KFC

I couldn't find anyone to eat dinner with, my teacher friends all unavailable, and my students all dodging out on me before I could ask for an escort. So, I down what is left of the Black Label that Hytham and I bought weeks before and hang my ratty black overcoat over my shoulders.

Outside, Xining is growing crueler and crueler. The sun is banished at six thirty PM, and only wan light emerges from behind the heavy hills in the morning. Everyday, I take a bitter mince to the 文科 building and back, keeping my eyes glued to the ground, making sure to avoid any run-ins that would result in my further finger numbing.

At night it is only colder, and so, this night, I head out expecting to eat at the first restaurant I see, and not spend any more time freezing my ass off. The restaurants on "Educational Establishment Alley" all serve dishes that I have eaten dozens of times, and all of them lack heating, a prerequisite for tonight's dining. So I press on into the stripping wind and turn towards the square that, after a long boulevard of anaemic trees, leads to a Kentucky Fried Chicken. The wind is harsh and the the air nipping, a few scattered souls accompany me on a few segments of the walk, but most of them abscond from me quickly, running to huddle near coal stoves or collapse near a radiator. I want to join them, but the promise of chicken, real ersatz bread, creamy fatty mayonnaise, and lank strips of lettuce called to me. When I finally make it to the restaurant, I am absolutely delighted to find it nearly empty.
Upon seeing me the cashier pulls out the idiot menu (for children? foreigners? a city that hasn't been indoctrinated by fast food terminology their whole lives?) comprised of mendacious photographs of giant symmetrical waxen burgers. I feel insulted and defiantly ignore it. Moments later I catch myself mocking the cashier's unintelligible accent. "Meh meh wehhh..." I mutter at her garble, hoping for a slower, clearer repeat. Its hard to know what is going on, if they are snickering at the foreigner, or if my Chinese is really that bad. I felt a tad guilty. We figured it out, - what would I like to drink? Using pantomimes and broken Chinese I pinpoint the Mountain Dew dispenser on the soda machine. I then demand an extra packet of ketchup in a similar fashion. My chicken sandwich is unready; somewhere behind the metal lattices and food transmogrifiers a lady has yet to refill the mayonnaise gun.

The irony of the Chinese American fast-food chain will never fail to amuse me. I often find myself getting up with my tray and walking towards the trash cans. And then, from across the slippery plastic dining room a lady in a pink shirt and silly baseball cap rushes towards me and expropriates my tray. She dumps its contents into the trash bin and ads the plastic board to the stack. I head towards the door remembering, "In China, this is a fancy restaurant!" Some new arrivals pass me on their way in, they smile knowingly, I have reaffirmed their belief that this is a sign of Westernness and prosperity!

My burger arrives. I open its thin red (auspicious) cardboard box (they definitely outsell their blue-boxed non-spicey counterparts). The brown bun has been violated in five spots by the mayonnaise lady's fingers, its form more like a crumpled tissue than a machine pressed bun.
I pause for a moment, and then hungrily devour it, playfully contemplating a piece of comparative literature between Cornell West and Tadeusz Borowski that I will never write.
Such is the life of an apathetic casual academic. Whiskey, cold, fried chicken, pocket the last packet of ketchup, back into the cold, onto a bus, ignore a student whose name I don't know, get off the bus, dodge piss-poor taxi drivers crossing the street, talk to some students I do know, and escape back home under the foggy coal smoke of a Xining winter night.