A Guide to Using Chopsticks, Parts 1-6
Elaine Chiew
1.
If you hold them too close to the tips that pick up food, you’ll mate with a short, stumpy person.
Victor nods. I’m just over five feet, but I tell him I’m 153 cm, and watch him do the metric conversion and check my measurements against my veracity, his gaze landing on my curled bare toes, his moment-to-moment thoughts behind those green eyes as transparent as sea glass, even the decision he makes that he doesn’t mind the height because the girl is cute.
We’re eating Chinese take-out in my apartment; slutty of me, as we’d met only hours ago at an a capella gospel session in Brooklyn Heights, a free meet-up session to learn a new skill, this being the closest we get to church on a Sunday. Swaying on our feet, clapping our hands, shouting more than singing Hallelujah, his shoulders kept bumping my head, and I noticed his hands are practically the size of my face. Thick and padded and furry like bear claws. I’d wondered if they were warm.
Victor holds his chopsticks two inches from the bottom. The top ends splay like ungainly legs while the slice of Hunan lamb wiggles in his grip. It doesn’t make it to his mouth. His paws are foam hands holding two spindly sticks. I like that this boy may not be able to feed himself without my help.
Later, I discover the temperature of those hands. Hot. Like a furnace.
*
2.
When scooping rice with your chopsticks, position the sticks underneath a tumulus of rice, hold the bowl close to your mouth, lift gently so that the cloud does not have far to travel.
Victor and I like staring up at clouds while lying on a picnic blanket in the park, snacking on take-away and kaki-no-tane. That one is a galleon, see? Victor calls me Dora the Explorer because my name is Eudora (I named myself after Eudora Welty whilst majoring in English in Boston) and I’m constantly talking about places I’d like to visit. What Victor doesn’t know is that I have a Chinese name I detest, Foo See Li (throughout college, the constant refrain was: your name is fusilli?).
My parents are coming from Malaysia to visit for a month, I casually mention. Victor envelopes me with his arms and legs, like a koala, and burnishing kisses all down my throat. Okay, sure. Can I meet them?
That one is a castle. I point upwards, but he’s missing all the subtle hints. I’m in such a state over him that at work, I keep doodling bear claws, and my editor thinks I’m doing a piece on nature reserves. I’m the Arts and Culture columnist for a poor-paying online magazine that’s all about the number of eyeballs per article. Any time there’s an article on Chinese culture, I’m their go-to person. Lately, I’ve been wondering about orientalised cultural packaging, the significance of translation and intended audiences, and whether my articles – on traditional Chinese bridalwear as fashion art pieces, for example, or understanding chopsticks etiquette – help or hinder the way culture is transmitted.
You’re not going to be the same after you meet them, I say. There’s going to be a Before and After, like reading a Toni Morrison novel.
Victor’s eyes glaze a little, he doesn’t get all the bookish references, but then, I don’t get all the wood warp repair references. Victor designs furniture, and when he first said it, I fantasised about a house full of bespoke pieces he designed. Right now, I’m thinking about how to broach the topic of moving in together, although we’ve only been dating six weeks.
*
3.
When pincering a piece of meat with chopsticks to serve others, turn the chopsticks around and use the top ends, so you don’t end up mixing saliva and inadvertently kissing.
We’re in a Chinese restaurant in midtown Manhattan and Ma eyes Victor with the scary eyes of a Chinese hopping ghost. The choy sum is wilting on the table, the crab claws are raised. Victor’s mound of rice falls, sticking on the tablecloth when he tries to pick it up. He brays with laughter. Why do you want to marry my daughter, Ma demands.
Victor’s mouth falls open. Dad looks embarrassed and scoops rice rapidly into his mouth.
I should’ve prepared Victor better before unleashing the stormy weather that is my mother on him, but I turned chickenshit several nights ago when he said marriage is an institution used to corral people into forms of socially acceptable behavior. Like religion.
Stunned, I said, Culture does that too.
Yeah, but you can easily opt out of culture and no one judges you. If I don’t like Woody Allen movies, I don’t have to go watch them.
Well, I don’t like Thai food.
Victor looked surprised, his eyes sliding side to side, uncertain where I was coming from or going with the non sequitur. He loves Thai food. Luckily, we’re eating Japanese or he might take it as overt criticism.
