Public Hygiene

The concept of privacy is different in China than it is in most of the Western word. Of course, China is the most populous country on earth, so it is little wonder that Chinese people don’t bother or care to look for seclusion when going about their day to day lives. China is a crowded country. Good luck finding a place to be alone.

The differences between China and the West in the pursuit of privacy extend to nearly ever facet of life. The most striking of these differences, that is to say, the one that was most off-putting to me when I first arrived, is personal hygiene. Don’t get me wrong. This isn’t to say Chinese people don’t take care of themselves. Most people born after the Cultural Revolution (roughly anyone under the age of 45) certainly care a lot about the way they look and of taking care of themselves. But, what we view as guarded, private activities, the Chinese comfortably perform in the most public of settings.

Tooth brushing is often done on the street with a bowl full of water (Who needs a sink drain when you’ve gone some perfectly nice asphalt on which to spit?). Men shave their faces in hotel lobbies and in grocery stores, sometimes with cordless electric razors loudly buzzing away as they pick through the produce section. People clip their nails (fingers and toes) on public buses, to hell with where the clippings might land. A friend told me a particularly frightening tale about a woman who sat next to her on a bus who was using tweezers to pull hair sprouts from a mole on her face. Charming.

Forget personal hygiene. China has invented public hygiene.

I walked into the teacher’s office at my school last week in and saw the head teacher washing his hair in the middle of the room with the help of a student. First, the student fetched the teacher a large bucket of water. Then the teacher bent over the bucket and had the student pour water over his head while he scrubbed vigorously. I didn’t see any shampoo. This was the very first thing I saw at work that day—public hair washing in an office. I knew it was going to be a good day. And, of course, it was.