If you can write with a pencil, you can master the techniques necessary for 100% of your chopstickable eating. This skill decreases the chance of being called "barbarian"
This how-to may be useful if you weren’t lucky enough to have a neighborhood Asian restaurant where the proprietor, seeing you reaching for a fork, would come over, pry the fork from your fingers and (muttering “Barbarian” under her breath) position chopsticks correctly in your hand.
Chopstick usage falls into three techniques:
- Shoveling;
- Tweezing; and
- Fly-catching
If you can write with a pencil you can master shoveling and tweezing. The good news is that you can utilize these two techniques for 100% of your chopstickable eating.
The advanced "fly-catching" technique was popularized by the late Pat Morita in The Karate Kid. Except for any spiritual insectivores out there, this technique has limited practical or nutritional value. Consequently this article will not attempt to detail the "fly-catching" technique, but maybe if you rent that movie one more time...
Tweezing
Step 1 Separate the chopsticks if necessary. Cheap chopsticks are machine-carved balsa wood joined at the head. Strictly speaking, for the shoveling technique the chopsticks don't need to be detached.
Step 2 Grasp one chopstick just like would a pencil, with the narrower end of the chopstick where the pencil point would be. Now slide your fingers up on the chopstick so two to three inches of the narrow end extends past your fingertips. Now practice moving the tip of the chopstick up and down as if you were drawing a ¾" line up and down. "Draw" over your imaginary line several times until you gain confidence in this motion.
Congratulations! You have now mastered the moving part of chopsticks. That's the hard part, the moving half. You're almost home.
Step 3 Leaving the first chopstick where you placed it, with your free hand slide the broader end of the other chopstick up through the crook between your thumb and forefinger (next to the first stick). Rest the other end of the second stick between the tips of your middle and ring fingers with the narrow end extending the same distance as the first stick. Adjust as necessary so the tips meet. This is the fixed half of the chopsticks.
Now practice that drawing motion again with the first stick so that at the bottom of the stroke the tip of the "drawing" stick touches the tip of the fixed stick. Separate the tips, touch the tips, separate them, touch them. That's all there is to it. You be tweezin'!
Tweezing is the all-purpose Western-genteel technique. I’ll teach you shoveling next. If you observe Asians in a restaurant, they're much more likely to be getting down to business rather than wasting time tweezing.
Shoveling
Shoveling is the same as the basic tweezing technique except that you don't move either stick relative to each other. Position the movable stick about ¼ inch from the fixed stick and don't move it. In this orientation you can use your chopsticks like a fork —or— for actual shoveling. Shoveling consists of holding a bowl of your target food quite close to your open mouth and using the two approximately parallel sticks to push food from the bowl and into your mouth.
When choosing whether to tweeze or shovel, be sensitive to your surroundings. At a dinner party, watch what your hostess does. If you're in an Asian restaurant frequented by Asians (a good sign that the menu is relatively authentic compared to those tailored to what someone presumes to be round-eye American or other tourist’s tastes.) you should encounter no raised eyebrows if you use the shoveling method… unless you fail to hold the bowl sufficiently close to your mouth.
With this latter possibility in mind, avoid wearing neckties or other dry-clean-only clothing until you gain a comfortable level of expertise with either method of chopsticking.
Try out your newly honed chopsticking skills on Shrimp Fried Rice, Chicken Curry or Pot Stickers
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