The Big Necessity

by Rose George

  There are also questions about the usefulness of biogas outside pig-owning rural households. Since 1980, China’s urban population has more than doubled. By 2025, over two-thirds of Chinese will be city dwellers. Their energy needs will be immense. But the current design of household digesters is little use in urban areas, where livestock is absent. One survey of the use of biomass and coal fuel dismissed biogas digesters by saying “they are limited to areas with sufficient dung, water, temperature and financial capital.” I make this point to the rural energy officials at Mian Zhu, as we drink endless cups of green tea in their ornate meeting room. China used to use the famous Hoover slogan of “a chicken in every pot,” so why not rework it for biogas? Why not get apartment owners to keep a pig or two? Yes, they say. “A pig in every bedroom!”

  We laugh, but it’s a serious question. Advocates of biogas promote it as an impressive source that need not be confined to village backyards. There are already some large-scale biogas digesters in Germany and Sweden, but more interesting are the buses of Lille. In 1996, the northern French city began to convert its bus fleet to run on biomethane, a fuel derived from municipal sewage (other sources are organic kitchen waste). Ten buses now run on biomethane, and ninety more on natural gas. City officials swear the gas is cleaner. They demonstrate this for reporters by sticking a white handkerchief into an exhaust pipe that emerges the same color. Biogas emits fewer particles and 20 percent less carbon dioxide than conventional fossil fuels. Also, it pays its way. Infrastructure is expensive, but because the gas is cheaper than diesel or petrol—and its raw materials are supplied for free—it matches petrol in price. What is more, the Lille officials say, it doesn’t damage food sources. (The practice of farmers dedicating their land to grow crops to produce bioethanol was condemned by a senior UN official as “a crime against humanity.”) Of course, there are obstacles to the brave new world of biogas: infrastructure is sparse. The oil industry is a powerful disincentive to alternative fuels. But biogas deserves a bigger place in our future, because of how it has so far transformed the present.

  In Da Li, I make a last stop at the house of another Mrs. Zhou, a white-haired widow who lives with her pigs and her beloved digester. She thrusts a bag of plums into my hands. She offers apples. But I decline. If I won’t take the fruit, she insists, then would I like to hear a poem? She has written it in honor of Wang Ming Ying, whom she idolizes for having made her life easier. “I’m illiterate,” she tells me, “but I memorized the words.” I watch her standing there in her yard, ramrod straight, equipped with time, health, and pride, and all because of methane and excrement. She starts to recite:

  Hear me out, friends!

  Let me tell you about biogas

  Our chairwoman is a vanguard of the environment

  She knows biogas makes good harvest

  Government cadres listen to her with delight

  Quickly they build the biogas tank

  Cooking is easy with biogas

  Relieves us women with big problem

  Four generations of the family can now dine together

  Soup noodles for breakfast

  Dry noodles for lunch

  Biogas, what a blessing!

  The elderly now stay home

  The birth of piglets can be managed

  Everyone is happy

  Everyone wants biogas

  Except that money doesn’t come easy

  We still need to work on it.

  _______________________

  Public bathrooms, North Shields, England

  (The Caravan Gallery)

  A PUBLIC NECESSITY

  FRIGHTENING THE HORSES

  ____________

  At the Happiness and Prosperity service station in the rural reaches of Sichuan Province, I prepare to face the public bathroom. We have been driving for hours, and my need is pressing, but I hesitate because Red has told me what lies beyond the entrance. She grew up in flushed and plumbed Hong Kong, and now lives in flushed and plumbed Britain, and she has the expat’s snobbery about standards that were before familiar and are now primitive. So she won’t come in, though she’s desperate as well. It’s not because the service station is unclean: the restaurant is pristine, and the food cheap and fabulous. It’s because of the doors. There won’t be any.

  In China, this type of public convenience is called open-style or ni hao (hello). Open-style stalls are common enough to be unremarked upon in Chinese public life and to be mentioned in travel guides warning first-time visitors of Chinese uniqueness. The 2002 film Public Toilet, by the Chinese director Fruit Chan, demonstrated the place open-style toilets hold in Chinese culture: banal, familiar, normal, where men squat and chat, unashamed and unabashed.

