Taste Cheese With Chopsticks

I’m not the first one to taste cheese with chopsticks. There are numerous  talented people who have come to a new place with their unique cultural backgrounds and produced masterpieces by connecting different cultures.

Ang Lee is definitely one of them. He is a famous director who has produced well-known movies including Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and Brokeback Mountain. He was born in Taiwan and he received his bachelor’s and master’s degree in the United States.

He has the talent to dive from one culture to another. In his recent film Life of Pi, he narrates a story of an Indian boy drifting in a lifeboat with a tiger named Richard Parker. It is not merely an adventure movie — it talks about nature, religion and our position in this world.

In almost all of the interviews Lee has done recently, the interviewees asked him how different cultural backgrounds have influenced his work. His answer solved a question of mine I have held for a long time.

“Growing up in traditional Chinese culture,” Lee said, “I’m used to tolerance and moderation. But getting to know the western, I find myself longing for conflicts, struggles and dreams. It is in this unstable inner state that I am able to continue the creation process.”

We will not question our philosophy of life until it has been challenged. It is all so common for us to repeat the same routine we have been practicing all our life. Repeating is safe, while changing is risky. But nothing will sparkle without friction. We cannot see the other facets of an object if we keep staring at it from one angle.

Cheese and tofu are different, but they share similar status in western and eastern diet respectively. Cheese comes from cows or goats, while tofu comes from soybeans. Cheese is an important and valuable source of protein in west, while tofu provides the same nutrition in east. They are both in milky white color and often appear in cube shape.

I ate more cheese than I had tasted in my past 18 years in my first week of living in Vermont. At the beginning, the strong flavor of goat cheese was disgusting for me. But soon, I came to appreciate the rich flavor of it, which at the same time made me more grateful for the light flavor of tofu.

It is a similar case for the tableware we use. Fork and chopsticks may seem not relevant at all if we merely look at their appearance. But they both function well on picking up the food from our plates.

I was frustrated when first learning about western table manners, and I believed I would never be able to use the right fork for different dishes. I have seen foreigners get upset at a Chinese restaurant when they were not able to get a bite of rice from the bowl right in front of them using chopsticks. The discomfort to expose myself under a new culture for me is never the fault of that specific culture, but rather how hard I try to accept and appreciate it.

It will be interesting to taste little-basket buns with fork next time, and I will remember not to burn myself.