Toilets of the World 5.6: Sharing the Movement

Perhaps most shocking to the Occidental tourist is not the toilet itself, but its surroundings. Public conveniences in China are a truly eye-opening experience. Forget all about cubicles, you’re lucky if you get a low wall between you and the next fellow.

Here, the traditional approach- multiple users straddling one long sloped trench- is preferable as it presents the squatter in profile, although the area above the foot of the slope is best avoided. Individual troughs, while less offensive to the nose (when flushing properly), are full frontal. As one might expect of a (nominally) Communist country of over 1.6 billion people, notions of personal space and privacy are very different in China.

If one manages to adjust and lose some of one’s inhibitions, there can be a sense of camaraderie in sharing a meal, cramming onto a train and, yes, even squatting next to someone. Walking into a public toilet and finding that one is not alone, one feels compelled to acknowledge fellow squatters as one might acknowledge slight acquaintances- a fractional inclination of the head or raising of the eyebrows- making the whole affair much more relaxed. However, I admit that I was too embarrassed to acknowledge the Tibetan gentleman who insisted on giving theatrical grunts of satisfaction for my benefit.

It is actually when it comes to the needs of the bladder that the open-plan toilet becomes most awkward for the Western male. With urinals few and far between, one often finds oneself looming above a neighbouring squatter, rendering any partition wall defunct, and giving one the uneasy sense that if someone were to take a photo at a certain angle it would look highly incriminating. And anyone with even the slightest familiarity with the male psyche would know that squatting for a number one is quite out of the question.