Master?

Why do Asian people who are good at something have to be called master? I've run into this a lot in dealing with martial arts. You go to a Chinese restaurant alone and you just eat your meal. You go there with a bunch of non Asian people who have studied at a Tae Kwon Do school for a while, and they call the teenage and college waitstaff sir and ma'am. I got my black belt in Tae Kwon Do when I was sixteen. Some people called me master Jim. I was in a butcher shop one time buying some steaks. I ran into a kid of about seven years old there with his parents. His parents made him bow to me.....awkward.

Here is a clip from the New York Times about a Chinese guy making noodles. The lady said that the guy took just a few months to learn how to make noodles, yet she calls him master Chen.

When I was a teenager, I had a job in a restaurant as a dishwasher. I was a good dishwasher because I didn't really take breaks, and I kept the old hobart industrial dishwasher running. I did that for about a year, but I never called myself a master dishwasher. I'm sure that if I practiced pulling noodles for a few months, I could get about as good at it as this guy in the video. I'm sure that the guy in the video doesn't want to be called a master noodle puller either, I bet he'd prefer some kind of job that doesn't cake your lungs in flour the way a coal miner might develop black lung.

Anyway enjoy the video: