The Bridegroom (18 page)

Our business didn’t boom for long. Several handcarts had appeared on Peace Avenue selling spiced chicken on the roadside near our restaurant. They each carried a sign that declared:
PATRIOTIC CHICKEN
—
CRISPY,
TENDER,
DELICIOUS,
30%
CHEAPER THAN C.C.
! Those were not false claims. Yet whenever we saw their signs, we couldn’t help calling the vendors names. Most citizens here, especially old people, were accustomed to the price and taste of the Patriotic Chicken, so they preferred it to ours. Some of them had tried our product, but they’d complain afterwards, “What a sham! So expensive, this Cowboy thing isn’t for a Chinese stomach.” And they wouldn’t come again. As a result, our steady clientele were mainly fashionable young people.

One day Mr. Shapiro came up with the idea of starting a buffet. We had never heard that word before. “What does it mean?” we asked.

Peter said, “You pay a small amount of money and eat all you can.”

Good, a buffet would be great! We were all ears. Our boss suggested nineteen yuan and ninety-five fen as the price for the buffet, which should include every kind of Cowboy Chicken, mashed potato, fries, salad, and canned fruit. Why didn’t he price it twenty yuan even? we wondered. That would sound more honest and also make it easier for us to handle the change. Peter explained this was the American way of pricing a product. “You don’t add the last straw to collapse the camel,” he said. We couldn’t understand the logic of a camel or a horse or an ox. Anyway, Mr. Shapiro fell in love with his idea, saying even if it didn’t fetch us enough customers, the buffet would help spread our name.

Peter wasn’t enthusiastic about it, but we all said it was a brilliant idea and would definitely make us famous. Of course we knew it wouldn’t work. We supported it because we wanted to eat Cowboy Chicken. Mr. Shapiro was such a skinflint that he would never give us a discount when we bought chicken for ourselves. He said the company’s policy didn’t allow any discount for its employees. On the other hand, our friends, when buying chicken here, often asked us to do them a favor—give them either some choice pieces or a discount—but we dared not break the rules for them. Now came an opportunity, so without delay we put out notices and spread the word about the buffet, which was to start the following week. For a whole weekend, we biked around town in our free time to make sure the news would reach our relatives, friends, and whoever might benefit from it.

Two feet of snow fell on Sunday night, and traffic was paralyzed the next morning, but we all arrived at work on time. Mr. Shapiro was worried, fearing the severe weather would keep people indoors. We assured him that they were not hibernating bears and would definitely show up. Still anxious, he stood outside the front door with the fur earflaps of his hat tied around his jaw, smoking and looking up and down the street at the people shoveling snow. Whisps of smoke and breath hung around his head. We all had on dogskin or quilted trousers in such weather, but he wore only woolen pajamas underneath jeans. It was glitteringly cold outside; the wind tossed the phone lines, which whistled like crazy.

With his protruding mouth pointed at Mr. Shapiro, Manyou said to us, “See how hard it is to be a boss in America. You have to worry about your business all the time.”

“Boy, he’s scared,” I said.

“For once he’s working,” added Feilan, who, though a plump girl, had a pleasant apple face with two dimples on it. Unlike us, she hadn’t gone to high school because she had flunked two of the entrance exams.

We set the buffet stand in a corner and fried piles of chicken. Gradually people arrived. When about a dozen customers had sat down to their meals, Mr. Shapiro looked relieved, though he couldn’t stop rubbing his cheeks and ears, which must have frozen numb. He retreated into his office for coffee, having no idea that this was just the first skirmish of a mighty battle. As the morning went by, more and more people came in, and we could hardly cook enough chicken and fries for them. The room grew noisy and crowded, undoubtedly reaching its maximum capacity, but still our boss was happy. Encouraged by the bustling scene, he even whistled in his office, where he, through bifocal lenses, was reading the
China Daily.

My father and uncle were among the first dozen customers. Both could hardly walk when done with eating. After they left, my brother brought over six young men from his electricity station; they all had a soda or a beer in their pockets so that they wouldn’t have to buy a drink. Without delay they began to attack the buffet; they ate as though this were their last supper on earth. I kept count of their accomplishment—on average they each finished at least a dozen pieces of chicken. Even when they were done and leaving, every one of them held a leg or a wing in his hand. Baisha’s family had come too, including her father, uncles, and aunts. So had the folks of Manyou, Jinglin, and Feilan. The two part-timers had no family in town, but more than ten of their schoolmates turned up. In the back corner a table was occupied by five people, whose catlike faces showed that they belonged to Peter’s clan. Among them was a young woman at least seven months pregnant; she was Peter’s sister, and surely her unborn baby needed nutrition.

