Little Emperors (20 page)

— McDonald's

Connie and I walk under the golden arches, the bamboo scaffolding that once clung to them long gone, and push open the glass doors. It is Saturday, and the place is crammed with families. Cadre papas, in their best green uniforms, sit and watch bright-eyed children push plastic cars across plastic tables. Other children suck intently, nearly cross-eyed, on yellow straws. Mothers in checkered blouses and flowered skirts wipe up spilled drinks as their knee-high stockings slide down.

The place is a whir of yellow and red, of colour and chaos. People crowd around the counter, hunt with brimming trays for empty chairs, or chat loudly across tables. And, up beyond the crowd, a uniformed team is doing exactly what Chairman Mao told the Chinese to do so many years ago.

They are serving the people.

Welcome to a Saturday at McDonald's in Guangzhou, China.

“Oh, Connie. It's really crowded,” I say. “I don't think we'll get a table.”

It is one o'clock, and we've come here directly after work to have a quick lunch and prepare for the kids to arrive. For the last week, we have been teaching McDonald's vocabulary in our English classes. I shuddered when I first learned that part of the food unit was a trip to McDonald's. As it turned out, I was the only one in the classroom who had a problem with it.

When Connie and I announced the McDonald's field trip to the classes, the kids let out an unprecedented cheer — hooting and clapping
and giggling with excitement as if this were what they'd been waiting for all along. Finally, the real reason for learning English had arrived!

They paid uncannily close attention to the lessons this week. In the first lesson, we handed out McDonald's tray menus and introduced basic McDonald's vocabulary. The kids learned quickly, helped by the fact that
Coca-Cola
and
hamburger
have already been co-opted into Chinese —
kekou kele
and
hanbaobao
. (Connie tells me that
kekou kele
means “tastes good, makes you happy” in Chinese. For the Coca-Cola Company, this is either a stroke of marketing genius or sheer luck.)

Near the end of the first lesson, some of the kids began bouncing on their chairs, urgently raising their hands and shouting out questions in Cantonese. Connie turned to me. “They want to know the name of the food in the box with the toy.”

“It's called a Happy Meal,” I told the class. It was the only item not pictured on their tray menus.

“Happy Meal!” they sang in unison.

In the second lesson, we taught them how to place an order at McDonald's in English. Then we taught them a song. How strange to stand in front of a classroom full of Chinese children — each wearing the red scarf of the Communist Party Young Pioneers — and listen to them sing joyously about an American fast-food chain. At the same age, their parents held high copies of the Little Red Book and sang the praises of Chairman Mao. A generation later, their kids clutch McDonald's tray menus and sing the praises of Big Macs.

“I'll talk to the manager,” Connie says. “Let her know we are here.”

“Okay.” I take Connie's knapsack and move to the side as she snakes her way through the crowd. From where I stand, I can watch the counter crew glide quickly past one another, loading tray after tray with orange Styrofoam boxes and hot fudge sundaes, barely pausing before greeting the next person in line. My eyes pan the restaurant, running over tables piled high with yellow wax paper and empty shake cups. I pause to stare as grandmothers hold toddlers up to the fibreglass Ronald McDonald statue for a photograph.

What is it with this place? I wonder to myself. Why does it have such appeal? How come it holds meaning beyond just a place to eat hamburgers?

Which came first, the rise of McDonald's or the demise of communism?

When McDonald's first opened in Moscow's Pushkin Square in
January 1990, people lined up around the square to get in. By midnight, the restaurant had served 30,567 customers. It set a record for the most customers served on an opening day at any McDonald's in the world. It was as if the Russian people's first taste of a Big Mac was their first taste of freedom. Or, as the Russian manager of McDonald's in Russia put it, “Many people talk about perestroika, but their perestroika is an abstraction. Now, me — I can touch my perestroika. I can taste my perestroika. Big Mac is perestroika.”

China also got its first McDonald's in 1990 in the city of Shenzhen, the Special Economic Zone just south of Guangzhou. Two years later, on April 23, 1992, the world's biggest McDonald's opened in Beijing. It was seven times larger than an average American McDonald's, and it soon became the busiest McDonald's in the world. Within a few years, 280 McDonald's restaurants opened in fifty Chinese cities. Its rapid spread through China coincided almost perfectly with China's opening up to the rest of the world.

And what an absurd world it is when a fast-food restaurant can accomplish more than diplomacy or the threat of nuclear war. Such is the strange power of the Big M.

“Manager says we can sit in the back room,” Connie tells me as she squeezes out of the crowd. We walk down a short corridor past the washrooms. The manager opens the door at the end of the hall and greets us with a big grin and an enthusiastic “Come in, please!” We step into the kitchen and pass a stainless-steel half wall behind which the crew is busy frying burgers under a leaning tower of Big Mac boxes. We make a quick left at a rack of hamburger buns and enter the staff room.

It is small and narrow and, except for the rice cooker balanced on a stool in the corner and the crew list written in Chinese, not unlike any McDonald's staff room in North America. Connie and I sit at the table with two of the staff as the manager takes our orders. (One of the perks of bringing so many children to McDonald's is a free lunch.) While waiting for our cheeseburgers and milkshakes, we watch as one of the staff fills in McDonald's Kid Club cards from a stack of application forms on the table. She hands the cards to her co-worker, who pastes children's photos on to them, then passes the cards through a small laminator.

Connie picks up the shiny pile of finished cards and flips through them to see if any of our students are card-carrying members of the Wu Yang McDonald's. We find a few familiar faces in the stack, but the club seems largely made up of toddlers and infants.

The manager comes back with our food and tells us that they have begun clearing away our reserved area. As we wolf back our lunch, we review our lesson plan with greasy fingers. I am just vacuuming up the dregs of my milkshake when the manager comes back to tell us that everything is ready. I glance at my watch. “It's show time!” I say as we push open the heavy door and head back toward the crowded restaurant.

“I feel like rock star going onstage!” Connie whispers.

“Me, too!”

We go to our reserved section, the kiddies' tables, which is separated from the rest of the restaurant by a glass partition and a half wall overflowing with plastic plants. The kids begin arriving in quick succession and take their seats at the low tables. We rope them off from their parents, who stay on the perimeters with cameras poised. By 1:35, everyone has arrived.

I stand on a chair and shout, “Good afternoon, everybody!”

“Good afternoon, Miss Dionne! Good afternoon, Miss Connie!” comes a chorus of clear voices, clearly showing off for their parents.

“Okay, everybody, please stand up! Let's sing a song!” I shout. They all stand. “In one, two, three . . .”

The children's voices burst into the room, reaching high into the fluorescent lights and filling the entire restaurant. Hamburgers stop on their way to mouths as every head in the place turns to look, some people jumping up from their tables for a better view. Outside, people walking by stop in mid-gait to gawk through the picture window at the sight of a crazy foreigner jumping and singing with a room full of Chinese children. The children, sensing the attention, sing louder and clearer than they ever have before, basking in every drop of limelight. When the song ends, everyone in the restaurant claps. Parents smile proudly. An old lady carrying a toddler pushes her way up to the rope and asks Connie, “What club is this?”

“It's the primary school English class.”

“Can my grandson join?” she asks, pointing with her chin to the ketchup-stained three-year-old strangling a french fry.

“I think it's best to wait a few years,” Connie tells her, then turns to me and rolls her eyes. “So impatient!” she whispers.

I sit at a small table in the corner, and the kids line up to tell me their orders in English. With all the pressure — the crowd, their parents, the flashbulbs going off — the kids promptly forget the vocabulary we taught them during the week and resort to pointing at pictures on the tray menu.
After they order, I hand each their order slip, and they dash through the busy McDonald's to the counter to get their food, moms, dads, and accompanying wallets in tow.

