“I hadn’t planned on staying there long–I just wanted some chicken wings,” said 26-year-old Tan Shen, a native of Chengdu in Sichuan, a southwestern province of China. The young woman had been dumped by her boyfriend.
“I was walking around feeling miserable and decided to stop off at the KFC at the train station,” said Tan. She phoned in sick to her job and stayed at the restaurant.
“But once I got in there and started eating I decided I needed time to think. I didn’t want to go back to my apartment because it was full of memories of him. So I stayed.”
“We work in shifts here and the restaurant is open 24 hours a day, so we get a lot of people coming through,” said restaurant worker Jiang Li Lung. “At first no one really noticed her. But after a few days I began thinking she looked really familiar.
“Then I realised we had been serving her for the past three days and that she hadn’t actually left. When we asked her if she was ok, she said she was and just needed time to think. And then asked for another box of chicken wings with extra large fries.”
“She was after all a paying customer, even if a bit of an odd one,” said Jiang, who also said that Tan was doing no harm eating boxes of chicken. The staff let her stay.
After a week, though, Tan left the restaurant. She said she was starting to get sick of the taste of the food.
“I was getting sick of the taste of chicken so there was no point in staying there anymore.”
“I decided the best thing to do would be to leave the city and go back to my parents,” said Tan. “I had already told work I was off sick, so phoned them and said I was leaving.”
Tan then boarded a train to her parents’ house.
Jiang said of their unusually long staying guest, “I guess we kind of miss her. It certainly made work more interesting.”
By Heidi Woolf