  This is my first open-style experience. I ask Red if there is an etiquette. Where should I look? What is considered rude? Is it obligatory to say ni hao? I have no idea, because this is turning all my concepts of public and private upside down. I know that some schools and institutions in the Western world have doorless toilets, the better to foster compliance or—in the case of the military—to extract individuality. But I grew up in a culture that provided privacy abundantly and without question. I like doors. At the Happiness and Prosperity service station, I know I will miss them. Red shrugs, trying not to smile (and also, I hoped, trying hard not to pee).

  There is a line inside. Women lean against a curving wall, only a few feet away from half a dozen women squatting in the stalls opposite, over squat latrines placed above a channel of trickling water. There isn’t a door in sight. No one says hello. I lean into the wall, making no eye contact and hoping to go unnoticed, but this is untouristed China, and I stand out anyway. The women in the queue smile at me. They gesture. You go first! No, please! Possibly it is courtesy. Probably it is curiosity. Let’s see how the lo wei (foreigner) does it!

  How does the lo wei do it? With my head down, the fastest expulsion of liquid possible, and by building doors in my mind.

  It wasn’t too difficult actually. If I thought about it, I’d had decades of practice. Privacy in the twenty-first century relies on hard, material items, on shielding wood or shiny partitions. But I’ve never found any partitions that were truly soundproof, that provide what one earnest government report on school washrooms called “aural privacy.” Doors and locks are a convention that takes privacy only so far, as I discovered the day in high school when my friends decided to lean over from the next cubicle. Privacy in a public toilet relies on an assumption—a social pact—that something that is not seen is not heard. Privacy involves pretense.

  To perform a private function in a public setting requires what the American sociologist Erving Goffman called “civil inattention,” or the art of making living among unknown people tolerable. You know they’re there, but you pretend not to acknowledge them by whatever means are at your disposal. How many people have lingered in a cubicle so that the sound of their excretion—of whatever variety—can’t be associated with them when they come out? How many have cringed in a hotel bathroom too close for comfort to a bedroom containing a new lover? I have, and I will.

  The modern concept of privacy seems as fixed as those doors, but it is actually a historical upstart. As Norbert Elias wrote in The Civilizing Process, it’s only slowly and without much forethought that humans in industrialized societies have developed the pressing need to perform certain functions away from the gaze of other people. This, he writes, shouldn’t necessarily be seen as progress. Civilization is too fluid a concept to be pinned down as a linear evolution from A (barbaric Middle Ages manners) to B (superior modern propriety). Many modern habits would horrify our courtly ancestors. Nose-blowing, for example. It is still frowned upon in Japan to discharge one’s nose in public, but modern “civilized” Westerners happily—and to me, puzzlingly—continue with a habit that the Italian poet Giovanni Della Casa found unpleasant several centuries ago, when he wrote that it was not seemly “after wiping your nose, to spread out your handkerchief and peer into it as
if pearls and rubies have fallen out of your head.”

  The rise of privacy, along with technology that could flush away evidence of defecation, allowed society to turn a natural bodily function into a hidden, shameful one. Our courtly ancestors happily defecated and urinated in public and without embarrassment. Public toilets have always existed, but until two hundred years ago, they were always communal. The Romans dined and bathed in company, and they did the same with defecation. Their communal latrines, called forica, were lavishly decorated with marble and running water, which served to cleanse the sponges on sticks Romans used to wipe themselves. They had murals of leaping stags and floors of geometric mosaic. Another famous public restroom, the twelfth-century Longhouse of London, had 64 seats for men and 64 for women. Facilities were basic: wooden seats were placed above holes that dropped directly into the Thames below. Stalls were judged to be unnecessary.

