Some Chinese practices: 10 (Table manners.4: No talking about bodily functions)

 

I used to give a woman regular massages (free and at her home) for her still-weak ankle after she'd twisted it a few years ago.  She'd lie down on a sofa, and I'd sit in a low folding stool by the sofa for the massage.

    One day, the folding stool was not in its regular spot.  The husband said he'd taken it, but would explain later, which he did -- at dinner time over the meal.

    He had read somewhere that one's sitting position on the toilet seat makes a difference to how easily one moves one's bowels.  He suffers from constipation (he'd taken a Xmas phone call last year greeting the caller with, "Is it diarrhoea or constipation?"), so he took the folding stool to the toilet to help him move his bowels, he said.  Putting his feet up on the stool, while defecating, he explained, changes the angle of the different parts of the lower half of the body to each other (the lower back with the hip joint with the upper legs with the anus).

    Since I was in his house, I didn't feel it good manners to tell him I didn't want to be given so much information, especially not at the dinner table.

    I have since been soul-searching and wondering if perhaps I'm being too squeamish and prudish about it.  Forward steps my latest blog-inspirer, the mainland Chinese drama series (set 1979–92) that I've been watching, to help vindicate me.

    In epi.36, the teacher chap, his textile factory worker wife and their post-grad son visit the flat in Shanghai rented by the new son-in-law.  The time frame would be around 1992, when China had started to catch up in terms of material life, e.g., fridge, wrist watch, camera, slow cooker, microwave.

    The girl's mother has gone through the flat, and as they sit down to the meal, marvels at the fact that it has its own separate bathroom and toilet, vs having to share them with neighbours like she and her husband had had to do all their lives.

    She compares the flat to the place the post-grad son is living in, saying, "上厕所都要排队 / shàng cèsuǒ dōu yào páiduì / has to queue up even for the toilet".  She then stops herself, saying, "吃饭我老说厕所 / chīfàn wǒ lǎo shuō cèsuǒ / meal time, and I keep talking about toilets."

    So, I'm not the only one, then, to consider it a taboo subject to bring up at the dinner table.  I feel vindicated.

    Well, she's only mentioned the fact that the son-in-law's flat has its own toilet, she didn't actually go through the details of how to move one's bowels more efficiently with a footstool to help.