Isham Cook's Blog: Isham Cook, page 2

Toilet terror

Utopian considerations

The performing of ablutionary activities openly in a shared social space was the norm before the individual’s right to seclusion became something sacrosanct and inviolable. People used to bathe and go to the toilet, in other words, in front of each other freely and unselfconsciously. In our day and age, however, the right to bodily privacy is so thoroughly ingrained and taken for granted it’s inconceivable why anyone would ever question it. Only in exceptional, disciplinary institutionalized settings — the army, the prison — is this right taken away. Yet it’s a relatively modern right, one that grew out of bourgeois “separate-spheres ideology” and Victorian preoccupations with the sanctity of the female sex only over the last century and a half or so. It’s also an outmoded right, despite being clung to so tenaciously, as Mary Anne Case writes: “Separate public toilets are one of the last remnants of the segregated life of separate spheres for men and women in this country, now that the rules of etiquette no longer demand that the women leave the men to their brandy and cigars after dinner in polite company.”

Well, to be more precise, the bodily right to privacy developed in tandem with late nineteenth-century technology — that of private plumbing, enabling at first the wealthy, and decades later most private residences to be outfitted with their own bathroom, although as Alexander Kira reminds us in his classic book, The Bathroom, private bathtubs designed for two could be found among the European gentry as far back as the seventeenth century. Nonetheless, privacy fetishization among the sexes remains very much alive today and is dramatically on display whenever the ladies get up on cue to go do their ritual restroom thing.

I am sorry to have to turn all this on its head in what follows, but it’s about time we disburden ourselves of the privacy fetish. This admittedly requires a drastic shift in cultural attitudes. As radical as it sounds, toilet liberation is wholly practical economically speaking and would be easily implemented, if not now then over a generation or two, as younger people already enlightened and versed in ecological imperatives take over the reins of government.

There are already signs among scattered visionaries of a relaxing of these strictures and regimes. One household fashion trend, among those anyway who can afford to tear down walls in their home or uproot their plumbing, is the “open-concept bathroom,” a large bathtub or jacuzzi as the centerpiece of a spacious bathroom or even the living room, the bather or bathers visible to family or friends. More exclusive hotels offer something comparable though the rationale is different, ostensibly being, of course, to enable you to watch TV while you bathe (or keep an eye on the fast company hoping to rifle through your pants), rather than to lure exhibitionist guests. More commonly, open bathtubs in hotels sit in a standard bathroom behind a clear glass wall, with a shade or curtain to accommodate the shy. An attractive selling point in hotels and new homes, the beautiful bathroom meant for more than one perhaps never really went away, at least in Europe. One such exquisite specimen and its wine-drinking naked couple is featured in the marvelous Hungarian film The Piano Player (1999, dir. Schübel), set in Nazi-occupied Budapest.

A bolder proposal, which I will elaborate shortly, would eliminate private toilets and bathrooms altogether and in their place encourage communal living arrangements with shared baths, showers and toilets. Anyone who has ever stayed in a no-frills dormitory or cheap hotel or hostel has experienced the shared hallway bathroom. While an annoyance if you’re not used to it, it is quickly accommodated to with revised expectations and a little mental agility. People with special bathing needs — the elderly, infirm and disabled — would especially benefit in a communal household, as they are in close proximity to people watching over them.

A hotel in Changsha, China.

The public restroom is equally deserving of beauty, elegance, even grandness, but not as a mere cosmetic gesture. A garish example is an entire temple-like WC at the White Temple complex in Chiang Rai, Thailand. The hugely popular haunt got some bad publicity years ago over an ill-advised decision to open up a separate WC exclusively for Chinese tourists, some of whom had been observed trashing the “Golden Toilet” with their messy toilet habits. The decision was reversed, and the majority of the tourists remain Chinese. The Golden Toilet has two entrances each for both sexes, visible below at the left and the right. The interior is rather prosaic, with nice décor touches but nothing in the way of a creative use of space; the upper floor is presumably for offices. Mere ornamentation slapped onto a conventional structure is in fact a waste of space. A true restroom design aesthetic would expand outward, organically, from the urinal. This makes more sense when you understand that the urinal itself is an object of beauty, with its perfect fusion of form and function. The public restroom should follow from that.

The Golden Toilet at the White Temple, Chiang Rai, Thailand.

Functionalism implies ease of access and use, but it must also be informed by utilitarianism and egalitarianism: something functions well because it’s easily used and equally accessible to all. But actually existing public restrooms just about everywhere remain a strange agglomeration of culturally imposed sexism and puritanism. In one highly representative UK study, women spend on average thirty-four times longer queuing for the toilet than men. If as a man you’ve always wondered why this is the case, imagine how your access to the men’s room would be impacted with the urinals removed. Even still, it’s easier for you to urinate in a stall by simply unzipping and peeing all over the toilet seat, whereas women often have to fiddle with layers of clothing, when they don’t have to clean up after you, if it happens to be a unisex toilet.

Men’s urinals in the Golden Toilet.

One solution is the female urinal. I can’t think of a more eminent solution to an intractable problem which at the same time throws up more flak of resistance, and this merits some discussion. Germany has been at the forefront of this, indeed has been experimenting with female urinals in public restrooms since the nineteenth century (“Female Urinal,” Wikipedia). The rationale is not only to give women equal ease of access but to save water; women waste three times as much toilet water as men in the multiple flushing required to clean and make clean contact with toilet seats. To use a female urinal (or urinals adapted for both sexes), a woman must either face the wall or forward, depending on the urinal’s design. The urinals pictured in the gorgeous women’s restroom below are evidently intended to be used facing forward. In either case, she must pull down her pants and pull aside her panties, legs astride in a semi-squatting stance, thus exposing her groin from the front or rear for the duration of her business, though she might drape her nakedness with a dress. Or if facing the wall, the use of a handheld device such as the Pee Easy funnel would make it possible to keep her buttocks covered like men, but she would need to carry such a device around with her and be comfortable using it.

In Germany as well, some cities are converting gender-segregated WCs to gender-neutral WCs, with the ultimate goal of replacing men’s urinals with gender-neutral urinals. What the etiquette would look like in a unisex restroom with women using the same urinals as men is anyone’s guess. It’s already delicate enough in men’s urinals. There are unspoken rules, namely 1) you are not allowed to use a urinal next to another user if other urinals are available, and 2) you are not allowed to look, however momentarily, at another man’s penis. There is a third curious injunction, unconsciously observed: you are expected to acknowledge others present with subtle signs, such as adjusting your posture when a newcomer arrives or a partial glance in their direction without eye contact. This is to mutually acknowledge the boundaries; not to do so might suggest you’re intending to subvert the boundaries with perverted designs.

Obviously, the presence of women would complicate this etiquette, as female users would invariably have to compromise themselves in front of the men milling about. Even when outfitted with emergency alarms and a divider separating male and female users (among other ameliorating measures), I suppose most women, initially at any rate, would regard unisex urinals as beyond the pale and refuse to use them. Even many men might be intimidated from entering such a restroom. Ruth Barcan is acutely aware of the fear and resistance that would need to be overcome before coed public toilets could be socially accepted and implemented: “For just as the spatial separation of men and women into different rooms aims…to reduce male violence against women, so the free circulation of sound is part of women’s defenses against that same threat of violence. Knowing that your screams can be heard outside was the first thing matter-of-factly mentioned to me by a woman when I asked some of my friends whether they thought sound was an important factor in public toilet design.” The irony is that coed public toilets are the best solution to male violence, since the presence of men would presumably protect women from any violent males.

Why, ultimately, are public toilets segregated in the first place? This historically burdened question confronts us with the uncomfortable realization that the public segregation of the sexes reinforces and justifies its own unfortunate consequences. As Gershenson (citing Wasserstrom) puts it, “Sex-segregated bathrooms…are just ‘one small part of that scheme of sex-role differentiation which uses the mystery of sexual anatomy, among other things, to maintain the primacy of heterosexual sexual attraction central to that version of the patriarchal system of power relationships we have today.’ The same patriarchal system that envisions sex as a crucial binary category insists on the sexual segregation of bathrooms.”

There hasn’t been much news about these German restroom innovations since a flurry of articles appeared in the scandalized international press in 2017. Were the proposals stopped dead in their tracks after massive public resistance? Or perhaps subsequent developments have slipped under the radar? Germany is a country known for its healthy tolerance and respect for public nudity, as shocked visitors discover when they stumble upon topless pool-side bathers in their hotel and full-blown nudist parks in city centers, such as the Englischer Garten in Munich. There may indeed be adequate public support among locals for unisex WCs with unisex urinals, but municipalities are likely constrained by their growing population of conservative communities, predominantly Muslim immigrants, not to mention the many tourists unacquainted with liberal German attitudes. Any viable changes would need to be two-pronged and incremental: gradually outfitting women’s WCs with female-adapted urinals, and gradually merging or replacing segregated WCs with unisex WCs, all the while keeping enough gender-segregated WCs operating to provide people with a choice. Germans regularly go naked among strangers in coed saunas, and over time, one assumes, male leering and harassment of female users would likewise dwindle as coed toilet use became commonplace and the norm. Then if enough women could be recruited, unisex WCs could all be outfitted with unisex urinals. I would add that this would also solve at one go the problem of safe toilets for trans people.

Female urinals, unknown location, Germany (Prince Grobhelm – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=3003594).

Germany presents us with an instructive test case on the limits of the progressive imagination. By prudish American standards, the Germans really are quite reasonable people and beckon toward what is possible. We might place Germany at one end of a continuum representing degrees of tolerance for bodily freedom, America in the middle, and more hidebound societies at the other end, such as those that regard women as inherently dirty (e.g., the practice in Nepal and Ethiopia of forcing menstruating women into huts) or as unassailably pure and needing protection and isolation, which amounts to the same thing. Far from being inconceivable or intolerable, unisex urinals and WCs do exist and are being implemented or in the planning stages by municipal governments not only in Germany but elsewhere, though still mainly confined to Europe. The reason for this growing shift toward sexual equality in public toilets, however slow and scattershot on a global scale is, again, the sheer logic of it. Above all, it’s environmentally and ecologically sound policy. Converting segregated WCs into unisex WCs saves money and space, and widespread adoption of the female urinal saves water — at a time when water shortages are becoming an urgent issue worldwide. And, of course, unisex facilities provide women the same ease and speed of use as men.

Egalitarian public restroom design (as opposed to its successful implementation) has a long history and I can hardly claim to be proposing something original, having relied on insights culled from the experts, notably Alexander Kira’s The Bathroom (Rev. Ed., Viking, 1976), and Harvey Molotch and Laura Norén’s scholarly collection, Toilet: Public Restrooms and the Politics of Sharing (New York U Press, 2010). The following design for a grand public restroom is my own. The structure is imagined in the round, to spotlight its aesthetic and functional self-sufficiency, though I’d stress “functional” here in the more generous sense suggested by Kira to distinguish it from the “American preoccupation with compulsive ‘cleanliness,’ devoid of any enjoyment, which results in our minimal ‘functional’ bathrooms.” On the contrary, “one can find examples today of bathrooms that are treated as family rooms, private sitting rooms, libraries, offices, formal drawing rooms, art galleries, garden rooms, beauty parlors, gymnasiums, and so on.”

Large enough to stand out in the urban horizon, my grand public restroom would be readily identifiable with its telltale dome-shaped skylight or cupola, yet each would be architecturally unique. They would come in different sizes depending on population density or local demand, and there would be smaller versions with fewer amenities, scattered around the neighborhood, some consisting of no more than several toilet rooms accessed on the outside and unisex urinals on the inside. They would be free, open to all, well-maintained, clean and safe, with attendants on hand twenty-four hours in the larger restrooms. Ideally, they would be strictly unisex, but as I must ground this in our day and age, a transitional version is presented, predominantly coed but with sex-segregated sections:

Bird’s-eye view of a grand public restroom: 1 entrance, 2 changing rooms, 3 urinals, 4 large toilet rooms, 5 small toilet rooms, 6 showers, 7 saunas, 8 trough sinks, 9 lactation room, 10 attendants’ office, 11 massage room, 12 espresso bar, 13 recreational tables. Female/male symbols indicate segregated versus coed sections. Concept and design by Isham Cook.

As in existing, conventional public restrooms, the divided entrance requires women and men to enter separately. If one just needs to urinate, there are segregated urinal rooms directly facing the first interior entrance on either side. If one needs to defecate, there are two options. First, private-use toilet rooms line the outside circumference of the structure, larger wheelchair-accessible rooms with a baby-changing table, toilet and sink, alternating with smaller rooms containing a toilet and sink. A sign on each door indicates whether the room is occupied or vacant (as in airplane cabin toilets), but with a big “O” or “V” so that the sign can be read from a distance. There is also an electronic display at the main entrance showing the occupancy of all the numbered toilets at a glance, enabling users to quickly locate a vacant toilet. Attendants would be aware of which toilets were in operation and could notify those hogging a toilet for an inordinate length of time. Likewise, if the user has a medical issue or emergency the attendant can be alerted and spoken to via intercom.

Alternatively, the same toilet rooms can be accessed within the building from the circular corridor lined with shower stalls and saunas. If a toilet is in use, its inner and outer doors are automatically locked, and become unlocked when the toilet is vacant. But one cannot access the corridor directly from the outside via the toilet rooms; only users already inside the building and making use of its facilities have access to the toilets from the inside. This enables the staff to monitor the visitors present and prevent men from entering the women’s section and vice versa (as indicated by the gender symbols in the diagram). The larger share of the shower area is coed, however. This is to give both sexes greater access to shower and sauna space and absorb spillover from the segregated sections. It’s also to accustom people to coed use and lower general resistance to the sight of naked users of the opposite sex.

Also offered are saunas, massage and lactation rooms, double-sided trough sinks with mirrors, recreational tables (with chess, checkers, Go sets), even an espresso bar. The purpose indeed is to encourage people not only to feel comfortable and at leisure, but to hang out and socialize. Other grand public restrooms might offer different options and facilities. The largest could accommodate hot and cold pools for recreational bathing, as have long existed in Japan, Korea and China. As in Germany and a few other European countries, many spa and hot spring resorts are both coed and clothing optional, so it’s not such a stretch to imagine this degree of institutionalized freedom.

If these grand public restrooms progressed to become fully coed, obviating the need for separate male and female sections, the interior could be further streamlined with a single set of urinals, showers and saunas for all genders to use freely, safely, and shame-free. Granted, the more exotic brand of European spa aside, existing public restrooms remain a long way from this vision, “a utopian vision of men and women and people of all sorts sharing toilet space and shaping social life….As the sex ratio of users changes, one gender can spill over into the facilities ordinarily over-selected by the other, while, as the need arises, managing glance in an appropriate way” (Molotch). Indeed, there is growing awareness of the need for a new approach, and piecemeal improvements are already happening in many cities and countries. And there is always constant, bustling change, often for the better, occasionally for the worse. In what follows, I would like to present two examples of change in two countries, one exhibiting dramatic change for the better, the other dramatic change for the worse.

The Chinese Experience

When I first arrived in China in the early 1990s, toilets were so squalid it was hard to believe that a country could be so wanting in public sanitation. A telling instance was a lunch stop in one mountain tourist town famous for its sprawling Buddhist temples. We chose the most promising among a shanty-like strip of private restaurants, all lacking a restroom. I was directed around back to the public WC, if you could call it that. It consisted of an open pit of raw sewage with a rickety wooden plank laid across to squat on while defecating. The pit was set back from the street but unsheltered and its occupants fully visible to passersby. Throughout my naked squatting ordeal, a male colleague I was traveling with stood nearby and stared, out of protective concern but probably also impatience. This had a most inhibiting effect. I gave up and resolved to hold in “the uneasy load,” as Gulliver described being denied use of a privy by his Lilliputian hosts. Nervously gathering up my belongings, I managed to drop my camera into the excremental sludge and fished it out with my fingers. Back at the restaurant, there was no sink or even soap, and I had to make do with a pan of water to restore my hands and the camera as best I could. I’m not sure how they washed their dishes.

In the nation’s capital, standard public WCs of the time weren’t all that much better: dark, dirty cinderblock cells with two facing rows of squatting holes. Low dividers partially separated you from adjacent users but not from those sitting opposite; some WCs lacked dividers altogether. Clearly, this was a more “social” culture, where people felt less awkward about the communal witnessing of all aspects of daily life including the bodily functions, where the concept of individual privacy was less refined than in the “civilized” West. I had no choice but to get used to being stared at shitting by curious males whiling away the time with their cigarettes, newspapers and chitchat, sometimes quite overtly about me, naturally assuming I had arrived in the country that very day and couldn’t speak the language (after decades here some still call out to me on the street, “Welcome to China!”). If you were out for the evening you could always use the restaurant toilet, if again it actually had one, and you didn’t mind soiling your shoes in the inevitable puddles of urine, spit, cigarette butts and stray feces surrounding the squat receptacle. So extravagant were these examples of national performance art that they have attracted comment. As did David Sedaris on a trip to China in 2011 and as Arthur Meursault wickedly satirized in his novel, Party Members (Camphor Press, 2016), I found these public potty displays, for want of a better word, funny.

Men’s public WC in a Beijing hutong, 2021 (photo by Isham Cook).

Once the country opened up in earnest to foreign tourism and the Chinese themselves started travelling internationally, they became educated on the sanitary standards commonly found outside the Middle Kingdom. They became in fact acutely conscious and embarrassed about their public WC problem, so much so that the Government trumpeted the country’s urgent toilet development plans, citing such mottoes as “You can judge a nation’s civilization by the quality of its public toilets.” And they indeed worked hard on this. Over the past decade there has been a sea change, though you can still find remnants of the past alongside signs of progress. Many tiny public WCs in Beijing’s old lanes (hutong), in order to maximize their limited space, maintain squatting toilets next to each other without dividers. But these WCs are kept spotlessly clean throughout the day. Some WCs even provide toilet paper from a single dispenser in the entrance (locals are long accustomed to carrying their own). Instead of aiming their waste into the obscure sewage holes of yore, users now position themselves on the polished metal platforms and simply stamp the flusher with their heel. It’s not so bad. Look at it this way: if you’re so close together you’re knocking knees with your neighbor, you can use each other’s legs as support. And in case you haven’t been following the latest health news, squatting toilets are better than sitting toilets for evacuating the body’s waste.

These national measures are continuously being ramped up throughout the country. I was walking through a nondescript neighborhood in the third-tier city of Changchun not long ago and stopped in a public WC. In years past, it would have been a ghastly sight. The individual toilet stalls had locking doors and were spic and span — and free. Chinese school lavatories too are kept cleaner than before, although their unshaded windows still give facing classrooms a clear sightline into the male urinals. In the newer shopping malls, the restrooms are ever larger, nicer and gender friendlier. In Beijing’s China World Mall shopping plaza, for example, ample restrooms are conveniently at hand wherever you turn. One male restroom has eight toilet stalls (with a choice of squatting and sitting toilets) and ten urinals; the female restroom facing it has twelve toilet stalls, somewhat making up for the lack of female urinals.

One troublesome aspect of public toilet use in China is that, unlike the U.S., there is no law requiring food establishments to provide a restroom. Most restaurants do as a matter of course, and no bar would be foolish enough not to, but cafés generally don’t. The waitstaff will always point you to the nearest WC in the mall or down the street, or they arrange with a neighboring restaurant to let you use their restroom. But even in posh residential complexes like The Place in Beijing with its $3,000 per month rental apartments catering to foreigners, the commercial space at ground level wasn’t designed to have restroom plumbing, and few of the many fine food and coffee establishments lining the concourse have their own restrooms. From certain locations one has to walk the equivalent of a football field to get to the nearest public WC. On the other hand, restaurants, office buildings, and hotel lobbies never object to anyone slipping in to use the restroom, patron or not. Meanwhile in American cities, restaurants and businesses commonly display a sign in their window prohibiting their restrooms to non-paying customers. You seldom encounter the same in restaurants in China. Staff tend to be relaxed and not inclined to interfere. Ironically, there is a greater need for non-patron use of restaurant restrooms in the U.S., since there are comparatively fewer public WCs. This brings us to our next country.

The American experience

As with many features of American life, amenities and facilities are distributed up the socio-economic scale. You have to pay for the convenience. I don’t mean the token fee commonly charged in public WCs in Europe. You’re expected to patronize an establishment before being granted use of the restroom, whatever cost that entails. Shopping malls do provide restrooms for public use, but then it’s assumed you’re there to shop, and unkempt, indigent types may be approached by guards and escorted out. McDonald’s and other fast-food chains present an interesting exception. They are often hangouts for the massive homeless population in many cities, who are generally allowed to stay as long as they purchase a coffee; apparently you can still get one for a dollar. Some shops may look the other way even if you don’t buy anything. For all the criticism they receive for their unhealthful food and low pay, in functioning as daytime shelters for the poor, the fast-food chains perform a valuable and needed public service.

The relative scarcity of clean, safe, accessible public toilets in the U.S., as compared to other countries, has long attracted frustrated commentary by visiting foreigners and domestic sociologists, if not by untraveled Americans who have no basis for comparison and don’t know anything else, though everyone is acutely aware of the inconvenience of being stuck somewhere with a bursting bladder or bowels and no idea where the nearest toilet is. But the assumption is you have only yourself to blame, in not planning ahead and taking better precautions, in not leaving that bar, party, sports event or outdoor concert before giving yourself enough time to fully clear your bladder, and not once, if it’s a long way home or there’s a long drive or heavy traffic ahead, but twice. Or don’t drink so much. Or carry an empty plastic bottle in your car if you have to. Or find some bushes or dark corner in a park to relieve yourself in.

By this point in my essay you may be assuming my title refers merely to the nuisance of being caught in public with no WC in sight. I don’t mean to trivialize the word, but it does have metaphorical scope to encompass the relatively little things in life that bother or “terrorize” us, the many minor hassles we blow out of proportion in order to characterize a fleeting yet momentarily excruciating situation or event, which of course bears no relation to a real act of terrorism — a shooting, a bombing — or other life-threatening cataclysm. But this is actually not what I am getting at by the “toilet terrorism” of my title. What I lay out as follows refers rather to something, if not quite life-threatening, far worse than our desperate search for a toilet. By an order of magnitude worse. And it is unique to the USA.

We can start by recognizing that there is an etiquette to public toilet use, but this etiquette is not confined to the toilet itself — and this may be counterintuitive — but extends beyond the facility to encompass all urban space, indeed the entire town, suburb or city. You can get into trouble by using a toilet stall against the rules, when for example dealing or shooting drugs or having sex in one (that’s what that half-inch gap between the door and the hinge is for), or even inadvertently, when stumbling into a poorly marked entrance for the wrong sex. You can also get into trouble for not using a public toilet. Public urination constitutes the greatest violation because it’s interpreted as the most flagrant, ultimate rejection of something society, at least American society, upholds to the absolute strictest of standards — toilet etiquette. This becomes apparent when these standards are violated. In the U.S., as Kira notes, “privacy demands and sex segregation are strictly enforced by both legal and social sanctions and…casual public elimination can lead to swift arrest.” As “technologies of division and separation,” public toilets, adds Barcan, are a “form of segregation…at once immensely naturalized and immensely policed, the most taken-for-granted social categorization and the most fiercely regulated.”

