1. Green when young and yellow old

2. They have shared their minds forever.

3. Whether bitter or sweet,

4. They always taste them together.

Zhuo Wenjun, a woman who lived in Han dynasty China, allegedly wrote this poem to her lover Sima Xiangru (179–127 bce), when she gave him a pair of chopsticks. In his legendary work, Sima Qian records some details about their love story, making it proverbial throughout Chinese history. Sima Xiangru was an illustrious writer, known for his mastery of rhapsody (fu), a prevalent literary genre during the period. (Shu Xi, for instance, wrote a rhapsody on doughy food in the third century, as mentioned in Chapter 3.) As Sima Xiangru’s fame grew, he also received several marriage proposals. On one occasion, Zhuo Wangsun, the richest man in the country, invited Sima to a banquet. Sima went reluctantly. At the party, he chanted a rhapsody, receiving many accolades. Attracted by Sima’s talent, Zhuo Wenjun, Zhuo Wangsun’s newly widowed daughter, fell in love with him. But her father disapproved of it because Sima Xiangru was poor. However, the two managed to elope to Chengdu, Sichuan, eventually forcing the father to give in and accept their marriage.

To end this book, I would like to share a personal story. When I was four or five, my mother, who has been a busy career woman all her life, sat me down one afternoon, asking me to practice the correct use of chopsticks. Of course, as a child growing up in China, I had been using chopsticks, along with a spoon, to eat before then. But my mother thought that I had reached the right age to learn to use chopsticks the right way. She taught me the correct method and asked me to clasp and move my toy wooden blocks spread on the table. What a long and grueling afternoon! I did not, initially, feel natural holding and using the chopsticks in the way she taught me. But in the end, I got used to it. And I have been using the utensil this way ever since.

I assume my experience was not uncommon among my generation, for as I was growing up, I saw many people use chopsticks the same way. Of course, I also saw some others who used the utensil in their own self-developed ways. Honestly, I must say that I find my way, or the way I learned from my mother, both more elegant and effective. In more recent decades, as an academic, I have traveled extensively across Asia. I have seen that most Japanese, Vietnamese and Koreans hold chopsticks in the same way that I do. How is this so? Did they have similar childhood experiences? Why do so many people in the region, or in the chopsticks cultural sphere, bother to learn to use the implement to convey foods?

Over one and a half billion people eat food with chopsticks daily. This is the first book in English that traces the history of the utensil from ancient times to the present day. The aim of this book is threefold. The first is to offer a comprehensive and reliable account of how and why chopsticks became adopted by their users and continued, as a dining habit, through the centuries in Asia and beyond. The second is to discuss the culinary impact of chopsticks use on Asian cookeries and cuisines and vice versa: how the change of foodways in the region influenced people’s choice of eating tools to aid their food consumption. And the third is to analyze the cultural meanings of chopsticks and chopsticks use in the respective cultures of their users. Chopsticks are distinctive in that though mainly an eating implement, they also have many other uses. A rich and deep cultural text is embedded in the history of chopsticks, awaiting our exploration.

Over many centuries, chopsticks have helped distinguish their users in Asia from those in the rest of the world. So much so that some Japanese scholars have identified a distinct “chopsticks cultural sphere” vis-à-vis the other two spheres on the globe: those who feed with fingers, which was a dining tradition for the people in the Middle East, South Asia and some parts of Southeast Asia, and those who eat with forks and knives, or the people who live in today’s Europe, North and South America, Australia, etc. Other scholars, such as Lynn White, have also noticed this tripartite division among the finger-feeders, the fork-feeders and the chopsticks-feeders in the world. Centering on China, where the utensil originated, the chopsticks cultural sphere encompasses the Korean Peninsula, the Japanese archipelago, certain regions of Southeast Asia, the Mongolian Steppe and the Tibetan Plateau. Thanks to the increasing global popularity of Asian foods in recent decades, this sphere is expanding – people outside the zone have increasingly adopted chopsticks while eating Asian foods. Indeed, in Chinese and other Asian restaurants throughout the world, many non-Asian customers attempt the use of chopsticks, with some showing admirable dexterity. In Thailand and Nepal, where the traditional dining method is to use one’s right hand, it is now increasingly common to see people use chopsticks to convey foods.