Once everyone is back with their food, the inevitable minor disasters begin. A large Coke flips off the edge of a tray and sends ice cubes sliding across the floor in a carbonated puddle. The McDonald's damage control team is standing by with mops and buckets and rushes in to control the flood. Connie and I step over mop handles and begin circulating among the tables to talk to the kids in English.

I go to Amy, Alice, Mandy, and Anna. “Hey, girls,” I say, crouching down to their table. “Do you like to eat cheeseburgers?”

They nod, their mouths stuffed full and busy chewing. Anna takes a swig of Coke and holds up a french fry. “Miss Dionne, do you like to eat french fries?”

“Yes, I do,” I reply.

She holds her gaze on me, then pushes the fry closer to my face. “Eat my french fry,” she commands.

“Okay,” I say, and let her pop the french fry into my mouth. “Thank you, Anna.”

Following suit, Amy extends one of her fries across the table. “Miss Dionne, eat my french fry?”

“Okay.”

Soon everyone is yelling, “Miss Dionne, eat my french fry!” and force-feeding me as I go from table to table and try not to think of where their fingers have been.

I watch as Russ, Joey, William, and Brian, in comradely spirit, collectivize their fries into a large hill in the middle of their table and douse it in twelve packets of ketchup. Russ holds up one of these soggy, red-stained fries, a bloodied potato finger, and asks, “Miss Dionne, eat my french fry?”

I stare at it for a second. “Uh . . . no, thank you, Russ.”

Someone accidentally elbows another Coke. It cascades off the end of a table and splashes Connie's jeans. The mop and bucket brigade moves in as the chubby kids waddle off to get more strawberry sundaes.

Jim, one of the chubby kids, has his McDonald's experience down to a science: a bite of McChicken, a slurp of Coke, a spoonful of sundae; a bite of McChicken, a slurp of Coke, a spoonful of sundae. His assembly line feasting is accomplished with no more than a slight swivel of his neck. He is an energy-efficient eating machine.

The students enjoy a field trip to the local McDonald's
.

Coco takes the biologist's approach to hamburger eating. I watch as she carefully dissects her Big Mac section by section, peeling off the sesame seed bun and working her way down through the layers of lettuce, cheese, patty, and secret sauce.

The Grade Sixes reach over the plastic plants and pump out dozens of drinking straws from the dispenser atop the garbage can. Each hoarding a good handful, they fit their straws end on end, then place their Cokes on the floor and stand on their chairs. For a moment, I don't quite understand what they are doing. Then I get it — they are competing to see who can make the longest operational drinking straw.

Lord give me strength
, I think, glancing quickly up at the ceiling, then over at Connie, whose ponytail is coming loose.

Then, suddenly, like earthquakes, typhoons, and other natural disasters, the trip to McDonald's is over. By 2:45, everyone is gone, leaving only the rubble of half-eaten hamburgers, ketchup-stained napkins, and a sticky spot on the floor to tell the story of what happened here.

In the air, the roar of a distant plane taking off. The pound and saw of construction on the high-rise across the street. The constant beep and honk of Huanshi Lu. And underneath it all, if you listen carefully, you can hear the faint twitter of birds. Some cities pulsate; Guangzhou screeches. (Every bus in this country needs brake oil.
Now
.) I blink awake and pick my watch up off the floor. It is 7:55 a.m.

I guess I should get up soon. It is funny how I don't need an alarm clock here. This city wakes me up with jarring, jackhammer efficiency at the same time every morning.

The walk to work energizes me, as if strolling through this chaotic urban mass jump-starts my system, as if its crazed traffic speeds into my bloodstream and circulates wildly through my veins. I have been taking a slightly different route to school recently. I now walk only partway down Guangzhou Da Dao, then duck down a small road next to a tire store. The road narrows to an alley where I turn left and come to an orange peaked archway. Walking through this gate, the noise and fumes of Guangzhou Da Dao — only a block away — seem to evaporate and I enter an entirely different world.