Good practices: 01 (Leaving outdoor shoes outside)

 

It is a(n almost universal) default practice in the Chinese culture to leave one’s outdoor shoes at the door when entering a house.

    In hot regions, one might just go around indoors barefoot.  In other places, people would wear indoor slippers.  Some families will have footwear assigned to each member, making each pair his/her own slippers.  Guests would be offered guest sets — which I personally find unhygienic (they might’ve been worn by people who have athlete’s foot…) but it is difficult to refuse.

    I see from watching drama series that Koreans do the same.  The Japanese wear socks all the time, it seems, so they just walk around in their socks.  (All observations of Japanese and Korean practices are from watching dramas, not first-hand experiences.)

    There’s the element of cost, of course:  outdoor shoes (which are more expensive) can be saved from the extra and unnecessary wear and tear.

    The main reason for this practice, however, is that soles will have picked up dirt on the ground which one doesn’t want to bring into the house.

    Hence, the sign on buses and Tubes here reminding people, “Please do not put feet on seats”, but it gets ignored a lot — mostly by young people like teenagers, from what I have seen, as well as young children whose parents don’t stop them, never mind explain why to them.

    The attitude seems to be that they don’t have to clean the seats, so why care?  Their own comfort is more important, from what I’ve seen.  Which is a very self-centred approach, I think, and very sad.

    I did once, back in the early 80s, actually witness a young man in the street on Tottenham Court Road tossing his litter onto the pavement and saying out loud, “That’s what our taxes pay for, isn’t it?  To have people clean it up.”  That young man should go and spend some time in Singapore….

    I saw an advert on telly here in the early 80s featuring a private dinner party, with, say, 10 people at the table.  The smokers were tipping out the contents of the full ashtrays onto the carpet to make room; some other guests were chucking things like wrappers straight onto the floor or stale drink to make room for a fresh top up.  This went on for about 10 or 15 seconds, for the viewer to register what was happening, then the voiceover at the end said, “You wouldn’t do this in your own home, would you?”  It added some message about managing what to do with litter (the wording for which I cannot remember now).

    That advert didn’t make another appearance, which is a shame, because:

 

(i) people need to have the “don’t do unto others what you don’t want done unto yourself” message instilled in them — too rarely done by modern parents in my daily observations here, sadly;

(ii) it indicates that the authorities are not bothered enough to make the effort — a lot of Brits I’ve come across resent a nannying state (something a lot of them mock me about when they find out I’m from Singapore).