The Chopsticks

Hey, look... it's not your fault:

You grew up with pick-up-sticks, used sticks picked up from the ground and stirred your mud pie with it, but now "yous all grows up" and you have to eat with them.
I'm a white woman and have suffered all the humiliation for you, so please read on - I learned most of this the hard way. Big sigh.

Fish out of water:

I giggle to this day when I recall watching newbies at Sai Cafe in Chicago using their chopsticks as a food platform or as a vault to hurl sushi rolls dripping from soy sauce into their mouths as they are bent two inches from their plate. Too cute, but they should have been using their hands in the first place to pick those suckers up... and... if you need that much soy sauce to tolerate the stuff, perhaps you should try something else. Go easy on the soy sauce young grasshopper, I encourage you to try and keep the soy sauce clean and not look like rice soup by the end of the meal.
Learn to appreciate the fish and sea weed, if you can't... find a classy fish and chips place if all you want is to be fashionable, don't make an ass of yourself and insult the food that took a lot of skill and work to produce. OK? Deal? Please?

To use the chopstick: If my 60 year old step dad can learn, so can you.

The fork and knife do not train the westerners hands properly for the skill involved in using these tools, so, like learning to appreciate the flavors of the sea creatures, it will take practice, and you must leave your ego out the door and try to have a little fun with it. Don't be discouraged.

Don't stick your chopsticks in the rice:

It's rude. It doesn't matter, to me, if it's regarded as a "Japanese death omen" or just bad manners, please don't do this. If you wouldn't use your fork to push or pull the plate away from you, don't use the chopsticks. If you wouldn't use your slimy fork to rummage for the best piece of whatever it is you're looking for in the family style dish in the middle of the table, don't do it with your chopsticks. Take what's on top and closest to you. If you wouldn't stab your fork in your meatloaf and leave it there, don't do so with the chopsticks. It's an eating utensil and nothing else.

It's OK to use a spoon.

Rice is the main dish. Everything goes on top of the rice. The rice soaks up the sauces and gently distributes the flavors more evenly and fills you up so you won't be hungry an hour later. Really.
Spoon a little saucy something on top of your rice, pick that bowl up and bring it closer to you (vs. sticking your head in the bowl - you have a pretty face, let's see it), use your chopsticks to eat some of the big stuff, and use the spoon and spoon the drippy rice toward the end of your bowl. You'll embarrass yourself if you're trying to pick up slippery kernels of rice with your chopstick.

Eat all of your rice.

Rice does not make you fat - only high calories, high fat content and a lazy lifestyle do that - it's not the rice.

OH! It's also not cool to distribute the rice that was in your bowl, or on your chopsticks and let them fall in the shared food, sauces or anyplace other than the rice bowl. Try to keep the chopsticks clean -without licking them- as you pick up another lovely morsel.