In Taipei, which has the island's largest concentration of youth, one of the most favored choices is a convenient fast-food restaurant. Noisy, yes. But clean, air-conditioned, and friendly. These franchises have helped shape the lifestyle of today's youth.
"This is a pretty good place to hang out, I guess," a high school student says, while sipping a Coke at the McDonald's near the Taipei Railway Station. A couple of classmates join him, and they start talking about girls, motorcycles, and other priority topics. The scene is not unusual. At any given time of day, teenagers up and down the island can be found crowding local McDonald's, Hardee's, Kentucky Fried Chicken, or Wendy's franchise outlets.
According to Hsieh Hsiao-chin, a sociologist at Academia Sinica, fast-food restaurants have become a social haven for teenagers. The U.S. franchises attract the whole spectrum of youth, from school dropouts to college students, from those studying in vocational and technical schools to those in the so-called puhsipan schools, who are taking various cram courses to prepare for examinations.
Yet these establishments have become more than a pit stop to refuel or grab a cheeseburger to go. In Taiwan's consumption-happy, overcrowded cities and suburbs, they serve as prime teenage hangouts.
Why Wendy's? Or any other fast-food restaurant? One of the main reasons teenagers are attracted to these places is their relaxed and friendly atmosphere. Background music and courteous employees are matched with a bright and clean decor—a package deal rarely found in non-franchise Chinese restaurants or "help yourself" cafeterias (tzu-chu tsan-ting), where friendly service and high standards of cleanliness are virtually unknown qualities. In striking contrast, franchise restaurants (including recently opened European and Japanese establishments) cater to their customers, even if they only buy a soft drink and sit for an hour with a book or friends.
"We believe we should provide the customer with a comfortable, clean, and quality environment," says Ban R. Chen, a McDonald's vice president. Most teenagers would probably agree that fast-food restaurants have succeeded in creating such an environment. "I like coming here because it's clean and convenient," says a high school senior munching some Hardee's french fries. "I feel more comfortable here because of the atmosphere. At other eating places, they might kick you out if you stay too long."
Fast-food restaurants have become so popular that dozens of new franchises are opening every year. The biggest chain, McDonald's, will have 34 outlets in Taiwan by the end of this year, and has already projected another six to eight openings in 1990. Other chains are planning to expand as well, hoping to cash in on the high levels of disposable income now taken for granted by local residents.
Since fast-food restaurants are in high-density, convenient locations, teenagers consider them easy-to-recognize landmarks where they can arrange to meet friends. And if someone is delayed by Taipei's ubiquitous traffic jams, those who arrive first can always have a Coke—but rarely a cigarette.
Early last year, when foreign brand cigarettes first began saturating the Taiwan market, it rapidly became fashionable for teens to puff a Marlboro, Kent, or 555 while chatting with friends over a hamburger. This year the clouds of smoke cleared somewhat as an increasing number of U.S. fast-food restaurants began prohibiting smoking on their premises. Business suffered at first, but today the outlets are as packed as ever. Teenagers meet their friends, decide where to go next, or even stay and talk over fries and a soft drink. Some just hang out for hours at a time—creating a fast food, slow eat environment.
Lingerers are enthusiastic people-watchers. "I come here often with friends, and we talk about everything, sometimes for hours," says an 11th grade female student at a vocational high school. "Time really flies. We especially like to look at people and the clothes they are wearing, and the people they are with."
But fast-food restaurants are not specifically aimed at younger people, says McDonald's Chen. "We see ourselves as a family restaurant, as a place for the family to have good food and fun." Even though McDonald's own surveys indicate that most customers are in the 15-35 year old bracket, Chen points out that Western-style fast-food in Taiwan is only in its fifth year. Anything new and trendy is always welcomed first by younger people, later by the general population. Chen predicts that the age levels will fan out within a few years. Even then, the demographic structure of society will have an impact, because fully 49 percent of the island's population is 25 years old or younger.
For now, Taiwan's youth have associated fast-food restaurants with trendiness. "Going to any fast-food place can be seen as a gesture or statement of being young and energetic," Hsieh says. In other words, Church's Texas Fried Chicken, Wendy's, and all the others are cool places to go and be seen. A freshman at the Chinese Culture University chowing down at Kentucky Fried Chicken confirms this impression: "It really is pretty fashionable to come here, at least once in a while, because there are so many young people here."
The attraction is certainly not always the food. "I don't really like the hamburgers here," a 10th grader whispers, "though I like coming to Hardee's with my friends. But I feel guilty if we just sit and talk, so I usually end up buying a Coke or something."
Hsu Shen-shu, president and founder of the New Environment Housewives' Alliance and an active member of the Taipei Women's Development Center, says that another explanation for fast-food fascination is the connotation of a more dynamic and open Western (especially American) culture. "For the last 30 years many people have wanted to go to America, or associate themselves with American goods and concepts," she says.
Intentional or not, fast-food restaurants have substituted as a slice of Western life, for Colonel Sanders and Ronald McDonald have come to symbolize the U.S. in all its commercial might. This cultural magnetism is not usually a topic of everyday conversation, but if asked, teenagers often say that they admire the "free-spiritedness" of Western life—although many perceive the West as being too open. If one thing is certain, Hsieh Hsiao-chin says, it is that "outside cultures have been very influential on Taiwan's teenage population."
Local fast-food restaurants also serve as an escape from the weather, for in Taiwan there is a saying that "the weather is much like the unpredictable moods of a stepmother." It is not uncommon for people of all ages to flood the nearest hamburger or chicken joint to seek refuge from a cloudburst or heat wave. Fast-food restaurants are temperature-controlled, with precious air-conditioning during he hot and humid summer months, and circulated heat during the wet and cold winter.
