You Know Urine China When...

25 August 2005 (Lijiang, China -- reconnected to internet today)

Riding a train for two days across the breadth of southern China is something that few westerners have the opportunity to experience and I could post flowery prose about the miles of rich green rice paddies, glimpses of golden grain drying on cottage roofs in mountain villages and vignettes of daily life captured through dirty train windows. But what I’d like to focus on is urine, because it captured a lot of our energy during the course of the 44 hours we spent on Train number K79 from Shanghai to Kunming.

Train toilets in China are not unique (to China) in the sense that they are of the “squat” variety which means that instead of having an elevated porcelain toilet bowl like we’re used to in the West, there is a stainless steel hole, roughly the shape of a keyhole (but slightly larger), mounted in the floor into which one eliminates waste with better or worse accuracy depending on experience, age and prostate fitness. In fixed locations it is unclear where the waste goes when it leaves the toilet, but on trains it goes directly onto the tracks. Out of some ironic sense of sanitation, the bathrooms are locked shut at train stations to reduce the concentration of waste on the ground where there is a relatively high concentration of people. Sometimes you sit at train stations for a half hour or so loading and unloading passengers and inevitably during this time Bei needs to go badly, but that’s another story.

Imagine then, this keyhole in the floor of a very small room equipped with a tiny sink (water source to aid in flushing if one has the energy). The object for a man is to stand roughly in front of the hole while the train lurches and rocks along and direct urine into the tube that delivers it unto the tracks. For women the challenge (and I’m thankful to be male) is to squat over the hole while holding onto a handle attached to the wall about 2 feet off the floor. The result of all of this is that more or less 75-80% of all of the urine produced on the train goes out onto the tracks where it belongs and the remaining 20-25% goes onto the floor around the hole so that it can be collected on the bottoms of your shoes and then tracked down the hallway back to your compartment.

The next relevant information is that rather than designing the train hallway with an easily cleanable hard surface floor, the relatively plush soft sleeper cars are outfitted with nicely carpeted hallways which are impossible to clean any operational way. With toilets situated at either end of the approximately 60 foot long cars, the urine concentration in the carpet fits an inverted normal curve with the highest concentration at the ends of the cars and the lowest (but not inconsiderable) concentration in the middle. Our cabin thankfully was near the middle, but that was little comfort as Bei and her 7-year old her train friend, Luo Hao, rushed manically from one end of the car to the other for 8 to 10 hours each day, collecting urine on their often bare feet like bumblebees collecting nectar, and then rushing into our cabin to deposit it, as if to feed us, the queen bees, a special diet of ammonia.

For the first 24 hours we struggled hard—“BEI. Shoes!”—but eventually realized that struggle is useless and grudgingly allowed our circumstances to wash over us like a shower. Then, resigned, we turned our energy back to watching the blur of the green rice and mountain villages of southern China roll by, wishing that the sun didn’t have to go down so that we could see it all in the light.

Here's the toilet -- a bird's eye view.



Here's the carpeting. I can't believe it's still blue.



Here are a couple of shots of the urine vectors--Bei and Luo Hao, her best boyfriend on the train. Note the location of their feet in the second shot. That's my bed.





Here are the tracks. That's where some of the urine ends up.