Knife, fork or chopsticks？

      Friend D said that recently at a large restaurant, while drinking tea, he saw a young couple nearby eating with the old lady whom they got acquainted  with in a foreign country. The old lady was interested in the operation of chopsticks, learning to use chopsticks to get the shrimp dumplings. D said that he has an American friend, who had spent some time studying the methods of proper use of chopsticks whenever he has the opportunity to show you, and said that using chopsticks is a kind of art, also an ancient Chinese culture.

     Chinese people eat with chopsticks, foreigners use knife and fork to eat. In fact, foreigners didn’t use knife and fork before but used a kind of fork made of  wood. This fork spread from Italy through Istanbul to the United Kingdom, the two spines becoming meat fork (two-pronged fork). Prior to this, people ate meat by hand, so someone described switching to meat fork as "an insult to God who gives five fingers to the people."

     Chopsticks are also called "zhu", allegedly because of chopsticks and "live" homonym, meaning stop, which is bad to going boating, so Jiangsu sailors renamed them as "kuaizi", sounding like "be quick", not stop but go quickly, smoothly. Japanese chopsticks read as hashi, and it seems somewhat related to boat. There is a famous Japanese saying "only eat with chopsticks", meaning "tea to hand, mouth open for rice". On the Chinese table each is served a spoon and chopsticks (zhuchi). With a pair of chopsticks and a spoon, maybe there would not be so combative as knife and fork?