What The Hell Am I Doing Back Here?

For the last month I have been back-packing from Kuala Lumpur up through Malaysia and Thailand and into Bangkok.



It has been a time of sunshine, laughter, crazy adventures and clean toilets. And it was terribly difficult to come back.



No matter where I went in Malaysia and Thailand -from meanest village to bustling city or town, through bus stations and make-shift eateries - one thing was constant: the toilets were clean, airy, hygienic and odour-free. If you've never been out of a First world country you might be thinking "Well, duh!". But if you live in, or have been to, China you will probably be thinking "Oh, heaven!"



Because the one thing that all foreigners, whether loving China or disliking it, will agree with, is that the lavatories here are, frankly, disgusting. And I use the word not in a hyperbolic sense, but in every aspect of its actual meaning: they engender disgust. I have an almost cast-iron constitution and have spent my life in some of the most primitive corners of the world. But China is the only country in the world where, having entered a public toilet I raced outside and violently, wrenchingly, and at great length vomited.



I have witnessed a visiting Academic - a tough cookie and well-respected for her pragmatic, no-nonsense stand upon important issues - crouching, sobbing with humiliation in a Chinese lavatory. I have known a fellow-teacher who became agoraphobic: she was so worried about having to use a toilet outside her own apartment that she refused to venture from it. I have met backpackers who took the next plane out of the country after visiting a Chinese public lavatory and I myself have rung in sick when my tummy has had the slightest grumble, because the knowledge that I might have to use one of the toilets in the University teaching bloc is not to be borne.



Before I came here I read forums which moaned about Chinese toilets but did not go into graphic detail. In my innocence I imagined their only gripe was the absence of toilet paper: easily overcome by every resident in China carrying round small packets of tissues in their pocket or bag. The first habit one picks up. I then thought that the concern was centred solely around the issue of "squattie potties" as they are dubbed by expatriates. I was blase about that. China is not the only country to favour this form of lav. and my experience with squats was pretty extensive.



So I was actually as unprepared as any other foreigner for the reality of Chinese toilets. As long as one lives here it is impossible to equate the the sight of some dainty, doll-like creature click-clacking her way along a corridor with the knowledge of her destination. How can she bear it?



While not actually vomiting, I once stood in a line at a public toilet at a busy and modern shopping mall, absolutely desperate for relief, but dry-heaving with my hand-creamed hands in front of my nose, trying vainly to block out the sickening stench. Yet from smart urban office-staff, to elderly shoppers, everyone else stood there nattering unconcernedly, and, while I picked my way, gagging, into the cubicle, they sailed in with no obvious distaste for the inch-deep human waste that covered the cubicle floors, the discarded, unwrapped sanitary napkins around which blue-bottles and flies hovered hungrily nor the overflowing, open baskets of used toilet paper steaming in the summer temperatures.



When I have gone on holidays to Australia or England and delighted in the perfumed, Muzaked wastes of the sterile, hushed, ladies lavs. I have come back telling myself it is elitist to compare these to the insanitary conditions of a third-world country. But this time, this time I just got mad.



If villages that were no more than clearings in a jungle, or busy coach stations with hundreds of bladders a minute being continuously relieved could boast pristine, sanitary lavs, with plentiful water not just for flushing but for washing ones bits afterwards, why on earth was I returning to such conditions? I would look at Malaysian and Thai women, so dainty and feminine, and know that they were dainty and feminine in all aspects.



Using water to douche oneself is so much more civilized than the Western habit of sopping up excess with bits of paper, that I actually felt disgusted at a conversation overheard in a Malaysian Tea plantation: A busload of Aussie tourist had just pulled up and a gaggle of women invaded the amenities. I had, as usual, lingered a little in thoughtful delight at the spotless floors, the shining fixtures and the luxury of being able truly to "freshen up" in my cubicle before coming to wash my hands with plentiful hot water and a sweet-smelling soap that perfumed the entire area. No need ever for the sanitised wipes I always carried at home in China - where a single cold tap is considered all that's necessary for washing.



Yet I heard the group of women who had beaten their companions to it greeting the new arrivals with "Another bloody Asian toilet!" "Oh no! " the others groaned. ""Yeah, gotta crouch down like a bloody plantation worker...and there's no toilet paper!" "What! These people are the living end!" replied one of the new arrivals. "Ah don't worry love, I came prepared" someone grimly announced and started tearing sheets from a huge roll which she doled out to everyone else.



I slunk away trying to disassociate myself from these women and hoped that the nearby staff - all of whom spoke excellent English - did not group me in with these "dirty foreigners" who preferred using pieces of paper to utilising the douches attached to each lav. I also prayed that the next country they visited was China.