Most countries have penalties for public urination, typically fines of several hundred USD, though in some locations such as Singapore the fines can go up to several thousand dollars for blatant acts like public defecation. In Germany, on the other hand, there is no law against public urination. Indeed, the law in most countries is rarely enforced unless the act is deemed flagrant enough and performed openly in broad daylight. In China, where I’ve lived for decades, I’ve never heard of anyone getting into trouble for public peeing, nor have been warned about it. In civilized Japan, salarymen can be seen urinating outside without discretion, but then again they’re dragooned into enforced after-hours drinking sessions with the boss; they’re seen throwing up on the sidewalk or in the subway station as well. It is also generally grasped that some people afflicted by age, diabetes or various colon conditions are incontinent and may have to let go in an inopportune spot before they make it home, and allowance (one hopes) is made for medical reasons. But as for young partiers who have no such excuse, is it really necessary to slap them with a $500 fine (on top of a possible ninety days in jail) if they make at least a minimal effort to relieve themselves out of sight, such as in an alley or behind a tree?

The harsh truth is that the land of the free has little tolerance for public urination. This has led to gross distortions of the law, to an extent poorly understood by the very public that’s so ruthless in fingering offenders. Public urination signifies no mere rude display but is readily identified in the American psyche with extreme depravity: obscenity and pedophilia. Whereas the law is wise enough to make a distinction between public urination or disorderly conduct on the one hand, and public lewdness or indecent exposure on the other, not all people do. That includes the police, who are at complete liberty to interpret an act of public urination as lewd or obscene. The police are expected to uphold the law, but when it comes to sexual offenses real or imaginary, they have wide latitude to do whatever they want. They also have quotas to fulfill and incentive to err on the side of severity. As everyone who reads the news knows, American law enforcement have a habit of drastically over-extending their reach, when for example they shoot innocent but suspicious-looking African Americans. But while the public is turning against racist police brutality, nabbing sex offenders has the public’s unbridled support.

Sane, reasonable people, people with a solid grounding in reality, can surely grasp that while public urination occurs and can be a nuisance, the number of those urinate for the purpose of exposing themselves is certainly miniscule. Public paranoia, by contrast, is vast and volatile.

A sobering way to gauge the frequency with which public urinators are charged with public lewdness is a Google search of “public urination laws by state,” where a host of law firms offering their services to bewildered defendants lead the search results. These sites explain patiently and methodically what is happening and what you should and should not do to avoid worsening the quicksand you are in. For what you may not realize is that time is fast working against you, and an experienced attorney is needed to negotiate with the prosecutor and the police and prepare evidence before things proceed to sentencing. U.S. states have almost unlimited scope to apply the harshest punishment for the most minor of sex crimes — to avoid appearing soft on crime. In Michigan, for instance, the minimum sentence for public lewdness is one day in jail and the maximum is life in prison. In at least thirteen states, the distinction between urination and lewdness doesn’t even apply: urination automatically results in an indecent exposure charge — and possible registration as a sex offender (Human Rights Watch, 2007). Note that it’s “at least” thirteen states. The caveat is that all states can potentially charge your simple act of urination as a sex crime at the discretion of the police. Being witnessed masturbating is an automatic sex crime, and a serious one. I presume you would never have any intention of doing that in public, but men usually jiggle their penis when squeezing out their last drops, and someone happening to espy this could misconstrue it as masturbation. A citizen’s claim to have seen you in any state of exposure, even if you were taking the utmost precautions to urinate where you thought you were unobserved, could likewise result in an indecent exposure charge that escalates into a sex crime conviction. A child’s claim, and it’s all over for you.

A good lawyer and a sympathetic judge might help extricate you relatively unscathed from the quicksand, perhaps only several thousand dollars poorer from legal and court fees but saved from the sex offender registry. In the handful of countries that have sex offender registries, only the police have access to the identities of those registered, in order to monitor their whereabouts once out of prison, while allowing them to resume their lives. But sex offender registries in the U.S., in stark contrast, extend well beyond monitoring and tracking. Since the Adam Walsh Act of 2006, the national sex offender registry has been publicly accessible on the internet. This means anyone, and not just anyone but well-organized vigilante mobs who troll the registry, can locate the address of a newly registered sex offender, harass them and their family, rally the community to pelt their home with rocks and drive them out of the neighborhood, even physically attack them, all with virtual impunity. The identities of those registered as Tier 1 sex offenders (the mildest tier for minor sex crimes like public urination) are supposedly protected from public access. However, states have their own, more stringent registries which often do nothing to protect mild offenders. Worse, the registries don’t specify a person’s offenses, so you are assumed to be among the worst of the worst and are lumped together with baby rapists — for the crime of having been caught relieving yourself of a full bladder.

You are invited to read the dour Human Rights Watch report of 2007, “No easy answers: Sex offender laws in the U.S.” (things haven’t improved much in the years since), to enlighten yourself on the further consequences of being a registered sex offender in the U.S.: loss of job and potentially permanent unemployability (some states keep you on the registry for life); loss of residence as landlords (who have access to the registry) refuse to rent to you and child predator laws zone you out of your own town or city (all sex offenders are deemed a danger to children regardless of their offense), forcing you to join vagrant tribes of homeless sex offenders in scattered highway underpasses or designated rural trailer parks; and no way of paying for your accumulating court and administrative fees, GPS ankle bracelet rental fees, etc., apart from what your family is able or willing to shell out on your behalf. The U.S. is the only country in the world, by the way, to exile sex offenders, brand them irredeemable, and render them homeless and without means of subsistence.

In short, as a Men’s Health article puts it, “when you have to urinate so bad that holding it is no longer an option, you might want to consider just peeing in your pants. It may ruin the rest of your night, but the rest of your life will be spared.”

When the state multiples crime by creating new categories of crime; when it singles out groups for disproportionately punitive treatment and enlists a duped public to collaborate in the name of safety and security; when the state inventively deploys the latest technologies (comprehensive databases, GPS tracking, facial recognition) in the service of prosecuting crime; and when out of all of this emerges an atmosphere of fear designed to intimidate and terrorize the population including those supporting these measures, fear not only of the state but of one’s neighbor, fear of the racial or sexual predator, down to the fear of being caught without a toilet in public: we have arrived at fascism in its contemporary guise.

Works cited

Barcan, Ruth. “Dirty Spaces Separation, Concealment, and Shame in the Public Toilet.” In Harvey Molotch and Laura Norén (Eds.), Toilet: Public Restrooms and the Politics of Sharing (New York U Press, 2010).

“Berlin’s new toilets: Would you use a women’s urinal?” BBC News, August 11, 2017 (https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-40899902).

Case, Mary Anne. “Why Not Abolish Laws of Urinary Segregation?” In Harvey Molotch and Laura Norén (Eds.), Toilet: Public Restrooms and the Politics of Sharing (New York U Press, 2010).

Gershenson, Olga. “The Restroom Revolution: Unisex Toilets and Campus Politics.” In Harvey Molotch and Laura Norén (Eds.), Toilet: Public Restrooms and the Politics of Sharing (New York U Press, 2010).

Human Rights Watch. “No easy answers: Sex offender laws in the U.S.” September, 2007 (http://hrw.org/reports/2007/us0907/us0907web.pdf).

Kira, Alexander. The Bathroom (Rev. Ed., Viking, 1976).

Levitan, Corey, and Bettmann/Corbis, “You might be a sex offender and not even know it!” Men’s Health, May 19, 2015 (https://www.menshealth.com/trending-news/a19541024/you-might-be-sex-offender-and-not-know-it/).

Meursault, Arthur. Party Members (Camphor Press, 2016).

Molotch, Harvey. “On not making history: What NYU did with the toilet and what it means for the world.” In Harvey Molotch and Laura Norén (Eds.), Toilet: Public Restrooms and the Politics of Sharing (New York U Press, 2010).

“The Peequal: Will the new women’s urinal spell the end of queues for the ladies’?” The Guardian, June 7, 2021 (https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2021/jun/07/the-peequal-will-the-new-womens-urinal-spell-the-end-of-queues-for-the-ladies).

Sedaris, David. “David Sedaris: Chicken toenails, anyone?” The Guardian, July 15, 2011 (https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2011/jul/15/david-sedaris-chinese-food-chicken-toenails).

“Should I be worried by indecent exposure and public urination crimes?” Gravel & Associates. Michigan Sex Crimes Lawyers (https://www.michigan-sex-offense.com/public-urination.html).

“Thai temple to build separate toilets for non-Chinese visitors after complaints: report.” Straights Times, February 28, 2015 (https://www.straitstimes.com/asia/se-asia/thai-temple-to-build-separate-toilets-for-non-chinese-visitors-after-complaints-report).

Wasserstrom, Richard A. “Racism, sexism, and preferential treatment: An approach to the topics,” UCLA Law Review 24 (1977): 581–615.

Yuko, Elizabeth. “The glamorous, sexist history of the women’s restroom lounge.” Bloomberg CityLab, December 3, 2018 (https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-12-03/the-rise-and-fall-of-the-women-s-restroom-lounge).

* * *

This essay will appear in Sexual Fascism: Essays (forthcoming, January 2022)

Related posts by Isham Cook:
The sewage system
American fascism: The sexual rage of the state
Sexual surveillance in the Covid-19 era
An American talisman
American massage

Toilet terrorism

Utopian considerations

The performing of ablutionary activities openly in a shared social space was the norm before the individual’s right to seclusion became something sacrosanct and inviolable. People used to bathe and go to the toilet, in other words, in front of each other freely and unselfconsciously. In our day and age, however, the right to bodily privacy is so thoroughly ingrained and taken for granted it’s inconceivable why anyone would ever question it. Only in exceptional, disciplinary institutionalized settings — the army, the prison — is this right taken away. Yet it’s a relatively modern right, one that grew out of bourgeois “separate-spheres ideology” and Victorian preoccupations with the sanctity of the female sex only over the last century and a half or so. It’s also an outmoded right, despite being clung to so tenaciously, as Mary Anne Case writes: “Separate public toilets are one of the last remnants of the segregated life of separate spheres for men and women in this country, now that the rules of etiquette no longer demand that the women leave the men to their brandy and cigars after dinner in polite company.”

Well, to be more precise, the bodily right to privacy developed in tandem with late nineteenth-century technology — that of private plumbing, enabling at first the wealthy, and decades later most private residences to be outfitted with their own bathroom, although as Alexander Kira reminds us in his classic book, The Bathroom, private bathtubs designed for two could be found among the European gentry as far back as the seventeenth century. Nonetheless, privacy fetishization among the sexes remains very much alive today and is dramatically on display whenever the ladies get up on cue to go do their ritual restroom thing.

I am sorry to have to turn all this on its head in what follows, but it’s about time we disburden ourselves of the privacy fetish. This admittedly requires a drastic shift in cultural attitudes. As radical as it sounds, toilet liberation is wholly practical economically speaking and would be easily implemented, if not now then over a generation or two, as younger people already enlightened and versed in ecological imperatives take over the reins of government.

There are already signs among scattered visionaries of a relaxing of these strictures and regimes. One household fashion trend, among those anyway who can afford to tear down walls in their home or uproot their plumbing, is the “open-concept bathroom,” a large bathtub or jacuzzi as the centerpiece of a spacious bathroom or even the living room, the bather or bathers visible to family or friends. More exclusive hotels offer something comparable though the rationale is different, ostensibly being, of course, to enable you to watch TV while you bathe (or keep an eye on the fast company hoping to rifle through your pants), rather than to lure exhibitionist guests. More commonly, open bathtubs in hotels sit in a standard bathroom behind a clear glass wall, with a shade or curtain to accommodate the shy. An attractive selling point in hotels and new homes, the beautiful bathroom meant for more than one perhaps never really went away, at least in Europe. One such exquisite specimen and its wine-drinking naked couple is featured in the marvelous Hungarian film The Piano Player (1999, dir. Schübel), set in Nazi-occupied Budapest.

A bolder proposal, which I will elaborate shortly, would eliminate private toilets and bathrooms altogether and in their place encourage communal living arrangements with shared baths, showers and toilets. Anyone who has ever stayed in a no-frills dormitory or cheap hotel or hostel has experienced the shared hallway bathroom. While an annoyance if you’re not used to it, it is quickly accommodated to with revised expectations and a little mental agility. People with special bathing needs — the elderly, infirm and disabled — would especially benefit in a communal household, as they are in close proximity to people watching over them.

A hotel in Changsha, China.

The public restroom is equally deserving of beauty, elegance, even grandness, but not as a mere cosmetic gesture. A garish example is an entire temple-like WC at the White Temple complex in Chiang Rai, Thailand. The hugely popular haunt got some bad publicity years ago over an ill-advised decision to open up a separate WC exclusively for Chinese tourists, some of whom had been observed trashing the “Golden Toilet” with their messy toilet habits. The decision was reversed, and the majority of the tourists remain Chinese. The Golden Toilet has two entrances each for both sexes, visible below at the left and the right. The interior is rather prosaic, with nice décor touches but nothing in the way of a creative use of space; the upper floor is presumably for offices. Mere ornamentation slapped onto a conventional structure is in fact a waste of space. A true restroom design aesthetic would expand outward, organically, from the urinal. This makes more sense when you understand that the urinal itself is an object of beauty, with its perfect fusion of form and function. The public restroom should follow from that.

The Golden Toilet at the White Temple, Chiang Rai, Thailand.

Functionalism implies ease of access and use, but it must also be informed by utilitarianism and egalitarianism: something functions well because it’s easily used and equally accessible to all. But actually existing public restrooms just about everywhere remain a strange agglomeration of culturally imposed sexism and puritanism. In one highly representative UK study, women spend on average thirty-four times longer queuing for the toilet than men. If as a man you’ve always wondered why this is the case, imagine how your access to the men’s room would be impacted with the urinals removed. Even still, it’s easier for you to urinate in a stall by simply unzipping and peeing all over the toilet seat, whereas women often have to fiddle with layers of clothing, when they don’t have to clean up after you, if it happens to be a unisex toilet.

Men’s urinals in the Golden Toilet.

One solution is the female urinal. I can’t think of a more eminent solution to an intractable problem which at the same time throws up more flak of resistance, and this merits some discussion. Germany has been at the forefront of this, indeed has been experimenting with female urinals in public restrooms since the nineteenth century (“Female Urinal,” Wikipedia). The rationale is not only to give women equal ease of access but to save water; women waste three times as much toilet water as men in the multiple flushing required to clean and make clean contact with toilet seats. To use a female urinal (or urinals adapted for both sexes), a woman must either face the wall or forward, depending on the urinal’s design. The urinals pictured in the gorgeous women’s restroom below are evidently intended to be used facing forward. In either case, she must pull down her pants and pull aside her panties, legs astride in a semi-squatting stance, thus exposing her groin from the front or rear for the duration of her business, though she might drape her nakedness with a dress. Or if facing the wall, the use of a handheld device such as the Pee Easy funnel would make it possible to keep her buttocks covered like men, but she would need to carry such a device around with her and be comfortable using it.

In Germany as well, some cities are converting gender-segregated WCs to gender-neutral WCs, with the ultimate goal of replacing men’s urinals with gender-neutral urinals. What the etiquette would look like in a unisex restroom with women using the same urinals as men is anyone’s guess. It’s already delicate enough in men’s urinals. There are unspoken rules, namely 1) you are not allowed to use a urinal next to another user if other urinals are available, and 2) you are not allowed to look, however momentarily, at another man’s penis. There is a third curious injunction, unconsciously observed: you are expected to acknowledge others present with subtle signs, such as adjusting your posture when a newcomer arrives or a partial glance in their direction without eye contact. This is to mutually acknowledge the boundaries; not to do so might suggest you’re intending to subvert the boundaries with perverted designs.

Obviously, the presence of women would complicate this etiquette, as female users would invariably have to compromise themselves in front of the men milling about. Even when outfitted with emergency alarms and a divider separating male and female users (among other ameliorating measures), I suppose most women, initially at any rate, would regard unisex urinals as beyond the pale and refuse to use them. Even many men might be intimidated from entering such a restroom. Ruth Barcan is acutely aware of the fear and resistance that would need to be overcome before coed public toilets could be socially accepted and implemented: “For just as the spatial separation of men and women into different rooms aims…to reduce male violence against women, so the free circulation of sound is part of women’s defenses against that same threat of violence. Knowing that your screams can be heard outside was the first thing matter-of-factly mentioned to me by a woman when I asked some of my friends whether they thought sound was an important factor in public toilet design.” The irony is that coed public toilets are the best solution to male violence, since the presence of men would presumably protect women from any violent males.

Why, ultimately, are public toilets segregated in the first place? This historically burdened question confronts us with the uncomfortable realization that the public segregation of the sexes reinforces and justifies its own unfortunate consequences. As Gershenson (citing Wasserstrom) puts it, “Sex-segregated bathrooms…are just ‘one small part of that scheme of sex-role differentiation which uses the mystery of sexual anatomy, among other things, to maintain the primacy of heterosexual sexual attraction central to that version of the patriarchal system of power relationships we have today.’ The same patriarchal system that envisions sex as a crucial binary category insists on the sexual segregation of bathrooms.”

There hasn’t been much news about these German restroom innovations since a flurry of articles appeared in the scandalized international press in 2017. Were the proposals stopped dead in their tracks after massive public resistance? Or perhaps subsequent developments have slipped under the radar? Germany is a country known for its healthy tolerance and respect for public nudity, as shocked visitors discover when they stumble upon topless pool-side bathers in their hotel and full-blown nudist parks in city centers, such as the Englischer Garten in Munich. There may indeed be adequate public support among locals for unisex WCs with unisex urinals, but municipalities are likely constrained by their growing population of conservative communities, predominantly Muslim immigrants, not to mention the many tourists unacquainted with liberal German attitudes. Any viable changes would need to be two-pronged and incremental: gradually outfitting women’s WCs with female-adapted urinals, and gradually merging or replacing segregated WCs with unisex WCs, all the while keeping enough gender-segregated WCs operating to provide people with a choice. Germans regularly go naked among strangers in coed saunas, and over time, one assumes, male leering and harassment of female users would likewise dwindle as coed toilet use became commonplace and the norm. Then if enough women could be recruited, unisex WCs could all be outfitted with unisex urinals. I would add that this would also solve at one go the problem of safe toilets for trans people.

Female urinals, unknown location, Germany (Prince Grobhelm – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=3003594).

Germany presents us with an instructive test case on the limits of the progressive imagination. By prudish American standards, the Germans really are quite reasonable people and beckon toward what is possible. We might place Germany at one end of a continuum representing degrees of tolerance for bodily freedom, America in the middle, and more hidebound societies at the other end, such as those that regard women as inherently dirty (e.g., the practice in Nepal and Ethiopia of forcing menstruating women into huts) or as unassailably pure and needing protection and isolation, which amounts to the same thing. Far from being inconceivable or intolerable, unisex urinals and WCs do exist and are being implemented or in the planning stages by municipal governments not only in Germany but elsewhere, though still mainly confined to Europe. The reason for this growing shift toward sexual equality in public toilets, however slow and scattershot on a global scale is, again, the sheer logic of it. Above all, it’s environmentally and ecologically sound policy. Converting segregated WCs into unisex WCs saves money and space, and widespread adoption of the female urinal saves water — at a time when water shortages are becoming an urgent issue worldwide. And, of course, unisex facilities provide women the same ease and speed of use as men.

Egalitarian public restroom design (as opposed to its successful implementation) has a long history and I can hardly claim to be proposing something original, having relied on insights culled from the experts, notably Alexander Kira’s The Bathroom (Rev. Ed., Viking, 1976), and Harvey Molotch and Laura Norén’s scholarly collection, Toilet: Public Restrooms and the Politics of Sharing (New York U Press, 2010). The following design for a grand public restroom is my own. The structure is imagined in the round, to spotlight its aesthetic and functional self-sufficiency, though I’d stress “functional” here in the more generous sense suggested by Kira to distinguish it from the “American preoccupation with compulsive ‘cleanliness,’ devoid of any enjoyment, which results in our minimal ‘functional’ bathrooms.” On the contrary, “one can find examples today of bathrooms that are treated as family rooms, private sitting rooms, libraries, offices, formal drawing rooms, art galleries, garden rooms, beauty parlors, gymnasiums, and so on.”

Large enough to stand out in the urban horizon, my grand public restroom would be readily identifiable with its telltale dome-shaped skylight or cupola, yet each would be architecturally unique. They would come in different sizes depending on population density or local demand, and there would be smaller versions with fewer amenities, scattered around the neighborhood, some consisting of no more than several toilet rooms accessed on the outside and unisex urinals on the inside. They would be free, open to all, well-maintained, clean and safe, with attendants on hand twenty-four hours in the larger restrooms. Ideally, they would be strictly unisex, but as I must ground this in our day and age, a transitional version is presented, predominantly coed but with sex-segregated sections:

Bird’s-eye view of a grand public restroom: 1 entrance, 2 changing rooms, 3 urinals, 4 large toilet rooms, 5 small toilet rooms, 6 showers, 7 saunas, 8 trough sinks, 9 lactation room, 10 attendants’ office, 11 massage room, 12 espresso bar, 13 recreational tables. Female/male symbols indicate segregated versus coed sections. Concept and design by Isham Cook.

As in existing, conventional public restrooms, the divided entrance requires women and men to enter separately. If one just needs to urinate, there are segregated urinal rooms directly facing the first interior entrance on either side. If one needs to defecate, there are two options. First, private-use toilet rooms line the outside circumference of the structure, larger wheelchair-accessible rooms with a baby-changing table, toilet and sink, alternating with smaller rooms containing a toilet and sink. A sign on each door indicates whether the room is occupied or vacant (as in airplane cabin toilets), but with a big “O” or “V” so that the sign can be read from a distance. There is also an electronic display at the main entrance showing the occupancy of all the numbered toilets at a glance, enabling users to quickly locate a vacant toilet. Attendants would be aware of which toilets were in operation and could notify those hogging a toilet for an inordinate length of time. Likewise, if the user has a medical issue or emergency the attendant can be alerted and spoken to via intercom.

Alternatively, the same toilet rooms can be accessed within the building from the circular corridor lined with shower stalls and saunas. If a toilet is in use, its inner and outer doors are automatically locked, and become unlocked when the toilet is vacant. But one cannot access the corridor directly from the outside via the toilet rooms; only users already inside the building and making use of its facilities have access to the toilets from the inside. This enables the staff to monitor the visitors present and prevent men from entering the women’s section and vice versa (as indicated by the gender symbols in the diagram). The larger share of the shower area is coed, however. This is to give both sexes greater access to shower and sauna space and absorb spillover from the segregated sections. It’s also to accustom people to coed use and lower general resistance to the sight of naked users of the opposite sex.

Also offered are saunas, massage and lactation rooms, double-sided trough sinks with mirrors, recreational tables (with chess, checkers, Go sets), even an espresso bar. The purpose indeed is to encourage people not only to feel comfortable and at leisure, but to hang out and socialize. Other grand public restrooms might offer different options and facilities. The largest could accommodate hot and cold pools for recreational bathing, as have long existed in Japan, Korea and China. As in Germany and a few other European countries, many spa and hot spring resorts are both coed and clothing optional, so it’s not such a stretch to imagine this degree of institutionalized freedom.

If these grand public restrooms progressed to become fully coed, obviating the need for separate male and female sections, the interior could be further streamlined with a single set of urinals, showers and saunas for all genders to use freely, safely, and shame-free. Granted, the more exotic brand of European spa aside, existing public restrooms remain a long way from this vision, “a utopian vision of men and women and people of all sorts sharing toilet space and shaping social life….As the sex ratio of users changes, one gender can spill over into the facilities ordinarily over-selected by the other, while, as the need arises, managing glance in an appropriate way” (Molotch). Indeed, there is growing awareness of the need for a new approach, and piecemeal improvements are already happening in many cities and countries. And there is always constant, bustling change, often for the better, occasionally for the worse. In what follows, I would like to present two examples of change in two countries, one exhibiting dramatic change for the better, the other dramatic change for the worse.

