For The Silk Road Kung Fu Friendship Tour Part 8, click here.

Flashback to: July 30, 2015 – International Bus Station in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan

True Story from the Silk Road

Thursday at 6:30 pm, I got to the bus station. It was still hot and sunny but there were some benches in front of the bus that I had to take to get to the border of Uzbekistan and they had a corrugated tin roof so consequently were a cool place to sit and wait for the 7:50 bus. I had my medium small camera bag and larger heavy red backpack, loaded mostly with things like papers I might need to help cross international borders (copies of travel plan, visa applications for various countries all filled out, my employment contract, copies of my passport, China visa and China residency certificate, maps, passport size photos, etc.), protein powder, vitamins, a couple of shirts, my running shoes, hair gel (most people don’t know there’s an Islamic Hadith that Muslims should put oil in the hair), beef jerky, and so on.

Anyways I sat for a few minutes then got up and strolled about a little when a very serious looking gray haired older man sitting on the bench looked me square in the eyes and barked: “Passport!” Then he said something about Kazakhstan but I couldn’t understand not speaking Kyrgyz language or Russian, and not even sure which language he was using. But he was clearly glaring at me in a not exactly friendly way on that hot sunny afternoon.

He had no ID pinned on him and was wearing kind of scruffy old clothes so he didn’t appear to be an official. I know from previous experiences there are some weird people in the world, so I just looked back at him and said in English: “Who are you? God or something?” I got no response so I tried it in my unquestionably bad Arabic. “Hal Anta Allah?” Again, no response. For the briefest second I wanted to add a “ma?” at the end of my probably bad Arabic language question, because in Chinese all interrogatories with a yes/no answer end in “ma?” which made me think for a millisecond how the mind carries over grammar rules from one badly learned language to another, a thought I was to repeat only four days later at Inchon Airport in South Korea where I had to remember that interrogatories in Korean end with “…shimnika?” or “ … imnika?” according to the rules of that subject-object-verb - with a “politeness” tag at the end - language. But, I quickly suppressed my cognitive psychology (which studies how the brain stores memories) ruminations during my brief conversation with the rather demanding old guy at the International Bus Station in Bishkek as I had more important things to think about.

So I wandered off for a few moments to consider my options. The fact that he mentioned Kazakhstan was not good, as I was going to Uzbekistan, but I failed to remember that to get to Uzbekistan the bus had to cross a rather long distance in Kazakhstan. Even so, that should be no worry as Americans get visas at the Kazakh border no problem. But, when buying the ticket at the bus station that morning the woman selling the tickets didn’t want to sell me one, and I didn’t understand why, except she kept taking about Kazakhstan. Mmm. Worrisome! Finally the older Soviet style ticket seller woman in the morning did sell me the ticket, but only after I started talking a bit loudly about BBC and CNN.

Anyways, after a few moments of consideration I thought it best to go and talk with the old guy. Maybe he knew something, even though we didn’t have any language in common. So I strolled back and sat down next to him, smiling winningly. I slowly opened the notebook part of my camera bag where I kept a copy of my Kung Fu Tai Chi magazine, and ever so slowly pulled it out. I was relatively sure during my short absence he’d been considering various tortures for me to teach me not to be such an insolent foreigner, but I also knew that if I act too much like a wimp I’ll be turned into a slave by every Tom, Dick and Harry that walks along. It’s a fine line one must walk when traveling in foreign territory!

His eyes widened just a little when I pulled out the magazine. I’m pretty sure he was expecting something different, like a wad of crumpled papers “proving” I was somebody or other, or something other than what I really was, because this is a land and border crossing with some shifty people; nice people too, but definitely with drug smugglers, thieves and all kinds of illegals mixed in.

As I put the magazine in front of him I pointed to “Kung Fu Tai Chi” in big print at the top and said: KUNG FU!” Then, I did my best Bruce Lee imitation, flicking my nose with my thumb and beckoning ‘bring it on’ with the other. “BRUCE LEE!” I said.

He looked a bit confused, but I could see a slight glimmer in his eyes. He knew who Bruce Lee was and suddenly he was a bit curious about this strange foreigner. From that look in his eyes I was pretty sure he’d seen a Bruce Lee movie in his younger days, and he’d liked it! Great! Next, I pulled out my passport and turned the pages showing him page after page and year after year of China Visas. “BEIJING” I said. He kind of started to get it I thought.

Then I said: “XI JINPING!” who I think everybody knows, and I made the heart symbol with my index fingers and thumbs, and added: “ LOVES KUNG FU!” Then, with my heart symbol moving back and forth from my heart, I said: “Boom boom, boom boom” like a beating heart, trying to communicate that Xi Jinping loves Kung Fu!

I’m not entirely sure that’s true actually. I know President Xi loves Beijing Opera, and can only hope he loves Kung Fu too, because I’d hate to misrepresent the President of China there at the International Bus Station in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan. But, hey! Everybody likes Bruce Lee. I was safe on this point, I’m sure.

Anyways by this time, the old guy was smiling and even starting to laugh a bit at my strange explanation. I gave him the magazine to look at for a few moments and he seemed entertained at the colorful pictures and so on. Then I pointed to my name in the magazine and my name in my passport and I’m pretty sure he started to figure it all out.

By this time he seemed like a nice old guy and relaxed a lot. So suddenly we’re two old friends sitting at a bus station.

Pretty soon he wandered off and before long a young guy named Ali wandered by and we struck up a conversation as it turned out his English was pretty good. Fortunately for me, he was taking the same bus as I and he proved to be a tremendous help getting across the rather long, complicated, very crowded, dark, dirty and dangerous Kazakh border later that night on the way to Uzbekistan.

Also, I found out before too long at that still sunny rather warm bus station in Bishkek, the old guy was our bus driver, and the last of the cowboys roaming the ranges in Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan. Ali knew the driver a bit and liked and respected him, and as time went on I grew to like and respect him too.

But before finishing this story, I have to thank Kung Fu Tai Chi magazine associate publisher and editor for making a fine looking magazine that became the key that opened the door to the old cowboy driver’s imagination, realizing the possibility that I wasn’t a drug smuggler at all, just a simple, regular Kung Fu journalist at loose in Central Asia.

Come to think of it, Kyrgyz, and for that matter Kazakh languages, might well have politeness tags at the end of sentences and follow the subject-object-verb grammar pattern the same as Korean, and Japanese for that matter, given that I vaguely recall they’re all from the same Turkic language family, unlike Chinese and English that follow a subject-verb-object grammar pattern, No time for that now. Always too much to think about and do! What was I writing about? Oh yeah! World peace through Kung Fu? Maybe it started there. Maybe it started a long time ago in a distant land along the Silk Road, with two old guys from distant lands waiting for a caravan and comparing ways to better lop someone’s head off with a halberd. Who knows?

For The Silk Road Kung Fu Friendship Tour Part 10, click here.

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About Greg Brundage :
Efforts by his parents led to the start of the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Wisconsin – Milwaukee back in the early 1970s. He has made a lifelong study of ancient philosophies and religions, martial arts and traditional medicines around the world. He currently lives in Beijing where he works as a high school teacher at a large private school.

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