The Big Necessity (22 page)

 

It is raining in Beijing. Straight, hard, determined rain. I welcome the change. I'd been here five days before I saw the sun, though every day had been sunny behind the smog. Beijing is a city where the weather doesn't seem to matter, like it has lost hope. Even this rain may be suspicious. It's August 2006, two years away from an Olympics that the Chinese authorities are determined will be a showcase for the world. An English expat tells me that everyone suspects the authorities of seeding the skies to make rain, to wash away pollution. Officials denied it, but the rain had still arrived every night in July, at 10
P.M
. exactly. Beijing's rulers want to clean up the city for the Games and if rainshowers work, they'll try it. They also want to clean up the city's restrooms for the expected three million visitors. The cleanup plan—launched in 2005—had epic ambitions. Five thousand public bathrooms would be constructed or renovated. No one would be more than five minutes' walking distance from a decent toilet. Any traveler to China, used to facilities that are few and filthy, might find these goals as unattainable as trying to tame the weather.

Top-down efforts to “civilize” China are not new. The New Life Movement of Chiang Kai-shek, the Kuomintang leader defeated by Mao's Communist Party, laid out 96 specific rules to improve Chinese virtues. Better-behaved Chinese, he believed, would herald a stronger, more competitive modern nation. The rules included no smoking, sneezing, spitting, or urinating in public. Eighty years on, China's authorities are trying an equally daunting social program, only this time the targets are China's people and its toilets. Civilizing campaigns launched over the past few years have been aimed at eradicating spitting, bad manners, rude taxi drivers, bad English, and flies. Sadly, this civilizing campaign will get rid of such Chinglish signs as “Deformed Man,” to indicate a handicapped toilet, and “Show mercy to the slender
grass” signs on Beijing's parks. But it has introduced Chinese readers to the inimitable Guo Zhangqi, a farmer who travels every day to Beijing to stand in a public park offering $2.50 for five dead flies, and funds his goal of “a fly-free Olympics” out of his own pocket.

The construction and renovation of 747 of the 5,000 public restrooms was handed to the care of Mr. Pang of the Tourism Development Authority. His office is in a building that has a TV in the lobby showing a video of some of China's lush scenery—green rivers, clear rushing waters, not a smokestack in sight. Mr. Pang is a middle-aged man in short sleeves who hands out goodies of Tourism Development Authority bags and literature, and shows us into a meeting room with plenty of windows through which to watch the teeming rain. Mr. Pang isn't responsible for toilets anymore, which may be why he agreed to meet us. (When I tried halfheartedly to meet with someone in the Beijing sanitation department, I was instructed to contact the Propaganda Ministry. I didn't.) The 747 bathrooms have been constructed and renovated, and the program is deemed to be completed.

Still, he's happy to talk about them. They are something to be proud of, and they are essential to his job. “Tourism is a window industry. We want foreigners to have a pleasant experience. Toilets are so important: without them, tourists don't come back.” The Tourism Development Authority decided to provide squatting designs and sitting ones, to be accommodating to all preferences. There are “third space” stalls, which families can use together. The construction was accompanied by public campaigns exhorting the Chinese to close the cubicle door, or to use less water, to behave more like civilized people. For a proud nation, it seems odd that the Chinese are choosing Western definitions of civilization to form their own. “In reality,” Norbert Elias wrote, “our terms ‘civilized' and ‘uncivilized' do not constitute an antithesis of the kind that exists between ‘good' and ‘bad.'” Concepts of what civilization means are more slippery than that. Chinese newspapers may be urging their citizens to be better behaved—and they mean more like Westerners—but it cuts both ways. Westerners could learn some manners, too, though Mr. Pang is too polite to say so. Western habits of putting wads of toilet paper—and plenty of other things—down the toilet
coincide unhappily with China's smaller sewers, which clog easily. I ask Mr. Pang how he's going to educate visitors to put toilet paper in a basket like the Chinese do, a practice that, according to Western concepts of civility, is dirty and unhygienic. “I don't know,” he says. “We can't follow them into the cubicle.” The Chinese can harness rainshowers and turn foul toilets into gleaming ones worthy of Olympic ideals, both considerable achievements. But they can't dictate toilet behavior, any more than anyone can, any more than sparrows can be tamed or flies bought into extinction, $2.50 for five.

