Here is quite an enlightening piece about the toilet culture in China from a Western perspective. In poor Hutong neighborhoods in Beijing and much rural China, smelly public restrooms are still what the population is condemned to, a fact that needs to be changed. Hopefully more and more people will leave that life style behind and move to the modern apartment buildings sprouting up everywhere. Urbanization may solve this problem gradually, someday. Of course there is a cost to this process. Some people are unwilling to leave their Hutong residence despite its shared smelly restrooms, at least not on the financial terms set by the government and developers. Conflict can flare up in the negotiation process, like in every process involving more than a single actor. Corruption can plight the development process, since somebody takes charge of the resources and its allocation. These are the problems I cannot solve as an individual of little consequence.
A moment of enlightenment comes from reflecting on the Chinese-West culture divide in the use of restrooms in particular, and the handling of bodily functions in general. The key cultural difference is in the perception of human contact, especially physical and visual contact. Which body parts and their functions should be kept private, and what kind of body contact is allowed from the hygienic perspective divide the Chinese and Western toilet cultures.
Having grown up in an apartment and gone to school in an urban area, I have experienced both the western style MDF toilet seat that you sit on and the Chinese pit you squat over to do your business. In retrospect, a rule of thumb on the distribution of these life-styles is that in apartments, where the toilet is accessible to only the family members (and the few invited guests, occasionally), you would have a seat. In public places, especially at the schools of all levels, from elementary to undergrad, the restrooms have pits. In my college dorm we had a single shared restroom for the entire floor (all guys). It featured a long rectangle wall-to-wall open urinal against one wall (basically a sink built on the floor, lined inside with ceramic tiles, surrounded by an elevated embankment for guys to stand upon in a row and unload liquid), with no dividers. While you are urinating into the sink, usually with your friends doing the same business beside you, your back is facing a row of cubicles with doors, housing the pits you squat over to unload solid waste. The pit was a ceramic structure and you could flash it after you are done, if you managed to remember somebody else might use it at a later time.
A random question popped up in my mind, about the design of Chinese and Western urinals. “Why doesn’t a Chinese guy need dividers to visually separate him from the other guys when he urinates?” Even more strange, why does he has the habit of making the trip with a friends or two, and keep talking about whatever the topic is when standing on the edge of the sink and shooting liquid against the wall in concert? Why don’t they need any pricy? Don’t they get embarrassed by their compromising posture, each holding a dubious piece of their flesh in hand and aiming that loser in the same direction? Actually, being a Chinese myself, I wonder about this culture difference from the other direction? Why do Western guys need privacy for this natural function? I have no answer, but my mind generated a few conjectures, from unsystematic and unorganized experiences. Does it have anything to do with the pervasive consciousness of homosexuality in the Western psyche? Maybe trying to avoid thinking about it makes it more strongly and constantly active. You can get obsessed with something because of your fear and ambiguity toward it. Another conjecture is that it may have something to do with the some societies’ obsession with the size and functionality of an appendage in the male reproductive system. If you turn off the Junk-Mail filter in your email, you will get a flood of “male enhancement” emails everyday. The television commercials are over-represented with this kind of stuff, targeting guys who naturally speaking should be winding down the use of their little instrument. That little instrument sometimes causes inconvenience is a source of pride and shame, sorrow and joy, sometimes life and death. It is a source of power. Its importance requires it to be kept private and protected, to avoid the disruptive effects coming from its power. Having grown up in the Chinese society, these concerns are mostly absent. Why do you want to look at the pecker of the guy urinating next to you? What’s wrong if the guy next to you takes a peek at your little bird? Who doesn’t have one? What’s the need to hide it? These are just some conjectures, maybe totally groundless.
The venue and instrument for dumping the body’s solid wasteis an equally interesting theatre for cultural differences. The Chinese have a reputation of leaving foot-prints on Western MDF toilet seats. From the shoe-marks, you can easily discern a Chinese has just squatted on the seat and relieved himself, instead of sitting on it as one is supposed to. What is the rationale of taking this odd position when using a western toilet? Was it a habit developed from using the pit-in-the-floor squatters? No. As far as I know, even those who have western MDF toilet seats at home and prefer using them squat on the western toilet seat at a public restroom, and most likely only at public restroom. The trick is that the Western toilet requires you to seat on it, with your bare buttocks firmly and physically touching (engrossed with) the surface of the seat. In a public restroom, how may unidentified buttocks of all shapes and sizes have physically graced that small surface on any day? What if some of those buttocks carry something invisible but horrible (like germs) and leave it on the surface, and then you end up picking the stuff up? This has been a major trepidation for many Chinese when using a MDF toilet seat in public restrooms (but not at home).
In the old days, some Chinese were especially fearful of sitting on the western toilet seat when visiting foreign countries. Somehow they got this wrong idea that foreign buttocks were especially likely to be associated with illnesses that could pass via the seat, a vivid illustration what an annoying idiot ignorance turns one into.
The Chinese rule seems to be something like this. “It’s ok to look at my bare buttocks when I am squatting and unloading; you can squat beside me and do the same business. But it is better to avoid physical contact, even the indirect contact through a shared surface.”
Another plight in using the Western toilet is the amount of (sometimes impossible) control required when you release solid waste into it. If you lower a long, continuous, soft and brown sausage with an even and deliberate speed into the puddle of water at the bottom of the bowl, everything is fine. Hell breaks out when sometimes you cannot help shooting little pallets in bursts of enhanced force and velocity. Imagine a string of people jumping into a swimming pool with great excitement and jubilation. They make splashes. So does the pallets diving into the toilet bowl. Even bigger splashes get stirred up when you are having a vigorous deluge from lactate intolerance, a plight of those harboring Chinese genes. For the uninitiated, it is difficult to suppress the imagination of the rich splashing solution (carrying lively organisms) invading your internal territory through that vulnerable opening to the royal passage and establishing colonies inside. Invasion from splashes in the toilet bowl in a public restroom is one of the most feared dangers in living in the US for some old-school Chinese. I had a friend who after suffering one of such loss of dignity at a McDonald’s restaurant with heavy traffic (it was in a major urban center), firmly believed he had contracted some horrible disease from the invading splashing brew, though he had no idea of its identity or nature. Being a friend, I had to accompany the debilitated soul to numerous doctors of various specialties, mainly in the STD domain, to go through examinations and testing. One of them told him that AIDS was unlikely, but HTB was a possibility.
