Table Manners 餐桌禮儀

Table manners differ quite a bit across cultures but, as you can see in these photos, toddlers’ eating styles are about the same wherever they are in the world 手忙腳亂. In the first photo, he is in the thick of eating 吃冰淇淋. The second photo shows the messy results and you can see that he is proud of it. A few minutes previously it was up to his eyes but I didn’t have my camera battery charged so he happily demonstrated for me again.

I’m not going to talk about differences in utensils 餐具, just the importance of utensils and decorum. In Anglo cultures, decorum is really important. Remember how your parents told you not to play with your food…well, mine told me that. Especially in formal circumstances, eating the correct way is very important in Western culture. I remember eating at this formal French restaurant, the ones where there are 8 different spoons and 7 different forks and knives each with a specific use. My father put his fork down in the wrong place and a waiter came by and sternly put it in the correct place…upon which my father put it back in the wrong place. If you say to yourself “that doesn’t happen that often”….think about that interview lunch you might have with your employer. Why are they taking you out to lunch, eh?

By contrast in Chinese culture, the use of utensils is not that important. As I have said in other posts, it is the food that is important. It’s not that there is no decorum at all. For one thing, food at a Chinese table is at the center of the table for public use 共用的. Unlike the Western table, each person does not have their own individual plate with their own individual portions. Sooo, at a formal occasion, people are expected to be polite by serving those next to them before taking a spoonful for themselves. It is only later, after others are full and perhaps drunk, that one can surreptitiously shovel half of those tasty morsels onto the plate.

A book I read previously is the memoirs of a son writing about his Chinese widower 鰥夫 father and his children who remarried an English wife. They generally got along well together but mealtimes were a real change. What used to be a noisy, tasty free-for-all dinner became a polite formal occasion with finger sandwiches. It was a really funny account of these cross-cultural differences in table manners from the viewpoint of (at the time) a little boy.