Chopsticks Are His Cup of Tea

When Jeffrey Davidson takes a seat in his favorite Chinese restaurant, the menu is not his first priority.

Instead, he produces a custom-made walnut and oak box and, like an orchestra conductor picking up a baton, deftly produces a pair of chopsticks.

But they are not your run-of-the-mill wooden variety. More often than not, Davidson’s chopsticks are crafted of elegant ivory, silver, jade or cloisonne and, of course, wood, albeit a fine wood, such as teak.

“I usually get some stares,” admitted the 42-year-old Woodland Hills bachelor. Even his female companions, especially on a first date, are apt to lift an eyebrow, he said.

They soon learn, however, this is no affectation. Davidson has an unusual passion--he is ever on the alert for rare chopsticks for his unusual collection.

Davidson has amassed 75 pairs of chopsticks, most of them mounted in cases on the walls of his small, cluttered apartment, which he shares with his cockateel, Peeve. (“She’s my pet Peeve,” he told a visitor.)

Many Chinese and Japanese families have handed down a fine pair or two of chopsticks from generation to generation. Fine stores such as Gump’s of San Francisco and Los Angeles sell lacquered chopsticks for $10 to $13 a pair.

‘It’s Very Esoteric’

And while there are chopsticks in the ethnological collections of some major museums, extensive private collections are scarce.

“I don’t know of anyone who’s ever collected them,” said James C. Watt, senior consultant for Chinese antiquities at New York City’s Metropolitan Museum of Art.

“It’s very esoteric,” observed Mee Seen Loong, New York-based vice president of Chinese art for Sotheby, the auction house. “Quite unusual.”

Actually, Davidson says, collecting chopsticks isn’t as odd as it seems. “I’m very interested in Oriental culture and Chinese cooking,” he said. “So chopsticks sort of naturally follow.”

Davidson, an unemployed administrative management specialist, said he figures his collection is worth $3,000, a significant sum when one considers that a pair of ordinary wooden chopsticks, normally 8 to 12 inches in length, costs just a few cents.

Davidson has pounded the pavement in Hong Kong, Tokyo, Bangkok, Toronto, New York and, of course, Los Angeles’ Chinatown, in search of unusual chopsticks. “I’ve been collecting them for 25 years,” he said.

Among the most valuable, he said, is a pair he discovered in Hong Kong that may date back to China’s Mongol period, spanning the 13th and 14th centuries. The bone chopsticks fit snugly in a sharkskin sheath trimmed with brass, along with a bone-handled knife that the nomadic tribes used to cut up their food. Davidson estimates their value at about $650.

But the age and value of such items are difficult to estimate, according to Asian art experts such as the Metropolitan’s Watt.

“It’s impossible to (accurately) date them,” he said, even though it is possible to estimate that the use of chopsticks by Asian cultures dates back to at least 500 BC.

Another valuable antique pair, Davidson said, is made of tortoise shell with silver tips, which he found in Hong Kong.

Davidson said the tale that accompanied them was that they were used by Chinese royalty to detect whether enemies had poisoned their food. If they had, he said, the silver tips turned black.

Like a hound sniffing out an elusive fox, Davidson has been hunting for valuable and unusual chopsticks long enough to know when to pounce.

Recently, for example, on Hong Kong’s Ladder Street, a steep walkway consisting of narrow steps, he ran into a peddler selling a mishmash of goods. Buried in the mess was a plain wooden box.

Davidson’s eyes lit up. The box’s shape told him he had once again scored. Inside was an elegant pair of chopsticks, he said, made of ivory and enameled cloisonne. He got them for a mere $2.

Similar adventures along the Asian perimeter have turned up chopsticks made of femur bone, walrus tusk and even scrimshaw carvings.

And then there was the time in 1963, in Manhattan, when he spotted an intriguing pair of ivory chopsticks in a shop window. “They were $12,” Davidson said, “which I thought was a hell of a lot to pay for chopsticks.”