chopsticks = china

"That Chinese cuisine is the greatest in the world is highly debatable and is essentially irrelevant. But few can take exception to the statement that few other cultures are as food oriented as the Chinese" - Chang Kwang-chih 1977.

To jump start this DISP I would like to throw something out there. This evening, sitting in an extremely crowded shitang (cafeteria) with my friend Ben, we found ourselves discussing the ever-present difficulties posed to us foreigners with the eating utensils provided for us. Both Ben and I are new to the art of chopstick dining, and I think we have picked it up relatively quickly seeing as we have no other choice. I began to realize the strengthy comparison between the use of chopsticks and our experience in China.

• It is a bit awkward at first, but you get used to it with time.
  
• Food constantly slips from in between the sticks back into the soupy dish from which it came. This is a perfect representation of learning Chinese. After learning a vocabulary word or grammatical rule, it generally slips from your mind over and over again until finally it can be remembered, recalled, and processed in the brain.
  
• With chopsticks we can't seem to eat everything we want to. It is very difficult to cut big pieces of food with a smooth stick. With the academic restrictions of the study program we are unable to go on long journeys throughout China or explore as freely as we would sometimes like, but this is most likely part of the culture of China.
  
• After awhile your hand starts to hurt and get tired. After just a short month in China, I am already pretty mentally, emotionally and physically exhausted. Still the prospects of adventures to come keep us going everyday.
  
• I find myself poking people around me with my chopsticks, or hitting them in the face with my elbow in the attempt to get a small piece of rice or peanut from the bottom of the dish. We are CLEARLY foreigners in China. Westerners stick out like a sore thumb in almost every situation. We don't know the language, we don't know the directions to walk in, we are loud, we have different color hair and appearanaces, maybe we even smell funny. I constantly feel like I am impeding the Chinese in their own home. And believe you me, the stares are out of control here. Sometimes it feels like we are from a different planet and we just landed in Beijing and no one has seen an alien before so they stare like there is no tomorrow.
  
• After awhile, you get use to it. Enough said.
  

All in all, China is a pretty cool place. Within a short period of time I realized how important food was to China. How could I not spend a substantial portion of my time in Beijing not researching (and eating) the vast array of foods?! With chopsticks in hand and Chen Tao, my trustee DISP tutor and translation expert at my side we set out to explore the endless possabilties of knowledge acquisition in the field of food.

Dai Haur Jian!
dèng lín lín