In 2006 I chuckled at a colorful BBC headline: Beijing clamps down on spitting. Fat chance of that, I thought.
Not everyone spat. Most of my students considered it gross, embarrassing. Still, the habit was pervasive enough that it was wise to watch your footsteps. The problem wasn’t just saliva: on city sidewalks I saw adults finger-clamp one nostril, then expel the contents of the other. (It took a particular stance, shoes rearward, neck craned forward, in order not to soil one’s apparel.) I was even present when a fellow teacher was doused (in the coat, thankfully, not the face) by a man aiming negligently out the window of a corner-turning taxi.
Why such public spitting? I wanted some cultural-psychological explanation. Maybe Daoism regarded congestion as an impurity that reduced one’s chi, so it was important to eliminate quickly, regardless of wherever one may be.
That was bunk, of course — I completely made it up. They just spat.
Then there were split pants. Instead of diapers, toddlers wore pants cut from crotch to rear so that a mere stretch of the legs would bare their tenderest flesh to the world. I was fortunate never to have witnessed this feature’s eliminatory use.
Most discomforting for me were the spit trays on cafeteria and restaurant tables. The Chinese tended to serve meats in a “chainsaw chicken” manner, using vertical cleaver cuts to transform animals into little geometrical cubes. The resulting cross-sections, though biologically fascinating, made for less effective consumption when dining without fork or knife.
Hence the spit tray. Insert meat cube into mouth, grind, separate savory parts from indigestible, swallow former, deposit latter via gravity into tray. If no tray was present, either your plate or a bare section of table sufficed.
March 17, 2008 at 11:55 am
BBC: Beijing clamps down on spitting
Rupert Wingfield-Hayes, 1 Mar 06