The Chinese Experience

When I first arrived in China in the early 1990s, toilets were so squalid it was hard to believe that a country could be so wanting in public sanitation. A telling instance was a lunch stop in one mountain tourist town famous for its sprawling Buddhist temples. We chose the most promising among a shanty-like strip of private restaurants, all lacking a restroom. I was directed around back to the public WC, if you could call it that. It consisted of an open pit of raw sewage with a rickety wooden plank laid across to squat on while defecating. The pit was set back from the street but unsheltered and its occupants fully visible to passersby. Throughout my naked squatting ordeal, a male colleague I was traveling with stood nearby and stared, out of protective concern but probably also impatience. This had a most inhibiting effect. I gave up and resolved to hold in “the uneasy load,” as Gulliver described being denied use of a privy by his Lilliputian hosts. Nervously gathering up my belongings, I managed to drop my camera into the excremental sludge and fished it out with my fingers. Back at the restaurant, there was no sink or even soap, and I had to make do with a pan of water to restore my hands and the camera as best I could. I’m not sure how they washed their dishes.

In the nation’s capital, standard public WCs of the time weren’t all that much better: dark, dirty cinderblock cells with two facing rows of squatting holes. Low dividers partially separated you from adjacent users but not from those sitting opposite; some WCs lacked dividers altogether. Clearly, this was a more “social” culture, where people felt less awkward about the communal witnessing of all aspects of daily life including the bodily functions, where the concept of individual privacy was less refined than in the “civilized” West. I had no choice but to get used to being stared at shitting by curious males whiling away the time with their cigarettes, newspapers and chitchat, sometimes quite overtly about me, naturally assuming I had arrived in the country that very day and couldn’t speak the language (after decades here some still call out to me on the street, “Welcome to China!”). If you were out for the evening you could always use the restaurant toilet, if again it actually had one, and you didn’t mind soiling your shoes in the inevitable puddles of urine, spit, cigarette butts and stray feces surrounding the squat receptacle. So extravagant were these examples of national performance art that they have attracted comment. As did David Sedaris on a trip to China in 2011 and as Arthur Meursault wickedly satirized in his novel, Party Members, I found these public potty displays, for want of a better word, funny.

Men’s public WC in a Beijing hutong, 2021 (photo by Isham Cook).

Once the country opened up in earnest to foreign tourism and the Chinese themselves started travelling internationally, they became educated on the sanitary standards commonly found outside the Middle Kingdom. They became in fact acutely conscious and embarrassed about their public WC problem, so much so that the Government trumpeted the country’s urgent toilet development plans, citing such mottoes as “You can judge a nation’s civilization by the quality of its public toilets.” And they indeed worked hard on this. Over the past decade there has been a sea change, though you can still find remnants of the past alongside signs of progress. Many tiny public WCs in Beijing’s old lanes (hutong), in order to maximize their limited space, maintain squatting toilets next to each other without dividers. But these WCs are kept spotlessly clean throughout the day. Some WCs even provide toilet paper from a single dispenser in the entrance (locals are long accustomed to carrying their own). Instead of aiming their waste into the obscure sewage holes of yore, users now position themselves on the polished metal platforms and simply stamp the flusher with their heel. It’s not so bad. Look at it this way: if you’re so close together you’re knocking knees with your neighbor, you can use each other’s legs as support. And in case you haven’t been following the latest health news, squatting toilets are better than sitting toilets for evacuating the body’s waste.

These national measures are continuously being ramped up throughout the country. I was walking through a nondescript neighborhood in the third-tier city of Changchun not long ago and stopped in a public WC. In years past, it would have been a ghastly sight. The individual toilet stalls had locking doors and were spic and span — and free. Chinese school lavatories too are kept cleaner than before, although their unshaded windows still give facing classrooms a clear sightline into the male urinals. In the newer shopping malls, the restrooms are ever larger, nicer and gender friendlier. In Beijing’s China World Mall shopping plaza, for example, ample restrooms are conveniently at hand wherever you turn. One male restroom has eight toilet stalls (with a choice of squatting and sitting toilets) and ten urinals; the female restroom facing it has twelve toilet stalls, somewhat making up for the lack of female urinals.

One troublesome aspect of public toilet use in China is that, unlike the U.S., there is no law requiring food establishments to provide a restroom. Most restaurants do as a matter of course, and no bar would be foolish enough not to, but cafés generally don’t. The waitstaff will always point you to the nearest WC in the mall or down the street, or they arrange with a neighboring restaurant to let you use their restroom. But even in posh residential complexes like The Place in Beijing with its $3,000 per month rental apartments catering to foreigners, the commercial space at ground level wasn’t designed to have restroom plumbing, and few of the many fine food and coffee establishments lining the concourse have their own restrooms. From certain locations one has to walk the equivalent of a football field to get to the nearest public WC. On the other hand, restaurants, office buildings, and hotel lobbies never object to anyone slipping in to use the restroom, patron or not. Meanwhile in American cities, restaurants and businesses commonly display a sign in their window prohibiting their restrooms to non-paying customers. You seldom encounter the same in restaurants in China. Staff tend to be relaxed and not inclined to interfere. Ironically, there is a greater need for non-patron use of restaurant restrooms in the U.S., since there are comparatively fewer public WCs. This brings us to our next country.

The American experience

As with many features of American life, amenities and facilities are distributed up the socio-economic scale. You have to pay for the convenience. I don’t mean the token fee commonly charged in public WCs in Europe. You’re expected to patronize an establishment before being granted use of the restroom, whatever cost that entails. Shopping malls do provide restrooms for public use, but then it’s assumed you’re there to shop, and unkempt, indigent types may be approached by guards and escorted out. McDonald’s and other fast-food chains present an interesting exception. They are often hangouts for the massive homeless population in many cities, who are generally allowed to stay as long as they purchase a coffee; apparently you can still get one for a dollar. Some shops may look the other way even if you don’t buy anything. For all the criticism they receive for their unhealthful food and low pay, in functioning as daytime shelters for the poor, the fast-food chains perform a valuable and needed public service.

The relative scarcity of clean, safe, accessible public toilets in the U.S., as compared to other countries, has long attracted frustrated commentary by visiting foreigners and domestic sociologists, if not by untraveled Americans who have no basis for comparison and don’t know anything else, though everyone is acutely aware of the inconvenience of being stuck somewhere with a bursting bladder or bowels and no idea where the nearest toilet is. But the assumption is you have only yourself to blame, in not planning ahead and taking better precautions, in not leaving that bar, party, sports event or outdoor concert before giving yourself enough time to fully clear your bladder, and not once, if it’s a long way home or there’s a long drive or heavy traffic ahead, but twice. Or don’t drink so much. Or carry an empty plastic bottle in your car if you have to. Or find some bushes or dark corner in a park to relieve yourself in.

By this point in my essay you may be assuming my title refers merely to the nuisance of being caught in public with no WC in sight. I don’t mean to trivialize the word, but it does have metaphorical scope to encompass the relatively little things in life that bother or “terrorize” us, the many minor hassles we blow out of proportion in order to characterize a fleeting yet momentarily excruciating situation or event, which of course bears no relation to a real act of terrorism — a shooting, a bombing — or other life-threatening cataclysm. But this is actually not what I am getting at by the “toilet terrorism” of my title. What I lay out as follows refers rather to something, if not quite life-threatening, far worse than our desperate search for a toilet. By an order of magnitude worse. And it is unique to the USA.

We can start by recognizing that there is an etiquette to public toilet use, but this etiquette is not confined to the toilet itself — and this may be counterintuitive — but extends beyond the facility to encompass all urban space, indeed the entire town, suburb or city. You can get into trouble by using a toilet stall against the rules, when for example dealing or shooting drugs or having sex in one (that’s what that half-inch gap between the door and the hinge is for), or even inadvertently, when stumbling into a poorly marked entrance for the wrong sex. You can also get into trouble for not using a public toilet. Public urination constitutes the greatest violation because it’s interpreted as the most flagrant, ultimate rejection of something society, at least American society, upholds to the absolute strictest of standards — toilet etiquette. This becomes apparent when these standards are violated. In the U.S., as Kira notes, “privacy demands and sex segregation are strictly enforced by both legal and social sanctions and…casual public elimination can lead to swift arrest.” As “technologies of division and separation,” public toilets, adds Barcan, are a “form of segregation…at once immensely naturalized and immensely policed, the most taken-for-granted social categorization and the most fiercely regulated.”

Most countries have penalties for public urination, typically fines of several hundred USD, though in some locations such as Singapore the fines can go up to several thousand dollars for blatant acts like public defecation. In Germany, on the other hand, there is no law against public urination. Indeed, the law in most countries is rarely enforced unless the act is deemed flagrant enough and performed openly in broad daylight. In China, where I’ve lived for decades, I’ve never heard of anyone getting into trouble for public peeing, nor have been warned about it. In civilized Japan, salarymen can be seen urinating outside without discretion, but then again they’re dragooned into enforced after-hours drinking sessions with the boss; they’re seen throwing up on the sidewalk or in the subway station as well. It is also generally grasped that some people afflicted by age, diabetes or various colon conditions are incontinent and may have to let go in an inopportune spot before they make it home, and allowance (one hopes) is made for medical reasons. But as for young partiers who have no such excuse, is it really necessary to slap them with a $500 fine (on top of a possible ninety days in jail) if they make at least a minimal effort to relieve themselves out of sight, such as in an alley or behind a tree?

The harsh truth is that the land of the free has little tolerance for public urination. This has led to gross distortions of the law, to an extent poorly understood by the very public that’s so ruthless in fingering offenders. Public urination signifies no mere rude display but is readily identified in the American psyche with extreme depravity: obscenity and pedophilia. Whereas the law is wise enough to make a distinction between public urination or disorderly conduct on the one hand, and public lewdness or indecent exposure on the other, not all people do. That includes the police, who are at complete liberty to interpret an act of public urination as lewd or obscene. The police are expected to uphold the law, but when it comes to sexual offenses real or imaginary, they have wide latitude to do whatever they want. They also have quotas to fulfill and incentive to err on the side of severity. As everyone who reads the news knows, American law enforcement have a habit of drastically over-extending their reach, when for example they shoot innocent but suspicious-looking African Americans. But while the public is turning against racist police brutality, nabbing sex offenders has the public’s unbridled support.

Sane, reasonable people, such as have gotten this far through my essay, people with a solid grounding in reality, can surely grasp that while public urination occurs and can be a nuisance, the number of those urinate for the purpose of exposing themselves is certainly miniscule. Public paranoia, by contrast, is vast and volatile.

A sobering way to gauge the frequency with which public urinators are charged with public lewdness is a Google search of “public urination laws by state,” where a host of law firms offering their services to bewildered defendants lead the search results. These sites explain patiently and methodically what is happening and what you should and should not do to avoid worsening the quicksand you are in. For what you may not realize is that time is fast working against you, and an experienced attorney is needed to negotiate with the prosecutor and the police and prepare evidence before things proceed to sentencing. U.S. states have almost unlimited scope to apply the harshest punishment for the most minor of sex crimes — to avoid appearing soft on crime. In Michigan, for instance, the minimum sentence for public lewdness is one day in jail and the maximum is life in prison. In at least thirteen states, the distinction between urination and lewdness doesn’t even apply: urination automatically results in an indecent exposure charge — and possible registration as a sex offender (Human Rights Watch, 2007). Note that it’s “at least” thirteen states. The caveat is that all states can potentially charge your simple act of urination as a sex crime at the discretion of the police. Being witnessed masturbating is an automatic sex crime, and a serious one. I presume you would never have any intention of doing that in public, but men usually jiggle their penis when squeezing out their last drops, and someone happening to espy this could misconstrue it as masturbation. A citizen’s claim to have seen you in any state of exposure, even if you were taking the utmost precautions to urinate where you thought you were unobserved, could likewise result in an indecent exposure charge that escalates into a sex crime conviction. A child’s claim, and it’s all over for you.

A good lawyer and a sympathetic judge might help extricate you relatively unscathed from the quicksand, perhaps only several thousand dollars poorer from legal and court fees but saved from the sex offender registry. In the handful of countries that have sex offender registries, only the police have access to the identities of those registered, in order to monitor their whereabouts once out of prison, while allowing them to resume their lives. But sex offender registries in the U.S., in stark contrast, extend well beyond monitoring and tracking. Since the Adam Walsh Act of 2006, the national sex offender registry has been publicly accessible on the internet. This means anyone can locate the address of a newly registered sex offender, harass them and their family, rally the community to pelt their home with stones and drive them out of the neighborhood, even physically attack them, all with virtual impunity. The identities of those registered as Tier 1 sex offenders (the mildest tier for minor sex crimes like public urination) are supposedly protected from public access. However, states have their own, more stringent registries which often do nothing to protect mild offenders. Worse, the registries don’t specify a person’s offenses, so you are assumed to be among the worst of the worst and are lumped together with baby rapists — for the crime of having been caught relieving yourself of a full bladder.

You are invited to read the dour Human Rights Watch report of 2007, “No easy answers: Sex offender laws in the U.S.” (things haven’t improved much in the years since), to enlighten yourself on the further consequences of being a registered sex offender in the U.S.: loss of job and potentially permanent unemployability (some states keep you on the registry for life); loss of residence as landlords (who have access to the registry) refuse to rent to you and child predator laws zone you out of your own town or city (all sex offenders are deemed a danger to children regardless of their offense), forcing you to join vagrant tribes of homeless sex offenders in scattered city underpasses or designated rural trailer parks; and no way of paying for your accumulating court and administrative fees, GPS ankle bracelet rental fees, etc., apart from what your family is able or willing to shell out on your behalf. The U.S. is the only country in the world, by the way, to thus exile sex offenders, brand them irredeemable, and render them homeless and without means of subsistence.

In short, as a Men’s Health article puts it, “when you have to urinate so bad that holding it is no longer an option, you might want to consider just peeing in your pants. It may ruin the rest of your night, but the rest of your life will be spared.”

When the state multiples crime by creating new categories of crime; when it singles out groups for disproportionately punitive treatment and enlists a duped public to collaborate in the name of security; when the state inventively deploys the latest technologies (comprehensive databases, GPS tracking, facial recognition) in the service of prosecuting crime; and when out of all of this emerges an atmosphere of fear designed to intimidate and terrorize the population including those supporting these measures, fear not only of the state but of one’s neighbor, fear of the racial or sexual predator, down to the fear of being caught without a toilet in public: we have arrived at fascism in its contemporary guise.

Works cited

Barcan, Ruth. “Dirty Spaces Separation, Concealment, and Shame in the Public Toilet.” In Harvey Molotch and Laura Norén (Eds.), Toilet: Public Restrooms and the Politics of Sharing (New York U Press, 2010).

“Berlin’s new toilets: Would you use a women’s urinal?” BBC News, August 11, 2017 (https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-40899902).

Case, Mary Anne. “Why Not Abolish Laws of Urinary Segregation?” In Harvey Molotch and Laura Norén (Eds.), Toilet: Public Restrooms and the Politics of Sharing (New York U Press, 2010).

Gershenson, Olga. “The Restroom Revolution: Unisex Toilets and Campus Politics.” In Harvey Molotch and Laura Norén (Eds.), Toilet: Public Restrooms and the Politics of Sharing (New York U Press, 2010).

Human Rights Watch. “No easy answers: Sex offender laws in the U.S.” September, 2007 (http://hrw.org/reports/2007/us0907/us0907web.pdf).

Kira, Alexander. The Bathroom (Rev. Ed., Viking, 1976).

Levitan, Corey, and Bettmann/Corbis, “You might be a sex offender and not even know it!” Men’s Health, May 19, 2015 (https://www.menshealth.com/trending-news/a19541024/you-might-be-sex-offender-and-not-know-it/).

Meursault, Arthur. Party Members (Camphor Press, 2016).

Molotch, Harvey. “On not making history: What NYU did with the toilet and what it means for the world.” In Harvey Molotch and Laura Norén (Eds.), Toilet: Public Restrooms and the Politics of Sharing (New York U Press, 2010).

“The Peequal: Will the new women’s urinal spell the end of queues for the ladies’?” The Guardian, June 7, 2021 (https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2021/jun/07/the-peequal-will-the-new-womens-urinal-spell-the-end-of-queues-for-the-ladies).

Sedaris, David. “David Sedaris: Chicken toenails, anyone?” The Guardian, July 15, 2011 (https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2011/jul/15/david-sedaris-chinese-food-chicken-toenails).

“Should I be worried by indecent exposure and public urination crimes?” Gravel & Associates. Michigan Sex Crimes Lawyers (https://www.michigan-sex-offense.com/public-urination.html).

“Thai temple to build separate toilets for non-Chinese visitors after complaints: report.” Straights Times, February 28, 2015 (https://www.straitstimes.com/asia/se-asia/thai-temple-to-build-separate-toilets-for-non-chinese-visitors-after-complaints-report).

Wasserstrom, Richard A. “Racism, sexism, and preferential treatment: An approach to the topics,” UCLA Law Review 24 (1977): 581–615.

Yuko, Elizabeth. “The glamorous, sexist history of the women’s restroom lounge.” Bloomberg CityLab, December 3, 2018 (https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-12-03/the-rise-and-fall-of-the-women-s-restroom-lounge).

Forthcoming Jan. 2022

This essay will appear in my forthcoming Sexual Fascism: Essays

Related posts by Isham Cook:
American fascism: The sexual rage of the state
Sexual repression in the post-Covid-19 era
Facebook, rococo vulvas, and the pornographic imagination
An American Talisman
American massage

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The Mustachioed Woman of Shanghai. A novel.

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It is the Shanghai of courtesans and concubines, danger and decadence, updated to 2020. American expat author Isham Cook has disappeared. His last known history is chronicled by an exotic woman who seems right out of 1930s Shanghai herself, Marguerite, a mustachioed Afghan-American who weaves Persian rugs and deals in psychedelics. As she tells it, Isham’s story all began with Luna, a beguiling but troubled Chinese woman who happens to have a mustache too. Also vying for Isham’s affection is the charismatic Kitty, who conspires to entrap him in a cyberweb of obsession and betrayal.

Fans of Cook’s fiction will recognize in this psychological thriller set in modern China his signature world of startling plot turns and his unsettling yet compelling landscape of ideas.

“I can’t think of any other white-boy author who has re-imagined himself as an Asiatic female in order to psychoanalyze his past relationships, and in that regard Isham Cook has crafted a truly gender-and-genre-bending work of literature.”—Tom Carter, author of An American Bum in China

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More fiction by Isham Cook:

The Kitchens of Canton. A novel

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Lust and Philosophy. A novel

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The Exact Unknown and Other Tales of Modern China

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Sexual surveillance in the Covid-19 era

Post-Covid-19 China

If there is such a thing as a politico-sexual Rubicon beyond which there is no turning back, it’s going to be when the state removes your right to privacy in the last redoubt: public restrooms, changing rooms, hotel rooms, and your own home — places where nakedness occurs and surveillance cameras are normally out of reach. Up until the Covid outbreak, no state had ever dared breach this line. It existed only in the realm of fiction, most famously the 24-hour two-way “telescreen” (video surveillance camera) installed inside every home in George Orwell’s novel 1984. Because the idea is so horrible, even tyrannical regimes and dictatorships are loathe to cross that line. To maintain their legitimacy, they rely on a base of popular support. this risks being eroded altogether in the face of a measure so drastic that no plausible justification exists. That’s why Orwell’s classic dystopia is generally regarded as too exaggerated (as satire is designed to be) to ever come to pass in reality.

Recently, a CNN news report revealed police in China’s Jiangsu Province to be engaging in this very act, installing surveillance cameras in people’s homes. They weren’t white-collar criminals or dissidents under house arrest, but coronavirus-free workers returning to the city of Changzhou after months of lockdown in their hometowns. In-home cameras were necessary to effectively monitor their two-week stay-at-home orders, the police argued, because placing them outside people’s front door (as some apartment complexes in Chinese cities have been doing) subjected them to vandalism (“China is installing surveillance cameras outside people’s front doors and sometimes inside their homes,” CNN, April 28, 2020).

Local authorities have long reached their tentacles into Chinese people’s private lives to an extent scarcely tolerated in the rest of the world. This has been due to a traditional absence of privacy rights in China, particularly since 1949. Few Chinese have ever experienced “privacy” as Westerners understand it. Most have only known narrow living quarters crammed with extended families, members of multiple generations occupying the same bedroom and even the same bed, packed student and worker dormitories, and other sardine-tin communal arrangements. In recent decades nuclear families have achieved greater privacy as housing capacity has expanded, but people are otherwise accustomed to routine encroachments into their personal lives by nosy neighbors, neighborhood committees, the police, etc. Yet though the Chinese may have a relatively higher tolerance level for privacy intrusion, in-home video surveillance is clearly overreach, to put it mildly. One resident interviewed in the CNN report was “furious.” The police had positioned the camera across his apartment toward his front door so that he was in its view while in his living room. It “had a huge impact on me psychologically,” he said. “I tried not to make phone calls, fearing the camera would record my conversations by any chance. I couldn’t stop worrying even when I went to sleep, after I closed the bedroom door.”

The Changzhou police were somewhat defensive and apologetic, promising the cameras would be removed as soon as the self-quarantine period was over. And it was only tried out in one Chinese city. But the trend is clear. If the technology is available, it will be used, and redundancy seems to be of little concern, even if there are more cost-effective (though less profitable) ways of ensuring people obey strict stay-at-home orders. China is inventive at this too. Arriving foreigners undergoing their fourteen-day isolation in Chinese hotels this February and March, for example, had a fresh piece of paper pasted over their door after each delivery of food, which would tear apart if they attempted to leave their room. In other countries, parolees and people under house arrest are monitored by the no less intrusive means of GPS ankle bracelets; the companies renting out these tracking devices do big business in the U.S. Video surveillance is, however, ready and waiting to be deployed everywhere, in every country. China appears to have taken the lead. In a related and no less disturbing development, jaywalkers in Chinese cities are seeing themselves, along with their name and other identifying information, displayed in real time on giant LED screens at busy intersections, thanks to face-recognition technology — and automatically fined.

You don’t need to be an expert on surveillance technology to see what’s happening. States are employing the latest tools at their disposal for compiling and combining databases of their population. From these an elaborate profile of any citizen can be instantly called up on a computer screen. In the U.S., the information used to identify you is your social security number, driver’s license or state ID, and your credit, tax, employment and medical histories. In addition to this is a wealth of information provided to innumerable databases fleshing out your profile in far richer detail than the FBI and NSA ever had the capability of: your personal interests voluntarily shared on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, WhatsApp and other social media, along with any morally dubious behavior in which you and your online contacts engage and assume no one outside of your circle could possibly be interested. Speaking of cellphones (and your entire conversation and text-messaging history), the GPS technology built in them can now pinpoint your real-time location with near perfect accuracy. In relatively democratic societies like the U.S., all these databases are not entirely centralized but scattered and incomplete. But they are bought and sold by private actors who may know more about you than the government. We mustn’t forget that our computer cameras and smart TVs also serve as 1984-style telescreens allowing hackers to watch us, a topic worthy of its own treatment, but for my purposes here it’s assumed the state itself is not (yet) implicated in this means of surveillance.

