Room for Milk (A Very American Interlude)

Loath though I am to support Starbucks - primarily because of a presentation that some of the students in my senior year Anthropology of Globalization class gave, the details of which I can't remember but which left a bad taste in my mouth vis-a-vis Starbucks as an ethical consumer choice - here in Chengdu, I have succumbed to its several appeals.

Firstly, the coffee situation in Chengdu is very weird. There are many coffee shops, and they sell excellent coffee, but it is European style coffee - small, well-prepared cups of espresso - and one of the few items that is actually more expensive here than in America. There must be some supply/demand quirk in the Chengdu market, because it is only slightly more expensive to buy a pound of these good coffee beans at the supermarket than to buy a single cup at one of the caffes. So, when I want to go sit at a coffee shop and read or work for a while, I have been unable to bring myself to pay four or five bucks for a teacup of espresso, and rather I head to Starbucks for the comfort of a vein-coursingly caffeinated, large mug of decent, if slightly bitter joe. There is also something very relieving to me about Starbucks as a public space. The decor is simpler and the seating arrangements more spacious than at most Chinese coffeeshops, and, since the five or six Starbucks in town have relatively high foreign patronage, it is less shocking for the Chinese customers to see you there, and therefore one is subjected to less of the staring and whispering with which we foreigners become more and more acquainted but never accustomed.

In addition, Starbucks has provided me with some interesting sights.

The cutest thing I have seen in Chengdu (aside from the babies and toddlers, who, because they by and large do not have diapers here, run around with their little butts hanging out of the crotch-slitted toddler-wear that allows them to just squat and poop at will), are the middle-aged, male, Western tourists standing in their all-weather, zip-off mountaineering pants in the middle of Starbucks, arms crossed, eyeing the bilingual menu like some worn but vigilant bannerman manning one of the far-outposts of western civilization.

Although Tom and I are perhaps less wary of China than they are, I cannot say that we are without our peculiar Americanisms. To wit: one afternoon last week, at the Starbucks a few minutes from our apartment, Tom and I committed an almost unbelievably American use of the milk-and-sugar station. Although Tom had asked for room for milk in his coffee, his steaming mug was filled to the brim. They serve the coffee boiling hot at this Starbucks, so, unable to sip it down, Tom proceeded to pour the top few centimeters of his coffee into the the little, round trash hole in the middle of the counter. Watching this tall, blond American pour a coffee he had just purchased into the trash of the very store he had just purchased it in struck me as such a profoundly, incomparably American thing to do, I found that I could not control my chuckling for several minutes. For my part, I had in hand one of the roasted sweet potatoes that they sell on the street here and, finding it a little bland, I added to this farm-grown, fresh roasted root a packet of Starbucks brand coffee sugar-crystals, thus completing our very American usage of the condiment station.