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I wish I could tell you that I’m furious about Iran. But I’m not. I’m annoyed, frustrated, despondent, but I just can’t summon up the righteous anger that feels appropriate in the face of this brand-new war the president of the United States has launched. Often, I’m bored. It’s like watching the reboot of a TV show I hated the first time around: the same hopped-up accusations, the false pretense of negotiations, the cynical claims of liberation, the lack of a realistic plan for the postwar era, the sheer hammy performativeness of the whole monstrous endeavor. I changed the channel in 2003, and I’m changing it again, or whatever the streaming metaphor is, in 2026. Whoever greenlighted these series should be cancelled. Again. Permanently.

The problem is that the rest of the “channels” are “airing” ragebait as well. Paramount’s takeover of Warner Bros. and CNN. Venezuela. AI. Crypto. Voter suppression. The one that most enrages me right now is the story of Nurul Amin Shah Alam, the blind 56-year-old Rohingya refugee from Myanmar who died in Buffalo, New York, on February 25. Honestly, “enrages” doesn’t begin to describe how I feel about what was, philosophically, a murder by Customs and Border Protection. For the record (and what is Trying! if not a catalogue raisonné of the horrors of our times?), here’s a timeline of the last year or so of Shah Alam’s life, courtesy of The Independent (don’t worry, we’ll get to noodle soup soon):

Now, I’m no doctor, but I’m willing to report the cause of death: the Border Patrol. The cruelty here is familiar, but especially outrageous in its offhandedness. They had in their custody a blind or nearly blind man with no English ability and no real footwear, and they dumped him at a closed Tim Horton’s on a cold February night in Buffalo. They could have contacted his family, they could have contacted his lawyer, they could have dropped him at his last known address (where someone might have known his family had moved), they could have verified that the doughnut shop was open. Any of these actions would have taken five minutes. And any of those actions would have kept Shah Alam safe; he would, I’m pretty sure, still be alive.

While the Border Patrol agents who abandoned Shah Alam to his fate may eventually argue they were not at fault, there is no reason to believe them. They made a choice to abandon him at that place, in those conditions. Any decent human being would have realized they were putting him in danger — at the very least condemning him to suffer until a private citizen or the local police intervened, and at the very worst (which is what happened) pushing him down the road to a lonely death. The agents had to have thought about this, even if maybe none of them discussed it aloud. (We don’t know yet.) Did they just say Fuck it, let’s dump him here? Did they want him to die because they couldn’t deport him? I don’t know the law here, so they may have a legitimate defense, but even if they are not legally responsible for his death, they remain morally responsible. If anyone involved in his abandonment had acted like a decent human being, Shah Alam might still be alive. But they didn’t. Those Border Patrol agents should kill themselves out of shame.

Which brings me to noodle soup.

More after the ad…

All last week, as Shah Alam’s tragic story was unfolding, first privately, then publicly, I was thinking about noodle soups. On Sunday the 22nd, I’d started a beef stock using marrow bones, but after refrigerating it I realized it needed … something more. It had a base layer of umami, but nothing beyond that — none of that deep beefy richness that perfumes a house. Luckily, I had a whole gallon, and some ideas on how to use it.

The first was to make Taiwanese beef noodle soup. When I visit Taiwan, this is not a dish I often seek out — I’m usually there in the summer, when the weather does not inspire me to eat a big, hot, heavy bowl of wheat noodles and meat. But back here in Brooklyn, in late winter, it’s a sure winner, especially since I discovered that it’s not hard to make.

My approach sits somewhere between that of Cathy Erway and that of Clarissa Wei. At midday Friday I began by searing three bone-in short ribs on all sides in a Dutch oven, then removing them and quickly sautéing garlic, ginger, and scallions in the residual fat. When these aromatics softened quite a bit, I added a few tablespoons each of light brown sugar, tomato paste, and doubanjiang (豆瓣醬), the fermented chili bean paste that is essential to Sichuan cooking (and which more or less made its way to Taiwan after the communist victory over mainland China in 1949). Once that mess was stirred and combined and fragrant, I poured in a couple of cups of rice wine, light soy sauce, and dark soy sauce — I used Erway’s ratios, though next time I might go with less soy sauce — followed by two quarts of the bone broth. I returned the meat to the pot, added some water to cover, and brought things to a light simmer, skimming off any foam that accumulated. I filled a metal-mesh spice ball with Sichuan peppercorns, star anise, cassia bark, red cardamom, sand ginger, and cloves, and sunk it into the liquid. After 90 minutes, I¹ added several cups of daikon chunks, and half an hour after that, the broth was finished.

What I hadn’t understood until recently was that with only two hours of braising, this would produce a pretty darn good base for Taiwanese beef noodle soup: spicy, rich, meaty, and well-perfumed. For some reason, I’d always assumed that beef broths required hour upon hour of slow cooking to coax flavor from the bones. But nope! Friday evening I extracted the short ribs from the broth and sliced them into small slabs, discarding the bones entirely. The meat was tender but still bouncy: just right. At dinnertime, I boiled some good Chinese noodles — they’re flat, with ruffled edges — and carefully composed four bowls. Noodles, short rib slabs, daikon chunks, and lots of broth, topped with chopped scallions and cilantro and, for me, minced red Thai chilies. This was it! And it was good.

