Bars boasting excessive taxidermy and bullet holes. I couldn’t even find a Chipotle, which, from my Texan perspective, seemed like the bare minimum. I couldn’t find a Target or a Home Depot or a Trader Joe’s to save my life. There was just pizza and burgers and one vegetarian restaurant, which even felt like one too many. The first thing I noticed was the lack that touched every corner of a day-to-day. As a liberal, a Chinese American, an immigrant, a woman-was Wyoming a safe place for me? For every one person that looked like me, there would be 130 others who didn’t. Furthermore, the state hadn’t gone blue since 1952-its one and only time.Īt the time of my move in 2017, there were only 4,426 Asians living in Wyoming, according to the census. While I was freaking out about my impending move to Wyoming, we were already one year into the Trump presidency, a few years into a major surge of the alt-right, years and years into growing gun violence, and almost twenty years into Matthew Shepard’s murder, which happened in Laramie. Could I survive without ramen and pho and Korean barbecue? And how do you look cute in six-degree weather? Did I really have to drive two hours for the nearest major airport? (And that was only if the weather permitted, which it often did not.) A quick Yelp search told me that Laramie had about twenty restaurants, ten of which were pizza places. You could never get bored with the food here, because there’s so much of it. There are undeniable perks about living in a place like Austin. So I looked to Wyoming: Outside of getting to work with literary stalwarts like Brad Watson and Alyson Hagy, there was something about the landscape of this mysterious state that appealed to my writer sensibilities.īut I also had a few concerns about leaving the city where I’d lived for almost eighteen years. I wanted to write about all the complexities, nuances, and traumas I felt as an Asian American immigrant, but in my young-professional bubble in Austin, I felt stymied. There was always something to do, because being in Austin makes you feel like you should always be doing something.
#NO NOT ONE KARAOKE FREE#
Only this hamster wheel was obfuscated by work “perks” like unlimited snacks and free lunch, and the quick joy of knowing that I was in my twenties and had money for the first time in my life. I worked for the weekend, though I didn’t admit it, trapped on the same hamster wheel I promised I’d never be a part of. There was always a new Eater-approved New-American/Pan-Asian/Tiki Bar restaurant to try. My weeks were filled with happy hours, late-night dancing, and late-start mornings. Before becoming a grad student, I was a content marketing manager at a startup in Austin. I moved here in the fall of 2017 to get my MFA in creative writing at the University of Wyoming. The tallest building is a twelve-story dorm, belonging to the state’s only four-year university in Laramie. For example, there are only two sets of escalators in the whole state. Suffice to say, in Wyoming, there’s a lot of space and not much in it.
![no not one karaoke no not one karaoke](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/uOxOIRgK4Xw/maxresdefault.jpg)
But Wyoming is also the least populous, with 579 thousand residents DC has more people living in its modest sixty-eight square miles. At roughly one hundred thousand square miles, it’s almost twice the size of New York state. Wyoming is the tenth largest state in the United States. It’s not one of those states you conveniently forget about (sorry, Rhode Island!), but more so a state you can’t believe still exists in today’s world. The thing about Wyoming is that no one really knows what it is. When people find out I live in Wyoming, one of the first questions they ask is, “What do you even do there?” I don’t blame them. This is Why-oming, a column by Jenny Tinghui Zhang that explores life as a woman of color in Wyoming, one of the whitest and loneliest places in the United States.