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.