  The transformation of defecation into an activity only done out of sight and smell arose from population growth and the social change that accompanied it. As cities grew more dense, private space became a privilege of the elite. Individual cleansing facilities were out of reach of the masses, unless you counted the enterprising gentlemen who tramped the streets of Vienna, Paris, London, and Edinburgh wearing large cloaks and carrying buckets. Passing citizens in need could use the bucket as a toilet and the cloak as a cover, or an early, cloaklike door. (The street cry of these human public toilets was surprisingly subtle in times so excrementitious that the streets were sewers. The slogan of French ambulant toilet providers was, “Every man knows what he has to do and it costs two sous to do it!”)

  Privacy was something rich people had, until the needs of industrialists and sanitary reformers coincided in the early nineteenth century. The mass labor force needed to be kept healthy to be productive, and the new device of the flush toilet was deemed to be the solution. Not everyone agreed. In 1857, the happily named Mr. Tinkler took his local council in London to court after it forcibly installed a flush toilet in his cottage, when he had been perfectly content with a privy. Work and health also intersected in the landmark 1848 Public Health Act. A more mobile laboring population that no longer worked in the fields—where any bush constituted a public convenience—needed facilities on the way to and from work. The Act, therefore, required the construction of Public Necessities “to alleviate public stench and disease.”

  These Public Necessities would be something new. For the first time, the privacy of residential facilities could be provided in a public setting. In 1851, over 800,000 people paid a penny to use private-public facilities installed by George Jennings at the Great Exhibition, a fact that gave the English the euphemism “to spend a penny” to signify a bathroom visit. With Jennings’s efforts, the template was fixed. So was the importance of public necessities in civilized life, at least for the next century. Providing publicly funded facilities was simple good manners—and kept the working classes from being too smelly—and the Victorians liked to show theirs off. Their public conveniences were as lavish as those of the Romans, with pretty porcelain and copper piping, heavy wooden doors, and sturdy locks. Across the Channel, the Parisians followed suit. A 1903 toilet, the first in a station of the Paris Métro’s new Line 1, provided 13 stalls for men and 14 for women, three of which included bidets with warm water. There were six attendants, and the facilities were open from 7 A.M. until midnight.

  From where I’m standing, that Paris subway restroom—long since closed, by the way—sounds like heaven. I grew up in the final decades of the twentieth century. This makes me a child of the new dark ages of the public bathroom. In London, 47 percent of public bathrooms have closed over the last eight years, and nationwide they have decreased in number by 40 percent. In a 2001 guide to New York City, Fodor’s warned visitors that “public bathrooms are few and far between, and run the gamut when it comes to cleanliness.”

  Three successive mayors failed to agree to proposals that would have put public restrooms on New York’s streets, and when Mayor Michael Bloomberg did, in 2005, newspaper headlines cheered that new restrooms were finally going to be provided. On closer inspection, it was apparent that the plan would provide 3,300 bus shelters, 330 news kiosks, and only 20 public bathrooms. Most of the world’s cities lack public facilities, of course. A Russian professor, lecturing at the WTO’s Moscow conference, managed to make the deprivation of Soviet times sound poetic. “When we still had socialism,” he explained, “the way to survive was to take your heart in your hand and squeeze tightly and be very, very patient.” It was the same with public bathrooms, which were few and very, very far between. “Sometimes there are kilometers to run before you reach a facility and can unsqueeze your heart and do what your body wanted you to do.”

  But New York City and London are supposed to represent the height of civilized achievement. They are examples of what urban planners call “the sanitary city.” They are cities that are supposed to have already perfected the skill of delivering services to their citizens. Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s first prime minister, declared that “a country in which every citizen has access to a clean toilet has reached the pinnacle of progress.” In that case, progress in two of the world’s most advanced cities is going backward, with barely a protest. Academia doesn’t much care, either. Toilet culture in general, and public necessities in particular, have rarely been considered worthy topics of study. Outside Norbert Elias and Alexander Kira, there is little examination of public facilities. When a call for papers was put out for a journal to be titled Toilet Papers: The Gendered Construction of Public Toilets, a blogger at New Criterion magazine could not contain his scorn. This, he wrote, represented “the pathetic intellectual and moral bankruptcy of the humanities. . . . Public toilets! Has it come to this?”

