Terroirs: A Folio

1.

It was the weekend—probably a Thursday night, the last day of the Saudi work week. I was surrounded by a dozen or so expats all holding glasses, their laughter swarming the air at a pitch that almost frightened me. I would have been around thirteen. It was this moment when their raucousness would begin to make sense, when I’d realize there was a reason the men and women I knew as teachers and parents seemed to come unhinged in this house. 

The villa was the home of my friend F, the daughter of an American contractor and a German woman who tutored princesses. Her parents were glamorous and gregarious, frequent party hosts who treated children like their peers. Their style was antithetical to that of my Christian mother and Muslim father, who, though religiously at odds, were matched in their conservatism. Along with sex and love, drinking was absent from our family lexicon and my sheltered imagination. And this was Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, in the early 2000s. Alcohol, like women drivers, gay sex, and public criticism of the King, were illegal and subject to severe punishment.

And so these things happened in furtive, coded ways. Later, I’d learn about embassy parties and taste smuggled, brand-name whiskey. Occasionally, there was a jug of bathtub-brewed beer, which was gulped with good-natured groans. There were the clear bottles brought by expats who blinked out of absent, red-rimmed eyes. This watery liquid was a harsh grain alcohol they nicknamed sid—short for sidiqi, the Arabic word for my friend. This they mixed with juice or the cans of wildly marked-up Schweppes they occasionally scored. But by far, at most soirees the alcohol of choice was muddy, homemade wine.

[This lyric essay was written for a special folio by Asian American Writer’s Workshop . Read the full piece piece here ]