The Big Necessity (20 page)

Biogas is not perfect. As the tragedy of Peng showed, digesters can fail because of mechanics and human error. Also, there is little agreement on how safe the slurry actually is. Opinions vary as to whether a four-week digestion process, for example, kills all pathogens. Ascaris eggs, which grow into long and revolting worms, are exceptionally hardy. (They are also still unvanquished, though humanity has been dealing with them forever: ascaris have been detected in fossilized Peruvian dung dating from 2277
BCE
.) Swedish academic Mathias Gustavsson, a fan of biogas—he refers to it as a “solution in search of its problem”—writes that “there is no such thing as a total removal of all parasites due to an anaerobic process.” But a biogas digester has to be better than a bucket.

There are other quibbles. Biogas lamps get very hot and are a fire risk if they're suspended too close to the ceiling. The Rural Energy officials
of Mian Zhu tell their customers to light a match and wave it around before they light the gas, because if there's more than 5 percent methane in the air they might get dizzy.

Also, the impressive numbers handed out by the Institute of Biogas should be taken with circumspection. Jiang Ping Zhao, a senior energy specialist with the World Bank in Beijing, believes that, technologically, biogas has evolved far enough to be easy to use. The days are past when state officials would install a digester, then be nowhere to be found when it broke down. But the numbers give pause. Chinese government targets project that 80 million digesters will be in place by 2020. They will produce 40 million cubic meters of gas. But Jiang thinks this is odd. “They don't have meters on the digesters I've seen, so where are the figures coming from?”

There are also questions about the usefulness of biogas outside pig-owning rural households. Since 1980, China's urban population has more than doubled. By 2025, over two-thirds of Chinese will be city dwellers. Their energy needs will be immense. But the current design of household digesters is little use in urban areas, where livestock is absent. One survey of the use of biomass and coal fuel dismissed biogas digesters by saying “they are limited to areas with sufficient dung, water, temperature and financial capital.” I make this point to the rural energy officials at Mian Zhu, as we drink endless cups of green tea in their ornate meeting room. China used to use the famous Hoover slogan of “a chicken in every pot,” so why not rework it for biogas? Why not get apartment owners to keep a pig or two? Yes, they say. “A pig in every bedroom!”

We laugh, but it's a serious question. Advocates of biogas promote it as an impressive source that need not be confined to village backyards. There are already some large-scale biogas digesters in Germany and Sweden, but more interesting are the buses of Lille. In 1996, the northern French city began to convert its bus fleet to run on biomethane, a fuel derived from municipal sewage (other sources are organic kitchen waste). Ten buses now run on biomethane, and ninety more on natural gas. City officials swear the gas is cleaner. They demonstrate this for reporters by sticking a white handkerchief into an exhaust pipe that
emerges the same color. Biogas emits fewer particles and 20 percent less carbon dioxide than conventional fossil fuels. Also, it pays its way. Infrastructure is expensive, but because the gas is cheaper than diesel or petrol—and its raw materials are supplied for free—it matches petrol in price. What is more, the Lille officials say, it doesn't damage food sources. (The practice of farmers dedicating their land to grow crops to produce bioethanol was condemned by a senior UN official as “a crime against humanity.”) Of course, there are obstacles to the brave new world of biogas: infrastructure is sparse. The oil industry is a powerful disincentive to alternative fuels. But biogas deserves a bigger place in our future, because of how it has so far transformed the present.

 

In Da Li, I make a last stop at the house of another Mrs. Zhou, a white-haired widow who lives with her pigs and her beloved digester. She thrusts a bag of plums into my hands. She offers apples. But I decline. If I won't take the fruit, she insists, then would I like to hear a poem? She has written it in honor of Wang Ming Ying, whom she idolizes for having made her life easier. “I'm illiterate,” she tells me, “but I memorized the words.” I watch her standing there in her yard, ramrod straight, equipped with time, health, and pride, and all because of methane and excrement. She starts to recite:

 

Hear me out, friends!
Let me tell you about biogas
Our chairwoman is a vanguard of the environment
She knows biogas makes good harvest
Government cadres listen to her with delight
Quickly they build the biogas tank
Cooking is easy with biogas
Relieves us women with big problem
Four generations of the family can now dine together
Soup noodles for breakfast
Dry noodles for lunch
Biogas, what a blessing!
The elderly now stay home

The birth of piglets can be managed
Everyone is happy
Everyone wants biogas
Except that money doesn't come easy
We still need to work on it.

 

 

_______________________

Public bathrooms, North Shields, England

(The Caravan Gallery)

 

 

FRIGHTENING THE HORSES

____________

 

 

At the Happiness and Prosperity service station in the rural reaches of Sichuan Province, I prepare to face the public bathroom. We have been driving for hours, and my need is pressing, but I hesitate because Red has told me what lies beyond the entrance. She grew up in flushed and plumbed Hong Kong, and now lives in flushed and plumbed Britain, and she has the expat's snobbery about standards that were before familiar and are now primitive. So she won't come in, though she's desperate as well. It's not because the service station is unclean: the restaurant is pristine, and the food cheap and fabulous. It's because of the doors. There won't be any.

