Eating: I
A father, a son and a jet-lagged, puzzled girl sit at a table together.
No one speaks. No one dares to raise their gaze upwards in fear of locking eyes
with another. The only sound emitted from this unplanned rendezvous is the slurping
of noodles into mouths and the tapping of chopsticks against soup bowls. Each
party has a single objective in mind: to finish their broth the fastest and
leave as swiftly as possible, so as to avoid any potential for future human
interaction. Looking around the compact soup deli, it seems as though all
customers are participants in an unspoken competition of “Who can be the most
efficient eater?”. Bodies no longer move with spontaneity, but are in a
trance-like state, repeating the same series of mechanical movements over and
over again; faces peering downwards, soup spoons and chopsticks moving manically
between mouth and bowl. Every limb knows exactly where to go during this seemingly
automated pattern of movement. There are simply no distractions from the task
at hand: the body continues to execute its instructions regardless of the interruption,
spoon into broth, chopsticks cling on noodles, eyes still lowered to the
ground. Was everyone taught this wonderfully-synchronised choreography in
school?
This was my first experience of
eating in Hong Kong. Having spent the last 30 hours of my life in solitude,
running from gate to gate in foreign airports and gesticulating in novel,
inventive ways to Hong Kong locals who appeared to have close to zero interest
in giving me directions, all I longed for was a steamy bowl of noodle soup to
comfort and caress my deeply disorientated soul. Little did I know that Hong
Kong was not necessarily the place for slow-paced eating: as I entered through
the door of the first noodle shop I found, not only was I thrust into a cloud
of spice-laden steam, but was also grabbed by a pair of hands that forcefully pushed
me into a seat on a table with two locals. Coming from Germany, a country where
eating in close quarters with strangers is not a quotidian occurrence, I was
taken aback by the apparent normalcy of sharing my experience of lunch with
people I did not know and, notably, could not even speak to. After hardly two minutes,
a woman placed a soup bowl in front of me, handed me a pair of chopsticks and a
soup spoon and ordered me to “Eat!”, pointing her index finger at me, then the
soup. And so, the series of robotic movements began. I deliberated whether I
should introduce myself to the father and son, two people whose feet were only
a few centimetres from mine, but after registering the implicit “No talking”
rule, I decided to simply get on with this soup and become a consumption
machine instead.
Although it began as a strange,
new experience, this silent eating session
of automated movements soon became enjoyable. In such a large city as Hong Kong – a place where you pass
thousands of people a day – it seemed reassuring to know that, whenever and
wherever you may choose to eat, you can sit down with a fellow stranger and
share the experience of your meal with them. While you may not speak nor
interact during these few minutes, the mere presence of someone whose life is
perhaps so different to yours, is something quite beautiful: you are together
for one moment on that particular day and may never see each other again. The
fleeting nature of this encounter suggests, on one hand, the obsoleteness of
this moment. On the other hand, it makes this experience all the more important:
for a few minutes, on the 24th of August 2018, I sat with a father
and son eating beef noodle soup together. I never knew their name, where they
came from, their story, but what I do know is that for some reason they decided
to come to the exact same place I was headed to and the world allowed us to
share a brief moment together that will probably become lost as a trivial,
worthless memory in each of our own lives.