After Cowboy Chicken Came to Town

This story starts out with a man asking for a refund on his chicken. He says, “This Cowboy Chicken only sounds good and looks tasty. In fact it’s just a name—it’s more batter than eman. After two pieces I still don’t feel a thing in here. (slapping his flabby belly) I don’t want to eat this fluffy stuff anymore. Give me my money back.” This was definitely an attention getter at the beginning of the story. The manager ends up refunding him half of his money. The employee’s are outraged and believe that he shouldn’t have let him take advantage of them. The manager responds by saying they should follow the American way of doing business which means pleasing the customer and believing that, “The customer is always right.” It seems as if there are some harsh feelings between the boss and the employees. One of the employees says, “I hated Mr. Shapiro’s hypocrisy. He always appeared good-hearted and considerate to customers, but was cruel to us, his employees.”

We later find out more about Mr. Shapiro who was, “an old fox and good at sweet-talking.” He also says that he chose to do business in Muji City because he “wanted to help the Chinese people, because in the late thirties his parents had fled Red Russia and lived here for three years before moving in to Australia; they had been treated decently, though they were Jews. The Jews and the Chinese had a similar fate, so I feel close to you. We all have dark hair.” It seems as if he has a compassionate side, and then rounds his compassion off with a joke.

The employees seem to have an alliance against their boss. They nicknamed Mr. Shapiro, “Party Secretary, because just like a Party boss anywhere he did little work. The only difference was that he didn’t organize political studies or demand we report to him our inner thoughts.” It seems as if they hold great hostility towards Mr. Shapiro. They clearly don’t think very highly of him, and are under the impression that he does little to no work. They tell us that Peter Jiao, his manager, “ran the business for him.”

From the way they describe it, it seems that Cowboy Chicken is a big deal in China. We are told that, “On the day Cowboy Chicken opened, about forty officials from the City Hall came to celebrate. At the opening ceremony, a vice mayor cut the red silk ribbon with a pair of scissors two feet long. He then presented Mr. Shapiro with a brass key the size of a small poker.” It caused quite the stir in town and, “the next day the city’s newspaper, the Muji Herald, published a lengthy article about breakthrough in the city’s campaign to attract foreign investors.”

We later find out that Mr. Shapiro has been taking a few of his employee’s out for dinner. Although the men that work in the restaurant think that he has bad intentions, the girls inform them that they paid their own way and that Mr. Shapiro considered it to be a “working dinner.” At one point, they decide to make the restaurant “buffet style.” This proved to be very popular, but unfortunately due to it’s popularity, “they lost seven hundred yuan, exclusive of our wages.” After they stopped doing the buffet style of serving food, the employees were happy that their wages hadn’t been withheld, despite the loss in revenue. We are told that, ‘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.” It is hard to believe that a company can actually withhold wages from their employee’s when their employees have worked for that money, and have every right to a full salary.

The son of the president of Muji Teachers College called Peter and informed him that he had now decided to get married and, “He wanted something exotic for their wedding dinner, so he picked Cowboy Chicken.” This sounds funny to me, considering Cowboy Chicken is a fast food restaurant. It would be like having KFC at a wedding reception. This just shows another difference in their culture and the American culture. Despite the fact that Mr. Shapiro was hesitant about being able to cater an entire wedding, Manyou tells him, “Mr. Shapiro, Peter is right. Men of China use all moneys for wedding, big money.” So they decide to cater the wedding. At the wedding the groom said, “We thank our American friend, Mr. Ken Shapiro, for providing us with such a clean, beautiful place and delicious food. This is a perfect example of adapting foreign things to Chinese needs.” This statement directly reflects what the goal of Cowboy Chicken’s presence in China is. After the wedding reception Mr. Shapiro and Peter, “Knew we had opened a new page in Cowboy Chicken’s history; our boss said he was going to report our success to the headquarters in Dallas.”

The next morning Cowboy Chicken was flooded with complaints about the food from last night. One caller was a woman, “Complaining about the previous evening’s food. She claimed she had been poisoned.” After receiving loads of complaining phone calls Mr. Shapiro was shaken and said, “Jesus, they’re going to sue us!” The employee’s were confused and didn’t know what that meant. Mr. Shapiro informs them, “In America that’s a way to make a living for some people.” This is another interesting comparison to the American way of life. It turned out that, “A third of the wedding guests had suffered from food poisoning, and that more than a dozen faculty members were unable to teach that day.” They are able to get out of trouble when Mr. Shapiro writes a article in the local newspaper explaining that these people’s Chinese stomachs weren’t accustomed to the dairy in the food and that’s why they were sick.