The nature of Chinese society has also yielded an extra and rather unique function for these establishments: a place to study. To American teenagers, the concept of going to McDonald's to do homework may seem a bit odd. But a large number of students in Taiwan find that fast-food restaurants, though noisy, are convenient and fairly comfortable settings for memorizing texts, computing trigonometric equations, or reviewing their English.
Unfortunately, for some students these are the only places where they can spend a block of time before puhsipan classes or after school. Places to study and relax are difficult to find, especially in crowded Taipei, where many students from out of town live in cramped rooms of six to eight students with space barely adequate for bunk beds, let alone desks.
Rote memorization while cramming for exams is a way of life, and fast-food restaurants offer space, good lighting, and even less noise than most alternative locations. "I want to squeeze in every minute preparing for the college exam," says one student brushing up on his geography. "So anywhere I can sit down and open my books is fine with me."
That some students have temporarily converted McDonald's into their own study hall not only highlights their diligence, but also raises the obvious question: Why not the library? In truth, libraries are often packed with students and scholars, but a large portion of them are doing research. There are simply not enough public or school libraries to accommodate those students who just want to study. Compounding the problem, there is a severe shortage of designated areas in libraries where people can bring in their own materials. Many libraries, in fact, require that all personal belongings—including homework and textbooks—be checked into a cubbyhole-like locker near the entrance.
While fast-food restaurants still rank behind the home as the setting where most schoolwork is done, teenagers are discovering that studying at home can also be counterproductive. Modern apartments are often too cramped to facilitate uninterrupted, intensive study. As one student asks: "Which Chinese home is not noisy, with brothers and sisters yelling or playing the piano, parents arguing, or relatives eating and playing mahjong?"
In addition, fewer and fewer parents are helping their teen-aged children with homework, either because they do not have the time or because today's coursework, especially in physics and math, is much more complicated and difficult than anything they encountered in school.
Hsu and other members of the Housewives' Alliance are concerned about the trend of children spending less time at home. Whether they are serious students or part-time workers, students may leave the house at 6:30 a.m. and return after 10:00 p.m. Some apartments, Hsu says, resemble a "hotel" crash pad rather than a permanent home base. She criticizes a lack of effort to coordinate "cultural or social" outings for the entire family, and complains that the home does not act more as "a social activity center."
The reduction of time spent together between parents and children certainly contributes to a widely discussed phenomenon: the generation gap. Over the last 20 years, family life has been radically altered, an unanticipated by-product of Taiwan's steam rolling economy. More money sometimes means more tensions in the home, especially if working parents are home only at night or at odd hours. As if these factors were not enough to disrupt family life, fewer extended families now live under one roof, reducing the number of adults helping supervise children.
Telescoped social change has quickly altered the face of society, with the result that parents and children have in fact grown up in completely different times. This can give rise to serious communication problems among family members. "Kids are much more open-minded now, so parents have less control," Hsieh says. "Intense family tension exists in many homes."
Teenagers are squeezed by both their parents and their schoolwork. Fast-food restaurants therefore act as a buffer between the generations, a place for the young to escape from all those pressures. As Hsu says, "the atmosphere is completely different from the home."
Although the importance of the "escape factor" in drawing students to fast-food restaurants is difficult to determine, it does figure into the final equation. When asked about this issue, student responses range from "my parents don't even know I'm here," to "my friends come here and talk about how old-fashioned our parents are," to "my parents want me to eat at McDonald's or Hardee's, because the food is safer than a pien tang [box lunch]." But at least there is general agreement on fast-food restaurants being preferred choices as temporary havens.
From the parents' point of view, knowing that their kids hang out at fast-food restaurants is infinitely better than wondering if they are at underground dance halls or less savory places. Hsu says the Housewives' Alliance has become aware of a disturbing increase in juvenile delinquency, gang involvement, and youth-related crime. Thus any activity that deflates, however indirectly, the teenager's potential for mischief or misdemeanor is always welcomed by parents and others trying to improve social relations.
The role of the fast-food restaurant as one possible alternative to less acceptable environments intersects with the larger question of what teenagers like to do with what free time they have. No doubt a fair share ends up going to fast-food restaurants, at least as a first stop, if not to hang out. "It's the only place to go," says one student at a technical school. "What else is there to do?"
Actually, there are other popular destinations, including movies, video game arcades, MTV establishments, and to a lesser extent, department stores, pool halls, and coffee shops. But the technical student's frustration illustrates what many teenagers believe to be all too true: there is nothing much to do. Limited by time and city space, and unable to spare time for traveling to Taiwan's remoter parks and resort areas, most young people simply do not have many choices of places to go. Therefore, it is easy to do nothing at all.
This mini-dilemma highlights the need for more family-oriented cultural and social activities. "While this island has experienced rapid economic growth, it has simultaneously experienced slow cultural growth," Hsieh says, adding that people, young and old alike, should reassess their priorities or even restructure their leisure time.
Just as fast-food restaurants can serve as a brief stop on the way to other activities, they also can be seen as a collective snapshot of a generation in transition. Today's teenagers, with more money than before, and perhaps less intimate with their own families, tend to drift towards anything labelled as cool, convenient, and user-friendly. The fast-food restaurant fills the bill. While the main attraction remains the ready-to-go burger, the greasy chicken wing, or the emergency Coke, it fulfills other key needs. Until there are more and better alternatives, fast-food restaurants will continue serving up a menu of social satisfactions that more than matches their standardized food items.