“I’m just going to eat it the Uyghur way,” Jewher Ilham, 31, tells New Lines as she picks up a lamb kebab and slides off a piece of meat with her teeth. Satiated, she smiles as she chews.
It’s a Tuesday evening in June, and Ilham is at the Uyghur restaurant Bostan, located in a strip mall in Arlington, Virginia, across the Potomac River from Washington. It is hard to miss with its flashing pink neon sign: “Welcome to Bostan.”
There are several Uyghur restaurants in and around the American capital — the result, perhaps, of the estimated 10,000 Uyghurs who live in the area — but Bostan is Ilham’s favorite. “I know how to make Uyghur food myself, but when other people make it for you, it’s better,” Ilham says, taking another bite of her lamb kebab.
Growing up in the Chinese capital, Beijing, Ilham says her relationship with her father was primarily a culinary one. “We just ate a lot,” Ilham says of her father, Ilham Tohti, a trained economist. “Uyghur people care about food so much.”
Uyghurs are a Turkic, majority-Muslim ethnic group native to the region of Xinjiang in northwestern China, where Beijing stands accused by rights groups and foreign governments of committing genocide against them. Many Uyghurs prefer to call the region East Turkestan or the Uyghur Region. Uyghur cuisine is just one aspect of life that has been affected by the actions of Chinese authorities, who launched an “antihalal” crackdown in 2018.
Ilham’s parents divorced when she was young, and she was primarily raised by her father, who taught at Beijing’s prestigious Minzu University. Ilham smiles as she recalls her favorite memories with him, which center around food and cuisine.
For instance, there was the time when Ilham was about 5 years old and she managed to eat 40 dumplings at the dumpling house she and her father frequented. Another time, she and her father were hungry in the middle of the night, so he cooked a chicken. He left their apartment for a few minutes to buy drinks at a nearby store and, by the time he had returned, Ilham had already eaten half of it. “I had a reputation for my appetite as a kid,” Ilham says. “He would praise me. I thought that was a badge of honor.”
Ilham’s relationship with her native cuisine has evolved since the days when she gobbled down dumplings and kebabs alongside her beloved father. For Ilham, food was always associated with a sense of home and the happiness one derived from it. That changed after she left China for the United States in 2013, and her relationship with food was further transformed in 2014, when her father was arrested back in China and later sentenced to life in prison on charges of “separatism.” The 55-year-old is now considered among the highest-profile Uyghur political prisoners. Ilham hasn’t received any updates on his status since 2017.
Food, especially Uyghur cooking, still makes Ilham happy, she tells me. But while it makes her feel closer to her father, it also reminds her that they are now worlds apart. Eating is when his absence is most painful, she laments. After several years in exile, the aromas and tastes that Ilham grew up savoring now serve to evoke deep sorrow, underscoring her father’s imprisonment and the fact that she can’t return to her homeland because of the political situation. “I feel guilty for enjoying food,” she says.
It’s a phenomenon that other members of the Uyghur diaspora say they’ve experienced: joy turning into sorrow, the private mourning of a nation that feels like a lump in the throat.
The exiled Uyghur journalist Gulchehra Hoja knows this feeling all too well. Hoja left Xinjiang and moved to the U.S. in 2001. Her mother still lives in Xinjiang, and Hoja feels her absence most profoundly when she’s cooking in the kitchen. “The memories come back to me every time, mixed with joy and happiness and sadness, together,” she says. “Missing our family. Food does very unique stuff with our memories.”
Xinjiang was once a key region along the ancient Silk Road trade route. Today’s Uyghur cuisine combines a variety of ingredients and techniques from the Middle East, Turkey, Central Asia and China. “You cannot make Uyghur food with a machine. It has to be handmade,” Ilham says.
Laghman — chewy, hand-pulled noodles topped with stir-fried meat and vegetables — is perhaps the most famous Uyghur dish. Lamb rice pilaf, known as polo, is also popular.
Hamid Kerim, the owner of Dolan Uyghur Restaurant in Washington, told me how he often thinks back to having dinner with his big family growing up in the city of Ghulja. “When I see a big plate of polo, I remember when we were six brothers and sisters, my dad and my mom. Beautiful time,” he recalled. One of his brothers is currently imprisoned in the Chinese government’s network of arbitrary detention centers in Xinjiang.
Other classic dishes include chopped fried soman, which are finely cut noodles stir-fried with meat and vegetables; chicken or lamb kebabs; pumpkin dumplings; eggplant salad; spicy cold skin noodles called rangpiza and oven-baked buns, known as samsa, that are filled with vegetables and lamb or beef.
Even in the diaspora, Uyghur food is a reminder of the abuses taking place back in Xinjiang, Ilham says. She cites the example of tomatoes, which are an important component in many Uyghur dishes.
Xinjiang produces about one-quarter of the world’s tomatoes. But rights groups say the industry is tainted by forced Uyghur labor. In 2021, the U.S. government banned the import of all Xinjiang tomatoes over forced labor concerns.
Since her father’s detention, Ilham says there have been a few occasions when food has made her cry because it evoked painfully vivid memories of her father. Once, she ate a meal of dumplings filled with beef, carrots and onion that tasted exactly like the ones her father used to make. Ilham didn’t want to cry, she says, but the tears came down anyway. “It felt too familiar. It felt like something that I can’t have,” she says. “It wasn’t the same chef that I wished it was.”