China has all the above data about its citizens as well, but the information is far more centralized and orderly, with the national ID number (passport in the case of foreign residents and tourists) being the key indicator used to seamlessly call up individuals’ identity. But there too information compilation is still an imperfect science. This is one of the more interesting observations which Covid has brought to light over the past few months. Since the outbreak began, Chinese citizens and foreign residents must employ various authorizations to get around in daily life. Your apartment complex provides you with a pass card to present at manned gates upon returning home every day, where your temperature is taken; if guests are allowed, they must register and prove they have been in the city for at least fourteen days. In recent weeks as the outbreak is ever closer to being stamped out across the country, restrictions are cautiously being relaxed, but there are still many shopping malls and plazas, stores and restaurants requiring you to scan one of a number of QR codes linked to your identification through downloaded apps, confirming on the spot that you’ve passed the two-week requirement. You’re then allowed to enter the establishment.

It may seem like clumsy overkill to have to prove your health status multiples times a day. Local governments seem to be competing to create the greatest daily hassle for everyone simply to demonstrate to the central authorities that they and they alone have the coronavirus under complete control. If people are calmly putting up with it, they recognize the importance of tracking down and screening out carriers of the virus. The larger issue is that the technology is still in its infancy. A few years down the road and it will all be much more powerful, effortless and invisible. When facial recognition reaches the apex of total accuracy (if that is indeed achievable), our exact whereabouts will be known twenty-four hours a day. There will be no need to screen us individually when moving about since we will all be tracked everywhere in real time by an omniscient central database. As noted, the capability of doing this is already more or less in place and is happening now, as exemplified by the instant shaming of jaywalkers at busy intersections. Why then can’t they apply the same to identity authorization when entering shopping malls so that people don’t have to fiddle with their devices? The answer is that face recognition is still short of 100% accuracy. It doesn’t capture everyone at intersections but pulls out the few who have been identified with any certainty. It’s just a matter of time before total accuracy will be achieved and applied everywhere, in all contexts. Let’s consider where all this is heading, and why China is the dour model of the future.

The Communists mastered surveillance long before video technology. This surveillance has always been, at its core, sex surveillance. During the Cultural Revolution, many families were split apart and forced to stay in sex-segregated dormitories. I have lived and traveled around China since the 1990s, and have been able to observe how hotels act as sexual gatekeepers and morality enforcers of the state. In the 1990s growing spending power allowed ordinary people greater mobility, and the private hotel industry developed in tandem with the domestic tourist industry. Only married couples were permitted to room together in hotels and had to present their marriage certificate upon checking in, a policy that remained in place until 2003. Oddly, the unmarried were allowed to room together in bathhouses, which had 24-hour private rooms (often with unlockable doors but police checks and busts were rare) and no registration requirement. This was freer even than in the U.S., where hotels require some identifying information such as your car’s license plate. The bathhouse industry flourished in the 1990s and they were the go-to places for illicit (extramarital) sex, until the authorities put an end to it around the time of the 2008 Olympics. All bathhouses thenceforth began to require identification upon entrance, though by that time unmarried couples could freely room together in both bathhouses and hotels as long as they registered with their IDs at reception.

The 2003 milestone securing for the Chinese the private space to cohabit with the opposite sex outside of marriage has in the past few years begun to wobble — due to the little Big Brother in everyone’s mobile phone. It’s not just GPS that’s to blame but GPS combined with the powerful WeChat app (like Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram and every other software you can think of rolled into one), which along with Alipay is also used for buying things. China has been cashless for a good four years now. Cash is still allowed, mainly to accommodate the tech-challenged elderly, but everyone else uses their cellphone for every monetary transaction from buying a car to booking a hotel room, to paying a prostitute or the migrant manning your favorite street-side snack stand. The trade-off is that this enormous convenience comes at the expense of the state’s knowledge of your every movement.

In that sweet decade of opportunity between 2003 and 2013 or so, before WeChat became so powerful and ubiquitous, committing adultery with someone at a hotel was still largely an anonymous act. The government could easily pay the hotel a visit and find you out if they had reason to, but mostly you could carry out trysts in reasonable confidence no one would ever know (to really be on the safe side, you could book the hotel yourself and sneak your partner up to your room). In the years since, your phone calls or WeChat messages recording your conversations to arrange the tryst, GPS tracking your respective locations in the same hotel, the record of your WeChat payment used to book the room, and your respective ID numbers presented at reception, all converge to overdetermine the fact of your liaison with a person of the opposite sex. This fact is potentially available to the police, and the knowledge it’s available have given many pause before using a hotel to embark on an affair, or adultery as the case may be, at least people with reputations to lose (to those who would advise against cheating if you’re already involved in a committed relationship, let’s save the American-style moralizing for later).

Fortunately, unless you’re a well-placed Party member or belong to the business or entertainment elite, nothing is liable to happen. There are far too many people having sex for the authorities to bother about. The sharing of politically sensitive material can result in your WeChat account being shut down without warning or recourse, but explicit sexting in personal messages has remained free from interference (forwarding of someone’s nude images without their permission is another matter and can get you thrown in jail). The Chinese Government today is actually quite lenient, surprisingly lenient, about people’s sex lives. It’s simply no longer a priority, and light years away from the grim circumstances that obtained up through the 1970s, when people could be shot or imprisoned for extramarital sex, while university students could be expelled for sex as late as the 1990s.

What’s changed under Covid is an intensification of the present mechanisms so that we are now under a much more active and comprehensive surveillance regime. To consider hotels again, you are only allowed to book once you’ve electronically established your health credentials (likewise the person you’re staying with) and no one gets past the reception desk without doing this. Bribery has long been a last resort in China; no longer, at least as regards coronavirus authorizations. Who knows what kind of algorithms the health and local authorities are presently using to scrutinize hotel guest lists for anomalies. They are interested not in adulterous affairs but in people infected with the virus and all those they had contact with. If someone in the same hotel is discovered to be Covid positive, you and your partner will certainly be approached during your stay, and there will necessarily be awkward questions about your motives in being together. In a more unlikely case, your hotel could suddenly go under lockdown before you had a chance to leave, and all existing guests including both of you would be stuck there for at least two weeks. If you feel it’s no longer worth the hassle going through with a hotel tryst, you’re not any safer sneaking your lover into your apartment while your live-in is out. He or she will have to register for the visit upon arrival at your complex’s gate (where you are both captured on video), your cellphones’ GPS tracks you right into your home, and your respective marital status will also of course be indicated in the database.

Few Chinese, in fact, carry out trysts in their home. It’s a cultural phenomenon going way back to when homes were mere hovels and living spaces were too small, shabby and crowded to accommodate guests. Since the functional 1990s when home décor consisted of white walls, bare concrete floors and fluorescent lighting, interior design has grown by leaps and bounds and most people nowadays put some effort into making their domicile more colorful and comfortable. Still, house parties and even small dinner parties remain a novel concept, as perplexed foreigners discover when they’re rarely invited to people’s homes. People know how to party all right — in restaurants. Chinese restaurant culture is vast and awe-inspiring. Many restaurants of the fancier variety are huge, multistoried affairs, with plentiful private rooms of different sizes for hosting couples to large groups. In the West, we go to a nice restaurant, even the most intimate of establishments, for the social atmosphere. In China, people go to restaurants for the privacy they offer. Some restaurants are joined to karaoke spaces and saunas; there are luxury bathhouses with their own first-class restaurants. All manner of hostesses, masseuses, and sex workers can be arranged, if you know the workings of indoor Chinese nightlife.

I should note that at this point in mid-May 2020, restaurant culture across Mainland China has already fully returned to its pre-Covid state of business and vibrancy. One place you might assume would still not be allowed to operate, given the close physical contact involved, is the massage parlor. Probably no country has more per-capita massage workers than China. Massage venues, both the therapeutic and erotic varieties, have been fully operative for a good two months now (though face masks are required by both masseuse and customer). We are confronted with the paradox, then, that in this most intrusive of surveillance states, the opportunities for intimate and sexual contact thrive even in the post-Covid era.

Post-Covid-19 USA

Unlike China where the coronavirus curve was crushed months ago and life is already more or less back to normal, the U.S. is scarcely able to even envision the post-Covid era. There may be no post-Covid era, only perpetual outbreaks and a new permanent normal of social-distancing. Short of real catastrophe (war, famine, etc.), few things are as dreadful as a total, Wuhan-style “hard” lockdown, in which no one is allowed out of their house and no one is allowed in. Wuhan’s two-month lockdown was brutal but it did have a clear beginning and end — crashing down on people before they knew what was in store for them and eventually easing in carefully orchestrated phases. There were adequate food supplies and deliveries and, as soon as the chaotic hospital situation stabilized, prompt medical care fully covered by the government. With Wuhan and Hubei Province sealed off and the virus contained, most Chinese cities were able to avoid home lockdowns altogether, though most businesses were closed. Even partial lockdowns, allowing people out to shop for basics and perhaps walk their dog, are stressful enough, especially when they drag on for months with no end in sight. The Chinese put up with it because they’re used to being ordered around by the government. Americans, unaccustomed to having their lives interfered with, have never encountered the like. It has been an awful experience for many, with growing unrest, e.g., heavily armed protestors congregating on the Michigan capitol and threatening to assassinate the governor.

The nasty conundrum forced on us by the Covid pandemic is that the only way to effectively combat it is not medicine but surveillance. Only surveillance provides the knowledge of who is infected, where they are located, and who they have been in contact with. This knowledge diminishes the medical burden, while its absence escalates the medical burden, since testing and contact tracing will be scattershot and impotent without it. There has been much controversy in books and the media — well before Covid — over electronic surveillance and the resulting erosion of freedoms in democratic states. The hard truth is that electronic surveillance is the only weapon at our disposal for fighting disease outbreaks. China is not the only country to employ sophisticated tracking of its citizens. In the wake of Covid, most countries are ratcheting up their surveillance capabilities. We are also seeing hints of another dystopian sci-fi Rubicon we hope won’t be crossed, the involuntary implanting in people of microchips (“Benjamin Netanyahu suggests microchipping kids, slammed by experts,” Jerusalem Post, May 8, 2020).

South Korea, held up as a model of national medical response, is revealing problems of overreach, when the state of the art collides with traditional prejudices, namely against homosexuality. In a recent virus outbreak at a gay nightclub, hundreds who might have been exposed are reluctant to get tested for fear the medical authorities will inform their workplace and they’ll be fired. In other words, further success in containing the virus hinges on how willingly this putative democracy’s leadership can let go of its dearly held homophobia (“South Korea struggles to contain new outbreak amid anti-gay backlash,” The Guardian, May 11, 2020). Singapore has similar issues with its discriminatory treatment of its million-plus migrant workers from India and Bangladesh (“Tens of thousands of Singapore’s migrant workers are infected. The rest are stuck in their dorms as the country opens up,” CNN, May 14, 2020). On the other hand, sex-positive social attitudes can be turned to advantage and people whose job involves extensive networking martialed to assist the medical authorities, as sex workers in Zambia are doing (“Coronavirus: Zambia sex workers praised for contact tracing,” BBC, May 10, 2020), but this takes a rare degree of imagination.

And then there is the dreadful situation in the U.S. (see my “Covid-19 and the disease of American exceptionalism“). It’s easy for nations that are successfully containing the virus through effective testing, contact tracing, and lockdown measures to lecture the US on what it’s doing wrong. But the American political system was no more structured to handle the Covid pandemic than it was the 1918 Spanish Flu. Four months into the present catastrophe, there are no signs that significant changes, or any changes, are in the works to prepare for the next pandemic. Apart from Democratic presidential candidates no longer in the running, there has been zero talk of reforming US health care to implement even bare-bones national health coverage, beyond the miniscule gains under the Obama Administration, which could bring the country into the club of civilized nations. The government can’t even administer the paltry $1,200 stimulus checks properly, sending them to people who don’t qualify and outrageously denying them to those married to non-U.S. citizens; or feed the hungry (“As hunger spreads with pandemic, government takes timid steps,” New York Times, May 13, 2020). Though the Trump Administration’s incompetence has been breathtaking, and we’re eagerly waiting for the nightmare of his presidency to end, its confused gesturing is symptomatic of a profounder problem: the inability of a cruel Victorian-style capitalist regime run by cynical and blindered plutocrats entrenched in old-school imperialist ideology to deal with something beyond its comprehension — a pandemic.

The U.S. is bifurcating in two directions as it adapts to Covid, roughly corresponding to the political “red” (Republican) and “blue” (Democratic) states, but with a few key differences. Covid Reds oppose lockdowns but are not necessarily Trump supporters and count liberals and Democrats in their ranks who are not only chafing under lockdown but losing their livelihoods. Covid Blues support lockdowns but include many conservatives who understand the need for them. More than political differences, the overriding factor determining people’s attitudes is how much they’re suffering financially. You are more likely to support a lockdown if you can afford to — you still have your job and can work from home. We cannot simply blame people for defying medical reality. If you find the present sight of bars and restaurants packed with patrons disturbing or pathetic, they might beg to differ. They’re not just out for a good time but are trying to preserve the only reality they have ever known before it collapses around them. This means continuing to support local businesses they have been supporting their entire lives and which may be only days away from going out of business. The patronizing of local business during this most trying of times could even be regarded as a well-meaning though misguided expression of Americans’ customary generosity, in stepping in to help the community during disasters.

The crowds of mostly young Americans blithely swarming bars and beaches despite stark warnings are causing much consternation and outrage. But their nose-thumbing acts of freedom are conveying something of symbolic importance. They are a logical, appropriately sarcastic, middle-finger response by the hapless subjects of a failed state. Why try to protect themselves from the virus when the government is doing everything in its power to allow it to spread? Why should they have to take on the burden of protecting the country when everyone’s going to catch it anyway? These people aren’t the complete idiots they’re being made out to be. They recognize what’s happening is a very bad flu season — well, ten times as bad — and despite their youth and health some of them will die. But their chances of surviving an infection are pretty good. They are simply carrying on as everyone will have to once the virus completes its trajectory through the rest of the population, and they’ll be the first to gain immunity.

We are hearing news of the devastating effects on mental health from stress and loneliness under lockdown, compounded by inadequate and unaffordable psychological services provided by the failed state (“Coronavirus pandemic prompts global mental health crisis as millions feel alone, anxious and depressed,” Democracy Now! May 14, 2020; the article is about the situation in the U.S., not the globe). Far down on the list of priorities is sexual loneliness (not once mentioned in the article). Being intimately bound up with loneliness, sexual loneliness is perhaps something many Americans — young and old alike — are in fact preoccupied with. You won’t find much in the way of advice, except of course to avoid sex altogether. What the conscientious, the Covid Blues, would say is this: the act of lovemaking turns you into a highly efficient disease vector (if not quite as bad as the act of singing, I should add: “Health authorities explain how choir practice caused the ‘superspread’ of 52 coronavirus cases in US town,” ABC, May 13, 2020). During AIDS this problem was solved with safe sex and condoms, but there is no safe sex under Covid. Socializing cannot be undertaken without aiding the enemy. Covid is changing America and you are never going to be able to party again. The only real way to contain the virus just happens to dovetail with — guess what? — good old “family values”: abstinence for teens and strict monogamy for adults. The new sexual normal means adapting to virtual relationships. Better get used to it.

And dating? Nothing could be more selfish, the Covid Blues would add, than the business of meeting people for the purpose of something as dangerous as sex. But there’s a problem with dating, even leaving sex out of the equation. It introduces a new person, possibly an asymptomatic superspreader, into your circle. If you cannot prove you had a more legitimate reason for meeting this person, it can be assumed your intent was sexual, and therefore gratuitous and reckless, as a result of which either one of you may have singlehandedly just started a new local outbreak. Simply going out and infecting, or being infected by, a person with the intent of potentially sleeping with them will make you guilty of intentionally aiding the pandemic.

Consider the sobering possibility that Covid could be declared a sexually transmitted disease. This is yet to be established by the medical community, but it’s coming (“A small study detects coronavirus in semen—but can you get it from sex?“, Health, May 8, 2020). If a person you slept with dies of Covid after informing those tracing her contacts that the only person she had close contact with was you, and if the virus was found in your semen, you could be in serious trouble. There are laws against knowingly transmitting an STD. From a legal perspective, the possibility you intentionally sexually transmitted Covid to your partner will be considered. You will not be able to fall back on the excuse you were asymptomatic. Ignorance is not a defense. You could have gotten yourself tested beforehand but didn’t. You had no right to be out meeting and potentially infecting new people in the first place. Convicted coronavirus spreaders could even be ruled sex offenders (as deliberate HIV-spreaders are). If you think Covid has ruined your life, see my “American fascism: The sexual rage of the state” for a look at how life is ruined for registered sex offenders in the U.S., including those guilty of the most minor of offenses. There is presently no more sexually punitive country than the United States. From internet trolls to mainstream journalists, from politicians on the left and on the right, the voices of morality are constantly on the lookout for new definitions of sexual misconduct, and if they can find it in Covid-19, they will.

In China, the state assumes the burden of worrying about who’s infecting whom. It tells everyone to wear a face mask, and they obey. It tells everyone it’s okay to remove their mask, and they remove them. If restaurants and hotels are allowed to reopen, people flock to them. If the virus is still lingering and some end up getting infected, they’ll shut the establishment down again. But no one is to blame and no one’s conscience is bothered. In the U.S., by contrast, individuals are duty-bound not to cause others harm, even from something as impossible to control as the coronavirus. You must take responsibility and will be held responsible for your actions. Of all the reasons for accidentally infecting someone, sex is the very worst, and there will be no forgiveness.

If you were to ask the younger generation of Covid Reds what they feel about the new sexual normal and how they are adapting to a foreseeable future without sex (since the medical consensus is that the virus may be with us for good), they would, again quite logically, assert that they aren’t planning on curtailing their freedom one iota. On the contrary, the danger of catching the virus from sex might make fucking intensely exciting. Not for me, but the allure of sex is intensified by taboos against it. Defiance naturally follows from an absence of moral exemplars. If we were living in a country that had been prepared for a pandemic and had instituted immediate measures before the virus had a chance to spread (Vietnam, Taiwan and New Zealand are a few shining examples), the hardships of living under lockdown would have a whole new meaning, one infused with national purpose. At the opposite extreme, the horrendous performance of the U.S. Government inspires nothing. Americans have nothing to fall back on in turn but themselves, their friends and their families. They are finding their own dignity under Covid on their own terms, whether this be at home or at the beach.

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This essay will appear in Sexual Fascism: Essays (forthcoming, January 2022)

Related posts by Isham Cook:
The Sewage System
Toilet terror
Covid-19 and the disease of American exceptionalism
American fascism: The sexual rage of the state
American massage

Sexual repression in the post-Covid-19 era

 

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Post-Covid-19 China

If there is a such a thing as a politico-sexual Rubicon beyond which there is no turning back, it’s going to be when the state removes your right to privacy in the last redoubt: public restrooms, changing rooms, hotel rooms, and your own home — places where nakedness occurs and surveillance cameras are normally out of reach. Up until the Covid outbreak, no state had ever dared breach this line. It existed only in the realm of fiction, most famously the 24-hour two-way “telescreen” (video surveillance camera) installed inside every home in George Orwell’s novel 1984. Because the idea is so horrible, even tyrannical regimes and dictatorships are loathe to cross this line. To maintain their legitimacy they rely on a base of popular support, and this risks being eroded altogether in the face of so drastic a measure, the implementing of which forecloses any plausible justification. That’s why Orwell’s classic dystopia is generally regarded as too exaggerated (as satire is designed to be) to ever come to pass in reality.

Recently, a CNN news report revealed police in China’s Jiangsu Province to be engaging in this very act, installing surveillance cameras in people’s homes. They weren’t white-collar criminals or dissidents under house arrest, but coronavirus-free workers returning to the city of Changzhou after months of lockdown in their hometowns. In-home cameras were necessary to effectively monitor their two-week stay-at-home orders, the police argued, because placing them outside people’s front door (as some apartment complexes in other Chinese cities have been doing) subjected them to vandalism (“China is installing surveillance cameras outside people’s front doors and sometimes inside their homes,” CNN, April 28, 2020).

Local authorities have long reached their tentacles into Chinese people’s private lives to an extent scarcely tolerated in the rest of the world. This has been due to a traditional absence of privacy rights in China, particularly since 1949. Few Chinese have ever experienced “privacy” as Westerners understand it. Most have only known narrow living quarters crammed with extended families, members of multiple generations occupying the same bedroom and even the same bed, packed student and worker dormitories, and other sardine-tin communal arrangements. In recent decades nuclear families have achieved greater privacy as housing capacity has expanded, but people are otherwise accustomed to routine intrusions into their personal lives by nosy neighbors, neighborhood committees, the police, etc. Yet though there is a relatively higher tolerance level for privacy invasion, in-home video surveillance is clearly overreach, to put it mildly. One resident interviewed in the CNN report was “furious.” The police had positioned the camera across his apartment toward his front door so that he was in its view while in his living room. It “had a huge impact on me psychologically,” he said. “I tried not to make phone calls, fearing the camera would record my conversations by any chance. I couldn’t stop worrying even when I went to sleep, after I closed the bedroom door.”

The Changzhou police were somewhat defensive and apologetic, promising the cameras would be removed as soon as the self-quarantine period was over. And it was only tried out in one Chinese city. But the trend is clear. If the technology is available, it will be used, and redundancy seems to be of little concern, even if there are more cost-effective (though less profitable) ways of ensuring people obey strict stay-at-home orders. China is inventive at this too. Arriving foreigners undergoing their fourteen-day isolation in Chinese hotels this February and March, for example, had a fresh piece of paper pasted over their door after each delivery of food, which would tear apart if they attempted to leave their room. In other countries, parolees and people under house arrest are less intrusively monitored with GPS ankle bracelets; the companies renting out these tracking devices do big business in the U.S. Video surveillance is, however, ready and waiting to be deployed in increasing contexts everywhere, in every country. China appears to have taken the lead. In a related and no less disturbing development, jaywalkers in Chinese cities are seeing themselves, along with their name and other identifying information, displayed in real time on giant LED screens at busy intersections thanks to face-recognition technology — and automatically fined.

You don’t need to be an expert on surveillance technology to see what’s happening. States are employing the latest tools at their disposal for compiling and combining databases of their population. From these an elaborate profile of any citizen can be instantly called up on a computer screen. In the U.S., the information used to identify you is your social security number, driver’s license or state ID, and your credit, tax, employment and medical histories. In addition to this is a wealth of information provided to innumerable databases fleshing out your profile in far richer detail than the FBI and NSA ever had the capability of: your personal interests voluntarily shared on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, WhatsApp and other social media, along with any morally dubious behavior in which you and your online contacts engage and assume no one outside of your circle could possibly be interested. Speaking of cellphones (and your entire conversation and text-messaging history), the GPS technology built in them can now pinpoint your real-time location with near perfect accuracy. In relatively democratic societies like the U.S., all these databases are not (yet) entirely centralized but scattered and incomplete, but they are bought and sold by private actors who may know more about you than the government.

China has all the above data about its citizens as well, but the information is far more centralized and orderly, with the national ID number (passport in the case of foreign residents and tourists) being the key indicator used to seamlessly call up individuals’ identity. But even there information compilation is still an imperfect science. This is one of the more interesting observations which Covid has brought to light over the past few months. Since the outbreak began, Chinese citizens and foreign residents must employ various authorizations to get around in daily life. Your apartment complex provides you with a pass card to present at manned gates upon returning home every day, where your temperature is taken; if guests are allowed, they must register and prove they have been in the city for at least fourteen days. In recent weeks as the outbreak is increasingly close to being stamped out across the country, restrictions are cautiously being relaxed, but there are still many shopping malls and plazas, stores and restaurants requiring you to scan one of a number of QR codes through downloaded apps linked to your identification, confirming on the spot that you’ve passed the two-week requirement. You’re then allowed to enter the establishment.