I’m saying I still eat it. Institutions aren’t abstract things, is what I’m saying. They work in tandem with people’s desires and wishes and dreams.
Aight. He cast around for the soya sauce boat to dip his salmon nigiri in then promptly lost control of it with his chopsticks, and that was the end of that conversation.
Frankly, I’m not all that gung-ho about marriage myself, but to sell the idea of moving in together to my parents, I have to lie that marriage is somewhere mapped on our trajectories.
What do you do, Victor? Dad now turns his chopsticks around, serves Victor a choice piece of fish. Eat, eat, he says. The Chinese geopolitics of love is through the stomach and chopsticks are the bridge.
When I met Victor’s parents, I told them I work for a well-subscribed online magazine, even though they hadn’t asked. Actually, they hadn’t asked me a single question about myself, and I wondered if that was because I was one lollipop within the pack who had met his parents, or whether it was a cultural thing.
At my father’s question, Victor waves his chopsticks. I make cabinets. I’m a furniture maker. A pellet of rice lands on his shirt.
Furniture designer, I hastily add. Ma’s eyes narrow.
Victor serves my father but does not turn his chopsticks around. Dad visibly blanches, gently places the sliver of beef on his side-plate.
*
4.
To take a sip of tea while eating, gently place your chopsticks on the chopstick rest provided before picking up your cup. Sticking the chopsticks in the rice-bowl is equivalent to planting joss sticks in front of an ancestral shrine.
A carpenter, Ma huffs. We’re back at my apartment and Victor is back at his.
Furniture design, I mumble.
Jesus was a carpenter, says Dad.
But He was a virgin! Ma chews her Mentos vigorously.
In college, my first boyfriend was Chinese. He picked his bowl clean of every speck of rice, a regular chopstick maestro, for fear of getting a wife with a face full of acne scars like pitted strawberry skin. The next guy I dated after that was Latin American. He drummed the table with his chopsticks, beating out salsa and merengue beats. Neither of them had been presented to my parents. Victor is the first. Like a sacrificial offering, poor lamb.
Ma, I take a deep breath before plunging in, I really like him. The Mandarin word is xihuan, because ai is so melodramatic a Chinese heroine in a historical drama admits it only on the point of death, e.g. before she pitches herself over the lip of a two hundred feet cascading waterfall.
Cultural hubris permeates any negotiation with my parents to get what I want, which is to live my life the way I see fit. I think about the way Victor sucks on his chopsticks. I think about his bear claws. Victor caresses the wood he uses for his furniture before he applies sandpaper. He strokes and rubs and abrades the top layer, and in so doing, excises away.
*
5.
A pair of chopsticks is inseparable. To use it to cut or slice, separate only the tips but not the bodies of the chopsticks.
Inexplicably, during my parents’ visit, I become as horny as a female panda in her ovulation period. This inures to Victor’s benefit, as a result of which he bends over backwards to be nice to my parents. Ma tells him to call her Aunty; he does.
Victor shows my parents around Battery Park and the Statue of Liberty. Takes them on a sunset cruise sailing around Manhattan. Ma comes back in awe of bridges. Brooklyn Bridge is her favourite, Williamsburg Bridge is meh.
Depends on the light you’re viewing things in, I say.
Ma glares at me. Why is New York so dirty? I feel like I want to take a big mop and just clean it up.
When Ma became ‘of marriageable age’, my grandmother apparently spanked her whenever she caught my mother smiling at a boy or even just wearing lipstick. Even though I understood how my mother, too, is a product of cultural institutionalisation, with Confucian verities grafted onto the body as if it were an amphora with markings, it doesn’t make me more tolerant of her acidic barbs or stop wishing for her to upgrade.
Something else must’ve happened on the cruise. My parents and Victor rope me into playing fan tan together, fan tan!, Ma explaining the rules to me and Victor, the both of us learning it for the first time together, Ma and Victor laughing like a pair of thieves. The presence of one Caucasian changes my relationship with Ma from a simple equation of 1 + 1 = 2 to a goddamn Venn diagram, where the overlap of the three of us is so small it’s negligible:
Next, of course, is food tutorials. Admission into a Malaysian Chinese household requires wok demonstrations and an ability to toss vegetables in the air during a stir-fry. Victor stands by the wok and flings in cut vegetables while Ma brandishes a long pair of cooking chopsticks like a pirate.
