Now, doing this in plastic was idiotically simple—polymers and 
nanotechnology went together like toothpaste and tubes. But Hackworth, who'd 
eaten his share of Chinese as a student, had never taken well to the plastic 
chopsticks, which were slick and treacherous
in the blunt hands of a gwailo. Bamboo was better—and not that 
much harder to program, if you just had a bit of imagination. Once he'd made 
that conceptual leap, it wasn't long before he came up with the idea of selling 
advertising space on the damn things, chopstick handles and Chinese columnar 
script being a perfect match. Before long he was presenting it to his 
superiors: eminently user-friendly bamboid chopsters with colorful advertising 
messages continuously scrolling up their handles in real time, like news 
headlines in Times Square. For that, Hackworth was kicked upstairs to Bespoke 
and across the Pacific to Atlantis/Shanghai.