The average reader is likely to be put off by a book capable of suggesting that “Theorists who write about cultural imperialism argue that it is the domination of popular culture — rather than outright military or political control — that matters most in the postmodern, postsocialist, postindustrial world.”
But readers should not avoid anthropologist James L. Watson’s new study, Golden Arches East: McDonald’s in East Asia, for it is, in fact, a tale of triumphal Americanism. Watson, the Fairbank professor of Chinese studies at Harvard, has assembled four Asian scholars to help him chronicle the largely benevolent influence of our premier fast-food chain on the Far East. Golden Arches East is an armchair reminder of how the good life is exported from the good, old United States.
It’s easy to take an American phenomenon like McDonald’s for granted, and we do. The chain still sells 41 percent of America’s hamburgers, but U.S. per-store sales have been flat for the past few years, most attempts to introduce new products have flopped, and the last chief executive was pushed aside.
Surveys show Americans simply figure they can get a better burger elsewhere and probably for less. McDonald’s is still a draw for youngsters — holding parents hostage and keeping the chain something of a meeting ground in an otherwise splintered society. But for the rest of us, there seem to be plenty of better options.
The McDonald’s recipe, however, still works in a developing world aspiring to American values. Nowhere is that appetite stronger than in Asia, where the fast-food giant is nearing four thousand outlets: A McDonald’s opens somewhere in the world every three hours. In Beijing, Seoul, Taipei, and Hong Kong, as Watson and colleagues observe, the reasons have more to do with the feeling than the fare.
In the United States, we’ve forgotten what it was like before Ray Kroc dramatically expanded his business during the 1960s. Roadside eateries used to be a rare and untidy lot. The appeal of a dependably clean joint with predictable grub and cheerful service — and a dependably clean bathroom — accounted for many of those early “billions served.”
McDonald’s in Asia is that same sort of respite today. When people there “deserve a break” from hot, dirty, pricey local alternatives, they repair to the safe American icon. In particular, the Golden Arches “have become sanctuaries for women who wish to avoid male-dominated settings.” The absence of alcohol helps. In some locations about 60 percent of the patrons are female. Be it as employee or customer, a woman is on something closer to an equal footing, and my own recent experiences in Tokyo indicate that the young ladies working the counter are anything but quiet and subservient.
Although the bustle for tables can be intense at peak times, McDonald’s is a leisurely hangout much of the day in Asia. For studying, romancing, or chatting with friends, they are “the equivalent of youth clubs” in Hong Kong. On weekends, McDonald’s can be a special meal out (taxi ride and all) for the family. A subtle attraction in the Chinese culture, at least, is that this not only affords a bargain but spares the possibility of humiliation: One need not fear loss of face from having a neighboring table order such expensive dishes as shark’s fin soup.
Egalitarianism extends even further: The fact that both employees and customers are standing at the counter — and that customers must fetch their own supplies — seems to even out social inequalities. Chinese customers learned to clean up after themselves by observing what foreigners did; this is now considered “civilized.” Also, spitting near the premises is frowned upon.
The ready-made smile from the help — an “indiscriminate display of goodwill toward perfect strangers” — is apparently a selling point in poker-faced cultures such as China, although it took some getting used to. At first blush the patrons thought they were being laughed at. Sometimes, as in China, McDonald’s had to teach the population not only new foods, but new terms: “waste” and “drive-through,” for example. Cheese also is a recent encounter for many; some parents now believe it is what “makes Americans so physically strong and energetic.”
McDonald’s has created conventions. Queuing is not first nature to Chinese; Hong Kongers preferred a scrum at the counter when McDonald’s opened there in 1975. The celebration of children’s birthdays, one of Watson’s essayists notes, was “unknown in most parts of East Asia” before Ronald McDonald made it a special event. As in the United States, kids are the key to McDonald’s marketing. In Hong Kong, Golden Arches East observes, “children rarely ate outside their home until the late 1970s, and when they did, they were expected to eat what was put in front of them. The idea that children might actually order their own food or speak to a waiter would have outraged most adults.” Nowadays, many Chinese parents want offspring to pick from a Western menu so they will grow up to be successful and know “how to enjoy a modern way of life.”
Not everything is an easy sell. To the hygienic Japanese, touching food is still mostly forbidden: The hamburger, if eaten at all, is usually held partially within its wrapper. Standing while eating — McDonald’s helped introduce countertop consumption in Japan — violated basic etiquette.
Korea, meanwhile, presented special challenges. Even before hard times hit last year, it was resistant to Western commercial invasions and stubborn about its ways. Paying in advance for food is a stretch there, especially for men used to taking the check at the end of a meal. Dining solo, which is inherent to fast food, “generates feelings of loneliness and self-pity.” Sharing items is the norm, and Koreans in a group at McDonald’s still pour their fries from the individual pouches into a heap.
All in all, Golden Arches East is a fun read and travel guide rolled into one. Only in the closing essay does the reader run up against the academic babble of “homologous social reactions.” But by then the message is unmaskable: This form of cultural imperialism is contagious, consumable, and incurable.
Of course, in the hostile quarters of the self-loathing West, the growth of McDonald’s is not an opening but a plague, and the other new McDonald’s book, McLibel: Burger Culture on Trial, is a bite of that. A cover blurb from Ralph Nader gives fair warning of what’s coming: “A tumultuously exciting story of corporate litigation against citizen’s free speech that continues to boomerang around the world.”
Written by John Vidal from the Manchester Guardian, the book recounts the company’s eight-year legal pursuit of a pair of London Greenpeace activists who accused McDonald’s of nearly everything but high treason. The resulting 313 days of trial — the longest in the history of English case law — ended in 1996 in a public-relations fiasco for the burger chain. It won nominal libel judgments against the pair — anarchists David Morris and Helen Steel — but the judge found substance in their contentions that McDonald’s targeted children in advertising, allowed chickens to be cruelly slaughtered for McNuggets, and drove down wages in the catering industry in Britain. (He did not accept the claim that Ronald McDonald was destroying the rain forest to raise cattle or murdering people by inducing them to eat unhealthy food.) McDonald’s opted not to try to collect damages or court costs (which one tabloid put at ten million pounds) from the two paupers.
The great mystery is why the case was mounted in the first place. All it did was give new life around the world to outlandish charges by shabby street picketers. Vidal’s wandering text doesn’t have much of an answer, except perhaps the implication that McDonald’s rigid culture — in which, according to one estimate, 10 percent of Americans find their first jobs — breeds paranoia.
The company’s frightened polishing of its image and its business blundering are on regular display in the excellent beat reporting of the Wall Street Journal’s Richard Gibson. McDonald’s hamhanded approach to the wave of bad press in recent years about its sales performance in the U.S. offers much better evidence of the company’s reactive hostility than the tour de farce Vidal serves up in McLibel: Burger Culture on Trial.
But for the anarchists Morris and Steel and their chronicler Vidal, it only begins with burgers: As a late chapter in the book puts it, “It’s Not Just McDonald’s.” No, the enemy is the whole American commercial culture — precisely, you’ll recall, what attracts all those ordinary Asians to the Golden Arches.
