After Cowboy Chicken Came To Town
After reading the title of this story, I was expecting some really strange fictional story. I envisioned a fully functioning chicken coup out west, complete with problems with gangs and crime. Until one day a mysterious stranger, cowboy chicken, arrived to clean up the coup. Silly and corny, I know. But instead I got an entertaining story that turned into a brutal lessen about capitalist America for a few Chinese workers.
The story follows the narrator, Hongwen, along his path of enlightenment within a brand new fast food restaurant called Cowboy Chicken in a Chinese city. The story describes the grand opening of the fast food restaurant and the hustlings and bustlings of a booming business until it all starts to go sour for the employees. They tried an al was, considering that around here most of the restaurants es there. Pretty soon, wedding parties are organized within Cowboy Chicken because of it's "exotic" food. I laughed at the thought of someone wanting their wedding party to be catered by a fast food restaurant. Anyway, some guy shows up talking about how he is going to sue the company because he found a fly in his food. He is sent away, and then Hongwen and Jinglin made sure he wouldn't come back by taking him down an alley and threatening him with a pocketknife. Everything is going fine until the full-time employees decide to pay their manager, Peter, a visit at his new home that is still being built off in the surrounding countryside. They are astounded and disheartened by the amount of money that he makes. Of course, this makes them suspicious of him and so they start to follow his every move to see what other perks his job gets him. They follow him one night after work to see what he does with all the food that he takes home and discover that he burns it (and pees on it apparently). Of course they are furious because they live in socialist China and many people they know are starving, and here is Peter wasting all this meat. After threatening to go public with the information leads them nowhere, the workers decide to try to get Peter fired by the owner Mr. Shapiro. That does not work, so they inform their boss that they are going on strike from the restaurant. Due to some incorrect wording because none of them speak good English, they end up threatening to strike at Cowboy Chicken rather than go on strike. So Mr. Shapiro calls in the cops for security. When the workers return from their half a day strike, they are promptly told that they are completely replaceable and "Terminated!" all at the same time. Hence the brutal lesson on capitalist America.