Portrait of an LBX

By Evan

Note: This post is written about events before our arrival in Shanghai in early November.

Saloman and his lovely young wife in front of their pulled noodles business off a highway in the heavy manufacturing district of Kunshan, Jiangsu, by Andy

On the road from Suzhou to Shanghai, in the prefecture of Kunshan, on one of the four-lane provincial highways on which goods from inland manufacturing bases are sped toward the ocean, sits a row of restaurants catering to truckers and other passers through the dusty industrial zone. Amid shabby storefronts, we found the familiar blue facade of a Lanzhou Pulled Noodles restaurant, here belonging to Ma Jun (马君), where we lunched on the final leg into Shanghai. After ordering a cheap lunch of noodles and stir-fry over rice, we settled into conversation with the proprietor, who instructed us to call him by his Arabic handle, Saloman (think baby-splitting king).

Hailing from a little village outside of Xining in Qinghai province, the 30 year old member of the Hui Muslim ethnic group of China didn’t exactly do any pioneering work in his trade. There are tens of thousands of Lanzhou Pulled Noodles restaurants throughout China, including hundreds if not thousands of shops just in and around Shanghai. Whereas outside of Shanghai the owners of these restaurants could come from any number of locales of high Hui concentration, in and around China’s most populous city, all the Lanzhou Noodleries seem to be run by Qinghai’ers. (more…)

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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.

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