To the Sound of the First Chopsticks Clinking

The first pair lifts before the bowl has even cooled, and the sound finds me before I see it.

It is early, just before eight at Maxwell Food Centre, and the porridge stall has opened its shutters into the half-light. A man sits alone at the nearest table, a bowl of century egg porridge steaming in front of him. He breaks apart his chopsticks, taps them together once to even the ends, and the small click carries across the quiet room. It is the first sound of eating I have heard all morning.

I stand near the column with my camera against my chest, doing nothing yet. The hall has that stillness it only holds in the early hour, before the queues build and the fans start working hard. A few stalls are still wiping down counters. Steam rises somewhere I cannot see.

He stirs the porridge first, slow, letting the heat escape in a thin ribbon. Then he lifts a little to his mouth, and the chopsticks clink softly against the rim as he sets them down again. There is no hurry in him. He eats the way you eat something you have eaten a thousand times.

I lift the camera and try to catch the moment his hand returns to the bowl.

It is harder than it sounds. The gesture is small and quick, and the light is soft, almost too soft, falling grey through the open sides before the sun climbs over the shophouses. I press the shutter once. The frame is close but the hand has already moved. I wait for the next mouthful and try again.

Around me, the room begins to wake. A second pair of chopsticks somewhere behind me. Then a spoon against a bowl of fishball noodles two rows over. The sounds gather slowly, one at a time, the way a place fills not all at once but person by person, breakfast by breakfast.

I think about how this sound has opened mornings here for longer than I have been alive. The first clink, then the second, then the quiet hum of a hall doing what it has always done. No one announces it. It simply begins, the way it began yesterday and will begin tomorrow.

The man finishes, lays his chopsticks neatly across the empty bowl, and sits for a moment without getting up. A meal closed as quietly as it opened.

I press the shutter one last time, on the chopsticks resting across the bowl, the steam gone now, the light a little warmer than before. The image will hold the bowl but not the sound. That part stays only here, in the room, in the morning.

I lower the camera and join the porridge queue myself.

When my bowl comes, I break my own chopsticks apart and tap them even. The small click sounds out into the hall, joining the others. Some mornings you photograph. Some you simply add your own small sound to, and let the day begin.