FuManChu

I often see this among most Chinese tablemanners is there a reason? i guess contrary to korean etiquette where holding/lifting the rice bowl is impolite, chinese etiquette is such where it is impolite if you don't hold the rice bowl. while i never got a walloping from not holding the ricebowl, i was frequently reminded. the other thing that comes to mind while growing up is the corollary of the way a horse feeds. ie, eat like a horse (whereby you lower your head to reach the grass), and one's life would resemble a hard one slaving like a horse. so, if you should 1) hold your bowl, and 2) bring the food to your mouth, one has two options: 1) pick up food and rice with chopsticks or 2) bring the bowl to one's mouth and scoop it in. i guess it eventually becomes a matter of convenience whereby option 2 prevails. this is especially the case in southern china i would say since people prefer long grain rice and the rice isn't cooked with as much water. this has the effect of making the rice less sticky vs that of northern china/korea/japan. when rice doesn't stick together, option 1 would again be more challenging to accomplish. for me etiquette is irrelevant versus convenience....just do whatever that floats your boat, unless you're dining in the presence of elders....

Is that really true? Most of the things I think of as "American Chinese Food" most Cantonese I know wouldn't acknowledge them as Cantonese, inferior or not, and I don't see at the Cantonese restaurants I frequent. What dishes are you thinking of? When I think about American Chinese food I think about chop suey, beef with western broccoli, orange beef, general tso's whatever, sweet and sour pork that is breaded and deep fried and served with bright red sauce and pineapple, deep fried eggrolls with indistinguishable middles and really dark brown horrible versions of fried rice. Basically stuff people buy at those mall "Chinese" fast food places. Do you consider these Cantonese? Some of the stuff that I read about from people in the eastern US I've never run across (shrimp with lobster sauce???) so maybe "American Chinese Food" has a regional element as well. regards, trillium I think it's just a case of the guise of bastardization that some would euphemise as "fusion" food. Albeit done without the sophistication that most restauranteurs command in higher class culinary establishments. As to American Chinese food, my opinion is that it is a melange of food brought to America's shores via the then unsophisticated Chinese peasantry...people who fled under repressed and starved situations (perhaps during General Tso's time). A phenomenon you will find in many "Chinese" restaurants that are not located near places with higher concentrations of ethnic Chinese, is that these "chinese" restaurants may not even be operated by owners who are trained culinarily. Perhaps construction worker by day, chinese delivery by night. For a lack of a better way to make a buck, any asian looking person could hitch a tent and toss a wok with the same dexterity of a shovel. However, as most of the American public began to assume this type of unrefined cooking as "chinese", it eventually became a product demanded by the marketplace. In my opinion, the best Chinese cuisine can be found in large cities such as NYC, and cities in California. With a more recent wave of immigration sparked by the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre thru 1997 with the "handing over" of Hong Kong to its communist motherland, it's in my opinion that chinese food in the US and Canada especially has become much more sophisticated as this time professionals (in particular CHEFs) and those with means (not peasants) emmigrated. An increase in well-to-do Chinese overseas created a demand for more refined tastes and a new array of more refined chinese restaurants filled this niche market. In the UK, I have noticed that chinese food hasn't come under as large a degree of bastardization as it has in the US. Things don't seem to retain the authentic zest of ethnicity when crossing either the Atlantic or the Pacific.