Carrick Hill

Rydges Carlton, Melbourne

We were talking about toilet habits. Know that this was in 1982, a time in Malaysia where bidets and toilet hoses were not common. Susanna, my vivacious Chinese friend was appalled to learn that none of her peers in our close knit group lived up to her own standards of hygiene by washing their behinds after a stint, big or small, in the toilet.

YUCKS !!! Soooooooooooo dirtyyyyy….. !!!

She exclaimed, revulsion written into every offended facial line scrunched up in outright disgust.

Carlton Crest, Sydney

Doubtless, trends have changed since then. Every new home in Malaysia now comes with a hose, for personal hygiene usage, next to every toilet bowl. Malaysians must surely deserve the world record for the world’s freshest smelling back end

Human beings are such creatures of habit. We get so used to doing this our way that we cringe at the thought of doing it other people’s way. And this thought was what amused me when I thought about the idiosyncrasies and contradictions of culture.

Let’s not talk about the Japanese. Hygiene has been hard coded into their genetic lineage since their early Samurai days.

Asian cities and villages are in the main, a disgrace. Dirty and unkempt, with uncovered monsoon drains, open air garbage dumps and disgusting perpetually wet public toilets, one would think that Asians are a people with unhygienic habits.

Yet, in more ways than one, Asians are fastidiously clean and meticulous in a way that could only be incomprehensible to others. Another obvious example is their universal insistence on keeping separate, (dirty) shoes to be worn outside the home and (clean) slippers that may be worn inside. A source of cultural confusion and another exotic habit incomprehensible to the Westerner

You know the Hongkong and Shanghai Bank adverts in the National Geographic mag ? Don’t you just love them? But of course, they stick to subject mattersmore socially acceptable than toilet habits haha

The throne in my castle