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How to Pick Up Anything
Learning to use chopsticks has brought me closer to my culture
My father handed me a folded slip of red paper. Printed inside were the instructions, saved from a recent restaurant excursion, for using chopsticks: Tuck under thumb and hold firmly. Add second chopstick, hold it as you hold a pencil. Hold first chopstick in original position, move the second one up and down. Now you can pick up anything.
He wanted me to learn the proper method, in which the eater only moves the top chopstick. Mine crossed in the back, both chopsticks moving at the same time, like a pair of scissors.
My husband smirked. Even though he’s not Chinese, he had the right approach, because he’s the sort who follows every step of the recipe while I’m always improvising before I get to the end of the instructions. “The food gets to my mouth. That’s what matters,” I said. With chopsticks, I ate enthusiastically and doggedly, but not always with finesse — which also describes how I’ve made my way in life.
I understood how using chopsticks might double as a test of cultural authenticity. It reflected how much of my heritage my immigrant Chinese parents passed down to me.
Whenever my father had chided me in the past for solving problems with “brute-force,” I had secretly taken it as a compliment. “Please try,” he now pleaded. This lesson seemed belated, after he’d guided me through so many other lessons already. He taught me how to ride my bike on a wide stretch of blacktop; how to drive our lime-green Buick LeSabre, stately as a cruise ship; and at my wedding, he’d walked me down the aisle — at my side at different stages in my march towards adulthood.
At this late date, when I was in my early thirties, he still felt a paternal duty, but I didn’t have any desire to learn. Why bother? I was American born and bred, and I’d never be a Chinese maiden in a long silk robe, plucking a zither in a garden. Yet I also understood how using chopsticks might double as a test of cultural authenticity. More than a way to eat, it reflected — measured? — how much of my heritage my immigrant Chinese parents passed down to me, just as mastering the rituals…
