August 3rd, 2000, Kentucky Fried Chicken opened up its first restaurant in Jiangnan.
“Sorry, we’re late!” Eight white characters on the enormous red slogan could hardly be missed as soon as one entered the plaza.
A new global sales record was set — the line of eager parents and kids extended well beyond the restaurant door. My wife and son ended up spending more than one hour in the line. But according to the child, the wait was well worth it.
“It was the best thing I ever had!” observed him.
KFC was the first fast-food chain that began to operate in China after Deng Xiaoping’s “reform and opening-up.” Mr. Dadong Wang, an American Chinese, once served as a KFC regional manager in charge of Southern California. When he visited his hometown Tianjin in 1982, he was invited by the major to launch a burger joint with a local state-owned enterprise. Having secured more investment from oversea Chinese in Singapore, he named the $300,000 restaurant “Orchid.”
The success of Orchid caught the attention of Mr. Wang’s old employer. In 1986, Mr. Wang was appointed as the general manager of KFC Far East. His first order was to move the regional headquarter from Hong Kong to Singapore, seeking Mandarin-speaking talent.
Mr. Wang told representatives of Chinese government, “Foreign investors must have a decent place to dine.” After searching for months, he secured a neat spot on Qianmen Avenue, the pre-eminent pedestrian street for shopping and sightseeing, located right on the central axis of the ancient capital. He also managed to convince the city husbandry and tourism bureaus to be partners, which was probably the only way for the business to get started in the “socialist market economy” of 1987.
KFC, and later McDonald’s, has hence played pivotal roles in the life of average Chinese. Majors and ambassadors personally visited, businessmen conducted negotiations and signed contracts, and couples hosted their wedding feasts. However, eventually the GDP of the country outgrew the price tag of these fast-food joints and the fad died. These were still popular locations, sure, but even kids no longer wish to throw their birthday parties lest they lose face before young friends. To make a last stand in the face of the inevitable, KFC began to sell chicken sandwiches and Peking chicken wraps (whatever that may be), and McDonald’s started to sell fried chicken. Doesn’t hurt to make a few extra bucks in a tough market, eh?
Initially, KFC had to import many ingredients. For one, the salt consumed by Chinese folks at the time was too grainy to season the French fries, not to mention the local potatoes that were too small to be any good. Despite all that, it did rely on suburb farmers to supply chicken in the first few years. But as the consumption of local consumers multiplied, this became commercially infeasible. Chicken breeds native to China usually took one year to grow and mature. Thus, Western broiler-fryers were introduced to China. Eventually, they were massively bred, fed, and culled by a chicken farm in Fujian, which has now turned into a billion-dollar conglomerate.
In the early 2000s, there was a widespread online rumor that KFC harvested mutated chicken with eight wings and six legs, completed with a grotesque GIF image. The restaurant chain responded by launching a disinformation campaign with tray liners. The broiler-fryers, fancily named bai’yu or “white feather” by seasoned marketers, takes only 42 days to grow to a kitchen-ready weight of 5.5lbs, while only consuming 8lbs of feed in the duration. It boasts a proud lineage tracing back all the way to Plymouth and Cornwall, wherever on the earth they might be. The liners didn’t bother to mention that 5 billion birds were brought into this world and eviscerated annually for a 150-billion-yuan business. In 2021, the Chinese had finally bred our own broiler-fryers, breaking a foreign monopoly that lasted near 40 years.
When Marco Polo reached the grand city of Cambaluc or Khanbaliq, City of the Khan, he did not quite expect that a mere century later the founder of the Ming Dynasty would overthrow the yoke of the Mongolians. The fourth son of Hongwu Emperor and third Emperor of Ming, Yongle “perpetual happiness,” founded an effective yet cruel state security agency entirely run by eunuchs. He also made the seat of his fief, now Sinicized to Shuntian (following God’s way), the de-facto capital of the Empire (Beijing, the Northern Capital). The old capital Yingtian (called upon by God) still retained certain functions and a skeleton staff, and was hence called Nanjing, the Southern Capital.
Beijing winters were known to be snowy and chilly. Sitting in his newly built palace, the Emperor missed the cozy and carefree days of his childhood, when all members of the Zhu House happily gathered and feasted. Relishing the memory of his father personally serving roasted duck, a Yingtian specialty, to the children, he ordered ducks to be brought to Beijing.
After several centuries, Peking Duck, both the dish and the animal, has turned quite differently from its ancestor. Used to freely consume spilled grain from barges on the Grand Canal, the ducks don a pristine white plumage and cruise with a grandiose grace. Yet to reduce them into the famous delicacy, workers would confine them in tiny boxes where they could not move at all, and force feed four times a day.
After a business trip to Beijing, I brought my son a Peking Duck in plastic film package. As we did not possess any type of oven at our flat, I had to reheat it with microwave. My son concluded that it was absolutely awful. Admittedly it is a bad idea, reheating Peking Duck. You have to enjoy it in a proper restaurant in Beijing, roasted in a proper oven burning the branches of fruit trees and served heat by a proper chef who knows his way with the knife. The most precious part of Peking Duck would be the breast skin cut into slices. Carefully coat one with sugar using chopsticks, it would melt in mouth within seconds, but the explosion of the sublime flavors on taste buds would linger much, much longer. Then, a connoisseur would wrap duck along with sweet bean sauce, shredded cucumber, and sliced haw roll in steaming thin spring pancakes for the layered creamy miracle between teeth and tongue. Gobbling down a bowl of refreshing duck soap after that, and you could hardly ask for a more gratifying meal anywhere in the world. After all, millions of ducks were fattened for this sole purpose.