 

There is no secret to how the Chinese overhauled their public restrooms. There was money, it was made available, and bathrooms were built. A command economy and an authoritarian political system helped. In the world's most famous democracy, things are handled very differently. In the United States, a country notable for its inability to provide acceptable levels of away-from-home bathrooms, the public's reaction to a lack of a fundamental public service is generally, like, whatever. The American Restroom Association wasn't formed until 2004 and has yet to make much impact. The Privy Council, a New York City–based toilet pressure group, hasn't updated its Web site for years. Apart from that, there is nothing. Perhaps such meekness is due to urban-dwelling stoicism. During a blackout that was an indictment of an imperfect infrastructure, New Yorkers threw parties. Perhaps it's due to language: a country that chooses “restroom” and “bathroom” to signify places that dispose of human excreta may not want to look beyond the language barrier.

Perhaps it's because humans are adaptable. When there isn't a bathroom, people manage, or they stay home. In 1966, Alexander Kira could crack the old joke about the difference between a camel and a lady: A camel can go all day without drinking, and a lady can drink all day without going. Self-restraint is the foundation of propriety, but this much restraint has serious health consequences. One organization that lobbies for older people's rights refers to the “bladder leash,” which confines hundreds of thousands of elderly people to their homes
because they are scared of not being able to find a toilet when they leave the house. (They call it a bladder leash because “bladder and colon leash” wouldn't get any publicity.) Bladders can be shy as well as leashed. “Shy bladder syndrome,” as parusesis is usually called, affects one million Americans, according to the International Parusesis Society, and renders them incapable of urinating in public places. Incontinence, meanwhile, affects 25 million Americans, according to the National Association for Continence, but you'd never guess from their minimal public profile. Compare this to the Australians, not known for their sensitive nature, who in 2001 launched a national toilet map to help their incontinent and continent citizens find the country's 13,000 public restrooms. Even the toilet-closing English of Westminster Council have now launched Satlav, a service that can send text messages to subscribers with the location of the nearest convenience.

Americans can get excited about bathrooms, but—unsurprisingly in a litigious country—only in the law courts. The biggest bathroom battle isn't about the absence of a common decency, but about inequality. The “potty parity” movement is led by lawyer John Banzhaf, who made his reputation by promoting antismoking and founding the anti-tobacco lobby group Action against Smoking and Health (ASH). He objected to smoking because it damages other people. It is unfair. He came to potty parity for the same reason. Banzhaf seeks to better an age-old inequality of public restrooms: women always have to wait. There are always lines in restrooms because it takes longer for women to pee. Careful research has established that women take 90 seconds to urinate, while men take 45. Men who complain that women should hurry the hell up do not take into consideration the fact that women must undress and sit. They have cumbersome clothes. They have shopping bags, sometimes, and small children. Providing an equal number of restrooms for men and women, Banzhaf argues, doesn't help, especially when square footage is taken into consideration: More urinals can be fitted into the same floor space.

Banzhaf first took the case of Jean Ledwith King, who filed a complaint against the University of Michigan, which wanted to renovate an auditorium and install 22 men's stalls and 30 for women. More
recently, he filed a complaint with the Architect of the Capitol, claiming that “the failure of the House to provide [. . .] equivalent access for women constitutes illegal sex discrimination and violates the constitutional right of Equal Protection.” Also, apparently it makes them miss the vote. Banzhaf's press release highlighted earlier research which found that male members of Congress have access to a washroom a few feet off the House floor. This includes “six stalls, four urinals, gilt mirrors, a shoeshine, ceiling fan, drinking fountain, and television.” The seventy female members of Congress, meanwhile, should they need the bathroom, would have to traverse a hall often filled with tourists, or be faced with “entering the minority leader's office, navigating a corridor that winds past secretarial desks and punching in a keypad code to ensure restricted access.”

There are other routes to equality that don't involve suing. Unisex restrooms are often touted as a solution to potty disparity. The unisex restroom that starred in the TV series
Ally McBeal
became as famous as its human stars. But unisex toilets are not popular. They make it harder to practice civil inattention, to pretend. Our feelings toward public bathrooms are already more negative than toward home ones, as Kira wrote. We don't want to see fecal matter in the toilet bowl, which is too much information about another person, and we don't want a warm seat, which is a sign that a stranger has left his/her body heat, and from a bare body, too. That, says Kira, “is more sharing than many people feel comfortable with.” Public facilities are only tolerable when users can pretend that they have “mineness.” “In a relatively spotless public bathroom, with no one ‘passing wind' or whatever, it is perfectly possible for us to pretend we are in a private situation—in a bathroom, or booth, that is ‘mine.'”

