I know, I know. Everyone poops.
By Jessica Wallner July 20 2008
I know, I know. Everyone poops. For the record, I have never considered myself uptight or high maintenance while growing up in the states. However, China has given me new insight into the various methods we humans have come up with to deal with waste management.
My story begins on our tour of Beijing and the glorious first stop that was the sewage plant. The Olympic News Service organized this three-day tour and clearly wanted us to understand the difficulty of purifying the waste of over 15 million people within the city limits. Not a simple task. I took pictures of the complicated process, like a good tourist would, but I still didn’t understand the magnitude of people within Beijing and how that would effect my (what I thought to be) personal elimination system.
It wasn’t until I spent a few days in Beijing that I realized that peeing and pooping is really as universal, and therefore as public, as eating and sleeping. In the states, I rarely saw a person casually rest at the side of a tourist attraction and take a nap among the bustling crowds. It seems, in Beijing, that people are far less concerned with where they sleep or where they pee and more with the efficiency of tending to their bodily needs.
The first sign of this difference occurred for me at our tour of the Summer Palace when we saw multiple children in their open crotched pants simply squatting and relieving themselves on the sidewalk. Later, when I visited the Forbidden City, I was amazed when a man held his daughter’s legs over his forearms, hugged her upper body, and pointed her in the direction of the Hall of Preserving Harmony while she peed a river all over his shoes.
When I see such things I rationalize it in multiple ways. Young children do not have the same control that adults do and this may be a more effective, cost efficient, and environmentally friendly method of potty training. Moreover, I find the lack of inhibition and apathy to such human processes rather comforting. But, such thoughts are erased from my mind when I’m faced with a dirty public squat toilet without toilet paper. Instead, I revert to a more emotional response learned from years of puritan influenced, individual centered, sterile seeking, luxury loving socialization.