|
McDONALD'S IS CHINESE FOOD What's a McDonald's in Shanghai like? Good question. I originally planned on making some profound statement about Chinese culture, mentioning how my neighborhood McDonald's is crowded, day and night; and how for 24 hours a day it's filled to capacity with Chinese mothers and their children, and young Chinese basketball players and kids in their school uniforms, and boyish Chinese teenagers with their teenage girlfriends, or would-be teenage girlfriends, and Chinese families, and employees of various Chinese companies, on lunch break and coming home from work, and old Chinese people too; how aside from a badly translated police warning to "don't be your valuables at your side," the only English I could find in the store was the word "McDonald's," which is to say that the menus, the posters and advertisements, and everything else in here is written only in Chinese; how let's say you don't speak Chinese, but you want to order a Big Mac meal anyway, and so you look confused and fumble around with words and point for a while, and eventually the employee at the cash register reaches underneath the counter for a laminated menu, which is a lot like the huge display menu overhead but with English in tiny bold letters underneath the Mandarin, and still you're reduced to pointing and all of this is a little embarrassing; how if the machine readout is broken on the cash register, you have no idea how much you have to pay this guy; how the Chinese customers and McDonald's employees don't seem to mind that no one is speaking English, even though this is an American restaurant, or at least I thought it was, and where are the clueless tourists in a city of 18.5 million people, afraid of the local food and looking for a touch of something familiar, where are they; and how the menu is different than you remember it, because some of these burgers have egg in them, or cucumber, and some weird spicy sauce; how the food is priced comparatively with local food chains and restaurants in China, and is actually quite cheap, especially if you consider that American food is near criminally expensive everywhere else in town; how you look up and, yes, I'm the only white person in here—what's up with that?; how then you start to notice a lot of smiling faces, lots, and halfway through your spicy McMandarin burger you observe that no one is dealing with the familiar pangs of a guilty conscience that you see regularly at any McDonald's restaurant in the States, or while you're shopping at Wal-Mart or whatever, because the whole dialogue about corporate greed and business ethics must play out differently here, you think, if it plays out at all, and that these Chinese customers all around you are not feigning enjoyment, like so many lower- to upper-middle class what-have-yous in the inner city or suburbs of any American city you care to mention, but that here in Shanghai, people actually enjoy their dining experience at McDonald's—McDonald's!—as much as you've seen them enjoy any Chinese restaurant; and how upon further examination Grimace is not a white man, or a black man or some guy from Mexico, but he's actually purple and perhaps not even human, and then you realize that McDonald's in Shanghai is not an American restaurant except in name, and that the burger you're eating is Chinese food. I was planning to say all of these things, but what I really want to talk about is why the employees in this McDonald's are so friggin' tall. These are some seriously tall people working here. Like really tall. As a rule, the Chinese are shorter than foreigners—women especially. But the women here are all like 5'9" or 5'11", and a couple girls are as tall as I am. The dudes are even taller, between 6'1" and 6'4". And here they are, with a plastic tray and a handful of change, serving me my spicy McMandarin burger. What's up with that? -murrayjames 07/13/08 |