Trying different food would be a promising way to find connections that I feel well to build on my sense of familiarity, or intimacy, with the city. And ashlyanfu is the first telling example to manifest how Bishkek includes me with its history of diverse migration.

I did not know what it was before ordering an ashlyanfu in a Dungan cafe, even though it seemed like the most representative of Dungan cuisine. Yet, its formation and taste are strangely recognizable to me: light noodles made of starch served with soul and cold broth. “It looks so like liangfen (涼粉)…” Suddenly I, as a native Mandarin Chinese speaker, realized this dish’s historical context by repeatedly chanting its name.

Liangfen is a typical street dish I tried in northwest China, made with starch noodles, vinegar, and species sauce, it is deemed Hui dish especially in Shaanxi (陝⻄) and Gansu (⽢肅). The contemporary identity of Dungan people always can be traced to the bloody history of the Hui people, Chinese Muslims, who fled from northwest China to Central Asian lands to escape from the mass warfare with the Qing empire in the mid-19th century. They were fugitives and one of the founding communities of Bishkek.

In a restaurant named after the renowned Turkic scholar, Mahmud Kashgari, I tried my first Uyghur lagman in Kyrgyzstan. It is owned by Uyghurs who have some connections to Kashgar, a notable ancient city currently purged by the Chinese authorities with confinement facilities. The images in the shop confirmed my speculation: an image of Hëytgah mosque in Kashgar hung at the entrance (notably, in the image, the mosque’s sacred board with Shahada hung on the main gate since 1908 remains; in reality, the board was confiscated by the Chinese authorities in 2018); a photo of the international great bazaar in its regional capital, Urumqi; and a duplicate of the popularized painting, Uyghur Muqam, by Ghazi Ehmet.

A small clue is like a thread of yarn falls off from a wool ball, it is something I can trace, to some of its origins in the vast past time, enabling me to connect with strangers, to let myself lean on the new life and, to live through it.

Following this approach, I found more Uyghur shops after merely by their names: “Ili” (Или) means this cafe is very possibly owned by the Uyghurs from the northern Weten, named after the main river of that valley; “Tarim” (Тарим) is the basin where Uyghur historical oases (the Six Cities, شەھەر ئالتە) located in, as well as the name of a small grocery shop which imports food stuffs from Weten and China; and, “Atush” (Атуш) is a super busy lagmanhana just beside the Madina bazaar, and its name exactly reflects the fact that I learned later: most of the Uyghur merchants in the bazaar have the origin of this Uyghur area bordering At-Bashy District, Kyrgyzstan.

People brought things and memories, sometimes, even their homelands’ names to the new home city.

At the very interior of the Madina bazaar, a sign attracts my sight. A fresh red background-filled board with bright white text, notes “do not smoke” in two languages. Probably different from most shoppers, the one I recognized is the one in traditional Uyghur scripts(“چەكمەڭ تاماكا”), instead of the Russian one (“не курить!”). This sign could signify the diversity of this trading place. Historically, there were several waves of Uyghur immigration to Central Asia, but nowadays, only the Uyghurs who were coming from the Weten more recently use the traditional scripts, not Russian or Cyrillic Uyghur.

With these gathered “clues,” I started to spend more time in the bazaar and found that some of my guesses were valid.

Just as every friend I met in Bishkek put, Madina bazaar is dominated by the Uyghur community. But the thing that most outsiders do not know is, that a high proportion of the community there is the more recently coming Uyghurs during the past two decades. And most of them have connections with Atush and Kashgar, as the lagmanhanas have clearly advertised.

I have been trying to converse with some shop owners with the help of my assistant, asking about their business and background. Many photos of the splendid textiles were taken, yet I did not think it was secure to photograph merchants there. For the very fact that, unsurprisingly, they thought I was suspicious of my Chinese-like appearance and the things I attempted to ask. A third of the Uyghur shop owners I met refused to talk to me, they would show their polite request of expelling by a bodily gesture, leading me to walk toward the gate of their narrow shops. This never happened to the Kyrgyz merchants. And the reason is obvious to us.

“Is not Taiwan a part of China?” It was the very first utterance, with an interrogating voice, from a young Uyghur shop owner to me after my self-introduction. “Most Chinese would say yes, but as a Taiwanese, I say no, it is not.” I did not know what he experienced in China and if he felt satisfied with my answer. Our conversation, as others, did not last long. In such a mistrustful environment, things would be difficult to carry forward if I did not have the right person to introduce me, or perhaps, this is what every migrant experiences of a new place in the first few months or years.

Ethnicity is a category with multiple elements of how people imagine, identify, and order the ways how they make sense of themselves and others, which is not necessarily essential to define varying relations among people. But in the bazaar, a set of very specific ethnic boundaries was amplified and consolidated. It is reasonable and understandable, that the living realities of migrants always are not out of the social-political context. We have to bear the consequences of the racial-ethnic oppression that happened on the other side of the Tien Shan ranges, as well as the ongoing murky transition of the bazaar’s ownership—I realized this later after months.