The Bridegroom: Stories

After Cowboy Chicken Came to Town

“I want my money back!” the customer said, dropped his plate on the counter, and handed me his receipt. He was a fiftyish man, of stout girth. A large crumb hung on the corner of his oily mouth. He had bought four pieces of chicken just now, but only a drumstick and a wing were left on the plate.

“Where are the breast and the thigh?” I asked.

“You can’t take people in like this.” The man’s bulbous eyes flashed with rage. This time I recognized him; he was a worker in the nearby motor factory.

“How did we take you in?” the tall Baisha asked sharply, brandishing a pair of long tongs. She glared at the man, whose crown barely reached the level of her nose.

He said, “This Cowboy Chicken only sounds good and looks tasty. In fact it’s just a name — it’s more batter than meat. After two pieces I still don’t feel a thing in here.” He slapped his flabby side. “I don’t want to eat this fluffy stuff anymore. Give me my money back.”

“No way,” Baisha said and swung her permed hair, which looked like a magpies’ nest. “If you hadn’t touched the chicken, we’d refund you the money. But—”

“Excuse me,” Peter Jiao said, coming out of the kitchen together with Mr. Shapiro.

We explained to him the customer’s demand, which Peter translated for our American boss. Then we all remained silent to see how Peter, our manager, would handle this.

After a brief exchange with Mr. Shapiro in English, Peter said in Chinese to the man, “You’ve eaten two pieces already, so we can only refund half your money. But don’t take this as a precedent. Once you’ve touched the food, it’s yours.”

The man looked unhappy but accepted the offer. Still he muttered, “American dogs.” He was referring to us, the Chinese employed by Cowboy Chicken.

That angered us. We began arguing with Peter and Mr. Shapiro that we shouldn’t have let him take advantage of us this way. Otherwise all kinds of people would come in to sample our food for free. We didn’t need a cheap customer like this one and should throw him out. Mr. Shapiro said we ought to follow the American way of doing business — you must try to satisfy your customers. “The customer is always right,” he had instructed us when we were hired. But he had no idea who he was dealing with. You let a devil into your house, he’ll get into your bed. If Mr. Shapiro continued to play the merciful Buddha, this place would be a mess soon. We had already heard a lot of complaints about our restaurant. People in town would say, “Cowboy Chicken is just for spendthrifts.” True, our product was more expensive and far greasier than the local braised chicken, which was cooked so well that you could eat even the bones.

Sponge in hand, I went over to clean the table littered by that man. The scarlet Formica tabletop smelled like castor oil when greased with chicken bones. The odor always nauseated me. As I was about to move to another table, I saw a hole on the seat the size of a soybean burned by a cigarette. It must have been the work of that son of a dog; instead of refunding his money, we should’ve detained him until he paid for the damage.

I hated Mr. Shapiro’s hypocrisy. He always appeared good-hearted and considerate to customers, but was cruel to us, his employees. The previous month he had deducted forty yuan from my pay. It hurt like having a rib taken out of my chest. What had happened was that I had given eight chicken breasts to a girl from my brother’s electricity station. She came in to buy some chicken. By the company’s regulations I was supposed to give her two drumsticks, two thighs, two wings, and two breasts. She said to me, “Be a good man, Hongwen. Give me more meat.” Somehow I couldn’t resist her charming smile, so I yielded to her request. My boss caught me stuffing the paper box with the meatiest pieces, but he remained silent until the girl was out of earshot. Then he dumped on me all his piss and crap. “If you do that again,” he said, “I’ll fire you.” I was so frightened! Later, he fined me, as an example to the seven other Chinese employees.

Mr. Shapiro was an old fox, good at sweet-talking. When we asked him why he had chosen to do business in our Muji City, he said 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 on to Australia; they had been treated decently, though they were Jews. With an earnest look on his round, whiskery face, Mr. Shapiro explained, “The Jews and the Chinese had a similar fate, so I feel close to you. We all have dark hair.” He chuckled as if he had said something funny. In fact that was capitalist baloney. We don’t need to eat Cowboy Chicken here, or appreciate his stout red nose and his balding crown, or wince at the thick black hair on his arms. His company exploited not just us but also thousands of country people. A few villages in Hebei Province grew potatoes for Cowboy Chicken, because the soil and climate there produced potatoes similar to Idaho’s. In addition, the company had set up a few chicken farms in Anhui Province to provide meat for its chain in China. It used Chinese produce and labor and made money out of Chinese customers, then shipped its profits back to the U.S. How could Mr. Shapiro have the barefaced gall to claim he had come to help us? We have no need for a savior like him. As for his parents’ stay in our city half a century ago, it’s true that the citizens here had treated Jews without discrimination. That was because to us a Jew was just another foreigner, no different from any other white devil. We still cannot tell the difference.

We 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. Peter Jiao, his manager, ran the business for him. I had known Peter since middle school, when his name was Peihai — an anemic, studious boy with few friends to play with. Boys often made fun of him because he had four tourbillions on his head. His father had served as a platoon commander in the Korean War and had been captured by the American army. Unlike some of the POWs, who chose to go to Canada or Taiwan after the war, Peihai’s father, out of his love for our motherland, decided to come back. But when he returned, he was discharged from the army and sent down to a farm in a northern suburb of our city. In reality, all those captives who had come back were classified as suspected traitors. A lot of them were jailed again. Peihai’s father worked under surveillance on the farm, but people rarely maltreated him, and he had his own home in a nearby village. He was quiet most of the time; so was his wife, a woman who never knew her dad’s name because she had been fathered by some Japanese officer. Their only son, Peihai, had to walk three miles to town for school every weekday. That was why we called him Country Boy.

Unlike us, he always got good grades. In 1977, when colleges reopened, he passed the entrance exams and enrolled at Tianjin Foreign Language Institute to study English. We had all sat for the exams, but only two out of the three hundred seniors from our high school had passed the admission standard. After college, Peihai went to America, studying history at the University of Iowa. Later he changed his field and earned a degree in business from that school. Then he came back, a completely different man, robust and wealthy, with curly hair and a new name. He looked energetic, cheerful, and younger than his age. At work he was always dressed formally, in a Western suit and a bright-colored necktie. He once joked with us, saying he had over fifty pounds of American flesh. To tell the truth, I liked Peter better than Peihai. I often wondered what in America had made him change so much — in just six years from an awkward boy to a capable, confident man. Was it American water? American milk and beef? The American climate? The American way of life? I don’t know for sure. More impressive, Peter spoke English beautifully, much better than those professors and lecturers in the City College who had never gone abroad and had learned their English mainly from textbooks written by the Russians. He had hired me probably because I had never bugged him in our school days and because I had a slightly lame foot. Out of gratitude I never spoke about his past to my fellow workers.

