A girl got me to
master chopsticks. And it wasn’t my wife.
Just before my senior
year in high school, Sheryl was my girl at the Methodist summer camp I had gone
to in South Jersey. Being half Native-American, the contrast of her tanned skin
to my sunburned Mick-Kraut pale face was offset by our mutual love for and
different skills at anything athletic. We were “the couple” at camp. Two months
later, at the South Jersey United Methodist Youth Conference in Ocean City, we hooked
up again. However, for some stupid reason, it was decided by our circle of
friends to eat Chinese one evening. Unfortunately, at the restaurant, Sheryl
ran into the guy with whom she had been “the couple” at a camp earlier that summer.
In the end, my inability to master the chopsticks (Hell, the only ethnic food
in my neighborhood was pizza or kielbasa.) and my use of a fork to finish the
meal made me lose face and lose out to the other guy. You can imagine my
mother’s surprise when the first thing I said upon my return from the
conference was that I wanted to buy a pair of chopsticks. It may not have been
a religious awakening, but it certainly was a widening of cultural boundaries.
The funny thing was that Sheryl and I had a few dates the following year, one
of which to a Chinese restaurant, where I saw guys making fools of themselves
tossing food onto the floor before deciding to use a single chopstick to stab a
dumpling.
Well, I’m here to tell
you that for every white guy who flips a piece of kung-pao chicken across the
room, there’s an Asian holding a fork like a Hollywood mass murderer looking
for his next victim. I have seen it all over East Asia. My wife was a travel
agent when we married, so we have usually stayed at very nice hotels whenever
we have travelled abroad. It didn’t hurt that the Taiwan dollar was so much
stronger than most of the other region’s currencies, enabling us to stay, for
example, at the Hilton in the “Golden Ghetto” on Bali or the Jumeirah in Shanghai.
And since we usually traveled on traditional Chinese holidays, at least half of
the clientele at these luxury hotels was Taiwanese or Chinese.
The Western-style
breakfasts served at these hotels is one of my favorite aspects of vacationing.
While my wife enjoyed Chinese dishes like glass noodle soup or congee, I savored
the western offerings, such as omelets and pancakes almost like what Mom used
to make, bangers and beans similar to those served on cold Welsh mornings before
hiking the Brecon Beacons, or rye bread with cold cuts and cheese, reminding me
of my Uni days in Vienna, usually all
eaten in one sitting. It was during these meals that I could observe Asians dealing
with Western cutlery.
One of the problems
Asians seem to have is judging the size of their mouths. Since Chinese meat
dishes are usually prepared by cutting them up in small pieces, there is a
certain elegance in watching one pick up a piece of pork with chopsticks and
place it in her mouth. The same can be said when eating vegetable, since only a
small amount of spinach or cabbage can be gathered and raised to the mouth.
Such refinement, such delicacy is totally lost when a businessman uses a fork
to push a mound of greens onto his spoon and tries to squeeze it into his
mouth, sometimes leaving strands hanging off his lips in such a way to remind
me of the Creature from the Black Lagoon.
When eating hot pot,
inch-long chunks of corn on the cob are often thrown in as well, requiring the
eater to assume a wider grip on the chopsticks in order to pull them out of the
soup. Though I’m sure I looked rather clumsy at first, I can now easily
accomplish the task. However, there is something disturbing when an Asian at an
five-star hotel restaurant impales a piece of corn on the sliced side and then
holds it up like a lollipop, which, instead of licking, he bites into
beaver-like to scrape the kernels into his mouth, his head tilted back so that
he doesn’t lose a morsel. Meanwhile, his eating partner holds his portion
sideways, twirling it with a steak knife while his left forefinger guides it.
I have often been
perplexed at why such eating behavior occurs when chopsticks are usually
available, since the restaurant is serving Asian food. Perhaps it is the
incongruence of trying to use chopsticks with a plate, instead of having a bowl
of rice into which the food can be placed. However, you know something is wrong
when a customer has a typical basket of steamed bāozi, and waves each bun on the end of a fork like a rubber mallet, biting
around the edges of it before getting into the meat-filled center.
Slurping noodles,
though abhorrent to the Western ear, is necessary and quite fun when using
chopsticks. But to see an Asian scooping up a clump of pasta larger than his
mouth, biting into half of it and sucking in the rest, much like a snake does
with a mouse, is outright disgusting.
So, for all those
newbies arriving in Asia who always ate Chinese take-out with silverware,
remember that you have an Asian doppelganger in need of Western etiquette
lessons.
No comments:
Post a Comment