Travels with Myself and Another: A Memoir

by Martha Gellhorn

Local customs charmed him, for instance ear-cleaning. Salesmen with trays of thin sticks, topped by tiny coloured pom-poms, roamed the streets; these sticks were ear cleaners. Customers would pause, in the middle of those bustling crowds, to prod away at their ears with the detached expression, U.C. said, of people peeing in a swimming pool.

From agonizing over the lot of my Chinese fellow men, I fell into a state of hysterical disgust with hardly a pause. “Why do they all have to spit so much?” I cried. “You can’t put your foot down without stepping on a big slimy glob! And everything stinks of sweat and good old night-soil!” The answer of course could be that spitting was due to endemic tuberculosis, and as for the stink, I had seen where and how the people lived. I knew I was being contemptible.