It may seem like clumsy overkill to have to prove your health status multiples times a day. Local governments seem to be competing to create the greatest daily hassle for everyone simply to demonstrate to the central authorities that they and they alone have the coronavirus under complete control. If people are calmly putting up with it, they recognize the importance of tracking down and screening out carriers of the virus. The larger issue is that the technology is still in its infancy. A few years down the road and it will all be much more powerful, effortless and invisible. When facial recognition reaches the apex of total accuracy, our exact whereabouts will be known twenty-four hours a day. There will be no need to screen us individually when moving about since we will all be tracked everywhere in real time by an omniscient central database. As noted, the capability of doing this is already more or less in place and is happening now, as exemplified by the instant shaming of jaywalkers at busy intersections. Why then can’t they apply the same to identity authorization when entering shopping malls so that people don’t have to fiddle with their devices? Because face recognition is still short of 100% accuracy, it doesn’t capture everyone at intersections but pulls out the few who have been identified with any certainty. It’s just a matter of time before it will be applied everywhere, in all contexts. Let’s consider where all this is heading, and why China is the dour model of the future.

The Communists mastered surveillance long before video technology. This surveillance has always been, at its core, sex surveillance. During the Cultural Revolution, many families were split apart and forced to stay in sex-segregated dormitories. I have lived and traveled around China since the 1990s, and have been able to observe how hotels act as sexual gatekeepers and morality enforcers of the state. It was in the 1990s that growing spending power allowed ordinary people greater mobility, and the private hotel industry developed in tandem with the domestic tourist industry. Only married couples were permitted to room together in hotels and had to present their marriage certificate upon checking in, a policy that remained in place until 2003. Ironically, the unmarried were allowed to room together in bathhouses, which had 24-hour private rooms (often with unlockable doors but police checks and busts were rare) and no registration requirement. This was freer even than in the U.S., where hotels require some identifying information such as your car’s license plate. The bathhouse industry flourished in the 1990s and they were the go-to places for illicit (extramarital) sex, until the authorities put an end to it around the time of the 2008 Olympics. All bathhouses thenceforth began to require identification upon entrance, though by that time unmarried couples could freely room together in both bathhouses and hotels as long as they registered with their IDs at reception.

The 2003 milestone securing for the Chinese the private space to cohabit with the opposite sex outside of marriage has in the past few years begun to wobble — due to the little Big Brother in everyone’s mobile phone. It’s not just GPS that’s to blame but GPS combined with the powerful WeChat app (like Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram and every other software you can think of rolled into one), which along with Alipay is also used for buying things. China has been cashless for a good four years now. Cash is still allowed, mainly to accommodate the tech-challenged elderly, but everyone else uses their cellphone for every monetary transaction from buying a car to booking a hotel room, to paying a prostitute or the migrant manning your favorite street-side snack stand. The trade-off is that this enormous convenience comes at the expense of the state’s knowledge of your every movement.

In that sweet decade of opportunity between 2003 and 2013 or so, before WeChat became so powerful and ubiquitous, committing adultery with someone at a hotel was still largely an anonymous act. The government could easily pay the hotel a visit and find you out if they had reason to, but mostly you could carry out trysts in reasonable confidence no one would ever know (to really be on the safe side, you could book the hotel yourself and let your partner sneak up to your room). In the years since, your phone calls or WeChat messages recording your conversations to arrange the tryst, GPS tracking your respective locations in the same hotel, the record of your WeChat payment used to book the room, and your respective ID numbers presented at reception, all converge to overdetermine the fact of your liaison with a person of the opposite sex. This fact is immediately available to the police, and the knowledge it’s available have given many pause before using a hotel to embark on an affair, or adultery as the case may be, at least people with reputations to lose (to those who would advise against cheating if you’re already involved in a committed relationship, let’s save the American-style moralizing for later).

Fortunately, unless you’re a well-placed Party member or of the business or entertainment elite, nothing is liable to happen. There are far too many people having sex for the authorities to bother about. The sharing of politically sensitive material can result in your WeChat account being shut down without warning or recourse, but explicit sexting in personal messages has remained free from interference (forwarding of someone’s nude images without their permission is another matter and can get you thrown in jail). The Chinese Government today is actually quite lenient, surprisingly lenient, about people’s sex lives. It’s simply no longer a priority, and light years away from the grim circumstances that obtained up through the 1970s, when people could be shot or imprisoned for extramarital sex, while university students could be expelled for sex as late as the 1990s.

What’s changed under Covid is an intensification of the present mechanisms so that we are now under a much more active and comprehensive surveillance regime, with little to no room for error. To consider hotels again, you are only allowed to book once you’ve electronically established your health credentials (likewise the person you’re staying with) and no one gets past the reception desk without doing this. Bribery has long been a last resort in China; no longer, at least as regards coronavirus authorizations. Who knows what kind of algorithms the health and local authorities are presently using to scrutinize hotel guest lists for anomalies. They are interested not in adulterous affairs but in people infected with the virus and all the people they had contact with. If someone in the same hotel is discovered to be Covid positive, you and your partner will certainly be approached during your stay or thereafter, and there will necessarily be awkward questions about your motives in being together. In a more unlikely case, your hotel could suddenly go under lockdown before you had a chance to escape, and all existing guests including both of you would be stuck there for at least two weeks. If you feel it’s no longer worth the hassle going through with a hotel tryst, you’re not any safer sneaking your lover into your apartment while your live-in is out. He or she will have to register for the visit upon arrival at your complex’s gate (where you are both captured on video), your cellphones’ GPS tracks you right into your home, and your respective marital status will also of course be indicated in the database.

Few Chinese, in fact, carry out trysts in their home. It’s a cultural phenomenon going way back to when homes were mere hovels and living spaces were too small, shabby and crowded to accommodate guests. Since the functional 1990s when home “décor” consisted of white walls, bare concrete floors and fluorescent lighting, interior design has grown by leaps and bounds and most people nowadays put some effort into making their domicile look nice. Still, house parties and even small dinner parties remain a novel concept (as perplexed foreigners discover when they’re rarely invited to people’s homes). People know how to party all right — in restaurants. Chinese restaurant culture is vast and awe-inspiring. Many restaurants of the fancier variety are huge, multistoried affairs, with plentiful private rooms of different sizes for hosting couples to large groups. In the West, we go to a nice restaurant, even the most intimate of establishments, for the social atmosphere. In China, people go to restaurants for the privacy they offer. Some restaurants are joined to karaoke spaces and saunas; there are luxury bathhouses with their own first-class restaurants. All manner of hostesses, masseuses, and sex workers can be arranged, if you know the workings of indoor Chinese nightlife.

I should note that at this point in mid-May 2020, restaurant culture across Mainland China has already fully returned to its pre-Covid state of business and vibrancy. One place you might assume would still not be allowed to operate, given the close physical contact involved, is the massage parlor. Probably no country has more per-capita massage workers than China. Massage venues, both the therapeutic and erotic varieties, have been fully operative for a good two months now (though face masks are required by both masseuse and customer). We are confronted with the paradox, then, that in this most intrusive of surveillance states, the opportunities for intimate and sexual contact thrive even in the post-Covid era.

Post-Covid-19 USA

Unlike China where the coronavirus curve was crushed months ago and life is already more or less back to normal, the U.S. is scarcely yet able to even envision the post-Covid era. There may be no post-Covid era, only perpetual outbreaks and a new permanent normal of social-distancing. Short of real catastrophe (war, famine, etc.), few things are as dreadful as a total, Wuhan-style lockdown, in which no one is allowed out of their house and no one is allowed in. Wuhan’s two-month lockdown was brutal but it did have a clear beginning and end — crashing down on people before they even knew what was in store for them and eventually easing in carefully orchestrated phases. There were adequate food supplies and deliveries and, as soon as the initial chaotic hospital situation stabilized, prompt medical care fully covered by the government. With Wuhan and Hubei Province sealed off and the virus contained, most Chinese cities were able to avoid home lockdowns altogether, though most businesses were closed. Even partial lockdowns, allowing people out only to shop for basics and perhaps walk their dog, are stressful enough, especially when they drag on for months with no end in sight. The Chinese put up with it because they’re used to being ordered around by the government. Americans, unaccustomed to having their lives interfered with, have never encountered the like. It has been an awful experience for many, with growing unrest, e.g., heavily armed protestors congregating on the Michigan capitol and threatening to assassinate the governor.

The nasty conundrum forced on us by the Covid pandemic is that the only way to effectively combat it is not medicine but surveillance. Only surveillance provides the knowledge of who is infected, where they are located in real time, and who they have been in contact with. This knowledge diminishes the medical burden, while its absence escalates the medical burden, since testing and contact tracing is scattershot and impotent. There has been much controversy in books and the media — well before Covid — over electronic surveillance and the resulting erosion of freedoms in democratic states. The hard truth is that electronic surveillance is the only weapon at our disposal for fighting disease outbreaks. China is not the only country to employ sophisticated tracking of its citizens. In the wake of Covid, most countries are ratcheting up their surveillance capabilities. We are also seeing hints of another dystopian-sci fi Rubicon we hope won’t be crossed, the involuntary implanting in people of microchips (“Benjamin Netanyahu suggests microchipping kids, slammed by experts,” Jerusalem Post, May 8, 2020).

South Korea, held up as a model of national medical response, is revealing problems of overreach, when the state of the art collides with traditional prejudices, namely against homosexuality. In a recent virus outbreak at a gay nightclub, hundreds who might have been exposed are reluctant to get tested for fear the medical authorities will inform their workplace and they’ll be fired. In other words, further success in containing the virus hinges on how willingly this putative democracy’s leadership can let go of its dearly held homophobia (“South Korea struggles to contain new outbreak amid anti-gay backlash,” The Guardian, May 11, 2020). Singapore has similar issues with its discriminatory treatment of its million-plus migrant workers from India and Bangladesh (“Tens of thousands of Singapore’s migrant workers are infected. The rest are stuck in their dorms as the country opens up,” CNN, May 14, 2020). On the other had, sex-positive social attitudes can be turned to advantage and people whose job involves extensive networking martialed to assist the medical authorities, as sex workers in Zambia are doing (“Coronavirus: Zambia sex workers praised for contact tracing,” BBC, May 10, 2020), but this takes a rare degree of imagination.

And then there is the dreadful situation in the U.S. (which I earlier laid out in my “Covid-19 and the disease of American exceptionalism“). It’s easy for nations that are successfully containing the virus through effective testing, contact tracing, and lockdown measures to lecture the US on what it’s doing wrong. But the American political system was no more structured to handle the Covid pandemic than it was the 1918 Spanish Flu. Four months into the present catastrophe, there are no signs that significant structural changes, or any changes, are in the works to prepare for the next pandemic. Excepting posturing Democratic presidential candidates no longer in the running, there has been zero talk of reforming US health care to implement even bare-bones national health coverage, beyond the miniscule gains under the Obama Administration, which could bring the country into the club of civilized nations. The government can’t even administer the paltry $1,200 stimulus checks properly, sending them to people who don’t qualify and outrageously denying them to those married to non-U.S. citizens, or feed the hungry (“As hunger spreads with pandemic, government takes timid steps,” New York Times, May 13, 2020). Though the Trump Administration’s incompetence has been breathtaking, and we’re eagerly waiting for the nightmare of his presidency to end, its confused and pitiable gesturing is symptomatic of a profounder problem: the inexorable inability of a cruel Victorian-style capitalist regime long run by cynical and blindered plutocrats entrenched in old-school imperialist ideology to deal with something beyond its comprehension — a pandemic.

The U.S. is bifurcating in two directions as it adapts to Covid, roughly corresponding to the political “red” (Republican) and “blue” (Democratic) states, but with a few key differences. Covid Reds oppose lockdowns but are not necessarily Trump supporters and count liberals and Democrats in their ranks who are not only chafing under lockdown but losing their livelihoods. Covid Blues support lockdowns but include many conservatives who understand the need for lockdowns. More than political differences, the overriding factor determining people’s attitudes is how much they’re suffering financially. You are more likely to support a lockdown if you can afford to — you still have your job and can work from home. We cannot simply blame people for defying medical reality. If you find the present sight of bars and restaurants packed with patrons disturbing or pathetic, they might beg to differ. They’re not just out for a good time but are trying to preserve the only reality they have ever known before it collapses around them. This means continuing to support local businesses they have been supporting their entire lives and which may be only days away from permanent shuttering. The patronizing of local business during this most trying of times could even be regarded as a well-meaning though misguided expression of Americans’ customary generosity in stepping in to help the community during disasters.

The crowds of mostly young Americans blithely swarming bars and beaches despite stark warnings are causing much consternation and outrage. But these nose-thumbing acts of freedom are conveying something of symbolic importance: they are a logical, appropriately sarcastic, middle-finger response by the hapless subjects of a failed state. Why try to protect themselves from the virus when the government is doing everything in its power to allow it to spread? Why should they have to take on the burden of protecting the country when everyone’s going to catch it? These people aren’t the complete idiots they’re being made out to be. They recognize what’s happening is a very bad flu season — well, ten times as bad that — and despite their youth and health some of them will die. But their chances of surviving after being infected are pretty good. They are simply carrying on as everyone will have to once the virus completes its trajectory through the rest of the population, and they’ll be the first to gain immunity.

We are hearing news of the devastating effects on mental health from stress and loneliness under lockdown, compounded by inadequate and unaffordable psychological services provided by the failed state (“Coronavirus pandemic prompts global mental health crisis as millions feel alone, anxious and depressed,” Democracy Now! May 14, 2020; the article is about the situation in the U.S., not the globe). Far down on the list of priorities is sexual loneliness (not once mentioned in the article). Being intimately bound up with loneliness, sexual loneliness is perhaps something many Americans — young and old alike — are in fact preoccupied with. You won’t find much in the way of advice, except of course to avoid sex altogether. What the conscientious, the Covid Blues, would say is this: the act of lovemaking turns you into a highly efficient disease vector (if not quite as bad as the act of singing, I should add: “Health authorities explain how choir practice caused the ‘superspread’ of 52 coronavirus cases in US town,” ABC, May 13, 2020). During AIDS this problem was solved with safe sex and condoms, but there is no safe sex under Covid. Dating and partying cannot be undertaken without aiding the enemy. Covid is changing America and you are never going to be able to party again. The only real way to contain the virus just happens to dovetail with — guess what? — good old “family values”: abstinence for teens and strict monogamy for adults. The new sexual normal means adapting to virtual relationships. Better get used to it.

And dating? Nothing could be more selfish, the Covid Blues would add, than the business of meeting people for the purpose of sex. But there’s a problem with dating, even leaving sex out of the equation. It introduces a new person, possibly an asymptomatic superspreader, into your circle. If you cannot prove you had a more legitimate reason for meeting this person, it can be assumed your intent was sexual, and therefore gratuitous and dangerous, as a result of which either one of you may have just started a new local outbreak. Simply going out and infecting, or being infected by, a person with the intent of potentially sleeping with them will make you an accessory to the crime of intentionally spreading disease.

Consider the sobering possibility that Covid could be declared a sexually transmitted disease. This is yet to be established by the medical community, but it’s coming (“A small study detects coronavirus in semen—but can you get it from sex?“, Health, May 8, 2020). If the virus was found in your semen, you could be accused of infecting someone with Covid through sex, without your being in the least aware of it. If this person later dies but before dying informs those tracing her contacts that the only person she had close contact with was you, you could be in serious trouble. There are laws against knowingly transmitting an STD. From a legal perspective, the possibility you intentionally sexually transmitted Covid to your partner will be considered. You will not be able to fall back on the excuse you were asymptomatic. Ignorance is not a defense. You could have gotten yourself tested beforehand but didn’t. You had no right to be out meeting and potentially infecting new people in the first place. Convicted coronavirus spreaders could even be ruled sex offenders (as deliberate HIV-spreaders are). If you think Covid has ruined your life, see my “American fascism: The sexual rage of the state” for a look at how life is ruined for registered sex offenders in the U.S., including those guilty of the most minor of offenses. There is presently no more sexually punitive country than the United States. From internet trolls to mainstream journalists, from politicians on the left and on the right, the voices of morality are constantly on the lookout for new definitions of sexual misconduct, and if they can find it in Covid-19, they will.

In China, the state takes the burden of worrying about who’s infecting whom off people. It tells everyone to wear a face mask, and they obey. It tells everyone it’s okay to remove their mask, and they take them off. If restaurants and hotels are allowed to reopen, people flock to them. If the virus is still lingering and some end up getting infected, they’ll shut the establishment down again, but no one’s to blame and no one’s conscience is bothered. In the U.S., by contrast, individuals are duty-bound not to cause others harm, even from something as impossible to control as the coronavirus. You must take responsibility for your actions. Of all the reasons for accidentally infecting someone, sex is the very worst, and there will be no forgiveness.

If you were to ask the younger generation of Covid Reds what they feel about the new sexual normal and how they are adapting to a foreseeable future without sex (since the medical consensus is that the virus may be with us for good), they would, again quite logically, assert that they aren’t planning on altering their freedom one iota. On the contrary, the danger of catching the virus from sex will make fucking intensely exciting. I understand this. Defiance naturally follows from an absence of moral exemplars. If we were living in a country that had been prepared for a pandemic and instituted immediate measures before the virus had a chance to spread (Vietnam, Taiwan and New Zealand are a few shining examples that “crushed the curve”), the hardships of living under lockdown would have a whole new meaning, one infused with national purpose. At the opposite extreme, the horrendous performance of the U.S. Government inspires nothing. Americans have nothing to fall back on in turn but themselves, their friends and their families. They are finding their own dignity under Covid on their own terms, whether this be at home or at the beach.

*     *     *

Related posts:

Covid-19 and the disease of American exceptionalism

American fascism: The sexual rage of the state

An American talisman

American massage

 

 

Covid-19 and the disease of American exceptionalism

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Confident nurses await patients at Yeungnam University Medical Center, Daegu, South Korea, March 3, 2020 (Reuters, photo by Kim Kyung-Hoon).

 

“Don’t imagine that these viruses have a deliberate strategy. They don’t come after us. We go to them.” — David Quammen, Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic

 

Hollywood got it wrong

Hollywood movies about disease outbreaks and pandemics tend to follow a predictable pattern. I refer to the more scientifically viable features — e.g. Outbreak (dir. Petersen, 1995) and Contagion (dir. Soderbergh, 2011) — as opposed to the fanciful zombie apocalypse genre, which will not concern us here. Soderbergh’s Contagion is universally regarded as the best, in the sense of being the most realistic. The director went to great length researching virus outbreak models and interviewing experts at the US Centers for Disease Control, for example. The film’s resulting fictional virus presents a plausible scenario: a recombinant bat-pig virus that originates in southern China and successfully jumps to humans, infecting tens of millions worldwide over a five-month period with a fatality rate of around 30% (comparable to the MERS virus), before a vaccine triumphantly arrives on the scene.

Whether your typical pandemic film ends happily or cataclysmically, the standard formula reduces everything to two variables: 1) the virus’s infectivity (its transmissibility and virulence), and 2) the availability or discovery of a cure. Everything else is posited as constant and fixed. The world’s medical infrastructures are all assumed to be facing the peril on a level playing field, the best scientific minds cooperating feverishly to beat back the scourge (no pun intended). It’s also assumed that the scientists working in the wealthiest and most economically advanced of countries, namely the U.S., are the best-positioned to lead this fight. Contagion is noteworthy, however, in admitting (if in passing) to a few other variables which might impact the proportion of survivors to fatalities, such as people’s socioeconomic status — the wealthy being more likely to receive treatment — and the extent of mutual cooperation among federal, state and municipal governments.

How wrong the paradigm is. On the contrary, the only real constant is the trajectory of the virus’s infectivity; everything else is a variable. What Covid-19 is laying bare throughout the world is that the major, decisive variable determining the proportion of survivors to victims is not the lethality of the virus but the quality and readiness of a country’s medical system. Now almost four months into the pandemic, the countries which have proven themselves to be the best-prepared are mostly neighbors of China: Vietnam (268 cases or a mere 0.00028% of the population as of April 18), Taiwan, South Korea, Laos, Myanmar, Mongolia, and after an initially disastrous start, China itself. In Europe, Italy and Spain have fared the worst, but all European countries are being pummeled and it’s taking time to “flatten the curve” and gain leverage over their exponential infection rates. And then there is the world’s outlier, the United States, its rate of infection totally out of control, with an estimated 20% of the population already infected, its vaunted medical system flopping flat on its face.

Misplaced conspiracies

As the U.S. public collectively confronts the coronavirus horror, two different reactions are predominating. On the one hand, we have those who grasp that we are in the midst of a crisis of humanity and must seize the moment. As local governments are rushing to acquire medical supplies and organize food donations, people at the grassroots are helping out families, neighbors and communities (physical and online) with whatever they can — money, hands-on help, moral support. On the other, we have those who consider it their duty to assign blame and voice revenge. The vindictive urge is somewhat understandable, given the shock and magnitude of the event, and given the culprit seems so obvious. But I wish to proceed with an open and investigative rather than a vengeful frame of mind. Let’s start with the timeline of events (drawn from a variety of news reports, most recently an Associated Press article of April 15):

November 17, 2019: First case of an untreatable pneumonia is reported in a hospital in Wuhan, China. Similar cases accumulate through December, the number infected possibly already by then in the thousands.
December 31: Chinese Government alerts the World Health Organization.
January 1, 2020: Wuhan doctor Li Wenliang is summoned by police for rumormongering after informing his graduate students of a SARS-like virus circulating the day before; he and other doctors are publicly reprimanded the next day (Dr. Li later dies of the virus).
January 5: Wuhan hospitals begin to fill with sick people.
January 12: Chinese Government publishes the virus’s genetic code.
January 13: First virus case is discovered outside the mainland, a Chinese woman from Wuhan in Bangkok, Thailand.
January 14: Chinese Government convenes a teleconference with Hubei provincial authorities, and hospitals nationwide begin screening patients.
January 15: Nationwide epidemic emergency response is put in place, though without publicization in the national media.
January 18: Wuhan goes ahead with several large pre-Spring Festival events, including a public potluck banquet to which 40,000 are invited.
January 20: Chinese Government publicly declares national emergency.
January 21: Human-to-human transmission of the virus is officially recognized.
January 23: Wuhan and Hubei Province are sealed off, though only flights and trains at first; people are allowed to escape by car over the next day; by this time some five million had left the city, many unknowingly already infected and spreading the virus around the country and abroad.
January 25: All Chinese cities are placed in lockdowns of varying severity.

China’s initial response has been lambasted in the Western media as a massive, coordinated coverup. We need to consider, however, what exactly is meant by “coverup.” If we mean a deliberate campaign to deny the existence of an outbreak, the Chinese Government indisputably covered up the SARS epidemic of 2002-3, until forced to come clean after months of denial when cases started multiplying in other countries. But the Covid-19 situation points rather to a different situation. The Chinese Government knew of the outbreak at some point in December, and they duly informed the WHO. This gave all countries knowledge of and precious warning to act on this information. The problem was nobody at the time had any idea of this particular virus’s infectivity. They naturally assumed it would be similar to the SARS virus, to which it was closely related. China had successfully stamped out the SARS virus and had no reason to believe they couldn’t stamp out this one; they just wanted a bit more time to ready the medical system before alerting the public. This was a major miscalculation, as asymptomatic carriers of the Covid-19 virus turned out to be highly infectious, while only symptomatic carriers of the SARS virus were infectious. Covid-19 was far stealthier than SARS, and this gave the virus a massive head start. On top of this, there was also the inevitable delay that any country’s bureaucracy would experience before acknowledging with certitude a new outbreak within its borders and moving into action; I wonder how quickly the U.S. Government would have handled the outbreak had the virus originated there.

