The place was tiny, much smaller than what would be viable at home at the Maple Leaf Café, yet the chef and his helper—his wife, as I thought—kept moving new people into the shop to take the places of those who had just paid up. When I couldn’t describe what a chopped-egg sandwich was and make myself understood, I pointed to the plate of one of my fellow diners and mimed my request for the same: it turned out to be mostly rice, but with a few vegetables and unidentifiable but tasty meat thrown in. I’d known from the beginning that I was sooner or later going to have to master the art of the chopstick or die of starvation. In practice it didn’t turn out to be as daunting as I’d feared. The secret was to keep one of the sticks solid and immobile, while the other did all the roaming and squeezing. To grab a particular morsel, I sometimes skewered it with a single chopstick. It might have earned me a penalty, but the referee wasn’t looking. I liked the challenge of eating in the Eastern way, even if I did get a stain on my clean shirt.
