Learning Chopsticks

In Guanlong Cao's essay titled “Chopsticks”, an excerpt from a longer memoir entitled The Attic: Memoirs of a Chinese Landlord's Son, Cao recounts a tale from his automotive school days in Shanghai China of students crafting their own chopsticks. Cao tells us about how the students made their chopsticks and the clandestine maneuvers required to obtain the raw materials. Some of the students went to great lengths to carve very elaborate chopsticks that were sometimes used to acquire a boyfriend or girlfriend. This is an enjoyable essay that not only illustrates a footnote in Chinese history between the 1950's and 1970's, but also brings some humor and a sense of irony to what many westerners may consider a dark time for a little understood country.
Cao begins by telling us about his four years spent at an automotive manufacturing school in Shanghai, China. The conditions at the school were harsh. Meals were scarce. So scarce, in fact, that the administrators encouraged more sedate pass times such as chess and cards so that the students would not use up the precious few calories they gained from the food (Cao 109). All of the students wore pouches that contained their personal set of chopsticks. The clandestine manufacture of these personal utensils became the favored hobby among the students.
The most treacherous stage in making one's own chopsticks was stealing the bamboo. The student dormitories were constructed of bamboo and the students would go on nightly raids, stealing bamboo stalks from the piles used by the maintenance workers to make repairs. At first no one noticed a few missing stalks, but as the fad grew, the construction department began complaining about the missing materials. Ultimately the superintendent of the school banned students from taking the bamboo to make the chopsticks. This slowed down the thievery, but it didn't stop the practice altogether (Cao 109).
The home made chopsticks became more than simple eating utensils. Some students went to lengthy steps to construct elaborately carved models. Modifications included four and five sided sticks (instead of the usual round) and calligraphy carvings (Cao 110). Some of these more elaborate sticks were used by the boys to attract a girlfriend even though dating was explicitly banned. If a girl liked a boy's chopsticks she would accept the gift and in return would make a slip cover for the boy's sticks. Cao ironically notes a certain Freudian symbolism in this interaction (Cao 111).
The tone of this essay is very warm and sentimental (Aaron 110). Cao bathes the reader in the warm light of fond remembrance. Most of us have gone through periods of difficulty and struggle. Like Cao, we tend to remember those times much more fondly in retrospect than we actually felt in the moment. While this sentimentality may render the story less accurate, it wasn't the author's intent to present an analytical history, but rather a kind impression of the moment.
The language of the essay is efficient and succinct (Aaron 167-174). Cao rarely uses more than a few words in a sentence, giving the essay a quick, fresh pace. Those quick sentences themselves portray a protagonist of youthful mind, full of vigor and immediacy. The language lends the story a Conradian gallop that helps the reader feel as if he were at that same school full of adolescents taking part, at breakneck pace, in the same bamboo raids and chopstick mating rituals.
Cao throws in a dollop of ironic humor at the end of the essay (Aaron 61-62). “We never heard about Freud, but with our raw wisdom we subconsciously felt that there was some symbolic meaning, which could hardly be expressed in words, in this exchange, in the coming and going of the chopsticks and the sleeves” (Cao 110-11). Adolescents certainly entertain pubescent rituals. Their clumsily overt sexuality is a bit like trying to play pool in the dark. The Freudian innuendo of placing a boy's chopsticks into a girl's pouch made especially for him is difficult to avoid.
Guanlong Cao's brief history of his adolescent school experiences in Shanghai, China is a warm reminiscence. He uses the students' ritual of stealing bamboo and fashioning chopsticks to not only capture a moment in time that might otherwise have been lost to history, but to weave a tale familiar to us all, of our own adolescent rituals. A simple, humorous story like this can bring human beings a little closer together, even though China and the West may often sit far apart shaking their heads and looking perplexed at one another.

Works Cited
Aaron, Jane. LB Brief. 4th ed. New York: Pearson Longman, 2011
Cao, Guanlong. “Chopsticks.” Every Day, Every Where Global Perspectives On Popular Culture. Ed. Stuart Hirschberg and Terry Hirschberg. 1st ed. Boston: McGraw-Hill, 2002. 108-11.