Golfclap to Miller for nailing it on the head.
Am I the only one amused by the fact that this person is a returned missionary? Waverly’s claim about cultural sensitivity strikes me as a little penny-wise and pound-foolish. Am I the only one who thinks that proselytizing is the height of cultural arrogance? C’mon, a two-hundred-year-old religion is telling two-thousand-year-old religions years old that it’s more spiritually valid? That’s OK, though; he uses chopsticks. :rolleyes:
Anyhow, we’re not talking about presumption, only pretension, so here goes…
[QUOTE=Waverly]
Which of you two has been to traditional Chinese dinners, in China, and has been advised on the customs by member of Chinsese society. Show of hands?
[/QUOTE]
Yo.
I’m Cantonese. Parts of my family are very traditional. I’ll use my grandfather as my benchmark. This is a man who barely owned forks (he kept a few for guests). In his house, they ate jook and yoatao pretty much every day for breakfast (forgive my Romanization), and served dinner in the traditional men-by-age, women-by-age order. My grandmother was shocked, when she came to the States, to discover that she could not buy live chickens at the supermarket. And so on. That said, we’re very traditionally Cantonese, so if we have any regional arguments going on, I’m at a loss. Sorry on that count.
I asked him once about when you used forks and when you used chopsticks. His answer was that if you were eating out of a bowl, you used chopsticks. If you were eating off a plate, except for things like dumplings or buns or the like, you could use a fork. Why? Well, for one thing, it’s really impractical to eat off a plate with chopsticks. Rice and Chinese noodles don’t really behave very well on them, and those are your basic Chinese staple foods. It’s a matter of practicality. European food is usually served on a plate (and should be eaten with a fork), unless it’s soup, in which case you use a spoon. It’s a good way of separating the world.
See, if you want to get really traditional (this may be a regional thing, and I’ll defer to any experts) we’re not really big on forks and knives, but we’re not really big on plates either. Plates are good for serving things, not so good for eating from. If you want to babble on about harmony and symbolism, go ahead, but I’ll tell you there are precious few things more disruptive to a graceful, harmonious dinner table than chasing particulate food around a plate with a chopsticks, or making a guest uncomfortable because you don’t have eating utensils he can use.
Now… for a sense of scale. Is it wrong to use a fork? Well… it’s certainly not offensive. As far as my grandfather was concerned, it’s one of those things that isn’t quite correct, but isn’t wrong either, like… hmm. Being a slightly loud eater is about the same level of “rude”, or perhaps buttering your rolls all at once instead of tearing little parts off and buttering them from a bit of butter you put on your plate.
It’s not really worth making a fuss, and certainly not worth insulting people.
