In 1981 I went to a washroom in a Chinese restaurant in Toronto's main Chinatown along Spadina and I realized I'd just used chopsticks without any problems. A few weeks earlier I'd been at The Whippletree, a a fancy restaurant in the U of Guelph's main building. I'd taken my Singaporean girlfriend out for the first time, and I honestly thought she was extremely poor as she said she'd gone to a school run by missionaries, so I thought I was doing her a favour. The waitress, who we both knew, asked "Would you like chopsticks?" She showed me how to use them. It was only in the Chinatown restaurant that I wondered why she'd been asked that, even though it was a western meal. She was Cantonese. After I got to know her better, she showed me a picture of Lord Mountbatten, along with his autograph, when he visited Methodist Girls School when she was there. The school was run by Methodist missionaries, but was actually a fancy private school, among the best in Singapore.
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