Originally written: Summer 2010
Do you carry hand sanitizer and toilet paper in your pockets wherever you go? Do you pick it up with your wallet when you leave the house; find it coming up in casual conversation amongst friends? Maybe you have small panic attacks when you pat your pockets and find it's not there, or start stealing napkins from restaurants to replenish your store. In a pinch, you'd share with close friends or even complete strangers. All of this you do in China, or at least I did, because hand sanitizer and toilet paper are not the public commodities that they are in America. Public and many private bathrooms simply do not have them, so you keep some on hand all the time. TP comes folded up in little travel packets like tissue, and unless you're in a big, modern city like Beijing or Shanghai you don't ever flush it--there are wastebaskets in the stalls for used toilet paper. Hand sanitizer is usually the alcoholic kind you don't need water for that comes in small, handy containers. But toilet paper and soap aren't the only items many Westerners will find conspicuously missing in bathrooms; another one is toilets.
Toilets in the Western sense that is; toilets that you sit on. These toilets do exist in China, and in many establishments you'll find stalls set aside for their type, but far more prevalent are the squatting toilets. Squatting toilets are a study in the art of minimalism of toilets--they generally consist of two places to set your feet and a hole or trough in between. The actual quality varies--I've been to some very nice restrooms with clean and even esthetically-pleasing stalls for squatters. I've also been to some not-so-nice ones, often with cigarette butts sitting in the trough. So basically the same range you'll find in bathrooms across the world. Squatting toilets operate effectively as the name suggests--you stand where the footpads indicate, straddling the trough, lower the necessary garments, then squat down so that your knees are up around your chest, and you're set. It may take awhile to perfect your stance, find your center of balance and build up your thigh muscles enough to make you a proficient squatter, but the first time you find yourself in an emergency situation with only a squatting toilet in sight (this will happen), you'll find you can comport yourself well enough.
Still, the Chinese do have an advantage over us. They've been doing this since infancy. Very many Chinese children, in lieu of wearing diapers, will have a slit in their pants right at the crotch. In the city where I was staying at least, it was not an uncommon sight for such a young child to squat down wherever they happened to be standing outside to take care of business. Just another hazard of life in the city.
But even among all the crazy bathroom situations I found myself in during four months in China, I'd reserve special mention for the bathroom in my dorm room. Actually, this bath area was in most respects very nice and familiar: it had a sink area, a shower, and even a sitting toilet, and it was private to our room; much better accommodations than you found in Chinese students' dorms or plenty of American dorms for that matter. But this bathroom had a peculiarity that made it memorable to my roommate and me, and it seems to have been unique to our case. The shower was not set off or separate from the rest of the bathroom in any way, not even a curtain--you just had a nozzle on one of the walls and a drain opposite of it. With most setups like this, the drain is imperceptibly lower than the rest of the floor, so the water flows down from the floor into the drain, leaving most of the bathroom reasonably dry. Ours was the opposite. The drain was apparently raised imperceptibly from the rest of the floor, like one of those trick holes in mini golf, so that the water actually flowed away from the drain onto the rest of the floor. And it always gathered at the lowest point on our bathroom floor, which was apparently the toilet. So every time we took a shower, and sometimes as long as twelve hours later, we would have a moat surrounding our toilet. This just generally made life difficult and prompted one of our first attempts at communication with the residential maintenance man (the first of many), in which Tim gamely tried to explain our problem. "Zhe ge you shui. Zen me mei you shui?", which I can only translate as "This (tapping the floor with his foot) has water. How to not have water?" The man basically shrugged and told us to leave the fan on, which helped to speed up the drying process, but even with that and our futilely trying to sweep the leftover water toward the drain each time after taking a shower, we never fully resolved the problem. We just lived with it.
So, here's my advice to all future travelers in China. Get used to the idea of squatting, and quickly--it's actually more hygienic and physically appropriate than the way we do it in the West, and it's an experience you're probably not going to miss out on however hard you try. Carry hand sanitizer and toilet paper on you at all times; steal napkins if necessary. Don't flush the toilet paper. And don't let the bathroom situation dictate how and where you travel in China--you'll do just fine.
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