A similar instance happened at an Uyghur restaurant in Munich, Germany, that reminded her of the last trip she took with her father around Xinjiang. The kebabs “tasted exactly the same — the texture, the size. Even how dirty the restaurant was,” she told New Lines. “I was quiet the whole time when I was eating, because I didn’t have words to express it. I was shaking.”
There was a period when Ilham even turned to food in order to push down those feelings of sadness, overeating to the point of inducing vomiting. “I realized this was not the right approach,” she says. When looking for a peaceful sense of home, she adds, “Food is very good, but it’s not always going to work.”
Uyghurs are among the few groups in the world who can’t return to their homeland and are, for the foreseeable future, separated from their family members who are left behind. Beijing’s reported abuses in the region include detaining Uyghurs en masse and forcibly sterilizing Uyghur women. As part of the Chinese government’s campaign to forcibly assimilate Uyghurs into the dominant Han group, Beijing has outlawed some cultural practices outright and turned others into mere tourist attractions.
Uyghurs in the diaspora are particularly concerned about keeping their culture alive for their children. “For my kids, I am sad they cannot taste their grandma’s food,” Hoja says. “So I’m doing my best to teach them about our food and Uyghur culture.”
What’s happening in Xinjiang means it’s even more important for Uyghurs to assert their identity in the diaspora, Ilham says, including through food. Uyghur restaurants are the closest that members of the diaspora can get to a taste of home.
“For a community whose culture is slowly being erased, you want to find a place where it’s not only existing but also thriving,” Ilham says. Restaurants, she adds, are “actively helping preserve that culture.”
In Bostan, the walls are painted the same blue as the East Turkestan flag. As in most Uyghur restaurants, a tapestry of Ghazi Ehmet’s iconic 1984 painting “Muqam,” which depicts Uyghurs playing traditional music, hangs on one wall. So, too, do Uyghur instruments and the traditional skullcaps called doppas.
In addition to educating non-Uyghurs about Uyghur culture, Kerim says that restaurants like his also serve as a place for Uyghurs to gather and, in some cases, commiserate about their shared grief. “This is like a medicinal practice,” he says.
When Ilham left China over a decade ago, she didn’t really know how to make anything besides salad. But a Uyghur journalist with Radio Free Asia, who had interviewed her father, traveled to Indiana to help Ilham learn how to make dishes like polo.
“I started having an obsession with it,” Ilham said, to the point that she even considered opening a restaurant herself. For the past several years, she has focused on improving her skills to prepare for what she hopes will be the inevitable day that she finally cooks for her father.
Ilham, whose name means inspiration, says she plans to cook laghman and polo, plus a third dish that is considered particularly challenging: a pasta soup called narin.
Ilham admits she still struggles to make that dish well and jokes that her father will make fun of her attempt at it. “He’s going to say, ‘You had many years,’” she says. She holds tightly to that hope.
Recipes:
Provided by Gulchehra Hoja
Samsa
Ingredients for dough:
3 cups of flour
1 stick of softened butter
1 teaspoon of salt
1/2 cup of water
2 eggs
4 tablespoons of yogurt
Ingredients for filling:
3-3 1/2 pounds of lamb, with fat
1 large onion
1 medium-sized potato
Spices (2 teaspoons salt, 2 teaspoons cumin, 1 teaspoon dried chili powder, 1 teaspoon black pepper)
Finishing:
1 egg for egg wash
1 teaspoon black sesame seeds
2 teaspoons white sesame seeds
Directions:
Mix the dough ingredients and knead until smooth and similar in firmness to pizza dough.
Cover the dough and leave to rest while starting on the filling.
Dice the lamb into small cubes the size of corn. Dice the onions and potatoes as well. Then mix along with the spices.
Divide the dough into “golf ball” sized pieces and roll to flatten out. Fill each with one tablespoon of meat filling.
Close the pastry in half and secure by pinching inward.
Lay on a tray spaced 1 inch apart, brush with egg wash and sprinkle with the sesame seeds.
Bake at 420 degrees Fahrenheit for 30 minutes on the middle rack of the oven.
Allow to cool for five minutes and serve with hot tea.
Polo
Ingredients:
3 cups of rice
5-6 medium-sized carrots
1 cup of olive oil
3 pounds of beef or lamb, slightly fatty
2 onions
1 cup of water
1 tablespoon salt
1/2 tablespoon cumin
Wash the rice three times and cut the meat into fist-sized portions. Prepare and peel the carrots and onions, then cut the carrots into crayon-sized chunks.
Start by cooking the meat. Heat the oil and, keeping the temperature high, let the meat cook for five minutes and brown. Then add the onions and cook for an additional five minutes.
Then add the carrots. Toss around the mixture in the pot and let it cook for another seven-10 minutes. Add water, reduce the heat to low and let it simmer for another 10-20 minutes.
Remove the meat only, place it aside and add rice.
Make sure the water covers the rice completely by at least 1 inch, adding more water if necessary (not too much though). After adding the rice, cook on medium heat until the rice has absorbed the water. Do not mix the pot.
Add the meat once the water has evaporated and turn to low heat to cook for 35-40 minutes.
Before serving, cut the meat into bite-size pieces. Then, mix the rice and carrots and place on a large dish with the meat chunks on top.
Serve with pickled vegetables and salads.
Enjoy!
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