“Okay, you must start with the placemats,” she said, in her lilting teacher voice.
“She” is my mother, standing beside their dining room table with both of my kids at her side. They are looking up at her, rapt, for what she considers to be a very important lesson: How to Set a Table.
This scene is from our Canada trip in July, our first family visit in two years. My mother (their grandmother) used to be a primary school teacher and, even though she is now retired and in her seventies, I never see her in her element quite so much as when she is teaching children. And my two, poised to start both grades one and two respectively, are absorbing her manner as naturally as a cob of corn takes in butter.
In preparation for the trip, the spring was spent talking at length about how dining habits are different in Canada. Iexplained that some Chinese table manners—while not considered rude in Asia—could possibly rile their Canadian grandparents.
Yet, in these discussions, I recognized, too, that (with the exception of smacking noises, which are strictly forbidden in my home regardless of geography), there are some ways in which even I have ceased to be Western at the dinner table: chopsticks and centrally shared dishes are more our default; the condoning of drinking liquid foods, like soup and zhou, direct from the bowl, for example. (In the first week of our trip, I had to remind the kids that Canadians use spoons!)
I don’t see much of a problem with all this, though. In the end, in this merged cultural swirl in which we find ourselves, we take what’s comfortable and reject what repels. Different rules for different countries; different rules for different households within those different countries. A balance.
Back to the scene:
“The napkin gets folded and put to the left of the plate,” my mother says. The kids dutifully fold napkins, racing each other to encircle the table to see who can place more than the other.
“Now, this is very important,” my mother says, pulling the kids’ attention back with a slightly raised volume and well-placed pause. They freeze and re-focus. “The fork goes on the left of the plate,” she says, placing one in demonstration.
“Now, how many letters in the word ‘left’? Let’s count them!”
My daughter is on it. She sounds it out. She holds up her fingers proudly and shouts, “FOUR!” Her grandmother beams.
“Yes! Very good. Four. And ‘fork’ also has four letters, F-O-R-K, so the fork goes on the left. That’s how you remember! Place each fork on top of the folded napkin, like this.” They mimic. The table gets laden with forks.
“The spoon and the knife,” she continues,“both go on the right! Why is that?Let’s count the letters in ‘spoon’ together!” (She does this for my son who is not quite at his sister’s spelling level.)
“S, P, O, O, N” she counts on raised fingers. They exclaim collectively: “5!”
“Now‘knife’ and ‘right’ also have five letters,” she says, subtly gracing over the silent letters in each word.
But, before they can place the rest of the cutlery, my daughter interrupts her “teacherly” grandmother with a very pertinent question that, for her, is the most obvious in the world. And with it, my mother is silenced and I find myself doubled over in laughter because, after all, there are no little English spelling rules to fully set a cross-cultural table like ours.
Her little excited voice cuts in:
“So, grandma, where do the chopsticks go, then?”
Photo Credits: Adobe
This article appeared in the beijingkids September 2019 Family Foodies issue
