Game of Thrones

So I give to you an essay I wrote in August after four months of EXTREME Vietnam Action.

When the economy collapsed in Las Vegas in 2008, one of the first office cutbacks was that our bathrooms went from being cleaned nightly to being cleaned three times a week (Tuesday, Thursday and Sunday).  Why this was deemed a prudent cutback was never fully explained.  The bathroom itself contains two stalls, two urinals and two sinks.  The office contains 41 men (yes I counted), all sharing the same two stalls, two urinals and two sinks.  I will spare you the full details, but there were times when I thought some type of hunting accident occurred in a stall prior to my arrival.   I would have rather interrupted men field stripping freshly killed game than endure five minutes in the men’s bathroom on a Friday afternoon.  With that image firmly in mind, I packed my bags to move to Asia.

On my first trip to Asia in 2008, I ate in a restaurant, a really nice restaurant mind you, in which the toilets were holes in the floor.  I shrugged and took aim, only realizing upon my exit that I had just used the women’s restroom.  The men’s indeed contained urinals.  Oops.  Later I was told by an American expat that many local women, even when a proper toilet is provided, squat on the bowl.  In Southeast Asia there is a quaint nostalgia to using a hole in the ground rather than the newfangled porcelain.  The hole is the Wurlitzer of toilets in this part of the world. 

In fact, squatting itself is proving a difficult habit to break here in HCM.  I find it strange that this city, containing sidewalks littered with tables and chairs, also contains thousands of people just squatting around.  Somehow it’s relaxing to squat flat-footed on the sidewalk, as if you are preparing to have an enormous bowel movement and can’t wait to find a toilet, or a hole or take your pants off.  In my younger years, this position was adopted as a stretching technique before soccer matches.  I suppose it shouldn’t have been a huge surprise since we now live in a country where people hang their urinating children off the side of moving motorbikes.  This sort of behavior begs the question “Is this place really an emerging country?”  All things considered, Vietnam is considerably less developed than Macau. I didn’t really know what to expect from the bathrooms in Vietnam. 

There are a few marked differences between bathrooms in the US and in Vietnam.  Vietnam is still mostly unacquainted with the notion of central air conditioning.  My office, my apartment and every place I’ve visited since moving here with conditioned air utilizes individual units rather than one large unit outside that feeds vents inside.  What this means is, on the whole, bathrooms are not air conditioned.  The office bathroom ventilates to the outside through a gap between the wall and ceiling.  If you are unlucky enough to be occupying the end stall when the monsoon hits, you can expect rain to blow in during your repose.  Beyond those very isolated incidents, they are hot and sweaty places. 

All toilets come equipped with a hose next to the bowl.  Our apartment doesn’t have a toilet paper dispenser, but it does have a chrome holder for the sprayer.  It is exactly like the sprayer we had on our kitchen sink in Vegas, except I wouldn’t use this one on the lasagna pan, and the hose doesn’t retract into the wall.  One of my coworkers referred to it as the “poor man’s bidet.” They have these exact same sprayers in our office bathroom.  It’s not unusual to walk into the stall to find the floor and seat covered with water from some erstwhile working man’s cleansing ritual.  After all, there is a water gun in the stall next to you.  Sadly, Northern or Cottonelle do not exist here.  There is nothing that could be marketed as “bath tissue,” as if it’s so soft you could wrap a gift in it.  The toilet paper is called Pulpy, and that is an appropriate name.  It requires half a roll just to clean the puddles on the doughnut.  Is there any worse feeling than walking back and sitting in your desk chair with wet ass?  But don’t worry; the back and cuffs of your pants will already be wet from the water left on the floor.

The relationship between the Vietnamese and water is an intimate one.  Perhaps because it rains so frequently and with such ferocity, they are accustomed to spending a great portion of life wet.  This is the only explanation I can think of for the state of the sink.  The local Vietnamese use the sink, but they only occasionally wash their hands.  They splash water on their faces, their hair, and rinse their mouths in an orgy of water splashing, sighing, throat-clearing and other man-noises I reserve for the privacy of my own shower. This was a shocking display for a guy who, after brushing his teeth, still rinses his mouth out with bottled water.

Everyone has a little cough here because the air quality is so bad.  In the smog wars, Los Angeles is a rank amateur compared to Saigon. Factor in that about 70% of Vietnamese men smoke, and you’ll find some outrageous fits of coughing.  It is normal procedure for a man desiring to freshen up to hock a ball of phlegm from the deepest, darkest regions of his blackened lung and spit it into the sink.  This is not done quietly or with any discretion or deference to the person in the stall trying to serenely coax last night’s dinner out of his body, or concentrate on the game he’s playing on his smart phone, no.  It’s as if ignition has been called for a rocket set to launch a distant satellite, both incredible and jarring all at once.  At least the rocket provides a photo opportunity.