In any case it was too late, and the virus was taking hold around the world. By January 31, outbreaks were already established in twenty-six countries. Whereas it’s possible the outbreak could have been contained or nipped in the bud had the Chinese Government acted more promptly and transparently, it’s by no means certain a pandemic could have been avoided (recall that in the film Contagion the epidemic quickly takes hold without any Chinese government coverup). This is because enough infected people may already have left the country, even before scientists realized a new virus was on the loose, to enable it to gain a foothold in one or more other countries. In this alternative scenario, we might have seen China stamp out the virus a month or two earlier, while it slowly but surely leaked out elsewhere on a pandemic trajectory, as the world watched in morbid fascination, paralyzed by the same inaction we have seen at present. China’s initial success would only have delayed the inexorable. (New research suggests the Covid-19 virus may have been circulating since September, with Guangdong rather than Hubei Province the likely epicenter).

At first the U.S. public (and government) viewed the affair with curious and complacent detachment, as if watching a riot of animals from the safety of a zoo’s plexiglass barrier, convinced the Chinese disease would remain confined to the filthy country where it had started, where people who eat bats, snakes, and other revolting creatures only had it coming to them. When the horror show started spreading from the confines of the mass media into real life, and onto American soil, the denial continued on full display, even among public authorities, who claimed to have the handful of domestic cases under control. As people started to get nervous, many also got angry — at the Chinese. Again, I should stress that I can appreciate this anger to an extent, especially as this isn’t the first time we’ve seen a Chinese Government coverup of a deadly virus (SARS in 2002–3). The urge to find a scapegoat is a natural reaction to an incoming disaster, one which threatens to upend life around the world and impact ordinary people’s livelihood — all apparently due to the nefarious workings of China’s authoritarian government.

Rumors soon circulated that the virus originated not from wild animals in a wet market but from a virology research center in Wuhan, and worse, that it was actually a biological warfare laboratory run by the Chinese military. Readily believed and widely shared on the internet, the rumor only served to intensify the anger. In turn, some Chinese officials began accusing the U.S. military itself of developing the virus and seeding it in China at a sports event in Wuhan last October by participating American soldiers.

We can dispense with these conspiracies at the outset; they are without basis or relevance. Neither China nor the U.S., the world’s two largest and highly entwined economies, would have anything to gain from planting a deadly virus on the other’s territory, even if they are presently engaged in a trade war (one they are working hard to resolve). The world’s powers do engage in biological warfare research, but this work is primarily defensive: studying existing viruses in order to develop vaccines or cures. No government in their right mind would resort to an offensive use of a pathogen without some equally drastic provocation, and even then it’s difficult to imagine any plausible scenario outside the logic of mutually assured destruction. Let’s say China modified the SARS virus to make it more transmissible and planted it in U.S. cities, knowing the U.S medical system is notoriously unprepared to deal with an epidemic. But what could the Chinese Government possibly gain from victory in a crippled or shattered world economy, even supposing they came out on top following the inevitable pandemic? Achieving world domination by means of spreading pathogens, though perhaps Hollywood movie material, is simply too farfetched to entertain in any serious discussion.

Whether the Covid-19 virus was manufactured or not, we cannot, of course, rule out the possibility that it escaped from the Wuhan virology institute (several outbreaks of existing animal viruses occurred in a high-security laboratory in Reston, Virginia in 1989–90). Yet I believe this too is unlikely. They would have acted much more promptly in containing it, having full knowledge of the accident from the outset. If the virus emerged out of the blue from a wet market, on the other hand, it would have gone undetected at first and taken longer for the authorities to figure out what was going on, as was indeed the case. At any event, scientists have lately demonstrated that the Covid-19 virus evolved through natural selection and could not have been manufactured in a laboratory (Nature Medicine, Mar. 17, 2020).

It is pointless to blame China for the coronavirus, because it’s part of a much larger, global problem, regarding which all governments share some of the blame. Scientists have been shouting for decades that the world is due for a pandemic. A novel virus can arise anywhere. It’s common knowledge animals harbor an unknown number of viruses capable of jumping to humans — “spillover” events — increasingly so as encroaching urbanization, forest clearing, and mechanized agriculture disturb the world’s ecosystems. Southern China is a notorious nexus for this phenomenon, with its gastronomical tradition of eating exotic animals, but it’s not the only place where new viruses emerge. The so-called Spanish Flu of 1918 originated in the U.S.; the Machupo virus of 1962 in Bolivia; the Marburg virus of 1967 in Germany; the Ebola virus of 1976 (harbored in bats) in central Africa; the Hanta virus of 1976 in South Korea (and later in South America); the Hendra virus of 1994 (harbored in bats) in Australia; Avian influenza virus of 1997 in Hong Kong (various bird flu strains have since been found in other countries including the U.S); the Nipah virus of 1998 in Malaysia; the SARS virus of 2002 in Guangdong Province, China; the Swine flu virus of 2009 in Mexico; MERS or “camel flu” of 2012 in Saudi Arabia, and so forth. Although the present outbreak began in Wuhan, scientists have been studying bat caves in Yunnan Province since 2005, which harbor a virus with a genome 96% similar to the Covid-19 virus, and these bats may turn out to be the ultimate source of the present virus. It’s conceivable it traveled from Yunnan to Hubei via one or more intermediate “amplifier” animal hosts (or directly via humans); the film Contagion shows how this can happen. You can read about the Yunnan bat caves in David Quammen’s article “We made the coronavirus epidemic” (New York Times, Jan. 28, 2020). While you’re at it, have a look at his book Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic (W. W. Norton & Co., 2012), which contains everything you need to know about where and why viruses jump from animals to humans.

Until we have evidence to the contrary, the biological explanation is sufficient; no other is needed. You don’t want to go down that road of blaming China or calling for punitive action or reparations (there have been veiled threats by U.S. politicians and at least one lawsuit against the Chinese Government), if the next pandemic emerges in your own country.

Disbelief and denial

Over the month of February, only weeks after the country went under lockdown, China appeared to get its outbreak under control. This was perhaps unfortunate for the rest of the world, as it led to complacency: if that overpopulated Third World country can succeed in bringing the virus to heal, we’ll easily be able to do the same with our superior medical systems. The first U.S. case, in Washington State, was confirmed on January 20. At this point knowledgeable people at the Centers for Disease Control knew an epidemic was virtually inevitable (they had warned Americans against travelling to China as early as January 6), yet the fact that the handful of the country’s cases stayed steady over the subsequent weeks only reinforced the complacency. A new influx of coronavirus patients arrived from infected cruise ships, but they were safely whisked away to hospitals. By late February, health experts already had enough evidence the virus was spreading widely in the U.S. In early March appeared, in Washington State and California, the first evidence of community transmission in people with no known contact with those previously infected. This meant that likely thousands were already infected, and the affected states should have gone under China-style lockdown at once. What proceeded was worse than a government coverup: inaction and denial.

The anger at China was compounded by disbelief as China got its numbers of infected down to zero and kept it there. Many Americans simply could not believe that the propaganda coming out of China was true; the virus was surely continuing to rage across China and the claims to the contrary were assumed to be lies. As late as the third week of March, when the numbers of infected were beginning to explode in the U.S., I saw Americans on Facebook and Twitter commenting how lucky they were not to be living in China. Even educated, politically aware people I’m acquainted with back home regarded the figures coming out of China with deep suspicion. It’s a classic textbook instance of denial: the initial reaction to a disturbing or overwhelming event which the mind at first refuses to process, until it’s subsequently forced to. As well as wish-fulfilment and projection: attributing to others what you are unable to accept at home; in this case the collective desire among Americans to see the pandemic continuing to rage on the other side of the world, where it belonged.

I live and work in China and have been in Beijing the entire time. When the city locked down on January 25, it was scary at first since nobody knew how widespread the virus was. It wasn’t a total, Wuhan-style quarantine. The subway remained open. We could come and go freely from our apartment complexes, though some residential compounds had stricter rules in place and only allowed people out once every day or two for essential shopping. Almost all shops and restaurants were shuttered (pharmacies, convenience stores and some supermarkets excepted). Some McDonalds and KFCs were still operating for takeout only. Interestingly, a handful of cafés and restaurant pubs popular with foreigners in the business district remained open. A Sina news agency app showed the number of known infected in each district of Beijing, updated daily. By early February, the city’s total surpassed 300 and hovered close to 400 over the next several weeks, levelling out as the newly infected gradually diminished to zero by February 25, exactly one month later. While the figures in Wuhan and Hubei Province continued to surge up toward 70,000, the rest of the country showed similar downward trends with Beijing (Zhejiang Province had a bit more trouble but finally got their outbreak under control). If you find it all a bit suspicious, the truth is that the Chinese Government acted just quickly and decisively enough in sealing off Hubei Province to keep things from getting out of hand in the rest of the country. The reason some cafés and restaurants could stay open and most of us allowed to come and go freely is that the virus had been under control in Beijing and other cities from the outset.

Perhaps you imagine those of us on the other side of the Great Firewall have all been duped by the Orwellian propaganda apparatus and the virus continues to rage across Chinese cities, and we’re blissfully unaware as the dead are secretly dispatched right in our midst in the late hours of the night. You’re welcome to entertain any fantasy you wish. If a giant coverup really were in place, however, it could not be maintained for long. There would be unmistakable signs and evidence of the virus all around. I have WeChat (the Chinese WhatsApp) contacts with several hundred Chinese and foreign friends and colleagues all over Beijing. Any rumors of infected people would course through the grapevine with lightening speed and we would hear of it. There would be ambulances rushing about. A single infected case would put an entire residential building or even the whole compound under stringent lockdown. Restaurants that had been open would all be shuttered. There are, of course, nonsymptomatic carriers who spread the virus without ever realizing they’re infected, and they are a real matter of concern, but the city’s lockdown has been in place for over two months; the vectors of transmission from such carriers would have been spotted and dealt with weeks ago. There is also nervousness about people who went back to their hometown for the Spring Festival and who have already begun returning to Beijing and possibly bringing the virus with them, but this too is unlikely, as everyone in China has been under lockdown the same extent of time. I don’t discount the possibility outbreaks may reoccur once Chinese cities let their guard down, but for now the country has everything under control.

Disaster unpreparedness

Despite China’s reprehensible start, it turned out to be among the best prepared, comparatively speaking. Its memory of SARS was a blueprint of what to do. As the infected were multiplying in Hubei, soldiers and medical personnel in the Chinese army were rushed to the province; hospital beds were initially overwhelmed, but repurposed amphitheaters and convention halls, and two hospitals built from scratch in ten days with a total capacity of 2,500 beds, soon absorbed the overflow of patients. They were able to accomplish all this with reasonable speed because they had experience doing it (a similar prefabricated hospital was erected in Beijing during the SARS epidemic).

South Korea is the other outstanding example of a country that was ready to take on the coronavirus. They were in some respects even better prepared than China, with twelve hospital beds per 1,000 people at the ready, versus China’s 4.3 and the U.S.’s 2.8. They have to be, facing a hostile, nuclear-armed enemy only thirty-five miles from their capital. Seoul is a large metropolis and the South Korean Government has had to plan for decades for any contingency, including nuclear and chemical warfare attacks. They initially bungled their response when superspreaders from a Christian sect were allowed to fan the virus across the city of Daegu after several mass religious events, and they have paid for it with 10,000 infected. But they quickly got things under control and flattened the curve, weeks before Italy has been able to, whose epidemic started around the same time.

Disaster preparedness comes down to more than marshalling factories to build ventilator machines and face masks quickly, but to the preexisting and ready availability of all the necessary medical resources so that they don’t have to be rush-made. The U.S medical system is reputed to have the finest institutions and physicians in the world (or at least some of the finest). But the best doctors and nurses are of no help if they themselves are sick and dying on the few ventilators available because of inadequate medical supplies, which is exactly what is presently unfolding in ill-prepared American hospitals. All countries are facing an initial deluge of patients, overwhelming the capacity of their hospital systems. Covid-19 is a report card revealing respective governments’ medical preparedness, and the grades received are mostly low. The U.S. medical infrastructure is a special case, however, flunking badly, outright delinquent, woefully worse prepared than any other country in the developed world.

We don’t yet have a clear picture of the fatality rate in the U.S. (which currently stands at 5.3% as of April 18), as the epidemic is in the early stages and many of the critically ill have not passed away. There are in fact two fatality rates: those under optimal medical circumstances and those not. South Korea was able to offer almost all of the afflicted immediate, first-class medical care, with adequate hospital beds and ventilators, and has thus kept the fatality rate to about 2%, as close to the ideal minimum as currently seems possible. Germany has also been able to keep its fatality rate to under 3%, with its excellent medical system. China’s fatality rate is 5.6% (it skewed higher due to the initial shortage of hospital care in Hubei). Italy’s fatality rate is the world’s highest, currently a frightening 13%, though this is partly because the Lombardy region where it first hit has an elderly demographic. We must be sceptical of these figures for the time being, with too many unknown factors, which time will eventually clarify; there are reports some countries may even be experiencing different strains of the virus, of different virulence. But at the moment it seems that anything over 1% reflects the degree of a country’s lack of medical preparedness.

It’s the duty of a nation’s leadership to protect the public. There are limits to what even the best-prepared government can do in the face of sudden disasters, whether natural (earthquakes, tsunamis) or manmade (invasions, economic collapse). When it comes to pandemics, we are at some advantage in that they don’t come crashing down all at once but build up slowly at first, giving us precious weeks or even months (if they start from afar) to track their course, monitor their infectivity and take preemptive action. The key thing to understand is it’s not just how quickly governments respond to an outbreak; it’s how well prepared they are before an outbreak occurs. Planning for pandemics is a matter national security, on the same level of importance as terrorist attacks and nuclear war. Nothing could be more foolhardy than doing nothing and then blaming the country where it started, as a way of deflecting responsibility from one’s own failed preparedness. The way cities, towns and villages in Medieval Europe learned about the bubonic plague — the fourteenth-century Black Death — was when rumor came round that a neighboring town had been stricken. By that time, of course, it was too late; the bacterium was already swirling through their own town. We have the advantage of instant global communication via the mass media and the internet, a helpful weapon, one which the U.S. Government declined to use.

The U.S. Government knew of the coronavirus outbreak at least as early as December 31, when the Chinese Government informed the WHO, but probably earlier than that, as the U.S. CDC and intelligence agencies such as the NSA, actively track disease outbreaks at the first sign of one as a vital matter of national security. The confounding question is why the U.S. Government did nothing the whole time, and continues to do virtually nothing. As I write this, with the number of infected at 710,021 (April 18), by far the highest in the world and with the world’s steepest trajectory, state governors are begging the White House for aid and not receiving it or are being outright refused, as was Michigan’s Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, for instance, merely because Trump doesn’t like her. I suggest the answer to this question has to do with the assumption held by all too many Americans that their country is somehow exceptional and immune to what happens in the rest of the world.

Institutionalized violence

Pandemics and other disasters bring out the best and the worst of society. So far, the ugliest reactions and incidents are being witnessed in the United States. I don’t merely refer to the dangerous clown in the White House, or to idiotic televangelists claiming that the virus is God’s revenge on LGBT people, or to reports that white supremacists are planning to (or may already be) employing aerosol weapons to disperse the virus in order to sow chaos and ultimately bring down the government. Among ordinary people too we are seeing the most barbaric behavior: the Caucasian father who spat in the face of the pharmacist’s aid who delivered medicine to his home because he was of Chinese ethnicity, the landlady who evicted a nurse living in her building for supposedly being a contagious threat, people spitting on food in supermarkets or attacking Asians on the street. Atrocious acts such as these lead one to worry that the average American’s moral character may really be of lower quality than people elsewhere. People are panic-buying guns, supposedly to protect themselves, though some may feel compelled to use them when their money runs out and local governments are unable to supply food.

Progressives would not say that Americans are necessarily inherently meaner (or intellectually challenged). Rather, they are victimized by the world’s most brutally refined form of capitalism, which they act out in turn in their personal lives in sublimated frustration and aggression. The U.S. medical system offers the starkest example of American-style institutionalized violence–the violence that is built into society as a permanent feature because everyone takes it for granted. In the arena of public health, it is an ideology which promotes and sustains such cultural assumptions, promoted by conservatives, as only successful people deserve health insurance and proper medical care; if you become ill it’s the result of some kind of lifestyle failure for which you only have yourself to blame. The financial violence of unaffordable care, the physical violence of lack of care, and the psychological violence of both are given free rein to wreak havoc, if enough people believe that they don’t deserve it. Enough people have indeed been taken in by this indoctrination — including the very people who most need governmental healthcare support — as to vote for a presidential candidate who promised to eliminate the only serious effort the country has seen to provide health insurance for everyone, President Obama’s Affordable Care Act of 2010.

The most astonishing thing about the U.S. medical system to people outside of it — the rest of the world — is the mind-boggling cost of treatment. Whereas the governments of almost every country (including China) are fully covering their coronavirus patients’ medical expenses, American hospitals, even in this national emergency, are charging patients at the usual rates, including testing for the virus. One Boston hospital billed a woman $35,000 for a couple ER visits for her coronavirus symptoms, only to be sent home with no more care. We will soon see news reports of the astronomical costs of ICU stays; the survivors may find the aftermath more depressing than being on a ventilator when they see their hospital bill. The lucky 40% of the population currently covered by insurance will be spared some of this financial burden, but many will still have to pay out thousands of dollars in deductibles and copays.

The brunt of the U.S. medical system’s violence is directed at the very people who have devoted their career to medical care: doctors, nurses and hospital staff. The wealthiest country in the world can’t afford to equip and safeguard its hospitals for major emergencies and disasters. Despite several months’ advance knowledge of the approaching pandemic, doctors and nurses are experiencing shortages of the most basic protective wear — face masks and hazmat suits, not to mention testing kits, medicines, beds and ventilators. This is turning hospitals into hazard zones. People who fear they may be infected must choose between riding it out at home and the certainty of becoming infected (and possibly bankrupt) if they set foot in a hospital.

The reason U.S. hospitals are being hit so hard by Covid-19 is precisely the illusion that they are the best. The true culprit, working hand in hand with capitalist malfeasance, is the belief so many have in American exceptionalism: the ethnocentric, solipsistic assumption that the USA is set apart from and above other countries with its sense of superiority, enshrined in the ridiculous old notion of “manifest destiny,” and given xenophobic life in Trump’s tired and embarrassing “America First” cliché. The criminal inaction of the U.S. Government — the absence of a coherent national response geared to protecting the public in a pandemic — follows directly from this delusion of specialness, and its corollary, the sneering presumption there is nothing we could possibly learn from any other country. I don’t entirely blame Trump for this. He’s been able to unleash his verbal diarrhea only because so many have long internalized the primitive “We’re Number One and fuck the rest of the world!” mindset. The rest of the world is now watching the USA fuck itself.

A silver lining

There is hope for two positive outcomes of the Covid-19 pandemic. First, the comprehensive failure of both the U.S. Government and its medical institutions to respond to the national emergency will force a crisis of confidence among the public, altering the national discourse toward articulating a new set of priorities more in line with the rest of the civilized world; or at least a significant shift in that direction: one of greater funding of healthcare and less of the military and the capitalist elite, and a more humble understanding of the nation’s place in the world. At the grassroots, the blind faith so many place in rightwing religious conservatism will be disturbed and upset, opening people’s eyes and transforming individuals’ awareness toward a more catholic (with a small “c”), humane apprehension of their society. I doubt you’ll see much change in the older generations who stubbornly cling to their spiritual pacifiers, but they will ultimately die off and be replaced by a more informed younger generation.

Second, the Covid-19 virus, though devastating, must be recognized in the larger scheme of things as a relatively benign virus. A 1% fatality rate (under ideal medical circumstances) is low by the standards of some other viruses. It could have been much worse. In other words, it’s not yet the Big One, say something on the scale of avian influenza with its 60% fatality rate (among people who have contracted it from birds), if it were to succeed in jumping to humans. If the world’s viruses had collective consciousness and could speak, they might be saying, “We know you’re not ready to deal with us. To play fair, we’ll toss you a softball for starters so you can familiarize yourselves with the game and be better prepared when we start throwing hardballs at you.” I can assure you that governments the world over will be much more vigilant about novel viruses after this dress rehearsal.

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Confident nurses await patients at Yeungnam University Medical Center, Daegu, South Korea, March 3, 2020 (Reuters, photo by Kim Kyung-Hoon).

Hollywood got it wrong

Hollywood movies about disease outbreaks and pandemics tend to follow a predictable pattern. I refer to the more realistic features — e.g. Outbreak (dir. Petersen, 1995) and Contagion (dir. Soderbergh, 2011) — as opposed to the more fanciful zombie apocalypse genre, which will not concern us here. Soderbergh’s Contagion is universally regarded as the best, in the sense of being the most realistic. The director went to great length researching virus outbreak models and interviewing experts, for example, at the US Centers for Disease Control. The film’s resulting fictional virus presents a plausible scenario: a recombinant bat-pig virus that originates in southern China and successfully jumps to humans, infecting tens of millions worldwide over a five-month period with a fatality rate of around 30% (comparable to the MERS virus), before a vaccine triumphantly arrives on the scene.

Whether your typical pandemic film ends happily or cataclysmically, the standard formula reduces everything to two variables: 1) the speed or infectivity of the virus (its transmission efficiency times its virulence or fatality rate), and 2) the speed with which a cure is found. Everything else is posited as constant and more or less fixed. The world’s medical infrastructures are all assumed to be facing the peril on a level playing field, the best scientific minds cooperating feverishly (no pun intended) to beat back the scourge. It’s also assumed that the scientists working in the wealthiest and most economically advanced of countries, namely the U.S., are the best-positioned to lead this fight. Contagion is noteworthy, however, in admitting (if in passing) to a few other significant variables which might impact the proportion of survivors to fatalities, such as people’s socioeconomic status — the wealthy being more likely to receive treatment — and the extent of mutual cooperation among federal, state and municipal governments.

How wrong the paradigm is. What Covid-19 is laying bare throughout the world is that the major, decisive variable determining the proportion of survivors to victims is not the lethality of the virus per se, but the quality and readiness of a country’s medical system. Now three months into the pandemic, the country which has established itself as the best-prepared to deal with the virus is South Korea, followed by China, and several other neighboring Asian countries or metropolises — Singapore, Hong Kong, Taiwan and Vietnam. The countries of East and Southeast Asia are as a whole faring much better than the West. Among European countries, Italy and Spain are faring the worst, followed by France and Germany, though I expect all these countries will soon succeed in “flattening the curve” and gaining leverage over their exponential infection rates. By contrast, the U.S. is on track to being the world’s outlier, its rate of infection totally out of control, its vaunted medical system flopping flat on its face.

Misplaced conspiracies

As the U.S. public collectively confronts the coronavirus horror, two different reactions are predominating. On the one hand, we have those who grasp that we are in the midst of a crisis of humanity and must seize the moment. There is a long tradition of people taking matters into their own hands at the grassroots level by helping out families, neighbors and communities (physical and online) wherever and with whatever they can — money, hands-on help, moral support. On the other, we have those who consider it their duty to assign blame and voice revenge. The vindictive urge is somewhat understandable, given the shock and magnitude of the event, and given the culprit is so obvious. But I wish to proceed with an open and investigative rather than a vengeful frame of mind. Let’s start with the timeline of events.

