Chopstick Faux PasYou’ve been in China for a couple of weeks and you think you’ve finally started to get the hang of this whole chopsticks thing. Your hand has stopped cramping painfully after every meal, it no longer takes you ages and ages to finish eating, and you’ve finally made it through a whole meal without dropping something while serving yourself from the common dish. You’ve triumphed!
Or so you think. Now that you’ve got the basic mechanics of eating with two sticks down, it’s time to move on to doing it without being rude. Chinese table etiquette might perhaps appear less complicated than Western (there are, after all, not three forks, three knives and two spoons to choose from) but it’s no less important for all that.
One of the biggest possible chopstick faux pas is sticking your chopsticks straight up and down in a bowl of rice or other dish. Many Chinese people offer a bowl of rice with chopsticks stuck straight up and down in it to the recently deceased during funerals and sometimes during other ceremonies. Even those who don’t practice this custom associate a dish with chopsticks stuck vertically in it with death, so using chopsticks this way at the table is a big no-no.
Since Chinese style eating involves a number of common dishes shared by everyone, there are a few things to remember in terms of proper sharing. First of all, chopsticks are for food, not dishes. Chinese tables are generally round with a lazy-susan in the middle, so if you can’t reach something you’ve only to turn it. But if you’re at a square table, ask someone to pass you the dish. Drawing a plate towards yourself with your chopsticks is very rude.
Sometimes dishes come with a pair of chopsticks for use in serving that dish and sometimes not, and sometimes each person has two sets of chopsticks, one for common dishes and one for eating. Whatever the case, don’t eat with chopsticks used for common dishes. If there are no extras it’s polite to use the blunt end to serve yourself. Of course, among friends, people tend to be less fussy on this point, but you should be aware of it all the same. Also, don’t dig around in the dish looking for a particular thing and taking all the choices bits for yourself; the rest of the table deserves better than your leftovers!
Don’t be afraid to not use chopsticks at all on common dishes. Some dishes are very difficult to scoop with chopsticks, and if you aren’t confident that you can do it without making a mess, use your ceramic spoon. Using the spoon is far from rude and it definitely won’t attract ridicule or teasing; it’s the proper way to serve hard to eat dishes.
However, once you do get such dishes into your bowl, eating them won’t be a problem. Lifting your bowl to your mouth with your left hand and using your chopsticks to “shovel” your food into your mouth isn’t rude. That’s just how it’s done! However, it is rude to lick chopsticks that don’t have any food on them, so don’t do that.
Just as it’s rude to point with a knife or a fork in the West, so it is rude to gesture or point with your chopsticks. But in China the rule has an extra dimension: depending on how you learned to use your chopsticks – “properly” with one held still and the other moved by the finger tips or “naturally” using the area between the thumb and forefinger to control them – it may be possible to point your index finger outward while you’re using them. Don’t do this as it’s very rude.
When you’re not using your chopsticks, you should be careful of how you set them down. Many places will provide a chopstick rest you can use to keep the tips off of the table. If not, place your chopsticks together across your bowl or plate. It’s important to keep the chopsticks together; they’re a pair and separating them disturbs that. This is also the reason you should make sure to keep both chopsticks in one hand, and if you should happen to drop one of them you should replace both chopsticks with clean, not just the one you dropped.
Hopefully you can now get through a meal without any major gaffs! And now for an interesting bit of culture trivia: a set of chopsticks is a common gift for newlyweds, because the Mandarin for chopsticks (ç·å “kuaizi”) is a homophone for “have a son soon” (å¿«å).
1- Wikipedia.org
2- Everything2.com
3- Typepad.com