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. What’s that for? we wondered. Our city didn’t have a gate with a colossal lock for it to open. The attendees at the ceremony sampled our chicken, fries, coleslaw, salad, biscuits. Coca-Cola, ginger ale, and orange soda were poured free like water. People touched the vinyl seats, the Formica tables, the dishwasher, the microwave, the cash register, the linoleum tile on the kitchen floor, and poked their heads into the freezer and the brand-new rest rooms. They were impressed by the whole package, shipped directly from the U.S. A white-bearded official said, “We must learn from the Americans. See how they have managed to meet every need of their customers, taking care of not only what goes in but also what comes out. Everything was thought out beforehand.” Some of them watched us frying chicken in the stainless-steel troughs, which were safe and clean, nothing like a soot-bottomed cauldron or a noisy, unsteady wok. The vice mayor shook hands with every employee and told us to work hard and cooperatively with our American boss. The next day the city’s newspaper, the Muji Herald, published a lengthy article about Cowboy Chicken, describing its appearance here as a significant breakthrough in the city’s campaign to attract foreign investors.

During the first few weeks we had a lot of customers, especially young people, who, eager to taste something American, came in droves. We got so much business that the cooked-meat stands on the streets had to move farther and farther away from our restaurant. Sometimes when we passed those stands, their owners would spit on the ground and curse without looking at us, “Foreign lackeys!”

We’d cry back, “I eat Cowboy Chicken every day and gained lots of weight.”

At first Mr. Shapiro worked hard, often staying around until we closed at ten-thirty. But as the business was flourishing, he hung back more and stayed in his office for hours on end, reading newspapers and sometimes chewing a skinny sausage wrapped in cellophane. He rested so well in the daytime and had so much energy to spare that he began to date the girls working for him. There were four of them, two full-timers and two part-timers, all around twenty, healthy and lively, though not dazzlingly pretty. Imagine, once a week, on Thursday night, a man of over fifty went out with a young girl who was happy to go anywhere he took her. This made us, the three men hired by him, feel useless, like a bunch of eunuchs, particularly myself because I’d never had a girlfriend, though I was almost thirty. Most girls were nice to me, but for them I was merely a good fellow, deserving more pity than affection, as if my crippled foot made me less than a man. For me, Mr. Shapiro was just a dirty old man, but the girls here were no better, always ready to sell something — a smile, a few sweet words, and perhaps their flesh.

The day after Mr. Shapiro had taken Baisha out, I asked her about the date, curious to see what else besides money made this paunchy man so attractive to girls. What’s more, I was eager to find out whether he had bedded them in his apartment after dinner. That was illegal. If he had done it, we’d have something on him and could turn him in when it was necessary. I asked Baisha casually, “How many rooms does he have?” My hands were busy pulling plates out of the dishwasher and piling them up on a table.

“How should I know?” she said and gave me a suspicious stare. I must admit, she was smart and had a mind quick like a lizard.

“Didn’t you spend some time with him yesterday evening?”

“Yes, we had dinner. That was all.”

“Was it good?” I had heard he had taken the girls to Lucky House, a third-rate restaurant near the marketplace.

“So-so.”

“What did you eat?”

“Fried noodles and sautéed beef tripe.”

“Well, I wish somebody would give me a treat like that.”

“What made you think it was his treat?”

“It wasn’t?” I put the last plate on the pile.

“I paid for what I ate. I won’t go out with him again. He’s such a cheapskate.”

“If he didn’t plan to spend money, why did he invite you out?”

“He said this was the American way. He gave the waitress a big tip, though, a ten, but the girl wouldn’t take it.”

“So afterwards you just went home?”

“Yes. I thought he’d take me to the movies or a karaoke bar. He just picked up his big butt and said he had a good time. Before we parted on the street, he yawned and said he missed his wife and kids.”

“That was strange.”

Manyou, Jinglin, and I — the three male employees — talked among ourselves about Mr. Shapiro’s way of taking the girls out. We couldn’t see what he was up to. How could he have a good time just eating a meal with a girl? This puzzled us. We asked Peter whether all American men were so stingy, but he said that like us they would generally pay the bill in such a case. He explained, “Probably Mr. Shapiro wants to make it clear to the girls that this isn’t a date, but a working dinner.”

Who would buy that? Why didn’t he have a working dinner with one of us, the male employees? We guessed he might have used the girls, because if he had gone to a fancy place like Four Seas Garden or the North Star Palace, which had special menus for foreigners, he’d have had to pay at least five times more than a Chinese customer. We checked with the girls, and they admitted that Mr. Shapiro had asked them to order everything. So he had indeed paid the Chinese prices. No wonder he had a good time. What an old fox. Still, why wouldn’t he take the girls to his apartment? Though none of them was a beauty, just the smell of the youthful flesh should have turned his old head, shouldn’t it? Especially the two part-timers, the college students, who had fine figures and educated voices; they worked only twenty hours a week and wouldn’t condescend to talk with us very often. Probably Mr. Shapiro was no good in bed, a true eunuch.

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.

The man officiating at the banquet spoke briefly about the auspicious union of the couple. Next, he praised the simple wedding ceremony, which had taken place two hours ago. After a round of applause, he turned to our boss and said, “We thank our American friend, Mr. Ken Shapiro, for providing us with such a clean, beautiful place and the delicious food. This is a perfect example of adapting foreign things to Chinese needs.”

People clapped again. All our boss could say in Chinese was “Thank you.” He looked a little shy, his cheeks pink and his hazel eyes gleaming happily.

As people were making the first toast, we began to serve chicken, every kind we had — crispy, spicy, barbecued, Cajun, and Cowboy original. An old woman opened a large paper napkin with a flowered pattern on it, and studied it for a long time as though it were a piece of needlework on lavender silk which she was reluctant to spoil. A bottle of champagne popped and scared the bridesmaid into screaming. Laughter followed.

