American Shrine

It has been a while since I wrote an installment regarding the snatches of life that I have experienced, but today I saw something that merits retelling.

I don't often go to McDonalds these days, partially for health reasons, and partially because I have so little money that I would normally rather save it and spend it on something of higher quality, but today I was short on time as well as cash and pulled in to their parking lot at the end of the lunch rush.

I am very tired these days and wanted a moment's peace, so I purchased a combo meal to eat in the restaurant. I was keeping to myself for the most part, with an occasional smile and nod to a passerby, when I noticed something strange.

At the table to my right was an elderly Chinese woman. She was wearing tidy, rust-colored pants, a beige cashmere sweater, a silk scarf tied around her neck in a tight knot, and comfortable shoes. In front of her on the table were three small paper cups with the ubiquitous golden arches logo placed at seeming random intervals around the sides. Besides the cups she had a newspaper written in Chinese script, and a framed image of an elderly Chinese man laughing. The image was partially blurred, having undoubtedly been taken with a slow shutter speed indoors, and the expression on his face seems to denote the kind of laugh that shakes a room. In some ways it was the perfect image of him, I would imagine. Not stationary, not "still", perhaps not captured at all. It was an image of emotion and presence rather than representation.

What caught my attention is that the woman, seated up at a raised table with her feet balancing precariously on the metal bar beneath the stool, was reading aloud from the paper. Reading, it seemed, to the portrait. I found her fascinating. She was simultaneously acknowledging the image, after all it was out on the table and she was reading to it, and not acknowledging it as I don't think I saw her look at it once. A moment later a younger woman, but still in her fifties, I would guess, came and lifted herself in to the seat opposite the elderly woman. There were still three small cups on the table. Three cups, two women, and a portrait.

It was then that I realized that she had, indeed, been reading to the portrait. Just as she had purchased a small drink for the portrait. It was an offering to a modern ancestor in the form of water in a waxed paper cup. I couldn't help but look at them. The strange little trio of colliding cultures from the most honored and revered traditions of one, to the most homogenized and marketed of the other.

When the woman at the counter microphone called for order 128, the younger of the two women shimmied out of the high stool and went to retrieve the food. To my great surprise she came back with one large fries and three sandwiches. All Premium Chicken sandwiches in their individual cardboard containers with bright green swaths of color and text indicating the contents. The younger woman placed all three on the table and handed the first to the older woman and picked up the second for herself.

After opening her own, the older woman reached across the table and picked up the third, carefully folded back the clamshell lid, and placed the open container in front of the portrait. It stayed there long after both of them had finished eating. I stayed until I realized I was becoming intrusive, and when I left, the shrine remained - Premium Chicken sandwich in a folded cardboard box, waxed paper cup of water, and blurry portrait that was both trapped in the moment and forever moving out of it.