zimatravels

This is an excerpt from my book, Memoirs of a Middle-aged Hummingbird, published in 2006.

It looked quite ordinary from the outside, standing under a tree along the roadside in Hokianga, New Zealand.  Stepping inside, I pressed a button and the door closed.  Classical music drifted into the immaculate little room with the very clean toilet.  I pressed another button and the toilet paper rolled down.  After washing at the perfectly clean sink, I reluctantly pressed another button that made the concert conclude and the door open.  As I stepped outside, the door closed again and a loud, very unmusical noise commenced as the toilet dutifully scrubbed and sanitized itself.

The vast majority of toilets I have used around the world were definitely not as pleasant.  Several in China might have been called downright traumatic because of the unsanitary conditions, lack of privacy, and the rather delicate balance required to squat.  Chinese learn how to squat firmly from childhood, not only for elimination, but also for sitting comfortably anywhere they are without a chair.  Anatomically, squatting over a toilet hole facilitates proper elimination.  Chinese do it so naturally that I have seen shoeprints on western-style toilet seats in airplanes while traveling between Asia and the U.S.

The most unusual toilet I used in China was a wooden barrel placed in a small shed outside the countryside home of one of my student’s families I visited.   Curious pigs also shared this shed.

Flushing has as many variations as the style of toilet– from none as in the trains in China where it all disappears down onto the tracks left behind, to the occasional sweep of water down a long trough in a public toilet, to the gentle but not always effective American swirl, and the New Zealand gush of water like a waterfall cleansing the bowl.

In China of the late 1980’s and 1990’s, I had many opportunities to observe that, while western toilets had arrived in some places in China, western toilet technology hadn’t.  In some cases, the pumps that brought water into the building didn’t do their job.  What always amazed me was how a ubiquitously available pink string was utilized to fix just about everything in China — including inside the toilet tanks.

Toilet paper can be brown and rough in the Chinese countryside, or in tiny little packets of inefficient tissues that girls carry everywhere with them in China and Taiwan.  Toilets, toilet accessories, and toilet culture are just another aspect of the fascinating and sometimes unpredictable similarities and differences found around the world.