Not ordering fried chicken or Peking Duck would be somewhat hypocritical and impractical, but at least we could dedicate these passages to these innocent birds and commemorate the entanglement of their transient lives and ours.
In the heat of summer at 4pm, I walked along with grandma towards the rice paddy field miles away from our shack. Carrying buckets, dustpan, and a few homemade tools not unlike lacrosse sticks, we all thought about the four lively, gluttonous Peking ducklings. Having undergone molting by the end of the last winter, they were proudly showcasing snow white feathers and continued following people around, eagerly waiting for the small fry and crayfish brought home by us. Grandma patiently waited on the one side of the long water channel by the side of the paddy with dustpan in hands. I then ran barefoot towards her, driving all aquatic creatures into the trap. We also collected waterweed and sometimes dug earthworms with a shovel.
We arrived at the home with filled containers and bags, basked in the sunset rays. Ducklings welcomed us with heart-warming quacking. In the alley-courtyard in front of our shack, I had already constructed a semi-permanent den for them, even a square pool for them to swim. When I heard about the new bridge on Yangtze in the north of Nanjing, I managed to build a bridge over the pool, too.
(You had already learnt about the fate of the ducklings in Chapter II.)
My life changed forever when I was gifted with a kitten by a kind neighbor of the Hood. A-Ming was a most handsome creature with a pair of glittering eyes and a shining black coat. It did not take long for him to bond with me: When I was working on homework in the afternoon, he watched silently by my side as if he knew all the answers and wished to check my performance. When he returned from his night stroll, he would knock on the door of my attic with paws so that I could let him in and allow him to sleep on my desk. Once, I heard someone snoring by my ear as I was about to fall asleep, which scared hell out of me — A-Ming was yawning as I turned on the light, as a way of protesting that I did not willingly share my pillow with him. An intelligent pet like A-Ming could still make mistakes, though. One day, I was out for a shopping trip and a cousin dropped by. As he was about my age and wearing an outfit that looked more or less like mine, A-Ming jumped right at him but instantly leapt away, realizing that the smell was different.
When A-Ming reached adulthood, it was only natural for him to court a she-cat in the neighborhood like the “gentlecat” he was. When grandma was not at home, he and his female companion would dine at our kitchen, enjoying the fish feast left by her. Unfortunately, A-Ming’s girlfriend turned out to be a shy one, who would not hesitate to rush out of our flat at the first sign of any human being. A-Ming usually saw her out, like any gentleman would do under the circumstance.
A-Ming failed to appear after another stroll. “He must have been cooked by that cat-eating Cantonese guy,” observed grandma. One year later, a stray sneaked into our flat on the fifth floor. Taking a closer look, I found it to be none other than my endearing friend A-Ming. While on his own, A-Ming suffered a great deal — smelly, disheveled fur barely covered his skinny body, not to mention a coin-sized, infected wound on his rear. Grandma immediately brought him some fish which he swallowed like a devil. In the meantime, I prepared a basin of warm water and mixed some washing powder in. When A-Ming finally finished his first decent meal in a long while, I beckoned him to take a bath. As soon as he stepped into the basin like the good old days, a layer of sesame-like flea corpse spread on the surface of the water. After I dried him off with a towel, I went on to dress the pus-secreting wound with gentian violet, like what grandma would do for my younger self.
Eventually, A-Ming found his lifelong partner, who produced a black kitten with four white paws. Cub naturally became an indispensable member of the family, before the freedom-loving couple elected to search for their destiny over the rainbow and never to be seen again. Unlike his father, Cub was much disciplined: He only rested and played by an empty yard right next to our new flat. When mom went to the balcony in the morning and saw Cub sleeping cozily on the brick wall of the yard, she only had to yell “Cub, go home!” and he would appear before our front door within a minute. Grateful and courteous, he often wished to enrich our diet with dead mice and placed the carcasses on the mat, which we had to clean up behind him so as to not hurt his feelings. Like a purebred puppy, Cub mastered the “fetch!” game like his second nature. Just with a plain river snail shell, the two of us could play for a whole afternoon.
I wasn’t able to keep these wonderful animal companions without grandma‘s assistance. Being the second wife of my grandpa, she didn’t have a child of her own. Nevertheless, she ceaselessly embraced each and every member of the family with her immeasurable motherly love. Even in her 80s, she insisted on personally preparing meals for Cub’s litter and regularly cleaning the cat toilet. When she was going to take a nap on the balcony under the winter sun, she would place a blanket on her lap and share it with the kittens.
When a cousin of grandma returned from a medical trip to Shanghai, she decided to visit and comfort him in person. She accidently suffered from an ankle sprain at the bus stop, a condition that never recovered. When I brought her clothes and food for the last time, grandma joyfully held my hands, “I was healed and am going to soon leave the hospital for good.” After I left, she took a bath and washed all her clothes by hand. At that night, she left us retaining all the dignity and grace of a woman.
Cub often lingered on grandma‘s empty bed and stared at the bedroom door for hours. We used to shoo him away a lot. Yet secretly longing for a miracle just like him, we knew better to leave him alone.