On November 17, 2019, the first case of an untreatable pneumonia was reported in a hospital in Wuhan, China. Similar cases accumulated through the end of the year, the number infected possibly already by then in the thousands. The real figures weren’t known at the time, but the Chinese Government knew enough that on December 31st they quietly alerted the World Health Organization to the existence of a new and virulent virus, only to issue a gag order on the Wuhan media a few days later (or the Wuhan Government did so independently of Beijing). On January 13, the first case was discovered outside the mainland, a Chinese woman who had traveled from Wuhan to Bangkok, Thailand. On January 17, the gag order on the Wuhan media was lifted, even as the city went ahead with several large pre-Spring Festival events, including a public potluck banquet the next day to which some 40,000 had been invited. Several Wuhan doctors who had alerted the public were punished. On January 21 it was confirmed in the Chinese state media that the virus was transmissible between humans. Two days later, Wuhan was sealed off, though only flights and trains at first; people were allowed to escape by car over the next day or two. By this time, word had gotten out and some five million had left the city, many unknowingly already infected and spreading the virus around the country and abroad (scientists had yet to learn how infectious carriers could be before showing symptoms). By January 25 all Chinese cities suddenly had lockdowns of varying severity in place.

Due to China’s initial bumbling response and coverup, it was too late, and the virus was taking hold around the world. Yet while it’s likely the outbreak on the mainland could have been contained or nipped in the bud had the Chinese Government acted promptly and transparently, it’s by no means certain a pandemic could have been avoided (recall that in the film Contagion the epidemic quickly takes hold without any Chinese government coverup). This is because enough infected people may already have left the country, even before scientists realized a new virus was on the loose, to enable it to gain a foothold in one or more other countries. In this alternative scenario, we might have seen China stamp out the virus a month or two earlier, while it slowly but surely leaked out elsewhere on a pandemic trajectory, as the world watched in morbid fascination, paralyzed by the same inaction we have seen at present. China’s initial success would only have delayed the inexorable.

In any case, by January 31 outbreaks were already established in twenty-six countries. At first the U.S. public (and government) viewed the affair with curious and complacent detachment, as if watching a riot of animals from the safety of a zoo’s plexiglass barrier, convinced the Chinese disease would remain confined to the filthy country where it had started, where people who eat bats, snakes, and other revolting creatures only had it coming to them. When the horror show started spreading from the confines of the mass media into real life, and onto American soil, the denial continued on full display, even among public authorities, who claimed to have the handful of domestic cases under control. As people started to get nervous, many also got angry — at the Chinese. Again, I should stress that I can appreciate this anger to an extent, especially as this isn’t the first time we’ve seen a Chinese Government coverup of a deadly virus (SARS in 2002-3). The urge to find a scapegoat is a natural reaction to an incoming disaster which threatens to upend life around the world and impact ordinary people’s livelihood — all apparently due to the nefarious workings of China’s authoritarian government.

Rumors soon circulated that the virus originated not from wild animals in a wet market but from a virology research center in Wuhan, and worse, that it was actually a biological warfare laboratory run by the Chinese military. Readily believed and widely shared on the internet, the rumor only served to intensify the anger. In turn, some Chinese officials began accusing the U.S. military itself of developing the virus and seeding it in China at a sports event in Wuhan last October by participating American soldiers.

We can dispense with these conspiracies at the outset; they are without basis or relevance. Neither China nor the U.S., the world’s two largest and highly entwined economies, would have anything to gain from planting a deadly virus on the other’s territory, even if they are presently engaged in a trade war (one they are working hard to resolve). The world’s powers do engage in biological warfare research, but this work is primarily defensive: studying existing viruses in order to develop vaccines or cures. No government in their right mind would resort to an offensive use of a pathogen without some equally drastic provocation, and even then it’s difficult to imagine any plausible scenario apart from the logic of mutually assured destruction. Let’s say China modified the SARS virus to make it more transmissible and planted it in U.S. cities, knowing the U.S medical system is notoriously unprepared to deal with an epidemic. But what could the Chinese Government possibly gain from victory in a crippled or shattered world economy, even supposing they came out on top following the inevitable pandemic?

Whether the Covid-19 virus was manufactured or not, we cannot, of course, rule out the possibility that it escaped from the Wuhan virology institute (several outbreaks of existing animal viruses occurred in a high-security laboratory in Reston, Virginia in 1989-90). Yet I believe this too is unlikely. They would have acted much more promptly in containing it, having full knowledge of the accident from the outset. If the virus emerged out of the blue from a wet market, on the other hand, it would have gone undetected at first and taken longer for the authorities to figure out what was going on, as was indeed the case. At any event, scientists have lately demonstrated that the Covid-19 virus evolved through natural selection and could not have been manufactured in a laboratory (Nature Medicine, Mar. 17, 2020).

It is pointless to blame China for the coronavirus, because it’s part of a much larger, global problem, regarding which all governments share some of the blame. Scientists have been shouting for decades that the world is due for a pandemic. A novel virus can arise anywhere. It’s common knowledge animals harbor an unknown number of viruses capable of jumping to humans — “spillover” events — increasingly so as encroaching urbanization and mechanized agriculture disturb the world’s ecosystems. Southern China is a notorious nexus for this phenomenon, with its gastronomical tradition of eating exotic animals, but it’s not the only place where new viruses emerge. The so-called Spanish Flu of 1918 originated in the U.S.; the Machupo virus of 1962 in Bolivia; the Marburg virus of 1967 in Germany; the Ebola virus of 1976 (harbored in bats) in central Africa; the Hanta virus of 1976 in South Korea (and later in South America); the Hendra virus of 1994 (harbored in bats) in Australia; Avian influenza virus of 1997 in Hong Kong (various bird flu strains have since been found in other countries including the U.S); the Nipah virus of 1998 in Malaysia; the SARS virus of 2002 in Guangdong Province, China; the Swine flu virus of 2009 in Mexico; MERS or “camel flu” of 2012 in Saudi Arabia, and so forth. Although the present outbreak began in Wuhan, scientists have been studying bat caves in Yunnan Province since 2005, which harbor a virus with a genome 96% similar to the Covid-19 virus, and these bats may turn out to be the ultimate source of the present virus. It’s conceivable it traveled from Yunnan to Hubei via one or more intermediate hosts (animals or humans); the film Contagion shows how this can happen. You can read about the Yunnan bat caves in David Quammen’s article “We made the coronavirus epidemic” (New York Times, Jan. 28, 2020). While you’re at it, have a look at his book Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic (W. W. Norton & Co., 2012), which contains everything you need to know about where and why viruses jump from animals to humans.

Until we have evidence to the contrary, the biological explanation is sufficient; no other is needed. You don’t want to go down that road of blaming China or calling for punitive action or reparations (there have been veiled threats by U.S. politicians and at least one lawsuit against the Chinese Government), if the next pandemic emerges in your own country.

Disbelief and denial

Over the month of February, only weeks after the country went under lockdown, China appeared to get its outbreak under control. This was perhaps unfortunate for the rest of the world, as it led to complacency: if that overpopulated Third World country can succeed in bringing the virus to heal, we’ll easily be able to do the same with our superior medical systems. The fact that the U.S. maintained only a handful of cases over this duration only reinforced the complacency. A new influx of coronavirus patients arrived from infected cruise ships, but they were safely whisked away to hospitals. Then appeared in early March, in Washington State and California, the first evidence of community transmission in people with no known contact with those previously infected. This meant that likely thousands were already infected, and the affected states should have gone under China-style lockdown at once. What proceeded was worse than a government coverup: inaction and denial.

The anger at China was compounded by disbelief as China got its numbers of infected down to zero and kept it there. Many Americans simply could not believe that the propaganda coming out of China was true; the virus was surely continuing to rage across China and the claims to the contrary were assumed to be lies. As late as the third week of March, when the numbers of infected were beginning to explode in the U.S., I saw Americans on Facebook and Twitter commenting how lucky they were not to be living in China. Even educated, politically aware people I’m acquainted with back home regarded the figures coming out of China with deep suspicion. It’s a classic textbook instance of denial: the initial reaction to a disturbing or overwhelming event which the mind at first refuses to process, until it’s subsequently forced to. As well as wish-fulfilment and projection: attributing to others what you are unable to accept at home; in this case the collective desire among Americans to see the pandemic continuing to rage on the other side of the world, where it belonged.

I live and work in China and have been in Beijing the entire time. When the city entered lockdown on January 25, it was scary at first since nobody knew how widespread the virus was. It wasn’t a total, Wuhan-style lockdown. The subway remained open. We could come and go freely from our apartment complexes, though some residential compounds had stricter rules in place and only allowed people out once every day or two for essential shopping. Almost all shops and restaurants were shuttered (pharmacies, convenience stores and some supermarkets excepted). Some McDonalds and KFCs were still operating for takeout only. Interestingly, a handful of cafés and restaurant pubs popular with foreigners in the business district remained open. A Sina news agency app showed the number of known infected in each district of Beijing, updated daily. By early February, the city’s total surpassed 300 and hovered close to 400 over the next several weeks, levelling out as the newly infected gradually diminished to zero by February 25, exactly one month later. While the figures in Wuhan and Hubei Province continued to surge up toward 70,000, the rest of the country showed similar downward trends with Beijing (Zhejiang Province had a bit more trouble but finally got their outbreak under control). If you find it all a bit suspicious, the truth is that the Chinese Government acted just quickly and decisively enough in sealing off Hubei Province to keep things from getting out of hand in the rest of the country. The reason some cafés and restaurants could stay open and most of us allowed to come and go freely is that the virus had been under control in Beijing and other cities from the outset.

Perhaps you imagine those of us on the other side of the Great Firewall have all been duped by the Orwellian propaganda apparatus and the virus continues to rage across Chinese cities, and we’re blissfully unaware as the dead are secretly dispatched in the late hours of the night. You’re welcome to entertain any fantasy you wish. If a giant coverup really were in place, however, it could not be maintained for long. There would be unmistakable signs and evidence of the virus all around. I have WeChat (the Chinese WhatsApp) contacts with several hundred Chinese and foreign friends and colleagues all over Beijing. Any rumors of infected people would course through the grapevine with lightening speed and we would hear of it. There would be ambulances rushing about. A single infected case would put an entire residential building or even the whole compound under stringent lockdown. There are, of course, nonsymptomatic carriers who spread the virus without ever realizing they’re infected, and they are a real matter of concern, but the city’s lockdown has been in place for over two months; the vectors of transmission from such carriers would have been spotted and dealt with weeks ago. There is also nervousness about people who went back to their hometown for the Spring Festival and who have already begun returning to Beijing and possibly bringing the virus with them, but this too is unlikely, as everyone in China has been under lockdown the same extent of time. I don’t discount the possibility outbreaks may reoccur once Chinese cities let their guard down, but for now the country has everything under control.

Disaster preparedness

It’s the duty of a nation’s leadership to protect its public. There are limits to what even the best-prepared government can do in the face of sudden disasters, whether natural (earthquakes, tsunamis) or manmade (invasions, economic collapse). When it comes to pandemics, we are at some advantage in that they don’t come crashing down all at once but build up slowly at first, giving us precious weeks or even months (if they start from afar) to track their course, monitor their infectivity and take preemptive action. The key thing to understand is it’s not just how quickly governments respond to an outbreak; it’s how well prepared they are before an outbreak occurs. Despite China’s bungled start, it turned out to be among the best prepared, comparatively speaking. Its memory of SARS was a blueprint of what to do. As the infected were multiplying in Hubei, soldiers and medical personnel in the Chinese army were rushed to the province; hospital beds were initially overwhelmed, but repurposed amphitheaters and convention halls, and two hospitals built from scratch in ten days with a total capacity of 2,500 beds, soon absorbed the overflow of patients. They were able to accomplish all this with reasonable speed because they had experience doing it (a similar prefabricated hospital was erected in Beijing during the SARS epidemic).

South Korea is the other outstanding example of a country that was ready to take on the coronavirus. They were in some respects even better prepared than China, with twelve hospital beds per 1,000 people at the ready, versus China’s 4.3 and the U.S.’s 2.8. They have to be, facing a hostile, nuclear-armed enemy only thirty-five miles from their capital. Seoul is a large metropolis and the South Korean Government has had to plan for decades for any contingency, including nuclear and chemical warfare attacks. They initially bungled their response when super-spreaders from a Christian sect were allowed to fan the virus across the city of Daegu after several mass religious events, and they have paid for it with 10,000 infected. But they quickly got things under control and flattened the curve, weeks before Italy has been able to, whose epidemic started around the same time.

Disaster preparedness comes down to more than marshalling factories to build ventilator machines and face masks quickly, but to the preexisting and ready availability of all the necessary medical resources so that they don’t have to be rush-made. The U.S medical system is reputed to have the finest institutions and physicians in the world (or at least some of the finest). But the best doctors and nurses are of no help if they themselves are sick and dying on the few ventilators available because of inadequate medical supplies, which is exactly what is presently unfolding in ill-prepared American hospitals. All countries are facing an initial deluge of patients, overwhelming the capacity of their hospital systems. Covid-19 is a report card revealing respective governments’ medical preparedness, and the grades received are mostly low. The U.S. medical infrastructure is a special case, however, flunking badly, outright delinquent, woefully worse prepared than any other country in the developed world.

We don’t yet have a clear picture of the fatality rate in the U.S. (which currently stands at 2.3%), as the epidemic is in the early stages and many of the critically ill have not passed away. There are in fact two fatality rates: those under optimal medical circumstances and those not. South Korea was able to offer almost all of the afflicted immediate, first-class medical care, with adequate hospital beds and ventilators, and has thus kept the fatality rate to under 1%, as close to the ideal minimum as currently seems possible. Germany has also been able to keep its fatality rate to under 1%, with its excellent medical system. China’s fatality rate is in the 3-4% range (it skewed higher due to the initial shortage of hospital care in Hubei). Italy’s fatality rate is among the world’s highest, currently a frightening 7-9%, though this is partly because the Lombardy region where it first hit has an elderly demographic. We must be sceptical of these figures for the time being, with too many unknown factors, which time will eventually clarify; there are reports some countries may even be experiencing different strains of the virus, of different virulence. But at the moment it seems that anything over 1% reflects the degree of a country’s lack of medical preparedness.

The U.S. Government knew of the coronavirus outbreak at least as early as December 1, when the Chinese Government informed the WHO, but probably earlier than that, as the U.S. CDC and intelligence agencies such as the NSA, actively track disease outbreaks at the first sign of one as a vital matter of national security. The confounding question is why the U.S. Government did nothing the whole time, and continues to do virtually nothing. As I write this, three months into the pandemic, with the number of infected at 142,082 (as of March 29), the highest in the world and on the world’s steepest trajectory, state governors are begging the White House for aid and not receiving it or are being outright refused, as was Michigan’s Gretchen Whitmer, for instance, merely because Trump doesn’t like her. I suggest the answer to this question has to do with the assumption held by all too many Americans that their country is somehow exceptional and immune to what happens in the rest of the world.

Institutionalized violence

Pandemics and other disasters bring out the best and the worst of society. So far, the ugliest reactions and incidents are being witnessed in the United States. I don’t merely refer to the dangerous clown in the White House, or to idiotic televangelists claiming their flock is immune and that the virus is God’s revenge on LGBT people, or to reports that white supremacists are planning to (or may already be) employing aerosol weapons to disperse the virus in order to sow chaos and ultimately bring down the government. Among ordinary people too we are seeing the most barbaric behavior: the Caucasian father who spat in the face of the pharmacist’s aid who delivered medicine to his home because he was of Chinese ethnicity, the landlady who evicted a nurse living in her building for supposedly being a contagious threat, people spitting on food in supermarkets or attacking Asians on the street. Atrocious acts such as these lead one to fear that the average American’s character may really be of lower quality than people elsewhere. Progressives would not say that Americans are necessarily inherently meaner or intellectually challenged. Rather, they are victimized by the world’s most brutally refined form of capitalism, which they act out in turn in their personal lives in sublimated frustration and aggression.

The starkest evidence of this is the institutionalized violence of the U.S. medical system. What this refers to is an ideology which promotes and sustains cultural assumptions around public health, beginning with the idea propagated by conservatives that only successful people deserve health insurance and proper medical care; if you become ill it’s the result of some kind of lifestyle failure for which you only have yourself to blame. Enough people have been taken in by this indoctrination — including the very people who most need governmental healthcare support — as to vote for a presidential candidate who promised to eliminate the only serious effort the country has seen to provide health insurance for everyone, President Obama’s Affordable Care Act of 2010.

The most astonishing thing about the U.S. medical system, apart from the government’s perennial refusal to address these problems, is the mind-boggling cost of healthcare. Whereas the governments of almost every country in the world (including China) are fully covering their coronavirus patients’ medical expenses, American hospitals, even in this national emergency, are charging patients at the usual rates, including testing for the virus. One Boston hospital billed a woman $35,000 for a couple ER visits for her coronovirus symptoms, only to be sent home with no more care. We will soon see news reports of the astronomical costs of ICU stays; the survivors may find the aftermath more depressing than being on a ventilator when they see their hospital bill. The lucky 40% of the population currently covered by insurance will be spared some of this financial burden, but many will still have to pay out thousands of dollars in deductibles and copays.

The brunt of the U.S. medical system’s violence is directed at the very people who have devoted their career to medical care: doctors, nurses and hospital staff. The wealthiest country in the world can’t afford to equip and safeguard its hospitals for major emergencies and disasters. Despite several months’ advance knowledge of the approaching pandemic, doctors and nurses who are experiencing shortages of the most basic protective wear — face masks and hazmat suits, not to mention testing kits, medicines, beds and ventilators. This is turning hospitals into hazard zones. People who fear they may be infected must choose between riding it out at home and the certainty of becoming infected (and possibly bankrupt) if they set foot in a hospital.

The reason U.S. hospitals are being hit so hard by Covid-19 is precisely the illusion that they are the best. The true culprit, working hand in hand with capitalist malfeasance, is the belief so many have in American exceptionalism: the ethnocentric, solipsistic assumption that the USA is set apart from and above other countries with its ridiculous sense of superiority, enshrined in the obnoxious, imperialistic notion of “manifest destiny,” and given zenophobic life in Trump’s stale and embarrassing “America First” cliché. The criminal inaction of the U.S. Government — the absence of a coherent national response geared to protecting the public in a pandemic — follows directly from this delusion of specialness, and its corollary, the sneering presumption there is nothing we could possibly learn from any other country. I don’t entirely blame Trump for this. He’s been able to unleash his verbal diarrhea only because so many have long internalized the primitive “We’re Number One and fuck the rest of the world!” mindset. The rest of the world is now watching the USA fuck itself.

A silver lining

There is real hope that we will see two positive outcomes of the Covid-19 pandemic. First, the comprehensive failure of both the U.S. Government and its medical institutions to respond to the national emergency will force a crisis of confidence among the public, altering the national discourse toward articulating a new set of priorities more in line with the rest of the civilized world; or at least a significant shift in that direction, one of greater funding of healthcare and less of the military and the capitalist elite, and a more humble understanding of the nation’s place in the world. At the grassroots, the blind faith so many place in rightwing religious conservatism will be disturbed and upset, opening people’s eyes and transforming individuals’ awareness toward a more catholic (small “c”), humane apprehension of their society. I doubt you’ll see much change in the older generations who stubbornly cling to their spiritual pacifiers, but they will ultimately die off and be replaced by a more informed younger generation.

Second, the Covid-19 virus, though devastating, must be recognized in the larger scheme of things as a relatively benign virus. A 1% fatality rate (under ideal medical circumstances) is low by the standards of some other viruses. It could have been much worse. In other words, it’s not yet the Big One, say something on the scale of avian influenza with its 60% fatality rate (among people who have contracted it from birds), if it were to succeed in jumping to humans. If the world’s viruses had collective consciousness and could speak, they might be saying, “We know you’re not ready to deal with us. To play fair, we’ll toss you a softball for starters so you can familiarize yourselves with the game and be better prepared when we start throwing hardballs at you.” I can assure you that governments the world over will be much more vigilant about novel viruses after this dress rehearsal.

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Confucius and Opium: China Book Reviews

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Have foreigners shaped China’s history to a greater extent than has previously been acknowledged, reaching back possibly millennia? Was Confucius’ most famous book, the Analects, inspired by entheogenic medicines imported from abroad, possession of which in the 1930s brought one before the firing squad in the name of Confucius?

In these book review essays by Isham Cook, foreign devils, old China Hands, eccentric expatriates, and a few Chinese tell an offbeat history of China’s last two centuries, with a backward glance at ancient China as told by Western mummies.

“Confucius and Opium contains surprises sure to both delight and annoy any potential reader….Cook’s audacity is shaming.”—John Grant Ross, author of Formosan Odyssey

“The sniffy China-watcher clique back west resent Isham Cook for having the effrontery to pull at the threads of their narratives of what China should be to the world. Confucius and Opium will only deepen that resentment.”—Tom Carter, author of An American Bum in China

CONTENTS

Preface:         Under Covid-19 Lockdown (book only)

Chapter 1      Confucius and opium

Chapter 2     Living the Taiping

Chapter 3     Out of the squalor and into the light: When the Shanghai wall came down

Chapter 4     Chungking: China’s heart of darkness

Chapter 5     Midnight in Peking and true crime fiction

Chapter 6     The expat and the prostitute: Four classic novels, 1956–1962

Chapter 7     Updating the great Chinese socialist realist novel

Chapter 8     The ventriloquist’s dilemma: Asexual Anglo travelogues of China

Chapter 9     The literature of paralysis: The China PC scene and the expat mag crowd

Chapter 10   The adorable expatriate eccentric

Chapter 11    Writing China in English: Recent novels

Afterword by Tom Carter (book only)

 

Now available on Amazon:

Confucius and Opium: China Book Reviews

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Confucius and Opium: China Book Reviews

 

[image error]Have foreigners shaped China’s history to a greater extent than has previously been acknowledged, reaching back possibly millennia? Was Confucius’ most famous book, the Analects, inspired by entheogenic medicines imported from abroad, possession of which in the 1930s brought one before the firing squad in the name of Confucius?

In these book review essays by Isham Cook, foreign devils, old China Hands, eccentric expatriates, and a few Chinese tell an offbeat history of China’s last two centuries, with a backward glance at ancient China as told by Western mummies.

Reviews:

“An offbeat, erudite work of China-centered literary criticism….adeptly drawing out common themes or compelling threads that hint at larger trends in Chinese history.”—Kirkus Reviews

“Confucius and Opium contains surprises sure to both delight and annoy any potential reader….Cook’s audacity is shaming.”—John Grant Ross, author of Formosan Odyssey

“The sniffy China-watcher clique back west resent Isham Cook for having the effrontery to pull at the threads of their narratives of what China should be to the world. Confucius and Opium will only deepen that resentment.”—Tom Carter, author of An American Bum in China

“Cook takes up the side of social life that is usually omitted from the history books, what are now unconventional points of view such as sex life, prostitution and drugs, and shows why they are quite reasonable.”—Colin Mackerras, author of Western Perspectives on the People’s Republic of China

“Isham Cook’s erudite, snarky, and very funny meander through books by and about Western expatriates in China serves up culture clashes that rarely see print.”—Hill Gates, author of China’s Motor: A Thousand Years of Petty Capitalism.

