Bruce Wang, All-American: The Chinese Cowboy With A Southern Accent

00:00:10
Speaker 1: This is Our American Stories. And that next story is about a man named Bruce Wang. He’s Chinese-born, a college student in Texas, and he learned a Southern accent by watching, of all things, Duck Dynasty and got a job as a cowboy on a ranch. As you are about to hear, Bruce may be Chinese-born, but he’s all American. Here’s Bruce Wang to tell his story.

00:00:37
Speaker 2: My friends and partners. It has been my great honor to be invited by Mr. Greg Angler to be on a show and talk about my experience here in America. My name is Bruce Wang, but I also go by Bruce Wang. When school is on, I am a graduate student at Texas Tech University, but when there’s no school, I am a feedlot cowboy. As some of y’all may not expect, that I am actually from China, and it’s kind of rare to see an Asian cowboy across the country. Well, if you come to West Texas, if you see one, that might be me. I am from Kunming, Yunnan, southwest China, and the city where I came from has the nickname of the City of Eternal Spring, meaning that the weather in my hometown is always like spring all year round. So, in a sense, I was a Southerner in China that came to the States and became a Southerner again. But this transformation was not as smooth as some people might assume, because no matter where you live, life is not always easy. About eight years ago, I said goodbye to my parents, got on an airplane, and then came here to the States, set my foot on the soil of America. The very first state that I went to for college was the state of Oklahoma. And we got on this minivan from the airport, and the driver just took us to the campus. I knew on the map it said Oklahoma City. So I had been sitting in that minivan for a long time, and all I saw was flatness and houses that were separated from each other as if they did not have business with each other, which was kind of shocking to me. But what really made me uncomfortable, at least in the state of Oklahoma, was when it came down to food. For one and a half years, I put chocolate pudding on my pizza and my burgers. The reason was I just couldn’t get used to the taste of American food for that period of time. But whatever I did, I found a way to compromise so I could eat burgers and go to school at the same time. The state of Oklahoma was very welcoming to foreign students like me. Local people were really friendly, and I didn’t feel the need to integrate much at that point because I had a lot of friends from other countries, other continents, and I was finally at that time. After the second year of me being in college, one day my mom called and said, “Well, son, you need to transfer to a bigger university with a better engineering program.” Well, I thought to myself, “Well, I’ve been here for more than two years, and I’ve had some fun, and it won’t hurt to go to other parts of the United States and to see the rest of this country.” So I agreed. Initially, I was planning to transfer to the University of Wyoming. However, my mentor at the time called me. Back in the old days, he and his wife both worked at the university where I went to school in Oklahoma, but then his wife came to Texas for her Ph.D. program, so he followed her. Then he called me and tried to convince me to come down to Texas. I said, “No way,” because in my mind, and upon all my own understanding of all the stereotypes of Texas, this is one of the least places I would ever want to come now. Eventually, I thought about it and reflected upon my experiences with so-called racism in America. Then eventually I came to the conclusion that the most important determining factor of my happiness is me, not someone else. So once that thought kicked in, I decided to say, “You know what? Why can’t I just give Texas a try?” And if my mentor came to Oklahoma, we loaded up my stuff, and we were on our way to Texas. Unfortunately, when I got to Texas, things took a downturn. There were more churches. It was a bigger campus, which made it more difficult to make friends. And after the first semester since I transferred to school in Texas, I decided to drop out because coming to a bigger university with a better engineering program made me realize I had zero interest in being an engineer, and I just did not see any point in continuing my higher education. So my mentor asked me to go to his office at the International Cultural Center, and I sat there. He basically lectured me in a mildly loud Southern accent. For some strange reason, I decided to stay in college and just to finish. So at that point I was no longer an engineering student. I switched my major to interdisciplinary studies, which contained three minors instead of a major. And during that summer, my appendix was about to burst, so I had to go to the hospital and have surgery. And during my stay at the hospital, I had some rare opportunities to just completely be surrounded by quiet. I couldn’t move much in my bed. I would watch TV from time to time, but there was this one day when it was about to rain outside. I saw clouds getting thicker and thicker, and then raindrops started to tap on my window. Everything else was just quiet. And that was the moment I thought about how I judged myself, how wrongly I judged a society that I didn’t even know. In what other way could I further learn about the society by integrating myself into it? The semester after that summer, I went to a rodeo, and that was life-changing. The things that changed me were not necessarily the events that were going on during the rodeo, but all the people and animals that were part of the show. There was country music playing in the background, and the host had a very thick, yet authentic, West Texan accent. I remember seeing this little boy, probably only seven or eight years old, with a cowboy hat on, and he was in charge of that gate which controlled the movement of all the other cattle, which were at least five or six times his body size. Yet he was calm and professional, and for all the participants with their animals, I was amazed by the relationships that were formed between two-legged creatures and four-legged creatures. Roughly about a month after the rodeo, I got my first pair of cowboy boots and my cowboy hat. And when I put that hat on, I couldn’t remember how much regret just went through my body. I thought hard about how dumb I was for not embracing this culture earlier and wasted so much time on things that were not important. So from that point on, my integration into this region of the southern parts of the United States started.

