eating at American households

Ahoy,

Eating at other peoples' houses is strange. I've found that most families don't conduct dinner like my family has. In my household, we typically gather around the tv for dinner. Sure, the tv is on, but most of the time no one is paying attention unless it's primetime - in which case my brother and I are interested. For most of my life we didn't even eat at a dinner table; we ate on the coffee table, or my brother and I would run over to the tv with our bowls of rice in hand and dash between the kitchen and living room in between commercials for more food.

Eating in a Chinese household, there is little dinner time conversation. If you are talking, that probably means the food is not good. Any attempts at conversation are dashed between full mouths and mid-chew, so don't even try. You pick a seat, grab a bowl of rice and chopsticks, and everybody just pulls from common dishes whatever they want. Manners be damned! You know the food is great when all you hear is the clatter of chopsticks and slurping from bowls of rice. That's all the praise a chef needs. You are expected to eat to the full and fast, but not like you are starved. If there is any food left over, everyone will make a big fuss over who will eat it. No one will claim it for themselves, but continue offering it to each other. Beverages are not allowed with dinner. Something about mixing solids with liquids is bad for your chi, but I think it's just that my mom feared liquids would take up valuable food space. And then after your bowls have been cleared, the plates have been cleaned - then does the conversation commence, typically over tea and fruit. The children have left the table long ago and are running around wreaking havoc at this point, or watching tv.

Eating at the RRS's household is strange; it's not like eating at a Chinese household. You sit down at a table and you are expected to stay seated for hours. There are place settings with forks, spoons, and knives - no chopsticks, no tvs. There are serving platters with separate utensils for each food item, and you are expected to pass things around. Manners abound! For hours you are expected to converse while you are eating, and you are expected to maintain eye contact with people. People ask you questions mid-bite and look at you until you cover your mouth to talk with your mouth full or finish chewing and then answer. Either of these situations are awkward. People aren't too busy eating to shower the chef with praise, niceties galore. You are also allowed to drink things, I typically get 3 different drinks at the same time during dinner at his house. And then there is a separate dessert course of an actual over-sugared confection.

I'll never delight in the hours long process of clearing my plate, in which I have to pace my eating rate with conversation time, but I don't mind the dessert. Clearly I've been raised a savage, incapable of being tamed.

excrutiatingly still,
jt