Chopsticks are pronounced the same as “bridge” in Japanese, as mentioned previously. Since the mid-nineteenth century, after Asia became incorporated into the modern world, the eating tool has indeed played such a part in bridging food cultures in that continent and those around the globe. As Chinese food moves from “China to Chinatown,” to borrow the title of J.A. G. Roberts’s recent book, chopsticks have also traveled along the pathway to regions outside the chopsticks cultural sphere of Asia. For a non-Asian customer, using chopsticks to convey food, perhaps, is the culmination and crystallization of the dining experience in a Chinese/Asian restaurant. To cater to and cultivate such interest, many Chinese restaurant owners also use “chopsticks” to name their restaurants outside China, for example “Golden Chopsticks” and “Bamboo Chopsticks” are popular. Of course, chopsticks are not only found in Chinese restaurants, they are also provided for customers at Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese and sometimes Thai restaurants. As such, chopsticks use adds to the global appeal of Asian foods. If chopsticks are a “bridge,” they bring together food cultures not only between Asians and non-Asians but also among Asians.

In his masterpiece, Records of the Grand Historian, Sima Qian relates many fascinating episodes happening during the Han dynasty (206 bce to 220 ce), a great era in early imperial China. Some of them, interestingly, feature chopsticks. In his biographical account of Liu Bang (256–195 bce), Sima records that while preparing to seize power, Liu, who grew up in northern Jiangsu near Longqiuzhuang and later became Emperor Gaozu after founding the dynasty, once considered a strategic plan by a counselor over a meal. But Zhang Liang (256–186 bce), his main and most trusted advisor, opposed it. In order to persuade Liu, Zhang borrowed several chopsticks and made a strong counterargument. And he prevailed in the end; Liu decided to adopt his plan instead. Sima does not tell exactly how Zhang used chopsticks to explain his objection. But the story has been well remembered in history ever since. It reveals that Liu and his staff, among others, used chopsticks in eating their food.

Chopsticks appear in another biography in the Records of the Grand Historian. Its protagonist is Zhou Yafu (199–143 bce), a distinguished and capable general under Han Emperors Wen (r. 176–157 bce) and Jing (r. 157–141 bce), son and grandson of Emperor Gaozu. Thanks to his remarkable accomplishments, Zhou became trusted by both emperors during most of their reigns. But in the end, perhaps due to his arrogance, Zhou lost Emperor Jing’s trust. Sima records an episode in which one day Zhou was summoned to court to dine with the Emperor and found a big chunk of meat in his food tray with no sliced pieces, nor chopsticks. He turned around asking for chopsticks, only to be mocked by the Emperor: “Was this treatment not good enough for you?” Feeling insulted and humiliated, Zhou thanked the Emperor and left the court without touching the food.

In 1996 Samuel P. Huntington (1927–2008), then professor of government at Harvard University, published The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order, a New York Times bestseller that year. Huntington argued that three major civilizations had been formed in the world: the Western Judeo-Christian civilization, the East Asian Confucian civilization and the Middle Eastern Islamic civilization. Interestingly, if this tripartite partition could indeed map out the world, then these civilizations are distinguished from one another not only in terms of religious traditions, cultural ideals and political institutions (factors Huntington considers most seriously) but they also differ in culinary practices and dining customs, which are little noted in Huntington’s book. As mentioned in the Introduction, from the 1970s, food historians in Japan, such as Isshiki Hachirō, and American historian Lynn White in the 1980s had already observed that three dining customs, or food cultural spheres, existed in the world: (1) eating with hand(s); (2) eating with forks, knives and spoons; and (3) eating with chopsticks. Isshiki detailed that the first sphere, constituting about forty percent of the world’s population, consists of peoples living in South and Southeast Asia, the Middle and Near East, and Africa. The second sphere, about thirty percent of the population, is composed of the peoples of Europe and North and South America. And the third, or the chopsticks cultural sphere, constituting another thirty percent of the world population, includes the Chinese, the Japanese, Koreans and the Vietnamese. These marked differences in dining customs, Isshiki further explained, reflect and extend the differences in food intake (e.g. whether one eats meat or not and whether the grain staple is a plant or a root tuber), food preparation, and eating etiquette and table manners. Geographically and demographically speaking, Isshiki’s, White’s and Huntington’s divisions of the world are identical.