00:09:03
Speaker 1: And you’re listening to Bruce Wang tell his story, and when we come back, we’re going to hear more from Bruce. This remarkable American story. By the way, there aren’t many American Chinese, but there are a whole lot of Chinese Americans. With that thought, we continue this story—Bruce Wang’s story, an immigrant song as good as we’ve ever heard here on Our American Stories. And we continue here on Our American Stories with the story of Bruce Wang. And this is an all-American immigration story, if ever we’ve had one. Now let’s return to Bruce Wang and his story.

00:09:57
Speaker 2: I believe one of the most important things a person can ever do to integrate himself or herself into a community is to talk like the community. So initially, I thought it would be funny to be an Asian person with a Southern accent. I made some jokes by speaking with a Southern accent in front of my classmates, and everybody laughed. I thought it was fun, so I started to look for more materials to enhance my ability to speak like a Southern nerd. But what I found during this process of learning: the more I learned, the more of an affection I developed for Southern accents. And even though before I was able to communicate with people in the English language, by learning the accent, it opened up new windows for me to look at America. One of the first learning materials that I used was a video on YouTube of Jeff Foxworthy.

00:11:01
Speaker 3: But it’s kind of a spokesman for this portion of the population. I got to thinking, and you know, it has reached the point where we do need a few redneck fashion tips if you’ve mastered the art of putting on makeup with your non-smoking hand while driving with your knee.

