Thick Description

I'm sitting in a Panda Express, and I am unhappy.

An obese man is filling his cup with soda. The troughs of meat are exhaling upon the sneeze guards. There are seven couples seated around the room, and two groups of friends - one of which is seated outside. All are white. The men cooking the meat are both white, cropped blond hair on one. The two girls working the counter are Hispanic. There are pandas plastered on everything, and a sign made of thick neon tubes declaring the word "DRINKS." I see a man in a sports jersey at the counter, choosing his meats. Phrases like "Surf 'n Turf" and "WOKSMART" are printed on little plastic tags above the troughs. My family has a wok. My dad carefully seasoned it before I was born, turning the speckled carbon steel into a dark, thick black, mottled nest - the type that would last forever. When he went to Taiwan for a family emergency, he came back with photos of the night markets - vast crowds of stalls in a sea of glossy blue tarpaulin, pale fluorescent light rods hanging over men wearing baseball caps and cheap watches. All of them huddled over woks, pans, piles of food and piles of ingredients.

Right now, at this moment, I am sitting in front of a styrofoam clam-shell full of meat and rice. Several of the couples have left, and the cashiers are beginning to clear tables. A woman is staring at her phone, which came from the other side of the world, from a factory where fourteen men leapt to their deaths. A smiling panda holds a shrimp on a fork and is captioned in adorably, calculatedly broken English, proclaiming the advantages of shrimp which can be had for a dollar more. I sit in my chair and hear the obese man tell his friend that chopsticks are stupid and useless. Cartoon pandas recite broken phrases, factory worker suicides become a punchline to a cruel joke, a man flies over a city and two hundred and fifty thousand japs are turned to ash. The meat is old, and the rice is stale, and I sit and I eat, still unhappy.

Artist's Statement

I chose Panda Express because, to me, it is an excellent flashpoint that compels thought regarding race and culture, and because it is so banal - fast food with pseudo-oriental trappings aggressively aimed at white American patrons. I feel out of place in the restaurant, and wanted to communicate that feeling through this piece. I juxtaposed descriptions of the heavily Americanised assembly-line food service and descriptions of the chaotic and fluid night markets of Taipei in order to create this sense of unaddressable longing, and to highlight the triteness of the contrived enterprise.

I focused mainly on details, and tried to avoid voicing my own thoughts too overtly - the introspection, hopefully, comes from the dwelling on places and things and events. I feel like it is still easy to understand and to read, but this is an attempt at subtlety on my part and may have fallen short - I am unhappy with how obvious I am being but cannot presently articulate myself in a more satisfactory way - the pitfalls of a novice artist.

My main goal was to communicate the emotional impact Panda Express has on me and how I regard it against my own frame of reference, and I feel like I have accomplished that. I am satisfied with this piece but I am sure that more consideration and observation would have given me more to write about.