What does your loo say about Yu?

Not always one for toilet humour, I still had to chuckle about a public toilet in Munich which has recently been converted into an art museum. Of course wonderful articles like this inspire puns. Creating art, like going to the loo, is a great form of relief. One is able to vent and offload and emerge from the session totally satisfied.

“Darling, dinner’s on the table.”
“I’ll be back in a flush, love.”

“So, Mr. Joe the Plumber, what’s your business like?”
“Draining.”

“Ouch, ooof! Get on with it Rod”, readers might by now be saying. Okay, okay, here goes.

One of our biggest cultural shocks when arriving in China nearly four years ago was the Chinese attitude to loos. Once we stayed on the school campus we taught at and many teachers had their own home in an apartment building.

We South Africans love walking around barefoot at home and in the garden, even though we sometimes have to remove nettles from our feet. It’s most relaxing and gives those little pink-soled critters, that scurry us everywhere, a chance to breathe. My feet love the feel of lawn and tingle joyfully as I trample about.

Not the Chinese. Mainland Chinese simply don’t do the barefoot thing. On going to their homes you remove your shoes and get into a pair of slippers offered to you. My feet virtually ask me, what have we done wrong?

So when a bachelor, a bespectacled young Chinese teacher, Wu Hao, visited our apartment I was not surprised to see him point at my bare feet in horror. “You are not wearing slippers!” he gasped. “Why is that a problem?” I asked, more or less knowing the answer. “Because it’s so dirty,” the nerdish Wu Hao scolded.

I looked at my pink pals, examined the brownish soles, which had a little dust on them, nothing more. But through my mind flashed that grim and all too typical sight in Wu Hao’s bachelor bed-sitter: his loo.

When I first walked past that grim gargoyle called his bathroom I was shocked. The toilet had probably not been cleaned since its installation. The inside of the loo bowl was pitch black. It looked like fungus was growing on and under the toilet seat. That was absorbed by me in a two-second flash as I winced in disgust and hurried into his lounge area.

I could not possibly sleep at night in his apartment knowing there was that foul beast, that sanitary hazard, lurking in the bathroom.

Inevitable no-brainer of a question: how on earth could he, and many other Chinese, possibly say I am dirty because I pad barefoot around the home?

Oh, and needles to say, Marion and I completely identified with that loo advert that was doing the rounds when we lived in England: “What does your loo say about you?” That area of the home should be spotless. Ours comes with all the accessories: the brush, the drain cleaner, “Mr. Muscle” ammonia gel, the plunger, all bristling next to the loo like loyal soldiers. After each use the toilet is inspected and should be left spotless. Woe betide me if Marion decides my inspection was not up to scratch. Our porcelain necessity is thoroughly scrubbed at least once a week.

To Westerners, and certainly South Africans, this practice of a spotless loo is absolutely the norm, but for many mainland Chinese – especially bachelors – it is a novelty.

I love the Chinese, love China, but cultural differences like the one I have just described unfortunately create racial divides and ensure that unfortunate word – racism – is still used. And I’m not a racist but … only spotless toilets please.