“Boy, this is hot!” the groom said, chewing a Cajun wing and exhaling noisily.

They all enjoyed the chicken, but except for the champagne they didn’t like the American wines, which were too mild for them. Most women wouldn’t drink wine; they wanted beer, Coca-Cola, and other soft drinks. Fortunately Peter had stocked some Green Bamboo Leaves and Tsingtao beer, which we brought out without delay. We had also heated a basin of water, in which we warmed the liquor for them. Mr. Shapiro raved to his manager, “Fabulous job, Peter!” He went on flashing a broad smile at everyone, revealing his white teeth. He even patted some of us on the back.

I liked the red wine, and whenever I could, I’d sip some from a glass I had poured myself. But I dared not drink too much for fear my face might change color. When the guests were done with chicken, fries, and salad, we began to serve cheesecake and ice cream, which turned out to be a big success. Everybody loved the dessert. An old scholarly-looking man said loudly, “Ah, here’s the best American stuff!” His tone of voice suggested he had been to the U.S. He forked a chunk of cheesecake into his mouth and smacked his thin lips. He was among the few who could use a fork skillfully; most of them ate with chopsticks and spoons.

That was the first time we offered cheesecake and ice cream, so all of us — the employees — would take a bite whenever we could. Before that day, I had never heard of cheesecake, which I loved so much I ate two wedges. I hid my glass and plate in a cabinet so that our boss couldn’t see them. As long as we did the work well, Peter would shut his eyes to our eating and drinking.

For me the best part of this wedding feast was that it was subdued, peaceful, and short, lasting only two hours, perhaps because both the bride and the groom had been married before. It differed from a standard wedding banquet, which is always raucous and messy, drags on for seven or eight hours, and often gets out of hand since quarrels and fights are commonplace once enough alcohol is consumed. None of these educated men and women drank to excess. The only loudmouth was the bridegroom, who looked slightly retarded. I couldn’t help wondering how come that wealthy lady would marry such a heartless ass, who had abandoned his two small daughters. Probably because his parents had power, or maybe he was just good at tricking women. He must have wanted to live in Moscow for a while and have another baby, hopefully a boy. Feilan shook her head, saying about him, “Disgusting!”

When the feast was over, both Mr. Shapiro and Peter were excited, their faces flushed. They knew we had just opened a new page in Cowboy Chicken’s history; our boss said he was going to report our success to the headquarters in Dallas. We were happy too, though sleepy and tired. If business was better, we might get a bigger raise the next summer, Mr. Shapiro had told us.

That night I didn’t sleep well and had to go to the bathroom continually. I figured my stomach wasn’t used to American food yet. I had eaten fries and biscuits every day, but had never taken in ice cream, cheesecake, red wine, and champagne. Without doubt my stomach couldn’t digest so much rich stuff all at once. I was so weakened that I wondered if I should stay home the next morning.

Not wanting to dampen our spirit of success, I hauled myself to the restaurant at nine o’clock, half an hour late. As we were cutting vegetables and coating chicken with spiced flour, I asked my fellow workers if they had slept well the night before.

“What do you mean?” Baisha’s small eyes stared at me like a pair of tiny daggers.

“I had diarrhea.”

“That’s because you stole too much food, and it serves you right,” she said with a straight face, which was slightly swollen with pimples.

“So you didn’t have any problem?”

“What makes you think I have the same kind of bowels as you?”

Manyou said he had slept like a corpse, perhaps having drunk too much champagne. To my satisfaction, both Jinglin and Feilan admitted they too had suffered from diarrhea. Feilan said, “I thought I was going to die last night. My mother made me drink two kettles of hot water. Otherwise I’d sure be dehydrated today.” She held her sides with both hands as if about to run for the ladies’ room.

Jinglin added, “I thought I was going to poop my guts out.” Indeed, his chubby face looked smaller than yesterday.

As we were talking, the phone rang. Peter answered it. He sounded nervous, and his face turned bloodless and tiny beads of sweat were oozing out on his stubby nose. The caller was a woman complaining about the previous evening’s food. She claimed she had been poisoned. Peter apologized and assured her that we had been very careful about food hygiene, but he would investigate the matter thoroughly.

The instant he put down the phone, another call came in. Then another. From ten o’clock on, every few minutes the phone would ring. People were lodging the same kind of complaint against our restaurant. Mr. Shapiro was shaken, saying, “Jesus, they’re going to sue us!”

What did this mean? we asked him, unsure how suing us could do the complainers any good. He said the company might have to pay them a lot of money. “In America that’s a way to make a living for some people,” he told us. So we worried too.

At noon the college called to officially inform Peter that about 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. The bridegroom’s mother was still in Central Hospital, taking an intravenous drip. The caller suspected the food must have been unclean, or past its expiration dates, or perhaps the ice cream had been too cold. Mr. Shapiro paced back and forth like an ant in a heated pan, while Peter remained quiet, his thick eyebrows knitted together.

“I told you we couldn’t handle a wedding banquet,” our boss said with his nostrils expanding.

Peter muttered, “It must be the cheesecake and the ice cream that upset their stomachs. I’m positive our food was clean and fresh.”

“Maybe I shouldn’t have gone the extra mile to get the stuff from Beijing. Now what should we do?”

“Don’t worry. I’ll explain to them.”

From then on, whenever a complainer phoned, Peter would answer personally. He said that our food had been absolutely fresh and clean but that some Chinese stomachs couldn’t tolerate dairy products. That was why more than two thirds of the previous night’s diners had not felt anything unusual.

His theory of Chinese stomachs was sheer nonsense. We had all drunk milk before and had never been poisoned like this. Three days later, a 1,200-word article appeared in the Muji Herald. Peter was its author. He wrote that there was this substance called lactose, to which many Chinese stomachs were allergic because our traditional diet included very little dairy food. He even quoted from a scientific journal to prove that the Chinese had different stomachs from the Westerners. He urged people to make sure they could endure lactose before they ate our dairy items. From now on, he declared, our restaurant would continue to offer ice cream, but also a variety of non-milk desserts, like Jell-O, apple pie, pecan pie, and canned fruit.

