My first introduction to table manners came far too late. Thankfully for them, my father’s kitchen table lesson stuck: eating with a spoon and a fork, which I happily used to scrape together my meals. I had already terrorized my Chinese Filipino parents in restaurants for three years, forever prone to dropping food off the booster seat, breaking the china plates they’d thoughtlessly given a toddler in a Los Angeles dim sum restaurant. My father repeats the act over and over, watching me until my crude imitations bear passing resemblance to his, satisfied his youngest daughter will finally, finally stop spilling food onto the tablecloth, the floor, and herself. With a smaller salad fork in hand, I copy his motions. He brings the spoon to his face, dropping nothing on the bite’s long journey from plate to mouth. Next, he tackles the kangkong, a wilted pile of greens sauteed in garlic. I can smell whole cracked black peppercorns and bay leaf as he digs at the humb à for a choice morsel. He brings the spoon to the side of the plate holding the humb à, a southern Filipino dish of soy sauce-braised pork trotter from Central Visayas. Holding a fork with his left hand, Daddy scrapes a smidgen of white rice onto the spoon held in his right.
FORK AND SPOON HOW TO
We’re sitting at the lacquered wooden dining table of my childhood, and I am learning how to eat-no, how to dine, like a grown-up. I’m between three and four years old, my wispy black hair fanning out from my high ponytail, eyes peering up in curiosity. “This is how you eat, properly,” my father says.
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