00:11:25
Speaker 2: Then I did more research on how people talk in the state of Georgia. Then, eventually, I found that the residents around the Appalachian Mountain area have the type of accents that melted my heart most of the time. What I further learned was that the region was devastated by poverty for decades, and there were people in poverty that I would never imagine that I would see in America. That it was real. Learning about how people suffering in that region really made me connect with the accents better. Why? Because if you think about it, all the good old classical literatures, what they reveal is suffering from people, regardless of culture and regardless of country. People’s suffering made me resonate more with them because there were things that were very similar between the Appalachian Mountain region and my home province where I came from. We were surrounded by mountains. In a sense, we are the urbanized hillbillies in China, and typically we’re about ten or twenty years behind the most developed area in China. And based on what I learned about the Appalachian Mountain region, those people’s suffering made me resonate more with them and also made Southern accents dear to me. And that was the point I decided to further master the accent. And somewhere down the line, this show came to my attention: Duck Dynasty. On the surface, it may seem like the show was about a bunch of rednecks shooting ducks, but what really goes deeper. The show touches on Christianity, on family, and on the unity of a community, which I believe are great values that are echoed among many other countries, including China. Again, I could resonate with people in the show, which excavated more passion out of me to learn the accent. Throughout this journey of learning the accent, I laid my eyes on things that I would never look at if I kept a judgmental attitude towards American society and would never have found comfort in knowing, listening, and speaking another accent that is so native, yet important, to some of the forgotten regions of America. Even though I was fascinated by how all the rednecks lived in Duck Dynasty, I didn’t realize for me, as a foreigner, it would be hard to put my hands on a firearm and shoot ducks. So I started to think of other ways that I could further Southernize myself by integrating myself not only linguistically but economically. It’s not too hard to notice there are a lot of cattle here in West Texas and cowboys, at least according to Hollywood. It’s one of the most iconic images of America and, to some degree, of the southern parts of America too. So I decided to try and get into the cattle industry. At first, what I did was just to drive up to some ranch or feedlot and have some conversations with people who are in the beef cattle industry. And all I did was just chatting with them. I took some pictures of cattle and made some of my videos on their properties, and at that time, that’s all I thought. What I could do. However, I was very amazed and really appreciative of how welcoming people in the beef cattle industry were in West Texas to me. So after building relationships for one and a half years, one day I got a call from a feedlot owner, and he got a lot more cattle going into his property, and he needed some help. So I got my paperwork lined up and done at the International Cultural Center, and then I made my way to become a cowboy. The training was not easy. I made a lot of mistakes, got screamed at a lot, and yes, like many other cowboys out there, there were times that I thought about quitting. Now thinking back, I’m glad I didn’t do that. Still, it was a hard life. Every day started early in the morning, and you wouldn’t get done until the sun went down, and sometimes we would still be working when the moon was up and high. However, I would not trade anything for the experience I gained on the journey of becoming a cowboy. I couldn’t wait for school to be over so I could go back to the feedlot and participate in beef cattle production. And the relationships I formed with cowboys and other people who are in the beef cattle industry, who may not be cowboys, but are still crucial to providing safe and sustainable animal protein to America. There was a period of time during my transformation where I did struggle very much about identities. Am I Chinese? Am I American? Am I a Southerner? Or what kind of Southerner was I? For my case, over time, the philosophy of Buddhism really helped me to ease my urgent questioning on the matter, because eventually I do realize, no matter what identity I claim myself to be, at the end of the day, I put down my cowboy hat, take off my cowboy boots, and fall asleep by myself. What is self? Who’s really able to answer that? Every night, despite whoever I’m with, or whatever I’ve done, or whatever I’ve been going through, I fall asleep by myself. And maybe that is me, and I acknowledge that. While I was learning the accent and trying to Southernize myself further, there were times that I denied to learn about other people. But if I really think about it, everybody has two or three meals a day, goes to work, comes home, and goes to sleep. No matter what color you are, or no matter what kind of identity you claim to be, it is the same way. Everybody is fundamentally the same. So on this journey of Southernizing myself, it also made me more open-minded towards others, which is kind of like the opposite of what people really perceive of how Southerners would think of people who are different from them. At least for me, via this journey, it was through the self-embodiment of Southern culture that I realized I’m not that special, and I’m happy to be that way too. Through this journey, it made me pay attention to the suffering of many people, the earthiness of agricultural producers, and the humbleness of Southerners. It is these difficult times that make me realize how much I care for this land which I have only spent one-third of my life, and I sincerely wish my journey on this land will continue, no matter how dark the shadows in front of me might be or how brightly the sun may arise tomorrow. Thank you very much for listening, my friends and partners. Wish you a safe and wonderful day.

00:19:42
Speaker 1: Bye. And you’ve been listening to Bruce Wang, and my goodness, what a voice, what a story, what a journey! We’re broadcasting from Oxford, Mississippi, just south of Memphis. We love the South too. So many people from here, from everywhere else in the country, have developed a real taste for rural and rural-suburban life and the intersection of both. Bruce Wang’s story: a classic American immigrant story. Here on Our American Stories.