I was unhappy about the article, because I had thought the company might compensate us for the suffering we’d gone through. Even a couple of yuan would help. Now Peter had blown that possibility. When I expressed my dissatisfaction to my fellow workers, Feilan said to me, “You’re small-minded like a housewife, Hongwen. As long as this place does well, we’ll make more money.”

Bitch! I cursed to myself. But I gave some thought to what she said, and she did have a point. The restaurant had almost become our work unit now; we’d all suffer if it lost money. Besides, to file for compensation, I’d first have to admit I had pilfered the ice cream and cheesecake. That would amount to asking for a fine and ridicule.

Soon Peter had Cowboy Chicken completely in his clutches. This was fine with us. We all agreed he could take care of the place better than Mr. Shapiro. We nicknamed him Number-Two Boss. Since the publication of his article, which had quieted all complaints, more and more people ate here, and some came especially for our desserts. Young women were partial to Jell-O and canned fruit, while children loved our ice cream. Again we began to cater for wedding banquets, which gradually became an important source of our profits. From time to time people called and asked whether we’d serve a “white feast”—the dinner after a funeral. We wouldn’t, because it was much plainer fare than a wedding banquet and there wasn’t much money to be made. Besides, it might bring bad luck.

When the snow and ice had melted away from the streets and branches began sprouting yellowish buds, Mr. Shapiro stopped going out with the girls as often as before. By now most restaurants in town treated him as a regular customer, charging him the Chinese prices. One day, Juju, the younger part-timer, said our boss had gotten fresh with her the previous evening when he was tipsy at Eight Deities Garden. He had grasped her wrist and called her “Honey.” She declared she wouldn’t go out with him anymore. We told the girls that if he did anything like that again, they should report him to the police or sue him.

In late April, Mr. Shapiro went back to Texas for a week to attend his stepdaughter’s wedding. After he returned, he stopped dating the girls altogether. Perhaps he was scared. He was wise to stop, because he couldn’t possibly contain himself all the time. If he did something indecent to one of the girls again and she reported him to the authorities, he would find himself in trouble, at least be fined. Another reason for the change might be that by now he had befriended an American woman named Susanna, from Raleigh, North Carolina, who was teaching English at Muji Teachers College. This black woman was truly amazing, in her early thirties, five foot ten, with long muscular limbs, and a behind like a small cauldron. She had bobbed hair, and most of the time wore jeans and earrings the size of bracelets. We often speculated about those gorgeous hoop earrings. Were they made of fourteen-karat gold? Or eighteen-karat? Or twenty-karat? At any rate, they must have been worth a fortune. Later, in the summer, she took part in our city’s marathon and almost beat the professional runners. She did, however, win the Friendship Cup, which resembled a small brass bucket. She was also a wonderful singer, with a manly voice. Every week she brought four or five students over to teach them how to eat American food with forks and knives. When they were here, they often sang American songs she had taught them, such as “Pretty Paper,” “Winter Wonderland,” and “Silent Night, Holy Night.” Their singing would attract some pedestrians, which was good for business, so we were pleased to have her here. Mr. Shapiro gave them a twenty-percent discount, which outraged us. We wondered why he kept a double standard. We had a company policy against discounts, but it must apply only to Chinese employees. Still, we all agreed Susanna was a good woman. Unlike other customers, she gave us tips; also, she paid for her students’ meals.

One afternoon in late May, Susanna and four students were eating here. In came a monkey-like man, who had half-gray hair and flat cheeks. With a twitching face he went up to Peter, his fist clutching a ball of paper. He announced in a squeaky voice, “I’m going to sue your company for ten thousand yuan.”

This was the first time I ever had heard a Chinese say he would sue somebody for money. We gathered around him as he unfolded the paper ball to display a fat greenhead. “I found this fly in the chicken I bought here,” he said firmly, his right hand massaging his side.

“When did you buy the chicken?” Peter asked.

“Last week.”

“Show me the receipt.”

The man took a slip of paper out of his trouser pocket and handed it to Peter.

About twenty people formed a half-circle to watch. As the man and Peter were arguing, Mr. Shapiro and Susanna stepped out of his office. Seeing the two Americans, the man wailed at Peter, “Don’t dodge your responsibility. I’ve hated flies all my life. At the sight of this one I puked, then dropped to the floor and fainted. I thought I’d recover soon. No, the next evening I threw up again and again. That gave me a head-splitting migraine and a stomach disorder. My ears are still ringing inside, and I’ve lost my appetite completely. Since last Wednesday I haven’t gone to work and have suffered from insomnia every night.” He turned to the spectators. “Comrades, I’m a true victim of this capitalist Cowboy Chicken. See how skinny I am.”

“Like a starved cock,” I said. People laughed.

“Stop blustering,” Peter said to him. “Show us your medical records.”

“I have them in the hospital. If you don’t pay me the damages I’ll come again and again and again until I’m fully compensated.”

We were all angry. Feilan pointed at the man’s sunken mouth and said, “Shameless! You’re not Chinese.”

Baisha said, “Ten thousand yuan for a fly? How could you dream of that? Even your life isn’t worth that much.”

When a student had interpreted the man’s accusation to Mr. Shapiro and Susanna, our boss turned pale. He moved closer and managed a smile, saying, “Sir, if you have concrete evidence, we’ll be willing to consider your demand.”

The student interpreted those words to the man, on whose face a vile smile appeared. We were angry at Mr. Shapiro, who again was acting like a number-one Buddha. If you run into an evil man, you have to adopt uncivil measures. Our boss’s hypocrisy would only indulge this crook.

“Excuse me,” Manyou cried and arrived with a bowl of warm water. He put it on the counter and said to the man, “I’m going give your fly a hot bath, to see if it’s from our place.” He picked up the insect with a pair of chopsticks and dropped it into the bowl. We were all puzzled.

A few seconds later, Manyou announced, “This fly is not from Cowboy Chicken because, see, there isn’t any oil on the water. You all know we only sell fried chicken.”

Some spectators booed the man, but he wouldn’t give way. He fished out the fly with his hand and wrapped it up, saying, “I’m going take you to court no matter what. If you don’t offer a settlement, there’ll be no end of this.”

With a false smile Jinglin said to him, “Uncle, we’re one family and shouldn’t be so mean to each other. Let’s find a quiet place to talk this out, all right? We can’t negotiate in front of such a crowd.”

The man looked puzzled, flapping his round eyes. Jinglin hooked his heavy arm around the man’s neck while his eyes signaled at me. Reluctantly the crook moved away with him.

I followed them out the front door. It was slightly chilly outside, and the street was noisy with bicycle bells, vendors’ cries, and automobile horns. A few neon lights flickered in the north. After about fifty paces, we turned in to a small alley and then stopped. Jinglin smiled again, revealing his rotten teeth, and he took out a small pocketknife and a ten-yuan note. He opened the knife and said to the man, “I can pay you the damages now. You have a choice between these two.”

“Don’t make fun of me! I asked for ten thousand yuan.”

“Then I’ll let you taste this knife.”

The man wasn’t frightened by the two-inch blade. He grinned and asked, “Brothers, why help the foreign devils?”

“Because Cowboy Chicken is our company, and our livelihood depends on it,” I answered.

Jinglin said to him, “You’re the scum of the Chinese! Come on, choose one.”

The man didn’t lift his hand. Jinglin said again, “I know what you’re thinking. I can’t stab you with such a small thing, eh? Tell you what — I know your grandson who goes to the Second Elementary School, and I can catch him and cut off his little pecker with this knife. Then your family line will be gone. I mean it. Now, pick one.”

The crook was flabbergasted, looking at me and then at Jinglin, whose fat face became as hard as though made of copper sheet. With a trembling hand he took the money and mumbled, “Foreign dogs.” He turned and hurried away. In no time he disappeared in a swarm of pedestrians.

We both laughed and walked back to the restaurant. Across the street, three disheveled Russian beggars were playing the violin and the bandora. Unlike most Chinese beggars, who would cry woefully and accost people, those foreign musicians were reserved, with just a porkpie hat on the ground to collect money, as though they didn’t care whether you gave or not.

We didn’t tell our boss what we had done; we just said the man was satisfied with a ten-yuan note and wouldn’t come again. Susanna and her students applauded when they heard the news. Peter reimbursed Jinglin the money on the spot. Still, Mr. Shapiro looked suspicious and was afraid the man would return.

“He won’t trouble us anymore,” Peter said, smiling.

“Why are you so sure?” asked our boss.

“I have this.” With two fingers Peter pulled the crook’s receipt out of his breast pocket.

We all laughed. Actually, even with the receipt in hand, that old bastard wouldn’t have dared come again. He wasn’t afraid of Jinglin exactly but feared his four brothers, who were all stevedores on the riverbank, good at fighting and never hesitant to use a club or a dagger or a crowbar. That was why Jinglin, unlike the rest of us, could get rid of him without fear of retaliation.

Later we revealed to Peter what we had done in the alley. He smiled and promised he would not breathe a word to Mr. Shapiro.

As our business became stable, Peter grew into a local power of sorts. For months he had been building a house in the countryside. We wondered why he wanted his home to be four miles away from town. It would be costly to ride a motorcycle back and forth every day. One Sunday morning, Baisha, Feilan, Manyou, Jinglin, and I set out to see Peter’s new home. We pedaled abreast on the wide embankment along the Songhua River, humming movie songs and cracking jokes. Birds were crying furiously in the willow copses below the embankment, while on a distant jetty a team of men sang a work song as they unloaded timber from a barge. Their voices were faltering but explosive. It hadn’t rained for weeks, so the river was rather narrow, displaying a broad whitish beach. A few boys fishing there lay on their backs; around them stood some short bamboo poles planted deep into the sand. When a fish bit, a brass bell on one of the poles would jingle. On the other shore, toward the horizon, four or five windmills were turning, full like sails; above them the gray clouds floated lazily by, like a school of turtles.

We knew Peter had a few American dollars in the bank, but we were unsure how rich he really was. His house, though unfinished, staggered us. It was a three-story building with a garage in its back; it sat in the middle of two acres of sloping land, facing a gentle bend in the river and commanding a panorama that included two islands and the vast landscape on the other shore.

Peter wasn’t around. Six or seven workers were busy, rhythmically hammering something inside the house. We asked an older man, who looked like a supervisor, how much the house would cost.

“At least a quarter of a million yuan,” he said.

“So expensive?” Manyou gasped, his large lashless eyes blazing.

“You know what? It could be even more than that. We’ve never seen a home like this before.”

“What kind of house is this?” asked Feilan.

“It’s called Victorian. Mr. and Mrs. Jiao designed it themselves. It has two marble fireplaces, both imported from Hong Kong.”

“Damn! Where did he get so much money?” Baisha said and kicked a beer bottle with her white leather sandal.

We were all pondering the same question, and it weighed down our hearts like a millstone. But we didn’t stay long, fearing Peter might turn up. On the way back we spoke little to one another, unable to take our minds off Peter’s house. Obviously he made much more than we did, or he wouldn’t have had the money for such a mansion, which was larger even than the mayor’s. Before setting out, we had planned to have brunch together at a beer house, but now none of us had an appetite anymore. We parted company the moment we turned away from the quay.

After that trip, I noticed that my fellow workers often looked suspiciously at Peter, as though he were a hybrid creature. Their eyes showed envy and anger. They began learning English more diligently. Manyou attended the night college, working with a textbook called English for Today, while Baisha and Feilan got up early in the morning to listen to the study program on the radio and memorize English words and expressions. Jinglin wanted to learn genuine American English, which he said was more natural, so he was studying English 900. I was also learning English, but I was older than the others and didn’t have a strong memory, so I made little progress.

At work, they appeared friendlier to Mr. Shapiro and often poured coffee for him. Once Baisha even let him try some scallion pancake from her own lunch.

One morning, when we were not busy, I overheard Baisha talking with Mr. Shapiro in English. “Have you a house in U.S.A.?” she asked.

“Yes, I have a brick ranch, not very big.” He had a cold, his voice was nasal and thick.

“How many childs in house?”

“You mean children?”

“Yes.”

“I have two, and my wife has three.”

“Ah, you have five jildren?”

“You can say that.”

Mr. Shapiro turned away to fill out a form with a ballpoint pen, while Baisha’s narrow eyes squinted at his heavy cheek and then at the black hair on his wrist. She was such a flirt, but I was impressed. She was brave enough to converse with our boss in English! — whereas I could never open my mouth in front of him.