A unisex bathroom not only has the stranger problem of regular public toilets but contravenes the social codes of gender segregation that have prevailed forever, and that operate with more or less severity in most countries in the world. Even in rural China, where I turned up unannounced in a tiny village in the middle of mountains, by one of those rushing rivers from the Tourism Development Authority video, and questioned a thirteen-year-old girl called Chen Xie about her family latrine. She was charming and showed no alarm about strangers arriving
to ask her about her toilet, until I asked her what happened when their latrine—which had no door, this being China—was occupied and someone else came to use it. “If it's a woman,” she said, “they can come in.” And if it's your father? She looked appalled. “No! That would be awful.” Then she led us back to the house and her grandfather offered a plate of watermelon, and though I'd just been told that the family fields were fertilized with the contents of the family latrine, I took the fruit. Watermelons have thick skins.

 

There is some innovation and invention in the public toilet field. Germans, for example, think urinals are flawed. Aiming a stream of urine at a toilet bowl sends a fine spray around the room (as does every toilet flushed without the lid closed). Spray becomes vapor, which leaves a chemical deposit on anything surrounding the urinal. It can also change the color of wallpaper. The Japanese toilet firm National dealt with this by putting a dot of light in the bowl to serve as a target, a concept developed after staff at Tokyo's main airport noticed that putting stickers in the bowl improved men's aim and kept their floors cleaner. The Germans, however, want men to sit instead. I discovered this curious cultural fact when a friend had a relationship with a German woman, who found his habit of standing to urinate as odd as he found her insistence that he sit down. She did not thankfully resort to the cheap technological answer to her problem, a ten-dollar German-made alarm that is attached to a toilet seat. When the seat is lifted, the transgressor is admonished that “stand-peeing is not allowed.” But the relationship didn't last and my friend now stands unimpeded, and probably cherishes his copy of Klaus Schwerma's interesting book,
Standing Urinators: The Last Bastion of Masculinity?

The other way goes the other way. Men should sit down, and women should stand up. This is not an outlandish concept: women have stood to urinate at various times and places throughout history. Herodotus reported that Egyptian women “stand erect to make water; the men stoop.” The grand ladies of the French court would pee and defecate at will with no shame, but they had clothing that was better suited to standing. The modern woman, with her trousers and underwear
and shopping bags, is unlikely to embrace the female urinal, and hasn't yet. There have been pockets of success—Swedish pharmacies do a creditable trade in cardboard funnels that enable women to stand-pee, and cardboard funnels and She-Pee female urinals were well used at the 2007 Glastonbury Music Festival. But TOTO's female urinal, launched in 1964, failed miserably. I saw many of these curious objects in Japanese department store restrooms, and no one was going near them, and I wouldn't, either.

Female urinals are often offered as a solution to restroom congestion, and they are usually offered as a solution by men who won't have to use them. For this reason, they really enrage Clara Greed. When a pleasant enough Hong Kong doctor suggests they are a good idea, during the WTO summit in Moscow, Greed was moved to leap from her seat and say, “This is war!” She hates female urinals because the concept is shortsighted. Women would not take as long if their public bathrooms were better designed. There would be fewer queues if there were more public bathrooms. All sorts of problems could be solved if only people in charge got it into their heads that providing their citizens with public toilets was not only the height of civility but good economic management. In rural Australia, a development thinker, Peter Kenyon, who runs the Bank of Ideas Institute, promotes toilets as the means to prosperity for the thousands of two-horse, public-toiletless settlements that are trying to survive. Because he is Australian, he calls this the “shit-led revival.” By his calculations, settlements located on good roads can get an extra twenty carloads of people to stop every day, if they install a public necessity, which would mean as much revenue as a smallish rural factory would make. Restaurants and service stations know that decent bathrooms bring in trade, and outlandish toilets—ones that play language tapes, or have special glass that means you can see out, but that people can't see in—bring the media, which bring clients. Effort is made in the private sector and nowhere else.