  I find this strange. Anthropologists and sociologists should be infesting public bathrooms. There’s nothing else in human society quite like them. Not in society, not quite out of it. Needed but rarely demanded. A place where all sorts of human needs and habits intersect: fear, disgust, conversation, grooming, sex. It’s an ambiguous space that is not quite in the public eye, though the public uses it. A place of refuge and sociability, of necessity and criminality. How we are allowed to behave in a public necessity even influences everyday speech. Steven Pinker, in his explanation of taboo words, quotes a spectrum of excreta-related swearing. Shit is less acceptable than piss, which is less acceptable than fart. And so on through to snot and spit, “which is not taboo at all. That’s the same order as the acceptability of eliminating these substances from the body in public.”

  To be uninterested in the public toilet is to be uninterested in life.

  In the absence of academic curiosity, I will ask the experts. I have like most people used all sorts of public bathrooms in my lifetime. I have struggled with luggage through stupid turnstile toilets in railway stations; I have used clean and free restrooms in supermarkets and libraries; I have trekked through half a dozen departments in department stores to find their poorly located, poorly sign-posted facilities behind indoor furnishing or haberdashery. I have sneaked into hotels, and failed, usually, to sneak into pubs, in case I’m identified as not being a customer and because I have an English sense of embarrassment. I have bought cups of coffee and bottles of water that I don’t want to be able to use cafe restrooms. All these qualify as public conveniences, though the British Toilet Association prefers the term “away from home toilets,” which mistakenly presumes that all of us have homes, or that our home and the public toilet aren’t the same thing. A postman in Devon was disconcerted to find an envelope addressed to “Simon Norris, The Disabled Toilet, The Pleasure Gardens, Bournemouth.” My local government in London was recently obliged to remodel the security system of a brand-new public convenience because it was being used as an overnight accommodation by Polish migrant workers, undoubtedly delighted to get a smallish room for twenty pence a night. (Fighting over the more spacious disabled cubicle was fierce.)

&nbs
p; Where there have been no facilities available, I have done what 95 percent of Britons have done, according to a survey by the Keep Britain Tidy Campaign: I have squatted behind parked cars, or in alleyways, with a friend keeping watch, or with considerable anxiety when I am friendless. Along the way, I have talked to restroom attendants in several countries, including in China, where a woman called Shu told me that not one of her clients flushed the toilet. She was also sick of finding footprints on the seats, from Chinese peasants too accustomed to squatting to change their habits for a new contraption.

  In Bangkok, I met women drivers of mobile toilet trucks, steel and shiny and smelling of ammonia, who seemingly lived in their cabs, which had carpets and TVs and Buddhist shrines. These hardy women would step in with their dozen toilet stalls at public events, or at the airport, which lacked bathroom facilities, or to assist Bangkok police with random drug testing that required impromptu urine samples. A woman who wouldn’t give her name told me she had driven a mobile toilet truck for twenty-six years, and her parents did it before her and her daughter will do it after her. She said some neighbors give her a hard time. “They say it stinks and that I stink, too. But as jobs go, it’s fine.”

  At various points along my public necessity life, I used the Longcauseway facilities in my home town of Dewsbury, a medium-size town in Yorkshire. The Longcauseway necessities were built in the 1980s as part of the Princess of Wales shopping center, which replaced the old bus station with the kind of low-rise forgettable shops that have infected the minds of urban planners for decades. I had used them many times while growing up and remembered their heavy doors with old-fashioned locks that could only be opened by the insertion of a coin (two pence when I was young; twenty pence now). But mostly I remember them from a visit I made a couple of years ago, because at the time they also contained a sink full of soft toys and several jars of lemon curd for sale, by a sign saying “To pay, apply to Margaret.” When it came to writing about public necessities, of all the toilets in the world, I remembered the lemon-curd ones. I set out to find Margaret.