For a moment or two, I admired my creation⁴. Composition is one of the first joys of noodle soups. You don’t want to just heap toppings on willy-nilly (except maybe at Ramen Jiro, where that’s the point). Instead you have a circular canvas on which to arrange your ingredients. The noodles can be a tangle or a neat skein. The meats can be chunks studding the surface, or a sheaf of slices in one corner. Eggs, bamboo shoots, leafy greens, pickled greens, pickled tubers, sliced onions, chopped scallions, fried shallots, fried garlic, dustings of black pepper or white pepper, drizzles of oil, tangles of mushrooms, dumplings large and small — each has a texture and dimension that determines its proper place in the bowl, and the variations are nearly infinite. For a sense of the aesthetic possibilities, check out my friend Michele Humes’s lovely cookbook The Noodle Soup Oracle, which she both wrote and illustrated.

The number of possibilities also speaks to the cooking challenge noodle soups present. You are not just making a soup and dropping in whatever’s at hand²; you must consider how anything and everything fits together. And you have to prepare it! You might be roasting pork, poaching goose, pickling quail eggs, wrapping wontons, and infusing oils with a souk’s worth of spices. And if you really care about your noodles? Hoo-boy! Pasta-making adds a whole extra layer of culinary challenge, one I’ve never been brave enough to take on. Noodle soups may appear humble, easy snacks, slurped down in seconds on anonymous streets from Makassar to Mandalay, from Cần Thơ to Chongqing, from Seoul to Sapporo. But even the most minimalist bowl requires all of a chef’s talents.

I appreciate, too, the tension that noodle soups create between the collective and the individual. If you are going to make a noodle soup, you are going to make more than one bowl at a time. You’ll prepare broth by the gallon, stockpile pasta, array your proteins, and outfit a mise en place with dozens of ingredients, condiments, herbs, and other accoutrements. Noodle soups begin as community-minded endeavors, food for the masses, which is why they can be so daunting at home. But they end with uniquely curated bowls — a diner selecting toppings, then modifying the whole with yet more sauces, herbs, chilies, sugar, vinegars, and whatever else happens to be on the table. No two bowls are alike. Yet this is only logical: If we’re going to make food for lots of people, we’d better make sure those lots can enjoy it. We share in the communal experience, but each in our own way.

All of that, though, is subtext, at least for me. I like noodle soups because I like them in their unending variety: broths that are salty, spicy, sour, meaty, thick, spare; noodles that are chewy, slippery, supple, wispy, alkaline, bouncy. I like them topped with roast pork and braised brisket, cockles and fishballs, oysters and intestines, wontons and pickled bamboo shoots and little crispy fried things. I love the comfort of soup and the comfort of noodles and the joy and surprise that emerge from a novel combination of familiar flavors. Give me tonkotsu ramen, give me bún riêu, give me assam laksa and kalguksu. Give me boat noodles; give me o a mi sua; give me this bowl I ate at the morning market in Tachileik, Myanmar, in 2005:

Really, this paragraph should start with “And give me phở.” But I don’t need you to give me phở — I can make it just fine. (🎶 I can give myself phở-lowers… 🎶) The process takes longer than Taiwanese beef noodle soup, even if many of the ingredients are the same. Last Saturday, I began with several pounds of beef neck bones (meatier than I expected), simmering them in more of the leftover marrow-bone broth and two quarts fresh water along with an onion and a knob of ginger — both well-charred over a gas flame. A quarter-cup of fish sauce, two tablespoons of brown sugar. A mesh spice ball with star anise, cloves, cassia bark, coriander seeds.

This soup went for a long while — nearly eight hours, during which I occasionally had to add water to replace what steamed away. In the end, after straining everything through a chinois, I had slightly more than two quarts of dark but clear soup, with only the thinnest layer of fat. It sat a day, turning to wobbly gelatin in the fridge, and meanwhile I prepared the accoutrements: Thai basil, bean sprouts, sliced yellow onion, chopped scallions and cilantro, red chilies, and well-marbled boneless short rib, frozen till I could slice it paper-thin, so it would cook instantly in the heat of the soup. {{first_name|Reader}}, it was so, so good. Phở was the first noodle soup I can remember eating (Campbell’s meatball alphabet and instant ramen don’t count), back in high school, at Chez Trinh in Williamsburg, Virginia, and it continues to strike a chord in my soul that no other can. And maybe that’s the reason I’m often hesitant to take it on — to mess up, to produce weak phở, would be to disappoint the 16-year-old who lives inside of me, who is in so many ways still the true me.

All last week, as I was making noodle soups — adjusting flames, skimming foam, slicing and chopping and charring — I was also thinking about Shah Alam. I won’t pretend there was some thematic connection. These were separate strands. Shah Alam had lived, faced danger in Myanmar and escaped it, and met an unnecessary end in Buffalo. I was preparing bougie food for my family in comfort and security in Brooklyn.

Did I feel guilty? Only in the most superficial sense, the way I often acknowledge to myself (or to you) that I wish I could do more to end the disparities of this country, then move on, powerless but well-fed. I made dinner, and I enjoyed dinner, and I’ll continue to enjoy my meals both despite and because of the collapse of our society — because the fascists want our lives robbed of delight, and because at least in the kitchen I maintain control over how things turn out. My conscience is as clear as a long-simmered cauldron of stock.

To live today is to live two lives, one engaged with the struggle to survive this absurdity, the other revolving around the age-old routines of work, family, food, friends — life. These dual existences can continue for months or years, intertwining without ever quite intersecting, like movie characters pursuing their own arcs, vaguely aware that a momentous encounter awaits before the end of the first act. How will that encounter proceed? When will the strands connect? Will they — will we — make it into act three and, more importantly, into the sequel? As always, it’s up to the screenwriter. And so we slurp on, bowls atop the counter, bone broth steaming us through this repast. 🪨🪨🪨