Generally this festival of noise is concluded by the unmistakable sound of the snot rocket, the cymbal crash of body fluid expellation.  For those unacquainted with the “snot rocket” in modern parlance, it’s when one nostril is closed or blocked with a finger while a sharp exhalation causes a phlegm projectile, or rocket, to shoot from the unblocked nostril.  There are only two places I ever utilize this nose blowing technique.  First is the shower.  Things are already getting cleaned, so it’s easy to deal with the fallout of a little nasal passage clearance while standing in rushing water.  The second is when I’m riding my bicycle.  It took me years to perfect the moving snot rocket without sliming half my face.  Look closely at any serious bicycle rider’s gloves, and you will see the stiff terry cloth patch between thumb and forefinger that serves as the Kleenex for snot rockets gone awry.  It’s a delicate art, one that is almost exclusively employed by men.  Imagine my surprise when I witnessed a man in a button down shirt, nicely pressed slacks, dress shoes  with hair combed neatly leaning over to eject a load of snot from his nose  into the vessel in which I was preparing to clean my hands.

All this activity makes the counter appear as if a group of grown men have just concluded an epic water balloon fight.  Despite the lack of “employees must wash hands before returning to work” signs, I am a hand washer.  I brave the wet, slippery and germy mess to handle my due diligence only to find that there are no paper towels. 

There are almost no paper towels in the whole country.  I have been in exactly two bathrooms containing paper towels in Vietnam in four months, only one of which was in HCM.  Paper towels are one of those luxuries that I didn’t even know was a luxury.  Paper towels are a given in the US.  You pee, you wash your hands, you get a paper towel and you dry them, period.  Not here. Here you pee, you wash your hands and then you wave them around or wipe them on your clothes all the way back to your desk, hands smelling like a Strawberry Shortcake doll.  The soap in the bathroom is not subtly scented.  You are not greeted with a scent that whispers “these hands are clean.”  You return to your desk stinking like you went to the bathroom and got a lap dance.  Some higher end places will provide little towels.  The problem with the towels is that many times they’re already moistened.  So you wash your hands, only to realize that all you have to dry them with is a wet towel.   One bar we like has a sink outside the bathroom to be used by both men and women.  Hanging opposite the sink is the towel.  That’s it; one big bath towel that everybody uses to dry their hands after using the facilities.  I choose to believe that the towel is rotated periodically, but it always looks the same when I’m there.

I shudder to think what the office bathroom might look like were it not for the small army of tiny, rubber-gloved women tasked with keeping it clean.  They are there before I get to work, and stay until the last person leaves waging a constant battle against the evils of mankind.  If I could understand what they were saying, I’m certain they could regale me with stories of the things they’ve seen.  They truly have been to the dark side.  That fact is made clear by the way they kick in the door to do their job.  There is no discrete knock as if the housekeeper has appeared at your hotel room a little earlier than expected.  It makes no difference what vulnerable position you find yourself in when it’s time; or what position you will find them in if you walk in as they’re cleaning your favorite stall.  They are going to clean.  Try not to make eye-contact because they already know that you’re here to literally shit in the thing they just spent the last five minutes cleaning.

When I encountered the bathroom for the first time I thought, “What else was I expecting?”  How could I have expected anything different in a place where men grow their fingernails long and it’s considered low class for a woman to have a tan?  Everything has that foreignness, that backwardness that makes living here just plain odd.

 Incredibly, despite the horrific scene I’ve just painted, the bathroom in my new office is paradise compared to the one I left behind in America.  They say scent is the sense most inextricably linked with memory, so I have to laugh when I think of the billionaires who have been forced to endure the stink these oft used, oft abused, receptacles when they adjourn to those particular facilities.  When they cast their minds back to the meeting in our office, do they remember the renderings and the presentation; or, do they remember walking into the bathroom, the air still and pregnant with the stench of forty-eight hours of non-stop use? 

That was written in August.  In December I returned to the US and worked a week in the home office.  Sure enough, during my week back I found a turd the size of a baby lodging in one of the stalls.  It was so big I actually had to go tell an adult, an adult with children, to come and verify that I was not imagining and to flush it down.  Parents have the stomach for this type of activity, where I have not yet acquired the necessary life-skills to do battle with foreign excrement as big as your head.  To be honest, the sight had rendered me powerless.  I was paralyzed by visions of attempting to flush it, only to have it back up the toilet and then come at me in a vengeful rage.  Lucky for you, I accidentally left my phone at home today, otherwise you'd have photo documentation of the offending ordure.  I'm not normally the type to take pictures of this sort of thing, but it was that big.  At once both shocking and fantastic like a fatal car accident.  You know you shouldn't but you get a sick thrill of exhilaration seeing the carnage.

Anyway, the point I'm trying to make here is that I believe the massive duke was left in the office bowl intentionally.  A symbol of anonymous pride.  A "Look At What I Have Made!" moment that the creator decided required a little more time to be appreciated; that needed a witness before leaving on it's long journey.  This has never happened in Asia since my arrival.  What does it say about our respective cultures?  I'm not sure, but it has to say something about the differences between us.