We all knew the buffet was headed for disaster, but we didn’t care very much and just continued deep-frying chicken and refilling the salad and mashed-potato bowls. Once in a while we also went over to the buffet stand and picked a piece of chicken for ourselves, because today nobody could keep a record. At last we too could eat our fill. I liked the chicken better with soy sauce and slapped plenty on. The employees shared a bottle of soy sauce, which we kept under the counter.

By midday some people in the marketplace had heard of this rare bargain, and they came in, all eating like starved wolves. Most of them were from the countryside, in town selling and buying stuff; surely they had never dreamed that any restaurant would offer such an abundant meal.

Peter wasn’t around most of the time. He had to be at the Tax Bureau in the morning, and in the afternoon he went to the bank to fetch our wages. When he returned at four o’clock, his face darkened at the amount of food consumed by the buffet. Twenty boxes of chicken and eighteen sacks of fries were gone—which should have lasted three days. He went to inform Mr. Shapiro, who came out of his office and looked disconcerted. Peter suggested we stop the buffet immediately. Our boss’s face reddened, his Adam’s apple going up and down as though he were guzzling something. He said, “Let’s offer it a little while longer. We’re not sure if we lost money or not.”

We closed twenty minutes early that night in order to count the money. The result didn’t surprise us: we lost seven hundred yuan, exclusive of our wages.

In spite of his misshapen face, Mr. Shapiro insisted on trying the buffet for another day. Perhaps he meant to show who was in command, reluctant to admit the buffet was a flop. This suited us fine, since not all of our people had come yet.

The next day, Mr. Shapiro sat on a chair outside his office and watched the customers stuffing themselves. He looked like a giant bulldog, vigilant and sulky, now shaking his head, now smiling exaggeratedly. At times his face turned grim, his eyelids trembling a little. A few men from my father’s office showed up, and two of them even attempted to chat with me in front of my boss. This scared me. I responded to their greetings and questions cursorily, for fear that Mr. Shapiro might detect my connection with them. Fortunately he didn’t understand our language, so he noticed nothing.

After my father’s colleagues left, a tall, thirtyish man in a buff corduroy jacket turned up. After paying for the buffet, he left his fur hat on a table, then walked across to the stand and filled a plate with drumsticks and breasts. As he was about to return to his seat, Mr. Shapiro stopped him and asked, “Why did you come again?”

The man happened to know some English and said with a friendly grin, “First-time customer.”

“You ate tons of chicken and mashed potato just now. How come you’re hungry again so soon?”

“What’s this about?” The man’s face changed.

Peter came over, but he wasn’t sure if the man had been here before. He turned to us and asked, “Is this his second time?”

Before we could answer, the man flared up, “This is my hundredth time. So what? I paid.”

Manyou laughed and told Peter, “There was a fella here just now in the same kind of jacket, but that was a different man.”

“That’s true,” I piped in. I knew the other man—he was an accountant in my father’s bureau. This fellow fuming in front of us was a genuine stranger, with a beeper on his belt. He must be a cabdriver or an entrepreneur.

Peter apologized to the man, told him to go ahead and eat, then he explained the truth to Mr. Shapiro, who had become so edgy that some customers began to look identical to him. “How the hell could I tell the difference?” our boss said. “To me they all look alike—they’re all real Chinese, with appetites like alligators.” He laughed heartily, like a young boy.

Peter interpreted his words to us, and we all cracked up.

On the second day, we lost about six hundred yuan, so that was the end of the buffet. Lucky for us, Mr. Shapiro didn’t withhold our wages, which we all received the next day. This was the beauty of working for Cowboy Chicken—it was never late in paying us, unlike many Chinese companies, especially those owned by the state, which simply didn’t have enough cash to pay employees their full wages. My mother often got only sixty percent of her salary from her weather station, which could not increase its clientele, or run a night school, or have any power over other companies. She’d sigh and say, “The longer I work, the more I lose.”

At the sight of my monthly wages—468 yuan—my father became heartbroken. He’d had a drop too much that night, full of self-pity, and, waving a half-smoked cigarette, he said to me, “Hongwen, I’ve joined the Revolution for almost forty years, and I earn only three hundred yuan a month. But you just started working and you draw a larger salary. This makes me feel duped, duped by the Communist Party I’ve served.”