“Candid, edgy, fearless, and unsparing, Isham Cook writes as though with a sword in this oddly titled compendium of book reviews. Books and China are clearly life passions for him—Cook is embedded in both—making him ideally placed to comment on other writers grappling to understand and provide insight into the country, its culture, and its people.”—Graeme Sheppard, author of A Death in Peking

“Confucius and Opium serves as a useful resource for those who wish to read more distinctive accounts of a country that these days feels like it’s been written about to death.”—Quincy Carroll, author of Up to the Mountains and Down to the Countryside

“Confucius and Opium‘s mildly dark, humorous and rebellious tone (a style I am particularly fond of) really sets Cook apart from the usual onslaught of popular books for the Western market by Chinese authors.”—Ivy Ngeow, author of Overboard

“Confucius and Opium is an unmitigated delight…[It] reads like a better, more interesting version of [Jonathan Spence’s] The Chan’s Great Continent and leaves the reader eager to follow the trail of references that garnish every review.”—Arthur Meursault, author of Party Members

“The book slapped me awake and made me wonder about fresh ways to observe and write about a culture as intriguing, complex and so radically different from our own as China.”—David Leffman, author of The Mercenary Mandarin

Goodreads customer reviews:

“Starting with a discussion of politics and their effect on Covid-19, the War on Drugs, moral conduct, and sex work, the author moves on to a gripping run through of past and present fiction and nonfiction with the necessary geography, history, and cultural nuances for understanding why some works are worth the reader’s time and some should be kicked under the rug.”

“A very intelligent and detailed book about the history of medicines among other things. A little opinion bent but a worthy read.”

Amazon customer reviews:

“A groundbreaking and clever concept that I don’t believe has ever been done before in literature, and it works quite well as an edifying yet entertaining read that will appeal to both seasoned Sinologists and the uninitiated.”

“Current, lavishly documented and free as free a book written and published in China by a foreigner based in China can be, Confucius and Opium — a title that alludes to the most enlightened (morality, virtues, education and culture) as well as to the darkest (crime, prostitution, prejudice and censorship) of China — is a book whose friction causes discomfort to many, but it is also a honest and very enjoyable book, like every other Cook’s work.”

“The American writer Isham Cook is a dangerous eccentric because he might very well be telling us the truth — or at least trying to. An open minded reader, who doesn’t mind having their leg pulled a bit, will find the erudite Confucius and Opium a rewarding read.”

 

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Preface:         Under Covid-19 Lockdown (book only)

Chapter 1      Confucius and opium

Chapter 2     Living the Taiping

Chapter 3     Out of the squalor and into the light: When the Shanghai wall came down

Chapter 4     Chungking: China’s heart of darkness

Chapter 5     Midnight in Peking and true crime fiction

Chapter 6     The expat and the prostitute: Four classic novels, 1956–1962

Chapter 7     Updating the great Chinese socialist realist novel

Chapter 8     The ventriloquist’s dilemma: Asexual Anglo travelogues of China

Chapter 9     The literature of paralysis: The China PC scene and the expat mag crowd

Chapter 10   The adorable expatriate eccentric

Chapter 11    Writing China in English: Recent novels

Afterword by Tom Carter (book only)

 

Now available on Amazon and Smashwords:

Confucius and Opium: China Book Reviews

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Writing China in English: Recent novels

[image error]If there was ever a story with an extreme cultural divide to navigate, it’s A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers by Xiaolu Guo (Anchor, 2008). A young woman from rural China is plopped down in London for a year on a study visa with little English ability or understanding of Western culture. Soon an Englishman she meets in a cinema seduces her and she moves in with him. He’s not your typical British chap (if there is such a thing) but an unpindownable bisexual eccentric and failed sculptor with leftist anti-establishment leanings and a Luddite distaste for the trappings of modern society. He’s also twenty years older than her but handsome and fit enough that she falls for him — her first significant relationship with a man. However, his aloofness and scorn for traditional monogamous relationships perplexes and tortures her, and she only makes things worse by smothering him with her love and attention. He avoids her and disappears for days at a time, leaving her abandoned and distraught in his flat. Then, he rather sadistically sends her off on a trip to the Continent alone for several months, for the purpose of cultivating her own sense of independence. Reluctant at first, she discovers she is able to extract much enjoyment out of her picaresque adventures, including spontaneous sex with strangers. These chapters become a turning point and centerpiece of this Bildungsroman novel, where naive country girl emerges as liberated female.

The book’s masterstroke is its odd, captivating style. Guo made the risky but astute decision not to attempt a flawless performance in English but to exploit her inevitably imperfect control of the language as a vehicle for depicting her personal transformation. The early chapters employ a delightfully entertaining broken English fashioned out of Chinese grammar: “I standing in most longly and slowly queue with all aliens waiting for visa checking. I feel little criminal but I doing nothing wrong so far.” Or, “Even when I see a beggar sleeping in a sleep bag I am scared. Eyes wide open in darkness staring at me like angry cat. What he doing here? I am taught everybody in West has social security and medical insurance, so, why he needs begging?” By the later chapters, her English has improved considerably, and her expanding vocabulary reveals the correspondence between linguistic and real-world knowledge: the almost claustrophobic relationship between language and awareness, the recognition, captured in the book’s title, that words are as important as money, food and shelter for surviving in an unfamiliar society.

The strength of the book — its effective fusing of linguistic texture and real-world experience — is also its weakness. Just as the narrator is stuck in the narrow world of her little red Concise-Chinese English Dictionary (I carried around the very same dictionary in my early years in China) without which the world around her would remain incomprehensible, she is also stuck in the fraught space between her marital expectations with this enigmatic man and his refusal to rescue her with a marriage visa and a happy ending. Many details of the narrative are all too true to life, and I assume the novel is autobiographical. This is where Guo falters, as it’s never clear where fiction and artistic objectivity fall off into personal grievance. We never learn the man’s name; he is referred to throughout in the second person as “You.” I’m not sure what the author intended by this device, but to me it lends the book the quality of a long, desperate love letter, as if it had been written not for a wider audience but him alone. The funny early chapters give way in the end to a humorless despair after the author’s visa application is rejected and she is forced to return to China. Her evident failure to comprehend the significance of the previous year and achieve some kind of psychological closure leaves us hanging as well.

[image error]The lengthy back-cover blurb of Xu Xi’s That Man in our Lives (C&R Press, 2016) closes with a big mouthful: “Originally inspired by John Adams’ [1987 opera] Nixon in China, a large cast of characters traverse the globe in search of…missing protagonist [“Gordie” Ashberry], a Gatsby-ish figure with Chinese characteristics. That Man in Our Lives is Xu’s metafictional answer to the late 18th century Chinese classic novel, Cao Xueqin’s Dreams of Red Chambers.” Now, no Great American Novel can approach the kind of importance Dreams of Red Chambers has for China. The comparison to that novel alone, ten times its size and with its own cast of 400 characters, is daring enough, though with over forty characters spread between the U.S. and Hong Kong and a time frame going back half a century, Xu’s effort intends at least to be proportionately ambitious. The opening sentence certainly lives up to the term “metafictional”: “Let’s say it’s the 21st century (2005 or maybe 2006) and we’re partaking of tea and sympathy when Bino says I’m in love with Gordie. What Bino Realuyo actually says to me is this: girl, you’re too much in love with Gordie.” The ambiguities are relentlessly worked. We never meet Bino, and though our first-person narrator claims to have had a relationship Gordie, she provides few hints about either the relationship or herself, apart from being a Hong Konger and Cantonese speaker (we do by the end have a strong suspicion who she might be). Gordon Marc Ashberry has a number of assets — exceedingly handsome, charming and cultured (fluent in Chinese and jazz), on top of which he happens to be a billionaire. His flaws only seem to heighten his appeal. Never having had to work in his life, he mismanages his sole business venture and is swindled of many millions. In the late 1990s he suddenly decides to give away all forty-three million of his remaining wealth to charity, and grows enigmatically distant toward everyone close to him. And then just as suddenly, in 2003 he stages his own disappearance. As if in imitation of his bizarre act, the elusive unnamed narrator removes herself from most of the heavily layered narrative as well, leaving a (possibly unreliable) third-person narrator, with the aid of diary entries and manuscript fragments, to unravel the complex tangle of relationships with all the other American and Chinese women bedded by “that man.”

That Man in Our Lives exemplifies, almost to the point of parody, the postmodernist literary novel. Some may find it unreadable or pretentious and hurl it against the wall. I found it stylish and thoroughly engaging, but it’s the type of book that needs a second read to fit the pieces of the puzzle together. I may give it a third read, though with a spreadsheet to work out the exact sequence of events. As with many an experimental novel, the narrative does not proceed in chronological order. That in itself is not necessarily a problem. There is a long pedigree of storytelling in nonlinear mode, going back to the in medias res structure of Homer’s Odyssey. A more relevant example of the “onion” style of narrative, which peels off layer by disturbing layer, spiraling inward to a traumatic core, or primal scene, is Ford Madox Ford’s masterpiece The Good Soldier (John Lane, 1915). In the deceptively bland opening of that novel, the American narrator and his wife become acquainted with a blue-blooded English family, the Ashburnhams, on holiday in their luxury resort on the Continent. Nothing could seem more banal than these two perfectly unruffled couples as they wile away the hours. But the surface of things is only a protective shell the narrator adopts in retrospect, as he works out the most graceful means of unfolding the shocking events succeeding upon their deepening relationship with the Ashburnhams. Here the nonlinear narrative strategy operates through a calculated, sustained and ultimately highly dramatic series of shocks. Xu’s novel unfolds in a somewhat analogous manner, working backwards bit by bit and lobbing perfectly timed grenades of revelation. And finally the irreducible kernel of mystery: what motivates the sad loner’s supremely narcissistic act of disappearance after such a supremely altruistic act of charity? More to the point, what motivates the obsession of so many of the characters, male and female alike, for the man himself? It’s never answered, but there are enough scattered clues to provide ripe material for interpretation, which I’ll leave to the reader.

The resemblance of the protagonists’ surnames in the respective novels, Ashberry and Ashburnham, may not be wholly coincidental; if the homage is conscious, I wonder if Xu intended to publish her novel exactly 100 years after Ford’s, and only a delay caused it to come out a year too late. On the other hand, there is some inkling (in the Acknowledgements page) her novel is based on “research” and therefore on real people, partially fictionalized or not; the verso page lacks the standard disclaimer denying any existing relationship between the characters and actually living persons or events. More intriguingly, Xu’s appears to be part of a much larger project, a series of novels, of which That Man is the fifth, with overlapping characters and an autobiographical underpinning. Her Chinese Walls (Typhoon Media, 1994) recounts American GIs trolling prostitutes in 1960s Hong Kong, where Xu grew up. Hong Kong Rose (Typhoon Media, 1997) tells the story of Rose Kho, who leaves Hong Kong for New York in 1987 and becomes involved with a man named Gordie; the same Rose Kho and father Jimmy Kho have minor roles to play in That Man. In The Unwalled City (Typhoon Media, 2001), a cast of local women and New York expats, including one named Gail Szeto, navigate interracial relationships in 1997 Hong Kong, the year of the turnover to Chinese control. Habit of a Foreign Sky (Typhoon Media, 2014) picks up where The Unwalled City leaves off, with Gail Szeto’s subsequent involvement in a web of relationships in New York, Hong Kong and Shanghai. In That Man in Our Lives, Gail Szeto is none other than Gordon Ashberry’s bastard “half sister,” from an encounter he had with a Chinese prostitute. If these five interconnected novels can thus be conceived of as part of a larger story, it is one indeed taking on the sweep of Cao Xueqin’s Dreams of Red Chambers. Xu is after all working on the largest of canvasses, that of East-West cross-cultural relationships, or in the contemporary literary cant, discourses of global “hybridity.” But I will refrain from assessing the artistic caliber of her entire project, at least until I have read all five novels.

[image error]Harvey Thomlinson, translator of Murong Xuecun’s Leave Me Alone: A Novel of Chengdu (Make-Do, 2017), gives us a very different sort of experimental novel with The Strike (Lucid Play, 2018). In Cubist painting and sculpture, an object is splayed on the canvas or in three dimensions as if jumbled up or turned inside out. The intention behind this is not only to present the object from multiple perspectives simultaneously, as when we see a woman’s face on the side of her head in a Picasso painting, but also to display the idea of the object, how it appears at once in the mind’s eye, inclusive of both its physical properties and the associations and emotions attached to it. Since the thought of an apple, for example, includes the sensation of eating it, a Cubist sculpture of an apple may present it as partially chewed or torn apart to represent this (Picasso did sculpt such an apple). Thomlinson boldly attempts to do with language what the Cubists do with images and things. Where the Cubists fracture the laws of perspective, he fractures the rules of grammar, collapsing or mashing together descriptions and impressions so that they appear in the mind’s eye as fused concepts.

One technique he employs to this end is to merge two clauses so that the complement of the first (the woman Meizhu) becomes the subject of the second:

She was Meizhu had been seething mad inside ever since catching Fat Pang with those young women he kept bragging about helping the strikers.

Or take the following sentence:

Slowly screaming wheels they climbed the sky stretched for miles across the afternoon full of small thickets and hills.

This is otherwise known as a run-on sentence — when one independent clause joins another without punctuation — and this type of grammatical error, which has long bedeviled freshmen composition students (along with the old comma splice), Thomlinson intentionally exploits at great length for the curious effects it produces. In this case, the mind wants to read “the sky” as the object of “they climbed,” until it’s forced to read “the sky” as the subject of “stretched for miles.” Almost every sentence in the novel uses run-ons to violate accepted grammar (could it be underhanded revenge for years of misery as a writing teacher?). Thomlinson even has a term for it: “existential syntax,” counterposed to “conventional syntax which shapes the way we perceive reality by encoding conceptual relations, particularly temporal relations, or causality” (“Author Interview,” The Strike). It is undoubtedly an intriguing technique. Similarly, we assume the prepositional phrase of the following sentence modifies the first clause, to produce the surrealistic image of Little Xu herself hanging from the ceiling by elastic bands while calling on her cellphone, when it turns out to modify the second clause:

After finishing Little Xu used a cheap cellphone bound by elastic bands to call from the ceiling hung balloons.

Or an intervening prepositional phrase floats ambiguously between two independent clauses:

She wasn’t dead but had married a deer farmer in the windswept five color valleys his wife rubbed his arm.

Here we’re not sure whether to read “the windswept five color valleys” as the place where “she” was married or where his wife rubbed her husband’s arm. Likewise ambiguous is when an adverbial clause intervenes between two clauses, as in the following example:

Two young cops half carried and half dragged him up the dark stairwell because the lights were broken strings of garlic bulbs hung on each landing.

When reading to the end of the sentence, we momentarily process it to mean “strings of garlic bulbs hung on each landing” because “the lights were broken” (“bulbs” of course suggesting lightbulbs), until it’s clear he was dragged “up the dark stairwell because the lights were broken.” As virtually every sentence in The Strike is altered in this fashion, the effect is quite dramatic, even drastic. Some readers will be put off immediately and not make it past the first page. With a bit of patience, you get used to the style and discover it’s not all that hard to read. The cumulative impact is of a collection or pile of shards, the way you might see yourself in a shattered mirror. Here content follows form: the story is about a city-wide strike in a bleak, economically depressed city in China’s northeast, a strike which is smashed by the authorities. The fragmented experience of reading The Strike aptly corresponds to the experience of life under a strike in a society that brutally suppresses any attempt by workers to protest or revolt.

As with Xu Xi’s That Man in Our Lives, Thomlinson’s novel repays a second reading. Unfortunately, however, the book is hampered by a serious pitfall. Take for example the following excerpt (from the paperback edition; the Kindle edition has the same issues):

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The narrative mostly proceeds in normal paragraphs. In some sections, like the above, the paragraphs are fractured with no apparent logic or pattern, so that each sentence, even bare clauses, appear on separate lines. This creates the same effect as when one accidentally hits the return key, unintentionally starting a new line, and fails to correct it. Why does the first sentence above wrap around to the next line, while the others don’t? There is already a powerful impression of disjuncture in Thomlinson’s use of fractured grammar, but this sort of fractured formatting only confuses things, as we’re not sure if it’s there by design or not. What severely taxes the patience of the reader is not the aforementioned, carefully calibrated run-on technique. Rather, it’s the effect of so much apparently haphazard or faulty formatting. It comes down to a matter of etiquette: if you dare to tinker with conventional grammar, it’s all the more important your formatting is perfectly neat and tidy, to keep the focus exclusively on the matter at hand — the grammatical style. Accordingly, I recommend Thomlinson come out with a revised and corrected edition, if he wants to salvage his otherwise solidly original literary statement.

[image error]Lots of people aren’t going to like the next book under our consideration, but isn’t due to experimental pyrotechnics. Arthur Meursault’s Party Members (Camphor Press, 2016) has the sort of straightforward linear narrative that appeals to readers of all stripes, except Chinese customs officials who will find reasons on every page to blacklist the book; patriots who don’t tolerate anything that puts their country in a bad light; cynics who freely disparage their own country but can’t stomach a single criticism by a foreigner; the humorless; sinophiles grateful for the privilege of being allowed into China; the Pollyannas who run the expat magazines and assume the burden of preventing China at all costs from losing face.

Meursault has done what everyone up till now has carefully avoided doing. He has gathered up all the worst aspects of Chinese society (a long list) and out of the trash heap assembled an inexorable plot and absorbing narrative. Some may ask why anyone would go through the trouble of needlessly hurting the Chinese people’s feelings. The answer is simple. When everyone tacitly agrees not to write a certain book, that is precisely the book that needs to be written. Somebody would have written this book sooner or later. Meursault got his foot in the door first. I have to say he’s done a pretty good job at it too, but we’re not talking gentle satire here. After a relatively benign comic start, things quickly descend into the most uncomfortable, brutal reading experience, even for the jaded. And that’s the whole point. China isn’t an easy place for a lot of people, including the Chinese themselves.

The art of satire exaggerates some aspect of reality to bring out a social truth. The more politically repressive a regime and the less freedom of speech, the more satire must distance itself from the recognizable present and veil itself in allegory. From 1949 until the 1980s Chinese authors could not publish satire in any form, unless as deadpan socialist realism (already unwittingly satirical), in such 1950s communist novels as Qu Bo’s Tracks in the Snowy Forest (林海雪原), Yang Mo’s The Song of Youth (青春之歌), and Luo Guangbin and Yang Yiyan’s Red Crag (红岩), novels which themselves were subsequently banned during the Cultural Revolution (see my Updating the great Chinese socialist realist novel). But things have always been on shaky ground in the more relaxed decades since, and even the absurdist dystopia of Wang Shuo’s Please Don’t Call Me Human (1989), for example (one of China’s best-known contemporary satirists), got itself banned.

As a foreigner writing in English and publishing outside the Chinese Mainland, Meursault is under no such constraints. Making his job even easier, Chinese society requires no exaggeration or hyperbole to play up the humor; the prosaic reality itself offers ample material for the satirist. He also racked up many years of experience living and working in China and knows his subject matter (as a resident myself of the country for twenty-five years, I can verify the accuracy of his portrayal). The setting of Party Members is the fictional city of Huaishi, but it could be any one of thousands of indistinguishable Chinese cities:

A grey mess of squalid narrow roadways and imposing broad expressways crammed with traffic at all hours. Tower after tower of morbid office blocks and apartment compounds repeated endlessly to the city’s outskirts. If there was little history, there was even less greenery. A few dead trees lined the roads. Billboards of photographed flowers were nailed to fences in an attempt to brighten up the surroundings, but the effect was diminished by the huge propaganda slogans…proclaiming that Huaishi was “THE PARIS OF ASIA”…lying in the middle of the city like a congealed fishhead in a bowl of grey noodles, was People’s Square.

We are not meant to like the hero of the story, Yang Wei (whose name, 阳痿, means “impotent”), a lowly faceless bureaucrat in a menial job with the city government. Some things are so ugly they have a certain beauty and fascination to them, and that’s where the humor lies. The Chinese do things in their daily life that the rest of the world doesn’t. All the author has to do is describe them. The rudeness of strangers, the fake friendliness of those who want something out of you, the toadying and money-grubbing, the class contempt for rural migrants, the obsession with iPhones and luxury handbags and black Audis (Yang Wei masturbates inside one in a showroom before buying it) to the exclusion of anything else in life, the squalor and the spit, are all wrought into a sharply focused technicolor mosaic, systematically paraded before the reader. Visitors to China who have witnessed the disaster zone known as a public toilet are in for a delight, as they follow a drunken Yang Wei into a restaurant’s men’s room and watch his contribution to this peculiarly Chinese form of performance art. The scene is worth the price of the book alone, but since I want the author to reap some earnings from his effort I won’t divulge any details.

Soon the rollicking comedy takes a darker and more disturbing turn. Yang Wei’s member begins talking to him and starts instructing him on how to really be a dick: the only way to get ahead in China. Over the course of the rest of the narrative he undergoes a part Dorian Gray, part Kafka’s Metamorphosis-style transformation — the book’s depraved but brilliant conceit — which again I don’t wish to divulge here and spoil for the reader. But along the way you can expect many horrendous scenes, such as a repulsive and quite explicit three-way sex or rape scene (it’s not clear which, but we can’t help averting our gaze) involving our hero, a prostitute, and a bucket of KFC. Yes, the chicken meat is engaged with sexually. Meursault has a great deal of fun with the notorious irony that the comfort food of choice for a great many Chinese, for all their disparagement of Western food, is none other than KFC.

On a more mundane level, the reader will notice throughout the novel an utter lack of kindness and friendliness shown by the characters toward one another. It is an unfortunate truth which those who have experienced even just a brief sojourn in the country will appreciate. Of course, there are nice people in China; I wouldn’t have survived here so many years myself if it wasn’t for the real friendships I have made among locals. The social truth which is being underscored, however, is well known and derives from a nasty combination of two traditions: first, the timeworn tendency among the Chinese to look out only for their own family and regard strangers with apathy and suspicion. Second, the general hostility of the Communist Party toward anyone not among their own (and toward their own as well), a bilious mindset that infects everything and everyone and trickles down to individual behavior in ways people are scarcely aware of who don’t know anything else. At the same time, it must be admitted that positive strides have been made over the past couple decades as more and more Chinese travel aboard and encounter for the first time simple, spontaneous friendly interactions and customer service. But there is still a long way to go (oddly, non-Communist Hong Kong often displays the same rudeness, but not Taiwan or Singapore).

Many predictably will protest that Meursault’s is a grossly one-sided affair. To be sure, one could turn things around and concoct an equally convincing positive account of China, full of uplifting scenes and touching, memorable characters. Even novelists depicting China’s political repression seek to counter the struggle or tragedy with sympathetic protagonists engaged in heroic actions and stoic determination against the forces of evil or disaster. This is to miss the point: it is exactly what almost every novelist on China, Chinese and foreign, already does. Meursault counts Bret Easton Ellis and Chuck Palahniuk among his literary influences. We wouldn’t want to condemn those two important and popular novelists merely because they explore the dark side of contemporary American society.

When China learns to take it on the chin and lose face again and again and again; in other words, when China mellows out, as it must at some point in the future if it doesn’t want to explode, it will be able to take critiques of its society in stride and laugh them off like oil off a Peking duck’s back. I salute this debut novel by Arthur Meursault which is guaranteed to earn him more enemies, Chinese and foreign, than friends. But to me there is no more admirable way of knowing who your true friends are than by declaring forthrightly where you stand.

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Of related interest by Isham Cook:

The adorable expat eccentric

Chungking: China’s heart of darkness

The literature of paralysis: The China PC scene and the expat mag crowd

The ventriloquist’s dilemma: Asexual Anglo travelogues of China

[image error]Forthcoming by Isham Cook (March 2020):

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