Instinctive reaction from upbringing: 03

In a Chinese restaurant in London's Chinatown one day in the 1980s, next to me was a table of Chinese people, numbering about ten.

    From their verbal interactions, I worked out that they were either Singapore or Malaysian Chinese from the Teochew dialect group -- which is my dialect group, therefore should be fairly similar in their cultural practices to me.

    Visually, it was also obvious that they were three (or four?) generations of the same family sharing a meal out:  a grandma, a couple of young children below 10, with the rest being the generation(s) between.

    There was a lot of criss-crossing of chopsticks at the table as everyone (except the ones below the age of 15) helped everyone else to the spread in the middle of the table.

    I was struck by how different they were to my family:  we never did anything of the kind, and certainly not to use our own chopsticks to pick up food to put in the bowls of other people, even if they were family.

    The mainland Chinese drama series I was watching on YouTube a little while ago (set in the China of 1977–92, which has inspired quite a few blogs here) has a fair number of eating scenes.

    Members of the same family would pick up morsels from various dishes to put in the bowls of other members, most typically parents for their younger children, or grown-up children for their elderly parents.

    (This is a fairly typical manifestation of the hierarchy of caring within the Chinese family:  the middle generation looking after the ones above and below.)

    However, this picking up of food for other people with one's own chopsticks was also done across relationship boundaries:  between good friends and neighbours even.

    I'm now watching another mainland Chinese drama series on YouTube.  There is a scene with three people, who are colleagues as well as good friends and neighbours, eating a hotpot meal with their bakery shop manager.  Here are my notes:

    Quote 今生有你.2 (15:00) hot pot meal, they dip their own chopsticks into the hot pot!!; serving girlfriend with own chopsticks is acceptable given their intimate relationship, but picking up raw ingredients to put into the hot pot, even stirring the raw ingredients around, is uggh. Unquote