I went out for seafood and beer with locals in the beach city of Da Nang, Vietnam a month ago, and when I asked where the crab cracker was, they smiled. There's no crab cracker, they told me. Locals use their teeth. Mind you, I come from a dental family. So I was like not... gonna do that. But they pressured me to do it. So I gently pressed down on the crab legs using my molars, like a toothless baby mumming on a chew stick(?) (whatever, idk, that BPA-free baby chew toy thing). I guess you could say I deliberately "struggled" to use my teeth, but that's also half true because I was chicken shit about breaking my teeth. Watching me, they told me it pained them to watch me struggle, and so the Chi (Chi = loosely, "big sister") took a metal spoon and took the crab leg outta my hand and whacked the leg open with the spoon.
They told me, in an orthogonal conversation teaching me about the differences between north and southern culture in Vietnam, that in the conservative north there's still a heavy emphasis on being a "man" or being a "gentleman." And one of these gentlemanly gestures that locals do when eating seafood is that the gentleman is supposed to sacrifice their teeth to break open the crab leg, and then give it to their lady. So the light humor at the table was that the Chi was the gentleman savior for the day. And indeed she was! Otherwise I wouldn't have had any crab to eat. I was there for the crab, man.
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