Out of one's depth: 04 (Chinese person eating pita/pide bread as a first course)

I've been watching a mainland Chinese drama series set in China in the 1930s and 1940s (before, during and after the Japanese Invasion).  

    There is a scene with three of the men in the story eating a Western meal at a restaurant in Qingdao city (Shandong province, east China).

    On each one's plate are two slices of bread, a slice of spam, one fried egg, two cross-sections of carrot and some unidentifiable brown thing.

    One of the men, who is very successful at running a dyeing factory but who had started life as a beggar and is illiterate, can't handle the Western cutlery provided, and asks for chopsticks.

    This reminds me of something in reverse of sorts that I'd witnessed at a soup kitchen meal provided by a charity.

    The first course was half a pouch of pita/pide flatbread, with dips (tzatziki, hummus and taramasalata) and some salad on the side.

(AI says)

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East Mediterranean flatbreads (like Greek pita, Turkish lavash, pide, and yufka) are traditionally eaten with your hands, not cutlery.  In Mediterranean and Middle Eastern dining cultures, flatbread serves as both the food and the "utensil" itself.

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    I vaguely saw, out of the corner of my eye, a young Chinese man (from mainland China or Hong Kong, going by his body language, in his mid-/late-20s or early 30s, at the next table from mine) using his knife to spread the dips on his flatbread, like what one would do with jam or honey.  

    He then proceeded to cut up the flatbread into smaller pieces with his knife and fork, like what one would do with a piece of steak, after which he delivered each piece to his mouth with his fork, the way one would do it at a Western meal.

(London, 2026)

PS.1:  For those who might be interested, Qingdao city is famous for its Tsingtao beer, with the factory set up in 1903 by the Germans still there.  

    Tsingtao is the Wade-Giles romanisation system version of 青島 / 青岛 / “green island". 

    Qingdao is the post-1949 mainland Chinese romanisation system version (called 拼音 pīnyīn / "put-together sounds").

PS.2:  Spam = spiced ham, a tinned food made of shoulder of pork and ham. The generic name is luncheon meat. Spam is a specific brand of luncheon meat. Tinned luncheon meat is fairly commonly consumed by the Chinese, and is one of the items in a Chinese New Year gift hamper in my childhood days in Singapore.