Suzanne Chew's "Encounters Along the Cowboy Trail"

Suzanne Chew

Encounters Along the Cowboy Trail

So, what do you think of your President?

Mother, with disingenuous naïveté, asked the two Americans who joined our day tour from Calgary. The young waitress had just taken our lunch order, in a cavernous, somewhat run-down-but-dark-so-you-couldn’t-really-tell, saloon-style establishment in the middle of Alberta’s dusty Cowboy Trail. The place was eerily quiet at high noon, sans cowboys.

Had my jaw not been wired shut from a brusque scolding by Mother that morning, it would have dropped.

I can’t remember if this was before or after they had asked her why our English was so good. Growing up as the studious Asian in a sleepy village in Cambridge, I encountered this question many times, mostly by older British people. My Queen’s English flowed from the BBC period dramas and Brontë books I had inhaled, but Mother still retained her rich, pithy accent. I know it was before they asked S, the Indian woman in our group, about how her country managed all their poor people. S grew up in a luxurious, gated family compound and was now working in a high-tech multinational in Dallas. They seemed surprised at her unexpected melange of prosperity and wealth, dark skin and foreign accent.

D and B were an older couple from the American Midwest. Hardworking small-business owners, they had reared four grown offspring who they had successfully catapulted into the world, into accountancy and other respectable undertakings. This was a rare travel vacation. B was tanned and blonde, dressed in fuchsia pink and khaki. Sitting next to her white hat and oversized sunglasses, I felt like I might have been on safari. She shared, excitedly, that she had planned this entire trip around Head-Smashed-In Buffalo Jump, along Alberta’s Cowboy Trail. It was “what she did.” Last year, it was all about an art museum in Spain. This year—Indians. The North American kind. D was a well-built man who would have looked right at home in an old-style Western, complete with cowboy hat and and silver spurs. He spoke his mind, prefaced with the statement Now, I don’t mean to offend you, but. I’m not sure that made it any better. But, he told good jokes. Feisty and direct, I felt that these Americans were full of good intentions. They terrified me.

Upon hearing that I research climate change, D asked, somewhat coyly, Why do you think some countries should do anything about it, when there are other countries who are polluting much more? Oh, the geopolitics of the United States and China. I wondered if my yellow skin had anything to do with the question. (They had watched Crazy Rich Asians, but I wasn’t completely sure if they knew that Singapore wasn’t in China. That was another question I had grown up with.)

I didn’t talk about the renewable power China has now put in place, generating twice the gigawatts compared to the United States. I didn’t mention the cruel economics of China’s (now-defunct) one-child policy, or the historical debt of Western nations. Instead, I talked about what a 14-year-old Calgarian student had told me—that her friends talked about not wanting kids, because they didn’t see much of a future for themselves on a scorched earth, and had no desire to bring loved children into an unloved world. I shared my story—how working in the climate field for so many years had also coloured my own thoughts on having kids. I talked about volunteering with a local non-profit on conversations about grieving the rapid ecological changes we see, and what we can do to act. We hoped to bring these conversations to every community here in Calgary, of all places. At the end of the day, the planet doesn’t care who does what. It only sees if we do or don’t.

B wasn’t sure she had heard correctly. No kids? It was hard to believe.

D secretly paid for everybody’s lunch, and at the end of the day tipped our tour guide generously, despite his genuine protestations (P is both the guide and the owner of the company) because “that’s what we Americans do.”

I love our President, so be very careful about what you say next!