Because we had seen Peter’s mansion, our eyes were all focused on him. We were eager to find fault with him and ready to start a quarrel. But he was a careful man, knowing how to cope with us and how to maintain our boss’s trust. He avoided arguing with us. If we didn’t listen to him, he’d go into Mr. Shapiro’s office and stay in there for a good while. That unnerved us, because we couldn’t tell if he was reporting us to the boss. So we dared not be too disobedient. Every night Peter was the last to leave. He’d close the shutters, lock the cash register, wrap up the unsold chicken, tie the package to the back of his Honda motorcycle, and ride away.

Ever since the beginning, the daily leftovers had been a bone of contention between Mr. Shapiro and us. We had asked him many times to let us have the unsold chicken at the end of the day, but he refused, saying the company’s policy forbade its employees to have leftovers. We even offered to buy them at half price, but he still wouldn’t let us. He assigned Peter alone to take care of the leftovers.

It occurred to us that Peter must have been taking the leftovers home for the construction workers. He had to feed them well, or else they might jerry-build his mansion. Damn him, he not only earned more but also got all the perks. The more we thought about this, the more resentful we became. So one night, after he closed up the place and rode away, we came out of the nearby alley and pedaled behind him. Manyou was at the night college, and Jinglin had to look after his younger brother in the hospital who had just been operated on for a hernia, so they couldn’t join us. Only Feilan, Baisha, and I followed Peter. He was going much faster than we were, but we knew where he was headed, so we bicycled without hurry, chatting and laughing now and then.

In the distance Peter’s motorcycle was flitting along the embankment like a will-o’-the-wisp. The night was cool, and a few men were chanting folk songs from their boat anchored in the river. We were eager to prove Peter had shipped the leftovers home, so that we could report him to Mr. Shapiro the next morning.

For a long while the light of Peter’s motorcycle disappeared. We stopped, at a loss. Apparently he had turned off the embankment, but where had he gone? Should we continue to ride toward his home, or should we mark time?

As we were discussing what to do, a burst of flames emerged in the north, about two hundred yards away, at the waterside. We went down the embankment, locked our bicycles in a willow copse, and walked stealthily toward the fire.

When we approached it, we saw Peter stirring something in the fire with a trimmed branch. It was a pile of chicken, about twenty pieces. The air smelled of gasoline and burned meat. Beyond him, the waves were lapping the sand softly. The water was sprinkled with stars, rippling with the fishy breeze. On the other shore everything was buried in darkness except for three or four clusters of lights, almost indistinguishable from the stars in the cloudless sky. Speechlessly we watched. If there had been another man with us, we might have sprung out and beaten Peter up. But I was no fighter, so we couldn’t do anything, merely crouch in the tall grass and curse him under our breath.

“If only we had a gun!” Baisha whispered through her teeth.

Peter was in a happy mood. With a ruddy face he began singing a song, which must have been made up by some overseas Chinese:

I’m not so carefree as you think,

My feelings never unclear.

If you can’t see through me,

That’s because again you waste

Your love on a worthless man.

Oh my heart won’t wander alone.

Let me take you along.

Together we’ll reach a quiet place

Where you can realize

Your sweetest dream. .

For some reason I was touched by the song. Never had I known he had such a gorgeous baritone voice, which seemed to come a long way from the other shore. A flock of ducks quacked in the darkness, their wings splashing the water lustily. A loon let out a cry like a wild laugh. Then all the waterfowl turned quiet, and Peter’s voice alone was vibrating the tangy air chilled by the night.

Feilan whispered, “What a good time he’s having here, that asshole.”

“He must miss his American sweetheart,” Baisha said.

Feilan shook her chin. “Makes no sense. He’s not the romantic type.”

“Doesn’t he often say American girls are better than Chinese girls?”

“Shh—” I stopped them.

When the fire almost went out, Peter unzipped his fly, pulled out his dick, and peed on the embers, which hissed and sent up a puff of steam. The arc of his urine gleamed for a few seconds, then disappeared. He yawned, and with his feet pushed some sand over the ashes.

“Gross!” said Feilan.

Peter leaped on his motorcycle and dashed away, the exhaust pipe hiccuping explosively. I realized he didn’t mind riding four miles to work because he could use some of the gasoline provided by our boss for burning the leftovers with.

“If only I could scratch and bite that bastard!” Feilan said breathlessly.

“Depends on what part of him,” I said.

Baisha laughed. Feilan scowled at me, saying, “You have a dirty mind.”

The next day we told all the other workers about our discovery. Everyone was infuriated, and even the two part-timers couldn’t stop cursing capitalism. There were children begging on the streets, there were homeless people at the train station and the ferry house, there were hungry cats and dogs everywhere, why did Mr. Shapiro want Peter to burn good meat like garbage? Manyou said he had read in a restricted journal several years ago that some American capitalists would dump milk into a river instead of giving it to the poor. But that was in the U.S.; here in China, this kind of wasteful practice had to be condemned. I told my fellow workers that I was going to write an article to expose Ken Shapiro and Peter Jiao.

In the afternoon we confronted Peter. “Why do you burn the leftovers every night?” Manyou asked, looking him right in the eye.

Peter was taken aback, then replied, “It’s my job.”

“That’s despicable,” I snapped. “You not only burned them but also peed on them.” My stomach suddenly rumbled.

Feilan giggled. Baisha pointed at Peter’s nose and said sharply, “Peter Jiao, remember you’re a Chinese. There are people here who don’t have enough corn flour to eat while you burn chicken every night. You’ve forgotten your ancestors and who you are.”

Peter looked rattled, protesting, “I don’t feel comfortable about it either. But somebody has to do it. I’m paid to burn them, just like you’re paid to fry them.”

“Don’t give me that crap!” Jinglin cut in. “You’re a capitalist’s henchman.”

Peter retorted, “So are you. You work for this capitalist company too.”

“Hold on,” Manyou said. “We just want to reason you out of this shameful thing. Why do you waste chicken that way? Why not give the leftovers to the poor?”

“You think I enjoy burning them? If I gave them away, I’d be fired. This is the American way of doing business.”

“But you’re a Chinese running a restaurant in a socialist country,” said Jinglin.

