Cowboy Fluency

Damn. I'm only weeks out of school, and already here i am romanticizing my academic life. truth is, when i wasnt finding more new and self-destructive ways to procrastinate, i was writing reflective pieces like these, and turnin them in for class credit. go figure. This is a short narrative piece is about finding my 'voice'...and playing cowboys and Indians.

Cowboy Fluency

By the time my study abroad group arrived in the city of Yangshuo in China’s Yunnan province, we were all well due for a recharge. Our bus honked weakly down the street, puttering—an exhausted mechanical horse—finally clomping its way to a water hole. The bus windows reflected bar lights, hotels, and Internet lounges lined on either side of the street, neon’s in reds and greens, zapping the air between flickers. Not a word was audible over the roar of hollers and yee-haws for finally landing in a place with some decent booze, beds, and breakfast.
Despite having been in the country for more than four months, and learning the language for the past seven years, my tongue still felt alien and useless. Seven years of academic learning had trained me automatically respond to a few key phrases, but I had neither the creativity nor the depth it took to consider myself fluent. I remained hopelessly hung up on this fact, unable to reconcile the oafishness of my Cowboy tongue with the native language.
My own impressions aside, it seemed that no matter where we went, the locals looked at us with the disgust and fascination they would an extraterrestrial species. I couldn’t help but think that it wasn’t my language skills that impressed them, but instead, the stark contrast of my appearance and what they expected to come out of my mouth.

Strangely enough, Yangshuo is a city with a western district hundreds of years old, so the town had already had a familiarity with foreign faces. Danny was the first to step off of the bus and led a parade down the street towards the hotel. His blonde dreadlocks and tie-dyed shirt made him a drum major in a cascade of brown hair, backpacks, blonde hair, knapsacks, sneakers, white skins and grins.
Jerome and I, the lone dark skinned Westerners, stepped off the bus as it made a final sigh, our rather unique complexions attracting the most dedicated stares. Eyes followed us up the stone sidewalk and all the way to the hotel. Somewhere down the street behind us, a child shouted “heiren! Ta shi meiguoren ma?” and I chose to ignore it.. The onlooker was puzzled as to how and why we were so dark, and wondered if we were Americans. I had heard heiren several times before, and usually fired back automatically, defending my Americanness. Yet this time—or one of the first times—I chose to relax. Let him guess, I thought, chuckling inside myself, and remembered being mistaken for Indian several times before.
The rest of our party sped along, and soon enough, after a brief stint in the hotel to drop off our bags, we were back out on the street headed towards Monkey Jane’s, a bar owned by an Englishman or Kiwi, who knows, but they spoke damn good English. Jerome, Danny, and I hastened our pace to catch up with the rest of the group, which was well settled upstairs at the bar by this time, at least according to the sound of the yee-haws echoing across the rooftops. We passed a bar with swinging saloon doors on our way to Monkey Jane’s, and part of me wanted to play the cowboy and order a sarsaparilla. Another part of me wanted a fistful of kabobs and shot of baijiu, Beijing’s traditional rice wine. And still another preferred to sit back and be mistaken for the Indian, either drunk or sober, and simply watch a horde of drunken Americans lay waste to another Chinese bar.
By the time we got to the rooftop bar, the smell of Tsingtao beer and sweat had thickened in the air and wrapped around us like smallpox blankets. Suddenly, Jerome and I jumped right in to a game of beer pong, and even broke the rules down for a couple of Brits who had never played the game American style. We beat the Brits at our game, but none of our fellow countrymen. Time melted, as we drifted towards the bar for a second round and started to dance to Cypress Hill’s “Jump Around”. Mid-hoopla, an itch in my stomach crawled up to mouth, and I knew it was time for a cigarette.
Breathing in the smoke, the music began to get louder and louder, and the effect of the tonic subsided, sobering my vision and covering me in the smell of hongtaishan tobacco. Gravity pulled me down the stairs and towards the street, while the smell of cumin and lamb kept me there. I walked towards a kabob stand I must have passed before but ignored.
I greeted the chef with a Uighur greeting I’d learned some months before out in west China, and he returned the salutation. Ali, the nineteen-year-old cook, set out for Yangshuo and began his own kabob business, serving the bar-hopping crowd. Skilled brown fingers fanned and flipped and flicked pepper over the roasted meat. My body rejoiced; tongue proudly preparing to pick out pieces of meat from between my bicuspids, and my stomach thanked gravity for helping to steer me away from the other Americans in the bar and towards nourishment. I ordered ten and ate them on the spot.
Out of a dark corner, a man, dressed in an all black traditional qifu materialized like a shadow. . His hair was lightning bolt white, his albino skin a pinkish hue to match his rose tinted shades. We shared a mutual stare until he was close enough to speak. He asked me all the questions typical of a Chinese asking an African-American, of which I’d been asked enough to answer automatically. So I answered, almost automatically:

