A friend who recently came from a tour of Korea brought me a pair of beautiful silver chopsticks wrapped in a cloth case with intricate embroidery. I don’t plan to use it and instead keep it among my collection of souvenir chopsticks.
I did the same for a schoolmate when I first visited China. She was dying of cancer and asked me to bring her beautiful chopsticks to display at home as a conversation piece. She died a year after I gave her my pasalubong.
I don’t know exactly how the idea began but I would imagine that it must have evolved from the habit of picking hot food such as grilled meat on red coals with sticks. The ancient Chinese must have discovered that it was easier to chew on bits of barbecue with a pair of sticks, perhaps made of bamboo which was always abundant.
Newly cut and polished from whatever wood they were made of, the chopsticks proved to be more hygienic than using hands or a spoon to eat. Cebuano newspapers before the 1920s ridiculed the Chinese way of eating with a pair of sipit or sticks. Yet, in those days when soap was scarce and toilet paper was practically non-existent, the writers also warned of how the “shameful” practice of eating using one’s bare hands was a major source of spreading disease.
The awareness of micro-organisms or germs as source of diseases was actually a recent event. It probably came with the microscope, which, for the first time, made people see a whole zoo swimming in a drop of, say, spit. Before that, people simply relied on their nose: if something didn’t smell bad, it was thought to be clean.
The spoon, which evolved from the bigger ladle, became the extension of the hand. The fork came later and soon the barbaric spoon was abandoned for the knife to give Western aristocrats a sense of dining sophistication.
Such a cutlery split is hard to understand for the Filipino, who looks at the spoon and fork as husband and wife. My foreigner friend, who lived in France before coming here, wonders why Filipinos dislike eating with a fork and knife in more formal dinners.
Like the husband in a patriarchal society, the spoon gets a privileged position in the politics of the table. Rough and realistic, it is the male cutlery. That’s how the Filipino looks at it, I told him.
Still, another friend, an old wisecrack, once likened the spoon to a prostitute: “You are not the first. So many others have used it before you.” After what he said, I found it hard to eat with a spoon without thinking of how previously it had entered and come out of so many mouths.
That’s when I started to like chopsticks. At home and in the office, I keep my own pair stored in a thin plastic case. I can wash and reuse them so I won’t have to use office cutlery which is for communal use.
And when I’m traveling I always bring a pair of disposables in the backpack for emergency use, as when you discover a great street-side noodle shop but see that the people in charge don’t seem to boil their spoons and forks.
So I often find myself eating cheap batchoy or mami in a downtown street stall with a pair of disposable bamboo chopsticks.There’s nothing like eating noodles with a pair of chopsticks. It’s much easier to clip and slurp noodles with them rather than with a spoon and fork.
Yet, it’s also awkward to do so when you don’t look Chinese or Korean. Those eating at the next tables will think you are pretentious. But I’d rather attract curious stares than hepatitis, tuberculosis, and other worse diseases that may come from unwashed or unsterilized spoons.
Some foods are best eaten with chopsticks and in bowls rather than on a plate with spoon and fork. They include Chinese, Korean and Japanese food, of course, but also—at least for me—pasta.
As in drinking tea, I learned the habit of eating with chopsticks in China, where we had to learn using them to pick up everything on the table from Western-style bread to peanuts. Then there’s the whole set of etiquette based on superstition.
Most Filipinos find chopsticks cumbersome. The Pinoys I chanced upon eating at the buffet in our hotel in China only had cakes and deserts. They didn’t like the food which they did not understand, they said. And they didn’t want to be caught having difficulty eating with chopsticks.
As they said this, they made all sorts of gestures with their chopsticks to make fun of themselves oblivious to the other people in the restaurants who stared at them, obviously irritated. It looked like we haven’t really improved much since the 1920s.