My youngest brother butted in, “It’s never too late to quit, Dad.”

“Shut up!” I snapped. He was such an idiot, he couldn’t see the old man was really suffering. I said to my father, “You shouldn’t think that way. True, you’re not paid a lot, but your job is secure, like a rubber rice bowl that nobody can take away from you or smash—even a tank cannot crush it. Every day you just sit at your desk drinking tea and reading newspapers, or chatting away, and at the end of each month you take home a full salary. But I have to work my ass off for a capitalist who pays me by the hour.”

“You make so much and always eat high-protein food. What else do you want?”

I didn’t answer. In my heart I said, I want a job that pays a salary. I want to be like some people who go to their offices every morning for an eight-hour rest. My father kept on: “Cowboy Chicken is so delicious. If I could eat it and drink Coke every day, I’d have no need for socialism.”

I wouldn’t argue with him. He was beside himself that night. Indeed, I did often have some tidbits at the restaurant, mainly fries and biscuits. As a result, I seldom ate dinner when I came home, but mainly it was because I wanted to save food for my family. My father, of course, assumed I was stuffing myself with chicken every day.

After the disastrous buffet, Mr. Shapiro depended more on Peter, who in fact ran the place single-handedly. To be fair, Peter was an able man and had put his heart into the restaurant. He began to make a lot of connections in town and persuaded people to have business lunches at our place. This made a huge difference. Because their companies would foot the bill, the businesspeople would order table loads of food to treat their guests to hearty American meals, and then they’d take the leftovers home for their families. By and by our restaurant gained a reputation in the business world, and we established a stable clientele. So once again Mr. Shapiro could stay in his office in the morning drinking coffee, reading magazines, and even listening to a tape to learn the ABCs of Chinese.

One afternoon the second son of the president of Muji Teachers College phoned Peter, saying he’d like to hold his wedding feast at our restaurant. I knew of this dandy, who had divorced his hardworking wife the year before; his current bride used to be a young widow who had given up her managerial position in a theater four years ago in order to go to Russia. Now they had decided to marry, and he wanted something exotic for their wedding dinner, so he picked Cowboy Chicken.

Uneasy about this request, Mr. Shapiro said to Peter, “We’re just a fast-food place. We’re not equipped to cater a wedding banquet.”

“We must not miss this opportunity,” said Peter. “A Chinese man would spend all his savings on his wedding.” His owlish eyes glittered.

“Well, we’ll have to serve alcoholic beverages, won’t we? We have no license.”

“Forget that. Nobody has ever heard of such a thing in China. Even a baby can drink alcohol here.” Peter grew impatient.

Manyou, who could speak a few words of English, broke in, “Mr. Shapiro, Peter is right. Men of China use all moneys for wedding, big money.” He seemed embarrassed by his accent and went back to biting his cuticles.

So our boss yielded. From the next day on, we began to prepare the place for the wedding feast. Mr. Shapiro called Cowboy Chicken’s headquarters in Beijing to have some cheesecakes, ice cream, and California wines shipped to us by the express mail. Peter hired two temps and had the room decked out with colorful ribbons and strings of tiny lightbulbs. Since it was already mid-December, he had a dwarf juniper and candlesticks set up in a corner. We even hung up a pair of large bunny lanterns at the front door, as the Year of Rabbit was almost here. Peter ordered us to wear clean uniforms for the occasion—red sweaters, black pants, and maroon aprons.

The wedding banquet took place on a Thursday evening. It went smoothly, since most of the guests were from the college, urbane and sober-minded. The bride, a small woman in her mid-thirties, wore a sky-blue silk dress, her hair was permed, and her lips were rouged scarlet. She smiled without stopping. It was too bad that her parents hadn’t given her beautiful eyes; she must have been altered by cosmetic surgery, which had produced her tight, thick double lids. Baisha said the woman owned two gift shops in Moscow. Small wonder she wore six fancy rings and a tiny wristwatch in the shape of a heart. With so many diamonds and so much gold on her fingers, she must be lazy, not doing any housework. From her manners we could tell she had seen the world. By comparison, her tall groom looked like a bumpkin despite his fancy outfit—a dark-blue Western suit, a yellow tie studded with tiny magpies, and patent-leather boots with brass buckles. He had a hoarse voice, often laughing with a bubbling sound in his throat. When he laughed, you could hardly see anything on his face except his mouth, which reminded me of a crocodile’s. His gray-haired parents sat opposite him, quiet and reserved, both of them senior officials.