One McBooth Please, For Here

I went to McDonald’s today for lunch. Friday is my long day at work—I have no classes on Fridays so I work the normal 10-6, eight hour work-day. And because I’m here all day, I usually grab my lunch downtown and go for something nice each Friday. There is a massive building called the “Shanghai No. 1 Food Mall” a short walk down East Nanjing Road, the pedestrian shopping street by my workplace, which is full of small restaurants across several floors. Some floors are like food courts, some just have restaurants, and some are open-market food stalls that swarm with locals during holidays and festival periods, selling things like moon cakes and red been buns. My favorite lunch spots though are Sushi Express, the Tokyo-style sushi-go-round (of the same kind I was obsessed with in Japan), and Coco Curry, a chain that serves up Japanese style curries and rice (another spot I was obsessed with in Japan). Today was a less glamorous exception. I went to McDonald’s. 18 kuai Spicy McChicken with fries.

But that is not noteworthy. I took a seat, party of one, on the second floor seating area that has some tall stool-style seats along a shelf that overlooks the first floor seating area. I was munching on some fries when I noticed this Chinese man, maybe upper twenties or lower thirties, tattered jacket, unshaven and a bit unkempt, hanging out at one of the booths by himself. His face was really tanned, as if he had spent a lot of time outdoors. He had no food, bought nothing, sort of rudely propped up his feet on the seat next to him, and he seemed to be scanning the other tables and watching people. This didn’t really phase me. McDonald’s and other western style fast food joints are notorious in China for their lax “loiter” policies. Many of these restaurants are open 24 hours and if you walk in to one at 4am after a night of clubbing or something, you will inevitably encounter youngsters or homeless people fast asleep, heads on the table, some having bought a small drink, some shamelessly buy nothing at all. Employees don’t bat an eye. They’ll clean up around them and let them sleep. This happens in the middle of the day too. It seems as if there is some unwritten code of tolerance for people who need a place to crash and have nowhere else to go. I have abused this code in the past. On my stopover to Lanzhou during my “Great Eurasian Adventure” period, my overnight train from Jiayuguan spit me out into the dark, wintery chill of the city’s pre-dawn hours and I had about five hours to kill, with my pack, dead tired, before I could check into this Chinese hotel room I had booked. I spent them wisely and without bother at a KFC in the train station, along with lots of other people doing the same.

A follow up photo of an earlier post on my commute---stuffing in to a subway car

This is what the station looks like at 5pm, it gets busier as rush hour develops

This is why I wasn’t too phased by the man hanging out by himself and without food, chilling in some first floor booth. But I watched him a bit. Another thing about western fast food joints in China is that the trend is that when you’re done eating your meal, you can just leave your tray on your table and a designated employee will take it to the trash for you. If you take up your tray yourself, people give you odd looks. During busy hours, the employees sometimes have a hard time efficiently clearing all the trash and trays and sometimes it collects. The man I had been watching, after a little while, got up from his seat and moved toward a table where a group of young Chinese girls had just vacated and left behind a fair amount of trays and trash. The man sat in one of the seats, looked around a little sheepishly, then began picking through the remains, looking for leftover food. He compiled what he could find into one empty burger container and shoved the rest aside for the McDonald’s employees to haul away. He had some success. He found lots of fries, found some veggies from the burger boxes, chiefly lettuce bits and tomato remains, and some soda from a cup. I had never seen this before but it seemed to me a really clever way to find food if you have no money. No one apart from me noticed him or cared and he ate quickly, as if he hadn’t eaten in a while. When he was done, he sat there quietly and re-commenced his scanning.

麦当劳 (mai dang lao)---Chinese for McDonald's

This is the McDonald's by my workplace. Also included: a McCafe, surprisingly good spot for a coffee

A crap photo of the golden arches outside an H&M

A slightly worse photo of the inside

These lines can get chaotic and seating is often at a premium

It was a sad scene. I actually haven’t seen too much public homelessness or street begging in China which may or may not be incredible considering how large the population is. Either the government is quite good at implementing social welfare policies or beggars and homeless people are shuttled out of the public eye. I remember when I was first in Beijing in 2007, you could see a fair amount of beggars and people sleeping in public spaces, especially around the Tiananmen area and where tourists congregated. But after 2008, after the Olympics that is, exactly zero beggars or homeless could be seen anywhere near Tiananmen which came as a shock at first, at least to me. But I had heard that the city government essentially initiated a huge movement to take care of this ‘problem’. Again, I’m not sure exactly how—whether they were relocated, arrested, or given proper care, I couldn’t say.

Some beggars congregate around Nanjing East Road, where I work, and where lots of tourists come. But they scatter when police walk by and I’ve seen more than a few beggars being chased away from the main pedestrian areas.

If I had seen this in another country, somewhere in the third world, I wouldn’t have been surprised and I probably wouldn’t have mentioned it. But for some reason this seemed noteworthy to me, having seen it in Shanghai. In many respects, China is still considered a “developing” country, not necessarily of the third world, but on the same token, not really a member of the developed world either—an industrializing country with a recently established, but rapidly increasing middle-class. Beggars and the homeless should be a not surprising part of development. But it’s a hard thing to find in China. Interesting phenomenon.

By the way, it’s midterm time for me. Stressful days ahead. I just wrote a paper on the long term effects of Yeltsin period, post-Soviet liberal economic reforms in Russia, lovely, and I have a presentation coming up on the implications of an emerging northern sea route in the Arctic on the shipping industry in Asia. I’m an international affairs nerd and so I really get into this stuff, but I’ve been busy. Just wanted to explain the obvious loosening of my self-imposed post deadlines.

But the warm weather is here and along with it are some sweet events in Shanghai, including two huge outdoor music festivals (Midi and Strawberry) and a couple of cycle events (a scene which I am increasingly enjoying). I just conducted some interviews with a local fixed gear bike shop in the French Concession and will get to write an online piece on that for the magazine. And “Labor Day”, in more of the Communist sense than the holiday’s counterpart in the US, a Soviet legacy to China and much of Eastern Europe, is May 1st which extends my weekend. I think I and some Fudan buddies are going to try and take over some park on the outskirts of the city and do some barbecuing. I’m excited.

Go Red Sox!