Chopsticks

Photography by Jisu Yee, staff writer.

There’s a pleasure in something that always works. You were nine, at a family dinner, and your dad was determined to teach you to use chopsticks if it’s the only thing you do that night. Imagine you’re holding two pencils, but just at the very ends. Don’t clench your wrist, that’ll restrict your range of motion. No, no, not like that, like this, I just showed you. The cadence of his instructions reminded you of a music teacher telling their student how to play an instrument. It’s the third time he’s tried to teach you, silicone trainer chopsticks and the “she’ll get it eventually” mindset having failed. You and your dad stopped eating for a while—your uncle, aunt, and grandparents glanced over but didn't interrupt, and you tried to stop your hand from shaking. It’s the fastest you’ve ever learned something truly important. Reading, writing, and counting took years. Under a period of intense focus, chopsticks took twenty-five minutes to master. Long enough that you felt justified in calling it a “skill.”

You have tried to piecemeal Hangul together, syllable by syllable. Lessons in elementary with only one other girl were beyond embarrassing, so you quit. You traded in Korean workbooks to learn Spanish in high school. Somehow, even after years of listening to your parents speak, what is supposed to be your language, your ancestors’ language, refuses to sit on your tongue. Even the Spanish accent and grammar came easier.

With chopsticks, you acquired not just a tool but a new method of speaking at the table. You relished the added precision, the strength of your grip, the admiration from your family. Halmoni cheered when you picked up bulgogi for the first time. From that point, there was no grain of rice too small, no snack that couldn’t be given an elegant touch. Waiters at Asian restaurants don’t swap out your chopsticks for a fork. You now consider yourself a connoisseur: wood is good. Not the takeout kind, the glossy sanded-down rounded out kind. Metal is better, except when it’s so flat that the edges dig into the sides of your fingers.

Sometimes, you actually don’t mind having the Korean language skills of a toddler. Your parents and the internet are willing to translate. Your cousins can speak a bit of English. You’re not particularly interested in K-pop, but many good Korean films or books come with subtitles and translations. You write down their names. There is still a slight feeling of accomplishment when a word comes up in a TV show that you see is not translated properly; you know you could’ve done it better. Or how your mom says a phrase, and you feel what it means in your heart before needing to figure it out in your head.

When you are fifteen, you are trusted to go hunt for a new set of utensils at a department store. The aisle seems to be filled with tens if not hundreds of spoons, forks, chopsticks. 

In 1443, King Sejong the Great said that using Chinese characters for the Korean spoken language was “like trying to fit a square handle into a round hole.” He developed Hangul in response, a pleasingly phonetic language. Yet almost all Korean names, most of which are three syllables, derive their meanings from corresponding Chinese characters. The Standard Korean Language Dictionary estimates that about 57% of Korean words are Sino-Korean. You learned two ways to count, based on Sino-Korean and “Native” Korean. The Korean language has adopted English words over the past few decades: elevator, juice, pizza, vitamin, pink, ice cream.

You are in the aisle, fingers skimming over countless chopsticks made from ceramic and wood when they rest on a new pair. One half of the chopstick is shaped like a rectangular prism made of some kind of durable plastic that comes in teal or white. The other half is metal, polished but not too polished, a cylinder that slims down to a point. In the middle, you see a square and a circle meet. You pick the teal ones up in your right hand. The plastic wedges itself comfortably in the spaces between your fingers, and the unique texture of the metal would never let anything slip.

You call out to your mom and your grandma. Tell them you’ve found the perfect pair.

Jisu Yee is a high schooler from New York whose writing has been recognized by the Scholastic Art & Writing Awards. She is an Incandescent Summer Studio alum & former mentor, and is a current staff writer for The Incandescent Review. While she primarily writes poetry or creative nonfiction, she is also the creator, editor, and writer of The ABLE Initiative’s newsletter. You can find her work published in Persimmon Review and Noor.