Zen and the art of McDonald's "feng shui"

Recently, I was involved in choosing and copy-editing an article out of California on a McDonald's franchise restaurant that incorporates "feng shui" elements into its design plan. The proprietor had ridiculous things to say about the attempt to appeal to Asian patrons, claiming that this McDonald's wanted people to feel that they could linger over their Big Macs and artery-clogging transfatty fries, in a calm and peaceful atmosphere -- ignoring, apparently, the entire ethos of McDonald's and all fast food establishments, in the process.

But far be it from me to criticize someone wanting to take down McDonaldization a peg or two. My problem is not so much with the corporate-subversive feel of the feng shui-ed restaurant; it's with the headline that accompanied the AP article.

"Do you want fries with that Zen?" the article headline read. "California McDonald's aims to boost sales with feng shui."

Now, on the business page, the reference to boosting sales becomes less cynical and more practical -- and anyway, it's nice to see them admitting that the bottom line is the bottom line, "qi-balancing" Eastern philosophy aside. The problem with this headline, which I forgave, and ran basically intact (because it also appeared on China Daily, which is an English-language in-China newspaper), is the reference to Zen in an article about feng shui, as though the two are interchangeable.

Getting "Zen" and "feng shui" confused is like referring to an "English kiss" -- which, let's face it, would have to be something between the inaccurately named "Eskimo kiss" and the mob's "kiss of death" -- when what you meant was a "French kiss." Just because the nations are in the same hemisphere and their citizens look basically the same doesn't mean that their cultures are interchangeable.

In fact, the opposite is true for Japan and China, as it is for England and France. The textbook controversy a few years ago -- when the Japanese re-published a series of history textbooks glossing over their actions in the "Rape of Nanjing" which was, well, pretty much what it sounds like, in WWII -- is only the tip of a very large and ancient iceberg. My ninth grade students sat morosely in my class, looking shell-shocked and confused, on the day they learned of Japanese actions in the second world war. The Japanese language teacher at my school stood up at the end of the year and gave a speech, in which he cried, imploring Chinese to please stop making fun of him and treating him badly for being a Japanese.

A shop-keeper at a market, when he found out I was American, immediately launched into a discussion of our countries' similarities, beginning with an animated hand-sign depiction of the bombing of Pearl Harbor. "We have mutual enemies," he seemed to be saying.

The longer I was in China, the more I picked up this paranoid, borderline hostility toward the Japanese. I enjoyed the interaction with the Japanese teacher, who taught my housemate to make sushi, and the karate instructor, who often watched movies with us. But when confronted with any element of Japanese culture -- Battle Royale, the Japanese remake, for instance, and the only movie I've ever turned off after seven minutes, being too frightened to continue -- I could only respond with bewilderment and occasional horror. The efficiency, the compact, neat lifestyle, the attention to detail, contrasted sharply with China's sprawling and messy way of life, its cobbled-together solutions to problems that should have been anticipated, its flagrant and dangerous use of fireworks whose detritus littered the streets for months after Spring Festival.

To conflate the idea of Zen, then, with feng shui, seems almost inconceivable to me.

It's a vocabulary slip-up, really, since we American English-speakers have imported the word "Zen" to indicate inner harmony, and the words "feng shui" to indicate putting our physical space in an order that promotes inner harmony; we sample what suits us, and use imported words generically to indicate whole and diverse worlds of (foreign) thought. It is on par with calling everyone who looks even slightly Asian, "Chinese."

We're going to have to stop this, especially considering the likely economic position of China -- and other Asian countries, like Japan, South Korea, or the rapidly developing Vietnam -- in our future.

But I don't expect a revolution in terms to begin with McDonald's.