I worked for a Japanese guy who ate some types of sushi with his fingers, and claimed that was how it was done in Japan. He was born and raised in Japan, but must have left many years ago.
I’ve tried to use the danged things several times. I could probably learn to use them with enough practice but it doesn’t seem worth the effort.
I use chopsticks at Japanese and Italian restaurants. I use a fork and spoon to eat at Chinese restaurants, but use the chopsticks to catch buzzing flies and to pinch waiter’s genitals when they mess up my order.
Have you noticed how they repeatedly mess up your order?
Yes, that’s why there are a lot of pinched Chinese genitals out there. 
In fact, I’m thinking of naming my band, Tibby and the Pinched Chinese Genitals.
You’re not here for the Hunan, are you?
Do you take your own chopsticks to the Italian restaurants?
I think it’s because the blade was shaped that way by the Inuits for scraping viscera from skin when processing furs.
I have a very odd little set of forksticks - little interlocking wooden forks that operate like chopsticks with a bigger gripping surface. They came with a grocery store salad. I love them!
Is it this?
Certainly what I remember seeing folks do while I was there. Of course mostly one would see it in the order of 1) pick up food from communal plate, 2) lay or at least touch food onto the rice in your own bowl (transferring flavour) then into face. This is also my wife’s preferred method at home.
Of God I hate those. The steel ones are, I understand, pretty much standard in Korea but I find them very hard to use. Sometime you luck out and get ones that have traction grooves on the last inch or so, but not every time at the restaurant.
Two chopstick stories. When I was visiting Guangzhou, we were eating in a neighborhood dim sum place one morning (we went there for breakfast frequently). An older lady at a table behind me called out to my fiancee and told her it was surprising to see a foreigner who could use chopsticks so well. (Sometimes I felt like I was on display. At the zoo a girl approached my SO and asked if she could take a picture of the girl with me. I wonder if that girl thought “foreign guy” was one of the zoo exhibits! 
)
A few years ago I was at a freind’s place playing expensive board games. His wife brought a bowl of Cheetos for the us to share. As soon as she picked one up, he started to glare at her. No Cheeto fingers on the game cards! She glared back, went to the kitchen and returned with two pairs of chopsticks, one for me and one for her. She is Korean, so they were metal chopsticks.
Maybe it’s a Canto thing. My wife’s family is all from H.K., and in my general experience with Cantonese food it’s often considered gross to pick food off the communual plates with your personal chopsticks. Plate chopsticks and spoons are usually provided for that, and are used to transfer food to your bowl to eat. It wouldn’t surprise me that this is mainly a H.K. quirk.
I’m trying to remember if we were ever given serving chopsticks in HK when we visited, but we didn’t eat a lot of meals there. Definitely didn’t get any in Guangzhou so it might be HK versus a general Canton thing.
No, I just ask for a pair of breadsticks.
And I almost forgot - secure your long hair up in a bun without any hairpins!
It’s practice. I learned to use chopsticks when I was 5 years old, and I’m white as you can get. (This ability impressed my colleagues from Hong Kong when we first had dim sum as a team; I guess they figured that Americans mostly can’t use them well?)
I eat Chinese food with chopsticks* to prove that I can.*
I like the point you made about the politicians who ate pizza with a fork and knife. Pizza can be so messy. When I was in high school I always chose fries and I wanted them with ketchup over them. Well, that’s messy and I find messes annoying - repeatedly having to wipe my hands or, God forbid, my clothes with a napkin (which are hard to find at the most inconvenient of times) makes me want to skip the meal. So I started using a fork and it was bliss. I didn’t think it was weird until someone asked me what the heck I was doing. Anyway, I felt superior no matter how ridiculous they thought I was being because I’d successfully solved my problem and life became a tad bit easier.
Haha that’s my jibberjabber for the day. Sorry 
I myself can’t use chopsticks. I probably never will get it down. But if I could I would always use them because it would make me feel so cultured and superior to fork-users. And I’d somehow deep inside me feel connected to Asians who do (like when someone learns a language, like German for instance, and pretty much becomes German).
:rolleyes: There certainly is a lot of stealth bragging about chopstick technique in this thread. I won’t sully my sterling “Mr. Modest” reputation engaging in same.
…however, before attending Chinese banquets where “fast chops” pays off by snagging the most choice morsels, I hone my fingering technique playing piano with a pair of chopsticks in each hand. If it’s just an average banquet, I practice Chopsticks; if it’s a really good banquet, I warm up with Liszt’s Mazeppa. I empty that moo shu pork platter out like nobody’s business, let me tell you.
How can that be? Mixing the rice with a sauce makes the rice no longer stick together, meaning to eat it with chopsticks you basically have to pick up each grain individually or eat whatever happens to sloppily stick to your chopsticks and not fall off before it gets to your mouth…