As we were wrangling, Mr. Shapiro came out of his office with coffee stains around his lips. Peter explained to him what we quarreled about. Our boss waved his hand to dismiss us, as though this were such a trifle that it didn’t deserve his attention. He just said, “It’s company’s policy, we can’t do anything about it. If you’re really concerned about the waste, don’t fry too many pieces, and sell everything you’ve fried.” He walked to the front door to have a smoke outside.

Peter said, “That’s true. He can’t change a thing. From now on we’d better not fry more than we can sell.”

I was still angry and said, “I’m going to write to the Herald to expose this policy.”

“There’s no need to be so emotional, Hongwen,” Peter said with a complacent smile, raising his squarish chin a little. “There have been several articles on this subject. For example, the Beijing Evening News carried a long piece last week about our company. The author praised our policy on leftovers and believed it would reduce waste eventually. He said we Chinese should adopt the American way of running business. In any case, this policy cannot be exposed anymore. People already know about it.”

That silenced us all. Originally we had planned that if Mr. Shapiro continued to have the leftovers burned, we’d go on strike for a few days. Peter’s words deflated us all at once.

Still, Jinglin wouldn’t let Peter off so easily. When it turned dark, he pressed a thumbtack into the rear tire of the Honda motorcycle parked in the backyard. Peter called home, and his wife came driving a white Toyota truck to carry back the motorcycle and him. This dealt us another blow, because we hadn’t expected he owned a brand-new pickup as well. No one else in our city could afford such a vehicle. We asked ourselves, “Heavens, how much money does Peter actually have?”

We were all anxious to find that out. On payday, somehow Mr. Shapiro mixed Peter’s wages in with ours. We each received an envelope stuffed with a bundle of cash, but Peter’s was always empty. Juju said Peter got only a slip of paper in his envelope, which was called a check. He could exchange that thing for money at the bank, where he had an account as if he were a company himself. In Juju’s words, “Every month our boss just writes Peter lots of money.” That fascinated us. How much did he get from Mr. Shapiro? This question had remained an enigma ever since we worked here. Now his pay was in our hands, and at last we could find it out.

Manyou steamed the envelope over a cup of hot tea and opened it without difficulty. The figure on the check astounded us: $1,683.75. For a good moment nobody said a word, never having imagined that Peter received an American salary, being paid dollars instead of yuan. That’s to say, he made twenty times more than each of us! No wonder he worked so hard, taking care of Cowboy Chicken as if it were his home, and tried every trick to please Mr. Shapiro.

That night after work, we gathered at Baisha’s home for an emergency meeting. Her mother was a doctor, so their apartment was spacious and Baisha had her own room. She took out a packet of spiced pumpkin seeds, and we began chatting while drinking tea.

“God, just think of the money Peter’s raking in,” Jinglin said, and pulled his brushy hair, sighing continually. He looked wretched, as if ten years older than the day before. His chubby face had lost its luster.

I said, “Peter can afford to eat at the best restaurants every day. There’s no way he can spend that amount of money.”

Feilan spat the shells of a pumpkin seed into her fist, her eyes turning triangular. She said, “We must protest. This isn’t fair.”

Baisha agreed with a sigh, “Now I know what exploitation feels like.”

“Peter has done a lot for Cowboy Chicken,” Manyou said, “but there’s no justification for him to make that much.” He seemed still in a daze and kept stroking his receding chin.

“We must figure out a countermeasure,” said Jinglin.

I suggested, “Perhaps we should talk with our boss.”

“You think he’ll pay each of us a thousand dollars?” Baisha asked scornfully.

“Of course not,” I said.

“Then what’s the point of talking with him?”

Manyou put in, “I don’t know. What do you think we should do, Baisha?”

I was surprised that he should be at a loss too, because he was known as a man of strategies. Baisha answered, “I think we must unite as one and demand our boss fire Peter.”

Silence fell in the room, in which stood a double bed covered with a pink sheet. A folded floral blanket sat atop a pair of eiderdown pillows stacked together. I wondered why Baisha needed such a large bed for herself. She must have slept with her boyfriends on it quite often. She was such a slut.

“That’s a good idea. I say let’s get rid of Peter,” Manyou said, nodding at her admiringly.

Still perplexed, I asked, “Suppose Mr. Shapiro does fire him, then what?”

“One of us may take Peter’s job,” said Manyou.

Feilan picked up, “Are you sure he’ll fire Peter?”

To our surprise, Baisha said, “Of course he will. It’ll save him fifteen hundred dollars a month.”

“I don’t get it,” said Jinglin. “What’s the purpose of doing this? Even if he fires Peter, he won’t pay us more, will he?”

“Then he’ll have to depend on us and may give us each a raise,” answered Baisha.

Unconvinced, I said, “What if the new manager gets paid more and just ignores the rest of us?”

Manyou frowned, because he knew that only Baisha and he could be candidates for that position, which required the ability to use English. Feilan, Jinglin, and I couldn’t speak a complete sentence yet.

“Let’s draw up a contract,” Feilan said. “Whoever becomes the new manager must share his wages with the rest of us.”

We all supported the idea and signed a brief statement which said that if the new manager didn’t share his earnings with the rest of us, he’d be childless and we could get our revenge in any way we chose. After that, Baisha went about composing a letter addressed to Mr. Shapiro. She didn’t know enough English words for the letter, so she fetched a bulky dictionary from her parents’ study. She began to write with a felt-tip pen, now and again consulting the dictionary. She was sleepy and yawned incessantly, covering her mouth with her left palm and disclosing her hairy armpit. Meanwhile, we cracked pumpkin seeds and chatted away.

The letter was short, but it seemed to the point. Even Manyou said it was good after he looked it over. It stated:

Our Respected Mr. Kenneth Shapiro:

We are writing to demand you to fire Peter Jiao immediately. This is our united will. You must respect our will. We do not want a leader like him. That is all.

Sincerely,

Your Employees

We all signed our names and felt that at last we had stood up to that capitalist. Since I’d pass our restaurant on my way home, I took charge of delivering the letter. Before we left, Baisha brought out a bottle of apricot wine, and together we drank to our solidarity.

