I apparently hold chopsticks incorrectly. I am a white guy so it’s not like this is my culture—I just started holding them the way I do as a kid in sushi restaurants and no one ever corrected me. I found out when I married my wife, who is from Taiwan.
Here’s the kicker though: I’m more dexterous with chopsticks than even she is. I can pick and place a single grain of rice, or hold the most slippery noodles with ease. So she just laughed about it and told me to keep doing whatever the heck I do.
Do you hold the moving one like a pencil and let the other one rest on your ring finger? I had always done this and was eventually told that you're really supposed to use only three fingers. But after trying it that way for a while, I found it limited my dexterity quite a bit, and went back to the pencil method.
Surprisingly, I did it in China for a month-long work trip and nobody batted an eye.
My family is ethnic Chinese and I grew up using chopsticks. I hold it using the pencil hold and no one has ever corrected me. It works well like 98% of the time. I may not be able to delicately pick up a tiny grain of rice or an entire salt shaker like my uncle who was demonstrating the proper hold but honestly those are such edge cases. The pencil hold is just way more natural and easier adoption may outweigh the benefit of handling some edge cases.
Turns out different people were taught to hold pencils very differently. I use two fingers to hold the moving one, which is also how I was taught to hold a pencil, and let the the other one rest on my middle finger. I've met people who use four fingers to hold a pencil and find the instructions incomprehensible.
I can't make heads or tails of any of these descriptions - it's not like I use chopsticks much, but I would hold the top/moving one between one (index) finger and thumb, but that's also how I'd hold a pencil (sort of resting on middle finger). (The non-moving chopstick kind of between middle finger & thumb.) Is that.. at all right?
...when people say "I use X fingers to hold this" and do not explicitly mention the thumb, they're including it in the count. Well, at least I am; I guess OP might be using one more finger than I'd thought. IG the unambiguous thing to do is say "digits" instead of "fingers" when that is intended; mea culpa (though if OP truly meant fingers and not digits their grip is more cursed than I'd imagined).
It sounds like you and I use much the same pencil grip.
Even in countries like Japan it is not especially rare for people to hold them that way. It's wrong but like you say, you can be just as good as anyone else with a bit of practice.
Here’s the kicker though: I’m more dexterous with chopsticks than even she is. I can pick and place a single grain of rice, or hold the most slippery noodles with ease. So she just laughed about it and told me to keep doing whatever the heck I do.