Ni shi neige guojia de?
Oh, I’m American, although I don’t much feel like one.
Shi ma? Ni weishenme name hei? Yes, really, I am, and I’m dark because that’s how my parents were, and how their parents were…

I returned the favor and inquired about his nationality, to which he replied Eluosi, the Mandarin word for Russian. I raised a skeptical eyebrow to Ali, and he nodded. More puzzled at our mutual exchange than satisfied, we retreated, myself back to the kabob stand, and he down the street to a picnic table outside of the bar, pulling out a hash spliff and lighting it, thick smoke making him a hazy spectre…
“Jamel, Jamel! What are you doing out here? Everyone’s upstairs.” I heard a familiar voice from behind the smoke of the kabob vendor stand. “Everyone’s upstairs…” Interesting—I thought—how people provide the answers to their own questions. Before I knew it, the rest of the Americans rushed the stand and ordered kabobs and toasted bread; roasted chicken wings satisfied their intoxicated cravings, a mountain of kabob sticks on the ground left in their wake. Besides a few stragglers such as myself, they all marched on, either to bed or off to another bar, off to meet more like-minded, equally intoxicated people.
Of the people left, one of them was my friend Ray (although his Chinese nickname was Meng meng, so that’s what I called him). Our eyes involuntarily followed the damsel to our left, who had come for a late night snack at Ali’s stand. Meng Meng and I, under the influence of liquid confidence, struck up a conversation with her. Her name was Xiu Xiu, she told us, and she worked around the corner at a bar. Without much hesitation, she led us to her bar, which was closed by now, but still open for her guests. She hadn’t asked about nationalities, so I was at a loss of what drink to order.
Inside of the closed bar, she introduced us to two of her friends. We three traversed topics like friends being reunited after a long time apart, where nothing was taboo, unsaid, or unheard. And yet, everything we said was distinctly new, as they talked to us with both fear and fascination. Impulsively, Xiu Xiu flicked her hair and ran downstairs to prepare us a drink—probably a sarsaparilla. Meng Meng and I ducked outside for a smoke. None of the girls smoked hashish. Through the window they looked at us like two Marlboro men opting instead for the peace pipe. I guess we were both.
Before long, three hours had passed, and again the combined forces of gravity and hunger pulled us out of the bar. We hoofed it to a late-night eatery for a 4 am pan of roasted fish. The spice on the fish quickly reminded me that I had been using my tongue all night, and my ears by this time, no longer overwhelmed, but calmed by the sound of Chinese chatter, left no question unheard or ignored. It took Xiu Xiu to show me that I’d always been both—the cowboy and the Indian, and could know no linguistic boundaries.
Sitting on low chairs, we finished our meal and poked at fish bones before the meal check came. Meng Meng and I walked a dizzying walk back to the hotel, foreigners with newly acquired native tongues--Western non-Westerners—losing ourselves down West Street in the Far East.


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And yet, I still feel the urge for a sarsparilla
...or maybe this time, a slow gin
with vanilla ice cream

--Jam