In China, this type of public convenience is called open-style or
ni hao
(hello). Open-style stalls are common enough to be unremarked upon in Chinese public life and to be mentioned in travel guides warning first-time visitors of Chinese uniqueness. The 2002 film
Public Toilet
, by the Chinese director Fruit Chan, demonstrated the place open-style toilets hold in Chinese culture: banal, familiar, normal, where men squat and chat, unashamed and unabashed.

This is my first open-style experience. I ask Red if there is an etiquette. Where should I look? What is considered rude? Is it obligatory
to say
ni hao
? I have no idea, because this is turning all my concepts of public and private upside down. I know that some schools and institutions in the Western world have doorless toilets, the better to foster compliance or—in the case of the military—to extract individuality. But I grew up in a culture that provided privacy abundantly and without question. I like doors. At the Happiness and Prosperity service station, I know I will miss them. Red shrugs, trying not to smile (and also, I hoped, trying hard not to pee).

There is a line inside. Women lean against a curving wall, only a few feet away from half a dozen women squatting in the stalls opposite, over squat latrines placed above a channel of trickling water. There isn't a door in sight. No one says hello. I lean into the wall, making no eye contact and hoping to go unnoticed, but this is untouristed China, and I stand out anyway. The women in the queue smile at me. They gesture. You go first! No, please! Possibly it is courtesy. Probably it is curiosity. Let's see how the
lo wei
(foreigner) does it!

How does the
lo wei
do it? With my head down, the fastest expulsion of liquid possible, and by building doors in my mind.

 

It wasn't too difficult actually. If I thought about it, I'd had decades of practice. Privacy in the twenty-first century relies on hard, material items, on shielding wood or shiny partitions. But I've never found any partitions that were truly soundproof, that provide what one earnest government report on school washrooms called “aural privacy.” Doors and locks are a convention that takes privacy only so far, as I discovered the day in high school when my friends decided to lean over from the next cubicle. Privacy in a public toilet relies on an assumption—a social pact—that something that is not seen is not heard. Privacy involves pretense.

To perform a private function in a public setting requires what the American sociologist Erving Goffman called “civil inattention,” or the art of making living among unknown people tolerable. You know they're there, but you pretend not to acknowledge them by whatever means are at your disposal. How many people have lingered in a cubicle
so that the sound of their excretion—of whatever variety—can't be associated with them when they come out? How many have cringed in a hotel bathroom too close for comfort to a bedroom containing a new lover? I have, and I will.

The modern concept of privacy seems as fixed as those doors, but it is actually a historical upstart. As Norbert Elias wrote in
The Civilizing Process
, it's only slowly and without much forethought that humans in industrialized societies have developed the pressing need to perform certain functions away from the gaze of other people. This, he writes, shouldn't necessarily be seen as progress. Civilization is too fluid a concept to be pinned down as a linear evolution from A (barbaric Middle Ages manners) to B (superior modern propriety). Many modern habits would horrify our courtly ancestors. Nose-blowing, for example. It is still frowned upon in Japan to discharge one's nose in public, but modern “civilized” Westerners happily—and to me, puzzlingly—continue with a habit that the Italian poet Giovanni Della Casa found unpleasant several centuries ago, when he wrote that it was not seemly “after wiping your nose, to spread out your handkerchief and peer into it as if pearls and rubies have fallen out of your head.”

The rise of privacy, along with technology that could flush away evidence of defecation, allowed society to turn a natural bodily function into a hidden, shameful one. Our courtly ancestors happily defecated and urinated in public and without embarrassment. Public toilets have always existed, but until two hundred years ago, they were always communal. The Romans dined and bathed in company, and they did the same with defecation. Their communal latrines, called
forica
, were lavishly decorated with marble and running water, which served to cleanse the sponges on sticks Romans used to wipe themselves. They had murals of leaping stags and floors of geometric mosaic. Another famous public restroom, the twelfth-century Longhouse of London, had 64 seats for men and 64 for women. Facilities were basic: wooden seats were placed above holes that dropped directly into the Thames below. Stalls were judged to be unnecessary.

The transformation of defecation into an activity only done out of sight and smell arose from population growth and the social change that
accompanied it. As cities grew more dense, private space became a privilege of the elite. Individual cleansing facilities were out of reach of the masses, unless you counted the enterprising gentlemen who tramped the streets of Vienna, Paris, London, and Edinburgh wearing large cloaks and carrying buckets. Passing citizens in need could use the bucket as a toilet and the cloak as a cover, or an early, cloaklike door. (The street cry of these human public toilets was surprisingly subtle in times so excrementitious that the streets were sewers. The slogan of French ambulant toilet providers was, “Every man knows what he has to do and it costs two sous to do it!”)

Privacy was something rich people had, until the needs of industrialists and sanitary reformers coincided in the early nineteenth century. The mass labor force needed to be kept healthy to be productive, and the new device of the flush toilet was deemed to be the solution. Not everyone agreed. In 1857, the happily named Mr. Tinkler took his local council in London to court after it forcibly installed a flush toilet in his cottage, when he had been perfectly content with a privy. Work and health also intersected in the landmark 1848 Public Health Act. A more mobile laboring population that no longer worked in the fields—where any bush constituted a public convenience—needed facilities on the way to and from work. The Act, therefore, required the construction of Public Necessities “to alleviate public stench and disease.”