The longer I stayed in Malaysia and Thailand the more the thought of returning to Chinese loo's was getting me down. I was also dreading walking down streets where fellow-pedestrians hawked enormous globules of spit around so that walking down any street becomes a hazard - not from pick-pockets or rapists, but from the possibly of of slipping in one of these enormous oysters as I once did in a busy, indoor market. The sound of a tiny Chinese girl, with fluffy pink scirts, and diamante jewellery fetching one of these up from, apparently, the depths of her being to let fly (sometimes on ones shoes)still has the power to amaze me.



Then, I started to think, there was the fact that everywhere one went people did not just stare...they turned around to do so; they held up their kids for an uninterrupted gawk; they got out their cell-phones and recorded one for posterity; the stood right next to one and did a slow, unsmiling inventory from the toes of one's shoes to the topmost hair on one's crown.



Which of course led me to dread returning to the daily battle to catch a bus: fighting and clawing with tens of other determined passengers, being elbowed out of the way, having ones feet trodden on and, sometimes, going down in the crowd unnoticed while people scramble blindly past.



Or the way one was dismissed with shooing motions like an uppity farmyard chook if someone didn't want to answer, or let one into their cab, or didn't know the answer to a question or just couldn't be bothered talking. AAArgh.



Even when I had actually run out of money I stayed on in Bangkok, lazing by the hostel pool, walking through the pavements crowds, taking free bus rides and dreading, absolutely dreading, having to leave the sunshine and the smiles, the cleanliness and the flowers, and come on home.



I've now been back a week and in have just come back from downtown. I stood back and let the fight go on without me to get a bus and so, despite having arrived at the bus stop in good time, had to stand, with someones bottom fitting snugly into the curve of my own and my boobs squashed up against a strangers back. Until, of course, the bus broke down and we were all abandoned without a word of apology or alternative arrangements, on the side of the highway.



But then a passing business man stopped and gave me a lift. Oh, all right: he stopped to give the three pretty young students ahead of me a lift and, as they slid, giggling, into the back seat I insinuated myself firmly into the front. No-one minded. And no-one said "Put on your seat belt, or I'll get a huge fine". Neither did anyone even flinch as he overtook a truck on the wrong side, or sailed down the bicycle lane, or stopped on a busy corner to let us off. As I hurried down a nearby lane a woman coming towards me beamed all over her face and said "Hello!"



Then I walked across the square, where teenagers linked arms with their grandparents, and a little boy accosted me and asked me what my name was. His mother didn't rush him off indignantly reminding him of stranger danger but sat, smiling proudly from a far bench, as her little one talked to the foreigner.

When I finally arrived at the place from which I was to conduct a class, no-one muttered darkly about me being dozy or unorganised when they reminded me it was the wrong day. They all giggled and laughed and asked me how my holiday had been, and told me how good I looked, and admired my new handbag and asked me how much I had paid for it and how much had been asked and congratulated me for getting a bargain.

In the coffee lounge no-one minded that I took a comfortable chair from the other side of the room and plonked it down in front of the plate-glass window which I gazed through, entranced, as though it were a giant t.v. screen. A young father and his tiny daughter thought it was a good idea and did exactly the same thing. When I had finished my coffee I knew I was free to sit there from then until the place closed, and even have a little snooze if I felt like it, without feeling the need to buy more bloating cups of anything in order to establish my right to do so.

I reflected on my weeks new classes, packed with old students who had signed on for another semester with me, and how they had welcomed me, and asked questions, and the incredible difference in them from the first classes I had ever had with them. They had lost their paralysing shyness, they had learned to joke and even dispute with me; their English was so improved from those first, faltering sentences of just a semester ago that it was difficult to believe they were the same people.

We discussed topics they wouldn't even have understood when I first met them; they argued with each other; they gave answers that did not match my thoughts on things; they didn't giggle and turn red when I made them all change places and sit with people of different gender.

So, sitting there in that coffee shop, watching old men hawk onto the pavement and same-sex couples go by hand in hand who would laugh at the idea of that looking gay, I suddenly knew why I had come back.

Bugger the toilets: I have a map in my head now of all the five star hotels downtown where I can go if I'm caught short, and I'll continue to ring in sick if I have a tummy-rumble. Bugger the hawking and spitting - my students think its revolting every bit as much as I do. Now I know what ha kept me coming back and signing on.

China is like nowhere else on earth: its anarchic and traditional at the same time. Its a place where one has enormous freedoms and none at all. Its a place at a frantic, hectic speed where whole busloads full of passengers calmly go to sleep on a twenty minute bus ride. It's unthinkably large population are worldly-wise and naive, cunning and trusting, excessively polite and (to our way of thinking only) incredibly rude. China is the epitome of Yin and Yang.

The older generation are slowly instigating change, but the youngsters are lapping it up. They can admit to themselves and, often, to me, that there are some things that need to change while their elders, still caught in a different system's mores, are sometimes more slow to acknowledge it. There's so much they need to learn and so much they can teach me.

I think I keep coming back to China because it's exciting being part of a new culture that is being forged. And hey, somewhere in the future, maybe that will include doing something about the toilets!