As a teenager, I tried to learn how to cook from my mother. Much danger was involved. Ma used a Chinese cleaver regardless of whether a mince or chop was called for, rendering the whole lesson in tones more suitable for a bazaar. My onion slices were too big, my chicken thigh pieces looked like roadkill and I burned myself holding the handle of the wok, and Ma subsequently threw me out of her kitchen. I’ve steered clear since.
Here she is with Victor, in my kitchen, the two of them discussing the fine points of Chinese stir-fry. Ma: you make the sauce in the wok by pushing the vegetables to the sides and clearing out space in the centre; Victor: oh, like a football game; Ma: no, not like a football game, like a koi pond; Victor: koi pond?
Chinese mother-daughter relationships are a cultural subset within a larger collective understanding that no amount of etiquette can break through. An inner cartography not so easily traversable, moving towards one destination entails going further away from another.
One afternoon, Ma bursts in on us in the bedroom while Victor and I are kissing. We are fully clothed but we are on the bed. No such thing as accidental in the Chinese mother-daughter relationship dictionary. Ma dumps the laundry basket on the bed and picks up Victor’s dirty socks from the floor. In a churchy tone, she asks why we are so dirty! When she means messy.
Victor lights out of my apartment as if he’s chased by a swarm of hornets.
I doodle pandas at work; my editor asks how my article about Chinese amusement parks is coming along, even though I never once said it was anything Chinese or even amusing.
*
6.
It’s verboten to pass food from one pair of chopsticks to another. Equally, chopsticks shouldn’t be used to flick through a dish to select what one wants to eat.
After my parents fly home, Victor doesn’t call. Or only when I call him. He doesn’t leave a message; I only see a missed call. Occasionally, typing…on Whatsapp, but no text follows.
It’s Saturday; I’ve no idea what Victor is doing because I haven’t called him. Picnic blanket in hand, I wander out to Prospect Park. The clouds look heavy and full; the air, too, is thick as milk. Atmospheric substrates that nestle within existence but remain chemically mysterious to the naked eye. A promise of rain, and maybe I welcome that.
That one looks like a pillow, I whisper, my head pillowed on my hand, my other shielding my eyes, so I can see with more clarity. In the cloud formations, Victor is placing a cushion on the floor. He gets down on one knee, hands me a box. Inside are two identical rings made of wood, which he’d painstakingly carved. He takes my hand and says they are rings of togetherness rather than marriage. Like double happiness.
The clouds change pattern, obscuring the wan sun. Victor, wearing one of those traditional Mandarin collar gowns Chinese tycoons wear. Victor, looking at me, uncomprehending. Didn’t you want a traditional Chinese wedding?
Victor, who says, Your mother says the Chinese bow before a suckling pig’s head while sticking incense in it. Is that what happens at a traditional Chinese wedding?
It’s not the pig’s head we’re bowing to, Victor.
What I don’t say. All the things I don’t say. Victor, I love you so much and yet, what I want is not someone who gets my culture and not me.
*
Go home, draw yourself a bath. You’re itchy all over from the grass that has been poking through the thin blanket. Order pasta on the phone, ask the guy who takes down the order if he has a splayd. Set out tealights, run more hot water from the tap, blast Nicki Minaj on Spotify. Eat the pasta that arrives while in the bath. Get slammed by what feels like a ton of bricks midway through. Immerse your head below the surface. The water is so hot it nearly smothers you. Surface, sob like a baby. Stuff your face to stifle the sobs and drop pasta in the bath water. Tell yourself it’s nothing compared to the pain of having to explain chopstick culture all the time; the endless translations – English to Chinese, Chinese to English, translation-ring-around-the-rosy – those endless translations between Ma and Victor in that envisioned future togetherness would make all three of you fall down. Tell yourself he’s a carpenter, Ma is more spot on than she could’ve imagined. Tell yourself your translations, perfect as they are for online magazines, have never grooved but the top layers because you can’t translate you to yourself.
***