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Malcolm Gladwell here from Revisionist History. Did you know T-Mobile for Business has an award show specifically for their customers? It's happening October 20th in sunny Orlando, Florida, and I'm encouraging you, yes you, to enter. This event honors outside the box thinking that changes industries, communities, and even the world. And if that doesn't sound great already, I'll be there as the keynote speaker. If your company did something next level using T-Mobile for Business, you're eligible. Entries close July 31st, so head to tmobile.com slash enter to learn more and nominate your team. NBC Nightly News.
Legacy isn't handed down. We're NBC News. I'm Tom Brokaw. We hope to see you back. I'm Lester Holt. It's carried forward. Tom Yarmus is there for us.
Firefighters are still working around the clock. As the world changes, we look for what endures. We are coming on the air with breaking news right now.
We look for a constant. And from one era to the next, trust is the anchor. For NBC Nightly News, I'm Tom Yarmus. A new chapter begins. NBC Nightly News with Tom Yarmus. Evenings on NBC.
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Full disclosures at public dot com slash disclosures. This is our American stories and our 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're about to hear, Bruce may be Chinese born, but he's all American. Here's Bruce Wang to tell his story.
Hi friends and partners. It's been my great honor to be invited by Mr. Greg Engler to be on the show and talk about my experience here in America. My name is Shibo Wang, but I also go with Bruce. 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 soul 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.
And I know on the map it said Oklahoma City, so I've been sitting in that minivan for a long time, and all I saw was just flatness and houses that were separated from each other as if they did not have business with each other, which is 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 fine 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 there for more than two years, and I had some fun, and it won't hurt to go to other parts of the United States and just 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 for in Oklahoma. But then his wife came to Texas for her PhD 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 understanding of all the stereotypes of Texas, this is one of the least places I would ever want to come.
But eventually, eventually I thought about it and reflected upon my experiences with so-called racism in America that eventually 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? When 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 had to 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 school to Texas, I decided to drop out because coming to a bigger university with a better engineering program made me realize I had zero interest for being an engineer. And I just did not see any point for 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 a surgery. And during my stay at the hospital, I had some rare opportunities to just completely be surrounded by quietness. 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 wrongly I judged myself, how wrongly I judged a society that I didn't even know.
And in what other way can I further learn about this 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 was 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 at 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 year 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 that 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 to this region of the southern parts of the United States started. 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. Tired of spills and stains on your sofa? Wash away your worries with Anibay. Anibay is the only machine washable sofa inside and out, where designer quality meets budget-friendly prices. That's right, sofas start at just $699. Enjoy a no-risk experience with pet-friendly, stain-resistant, and changeable slip covers made with performance fabric. Experience cloud-like comfort with high-resilience foam that's hypoallergenic and never needs fluffing.
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Full disclosures at public.com slash disclosures. NBC Nightly News. Legacy isn't handed down. We're NBC News. I'm Tom Brokaw. We hope to see you back here. I'm Lester Holt. It's carried forward. Tom Yarmuth is there for us.
Firefighters are still working around the clock. As the world changes, we look for what endures. We are coming on the air with breaking news right now.
We look for a constant. And from one era to the next, trust is the anchor. For NBC Nightly News, I'm Tom Yarmuth. A new chapter begins. NBC Nightly News with Tom Yarmuth.
Evenings on NBC. Hi, it's Jenny Garth. We all know the importance of taking care of our physical and mental health. But what about our sexual health? I've been there feeling totally stuck when it comes to my libido. That's why I started taking Addi.
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Now let's return to Bruce Wang and his story. I believe one of the most important things that a person can ever do to integrate him 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 southerner. 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, learning the accent would open 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.
But as kind of a spokesman for this portion of the population, I got to thinking, 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, 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, but it was real. Learning about how people suffering that region really made me connect with the accents better.
Why? Because if you think about it, all of the good old classical literatures, what they reveal is suffering from people, regardless of culture and regardless of the country. People suffering made me resonate more with them because there are things that were very similar between the Appalachian Mountain region and my home province. Where I came from, we were surrounded by mountains. And in a sense, we are the urbanized hillbillies in China.
And typically we're about 10 or 20 years behind the most developed area in China. And based on what I learned about the Appalachian Mountain region, those people 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 that the show was about a bunch of rat necks shooting ducks.
But what really goes deeper, the show touches about Christianity, about family, and a 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 and 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 the American society and would never 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 rat necks lived in Duck Dynasty, I did 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 do to 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, 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 feed yard 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 appreciate how welcoming people in the beef cattle industry were in West Texas to me.
So after building relationships for one 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 had my way to become a cowboy. The training was not easy. I made a lot of mistakes, get 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 was a hard life.
Every day started early in the morning, and you won't get done until the sun goes down, and sometimes we would be still working when the moon is up and high. However, I would not trade anything with the experience I gained on the journey of becoming a cowboy. I couldn't wait for the school to be over so I can go back to the feed yard and participate in beef cattle production, and the relationships I formed with cowboys and other people who are in the beef cattle industry could may not be cowboys, but still crucial to provide 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 I was 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 falling asleep by myself. What is self?
Who's really able to answer that? When 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 when 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 of it, everybody have two or three meals a day, go to work, come home, and go 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 in that way too. Through this journey, it made me pay attention to the suffering of American people, the earthiness of agriculture producers, and the humbleness of southerners.
It is these difficult times that make me realize how much I care of this land, which I 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 rise for tomorrow. Thank you very much for listening, my friends and partners. I wish you a safe and wonderful day.
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, having 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. With Amex Gold, you can make dining out before the big event a big event. Hey, you made it.
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