I dropped the letter into the slot on the front door of Cowboy Chicken. After I got home, for a while I was light-headed and kept imagining the shock on Mr. Shapiro’s pudgy face. I also thought of Peter, who, without his current job, might never be able to complete his outrageous mansion. But soon I began to worry, fearing Baisha might become the new manager. Compared with Peter, she had a volatile temper and was more selfish. Besides, she couldn’t possibly maintain the connections and clientele Peter had carefully built up, not to mention develop the business. Manyou wasn’t as capable as Peter either. Sometimes he could be very clever about trivial matters, but he had no depth. He didn’t look steady and couldn’t inspire trust in customers. To be fair, Peter seemed indispensable to Cowboy Chicken. I wouldn’t have minded if Mr. Shapiro had paid him five times more than me.

We all showed up at work at eight-thirty the next morning. To our surprise, neither Mr. Shapiro nor Peter betrayed any anxiety. They acted as if nothing had happened, and treated us the same as the day before. We were baffled, wondering what they had planned for us. Peter seemed to avoid us, but he was polite and quiet. Apparently he had read the letter.

We expected that our boss would talk with us one by one. Even if he wouldn’t fire Peter, he might make some concessions. But for a whole morning he stayed in his office as if he had forgotten us altogether. He was reading a book about the Jews who had lived in China hundreds of years ago. His calm appearance agitated us. If only we could have had an inkling of what he had up his sleeve.

When the day was at last over, we met briefly at a street corner. We were confused, but all agreed to wait and see. Feilan sighed and said, “I feel like we’re in a tug-of-war.”

“Yes, we’re in a mental war, so we must be tough-minded and patient,” Manyou told us.

I went home with a stomachache. Again my father was drunk that night, singing revolutionary songs and saying I was lucky to have my fill of American chicken every day. I couldn’t get to sleep until the wee hours.

The next day turned out the same. Peter assigned each of us some work, and Mr. Shapiro still wouldn’t say an unnecessary word to us. I couldn’t help picturing his office as a giant snail shell into which he had shut himself. What should we do? They must have devised a trap or something for us. What was it? We had to do something, not just wait like this, or they would undo us one by one.

That night we gathered at Baisha’s home again. After a lengthy discussion, we agreed to go on strike. Baisha wrote a note, which read:

Mr. Shapiro:

Because you do not consider our demand, we decide to

strike at Cowboy Chicken. Begin tomorrow.

We didn’t sign our names this time, since he knew who we were and what we were referring to. I was unsure of the phrase “strike at Cowboy Chicken,” but I didn’t say anything, guessing that probably she just meant we’d leave the place unmanned. Again I delivered the letter. None of us went to work the next morning. We wanted the restaurant to lose some business and our boss to worry a little so that he’d be willing to cooperate with his workers. But we had agreed to meet at one o’clock in front of Everyday Hardware, near Cowboy Chicken; then together we’d go to our workplace and start to negotiate with Mr. Shapiro. In other words, we planned to strike only for half a day.

After lunch we all arrived at the hardware store. To our astonishment, a squad of police was standing in front of Cowboy Chicken as if a fire or a riot had broken out. They wouldn’t allow people to enter the restaurant unless they searched them. What was going on? Why had Mr. Shapiro called in the police? We were puzzled. Together we walked over as if we had just returned from a lunch break. The front of the restaurant was cordoned off, and three police were stationed at the door. A tall policeman stretched out his arm to stop us. Baisha asked loudly, “Hey, Big Wan, you don’t remember me?” She was all smiles.

“Yes, I saw you,” Wan said with a grin.

“We all work here. Let us go in, all right? We have tons of work to do.”

“We have to search you before letting you in.”

“I’ve nothing on me. How do you search?” She spread her arms, then lifted her long skirt a little with one hand, to show she didn’t even have a pocket.

“Stand still, all of you,” said Wan. A policewoman waved a black wand over Baisha, a gadget like a miniature badminton racket without strings.

“Is this a mine detector or something?” Jinglin asked the policewoman.

“A metal detector,” she said.

“What’s going on here?” Baisha asked Wan.

“Someone threatened to blow this place up.”

We were all horrified by that, hoping it had nothing to do with us.

The police let us in. The moment we entered we saw an old couple standing behind the counter taking care of orders. Damn it, Peter had brought his parents in to work! How come he wasn’t afraid a bomb might blow them to pieces? In a corner, Susanna and two student-looking girls were wiping tables and placing silver. They were humming “We Shall Overcome,” but stopped at the sight of us. In the kitchen the two part-timers were frying chicken. Dumbfounded, we didn’t know how to respond to this scene.

Mr. Shapiro came over. He looked furious, his face almost purple. He said to us, his spit flying about, “You think you can frighten me into obeying you? Let me tell you, you are all terminated!”

I didn’t know what his last word meant, though I was sure it had a negative meaning. Manyou seemed to understand, his lips twitching as if he were about to cry. He gulped and couldn’t say a word.

Peter said to us, “We can’t use you anymore. You’re fired.”

“You can’t do this to us,” Baisha said to Mr. Shapiro and stepped forward. “We are founders of this place.”

Mr. Shapiro laughed. “What are you talking about? How much stock do you have in this company?”

What did he mean? We looked at one another, unable to fathom his meaning. He said, “Go home, don’t come anymore. You’ll receive this month’s pay by the mail.” He turned and walked off to the men’s room, shaking his head and muttering, “I don’t want any terrorists here.”

Peter smiled at us with contempt. “Well, the earth won’t stop spinning without the five of you.”

I felt the room swaying like a lumbering bus. I never thought I could be fired so easily: Mr. Shapiro just said a word and my job was no more. The previous fall I had quit my position in a coal yard in order to work here. Now I was a total loser, and people would laugh at me.

The five of us were terribly distressed. Before we parted company on the street, I asked Manyou to spell for me the word Mr. Shapiro had used. With his fountain pen he wrote on my forearm, “Terminated!” There was no need for an exclamation mark.

At home I looked up the word in my pocket dictionary; it says “finished.” My anger flamed up. That damned capitalist believed he was finished with us, but he was mistaken. We were far from terminated — the struggle was still going on. I would ask my elder brother to cut the restaurant’s electricity first thing the next morning. Baisha said she’d have one of her boyfriends create some problems in Cowboy Chicken’s mail delivery. Manyou would visit his friends at the garbage center and ask them not to pick up trash at the restaurant. Jinglin declared, “I’ll blow up Peter’s Victorian!” Feilan hadn’t decided what to do yet.

This was just the beginning.