KFC & the Middle Class

As so many other children of Asian mothers, I was punished for any grade other than an "A". After the divorce, when my mom was raising us on her own and she had free reign when establishing academic consequences, I was grounded a full nine weeks for earning a "B".

If the next report card showed the straight A's as it was supposed to, I would not only be free to hang out with the other kids in our apartment complex after school again, but we got a treat: a whole bucket of Kentucky Fried Chicken, complete with a styrofoam side of coleslaw and another full of mashed potatoes and a container of gravy.

This, friends, was the good life.

If the weather was nice, my mom, my little sister and I would sit on the plastic seats outside, overlooking the K-Mart parking lot, grabbing our favorite pieces out of the bucket, as she gave us kids the same speech she always did. It was our Filippino mother's version of the American dream: work hard, study, and we would be able to have the things we wanted.

Eight year old me wanted chicken seasoned with eleven herbs and spices. But I had a feeling the ethos applied more broadly.

So deep was my young love of KFC that I started studying and turning in homework on time and annoying my weary-eyed teachers for extra credit, not because I was worried about being grounded for two straight months, but because I wanted a drumstick of original recipe. The incentives worked.

I saw my first real negotiations at Kentucky Fried Chicken, too, as my Filippino mother haggled with the poor cashier to switch out the two wings for two breasts, without charging us more.

"Can you please change the wings out for breasts? We prefer the breast."

"That's no problem, but there is an extra charge, ma'am."

"Extra? Why extra? When we come, they always just switch the wings for the breasts."

"But it is extra...and we just rang you up."

"We really do prefer the breast. Can you just switch them?"

I could see the moment when Mom wore the cashier down. It worked a surprising amount of the time. Though I could see the look of disappointment on her face when she actually had to part with a couple extra dollars to do so. I suspect it wasn't strictly because she had to pay more money, but because she had faith in her ability to always negotiate her way to a better deal.

Kentucky Fried Chicken also gave us the chance to feel American. Like, really American. I knew that some of the food my mom cooked, the pancit, adobo, the sinigang, was straight up weird to the kids we went to school with in the suburbs of Pittsburgh. Most of our classmates didn't have their grandmother sharing a bed with them or an uncle on the bottom bunk, either. But on the day after we had fried chicken, I would brag about it to any kid that would listen. I'd smile when they talked about how much they loved it, too, and inevitably, the discussion would turn to a debate over which two sides were best.

Original recipe was the tie that bound us.

Eventually, I got too old to keep wanting to hang out with my mom and my little sister. I selfishly started asking for money as a reward for good grades instead of fried chicken hangouts complete with life lessons from mom, which was a preposterously bad trade off. I turned out to be a dumb fucking teenager.

Still, this tradition is perhaps my favorite childhood memory.

I want to recreate this with our son. I'd like to have a regular but-still-somehow-rare treat rewarding a job well done. But I noticed that Mrs. Done by Forty and I basically never eat at KFC any longer, and that we eat at restaurants more often in a month than I did in a whole year growing up.

I wonder if going to out to a place like that would be a treat at all.

In my gut I know we're just in a very different socioeconomic class than we were in growing up. That was kind of the point of what my mom was talking about as we scarfed down chicken: that in this country, we could work hard and get the things we wanted. Now, we have them, but there's a weird feeling you get when you're no longer really a member of the class you knew.

As we get better with our finances, accumulating more and more wealth as we go, I wonder if I ever gave much thought to what I might be giving up in the process. By any measure, we are not middle class any longer. We're wealthy. Which, of course, is really amazing. We are fortunate beyond belief, and this is not an attempt to complain about having too much money.

But I do think we should be intentional about the kind of life we want to live, and the kind of life we want our kids to live. Having a bunch of money doesn't mean we need to spoil our kids, or send them to a particular kind of school, or buy them cars for sweet sixteens. I'd like aim for the same sort of thing my mother did: trying to just live below our means, maybe even below the average standard of the kids in our suburban neighborhood, and just giving the kids a peek at the middle class life they might have, if they work hard for it.


*Photo is from JeepersMedia at Flickr Creative Commons.