I come from a relatively humble background, and our table manners may not have been the best when I was growing up.  People talked with food in their mouths at the table.  They may have been guilty of smacking their lips, while eating.  That was one extreme.  Since then, I have also rubbed elbows with high society, and I ran an internationally-recognized country inn and cooking school with alumni of the famed Four Seasons Hotel's kitchens.  In those latter situations, it was required that I not deviate, even a little, from very proper formal decorum.

Although my experiences and friends come from both low and high, on the social scale, and I am surprised at few things, I was a bit shocked by what are considered acceptable table manners, in China, either, in private or in public.  Beyond the lack of proper food safety measures, as in the U.S., which include washing dishes with cold water and, sometimes, not even using dish detergent, even in restaurants, there were many other surprises.  Many people use the first pot of tea to rinse chopsticks, bowls, cups and glasses in a resaurant tablesetting, before commensing drink or dinner: that dates back to imperial days.  Standard, in Chinese restaurants for use as napkins are small packets of tissue paper, usually for a fee, at better restaurants, and toilet paper, in a dispenser from which you can pull it out from the center, in the more common restaurants.  Sure, most everyone talks with food in their mouths and smacks their lips, while eating, but that is only the tip of the iceberg.  Although most people will not shake your hand, for fear of germs, everybody uses their chopsticks to dig into shared dishes at the table.  As we have said in other blog entries, Chinese love to eat food with the bones left in.  They also serve shellfish, like crabs, with the shells still intact.  Then, while eating such things, there are invariably bones in their mouthes.  In the U.S., in such situations, we would use a napkin to discretely remove the bones from our mouthes and keep them under wraps.  In China, people do not even, normally, use their fingers to remove bones or pieces of shell, they just spit them out on the table, not even on their own dishes.  Then, at the end of such a meal, the table is full of spit-out waste beside each person's place setting.  It is acceptable table manners, in China, although I refuse to conform (Yes...my table manners have declined...when in Rome...; when in China ...), and it is one of the most culture-shocking things that a visitor may experience when eating, in or out, with friends, in China.