghai.

“To make money and see the world,” he says.

“How does Shanghai compare to your home in Qinghai?”

“When you come out of my house in Qinghai and look left, there’s a mountain. Look right, another mountain. The air is clean, and it’s all relatives and friends in the area. So in terms of a good place to live, Qinghai is better. In terms of good people around you, Qinghai is better. Shanghai is only good for making money. The bad part is you can’t even spend money here or do anything at all because it’s so expensive.”

“So you just work here and don’t have fun?” I ask.

“In Qinghai you can go out and spend a few hundred RMB (think $20-50, or between a tenth and a quarter of an average monthly salary for somebody like him). Here you can’t have a good time unless you spend several thousand.”  I’m pretty sure he’s talking about hookers, since I know I can have a good time for a hell of a lot less, but it’s different definitions of “good time” that make the world go round. The saddest thing he told me is that when not working, the entirety of the little noodle shop society generally hangs around in the shop or on the ugly street watching cars roll past.

“Could you survive in Qinghai without coming to Shanghai to earn money?” I ask.

“No question we could live out there without coming to Shanghai, but everything costs money, and it’s impossible to earn really good money in Qinghai. Sure, you can open your own restaurant and sell to locals, but they could only pay you local prices.”  He then explained that if you want to make big money, you have to come where your minority is in the minority to peddle your more exotic noodles for big (relatively) bucks. My meal cost seven yuan, or about a dollar. I’m sure the ingredients cost less than a seventh of that price, and I’m more sure that it would go for at or below two yuan in Qinghai.

But is it worth it?  Why would you want to abandon a beautiful land that you love for a dingy restaurant where you slave your youth away?  I of all people understand that sometimes you just need to leave home and go on adventures. But who would call making the same noodles day in and day out working for your uncle an adventure?  Could there be a sense of “duty fulfillment” in addition to adventure in this behavior?  Could it be that they feel that in order to secure their own or their family’s futures, they must come to Shanghai to earn that almighty yuan?  I hope to write a little more about Lanzhou Pulled Noodles in the future and address this question in more detail. It is also one of our goals to make a trip to Qinghai and find the places where Ma Feng can’t turn his head without seeing mountains and figure out from the locals what’s driving them to flock to the dirty, neglected cracks and crevices in China’s huge cities by the tens of thousands.