Spitting Chinese
Singapore has an indigenous snake called the spitting cobra. I have yet to see one outside the zoo. But it also hosts a much more common species, the Spitting Chinese. These are lamentably abundant.
In the periodic TV announcements urging Singaporeans to be civil, government spokespeople sometimes inveigh against spitting in public. I’m with them! For a place that makes such a great effort at public cleanliness, order and beauty, Singapore has a lot of people who hawk heartily, dredging up phlegm from untold depths, nooks and crannies, and then spew it – onto the sidewalk, in the pool gutters (ew!), in sinks and toilets. I know that countrified Americans also do this, too, but it’s one of those marks of uncouthness that you’re supposed to suppress when you move to the big city. So maybe a lot of people in Singapore have just moved here from the Asian hinterlands? It seems to me that most of the spitters I see are Chinese, but I’m open to correction. Is China known for the amount of phlegm spewed in public?
When I went to the Peranakan museum the other day I learned that among the very wealthy Chinese-Indian-Malay families that used to live here (and in Malacca and Penang) part of the elaborate wedding celebration was the presentation of the young couple with new furniture – which often included spittoons, to receive the end product of chewing paan. And I know that chewing and spewing betel nuts is an old tradition in Taiwan. But that’s a bit different from what I see happening here, which involves no vegetable matter at all.
The contrast between the stringent cleanliness of public facilities and the sheers ickiness of people’s personal habits came to a head for me a few weeks ago. It was in one of the Five-Star Happy Toilets, in fact, where I was washing my hands, and I was concerned to hear nearby an irruption of rhythmic grinding noises – not the sort of thing you usually hear in the bathroom. Was someone drilling in the wall? Were they testing out a lawnmower or chainsaw in the ladies’ room? When I tracked down the sounds I found them emanating from a small older woman clearing her sinuses into a sink. She had a few shopping bags near her, so I guess she had just been overwhelmed at the checkout counter with the need to evacuate.
Today’s Straits Times newspaper carries a snippet from Agence France Press that in Beijing spitting is down since the Olympics. Before the Olympics 2.4 % of Beijingers surveyed said that they spit when and where they felt like it. In the more recent survey, after considerable government campaigns to make Beijingers stop spitting and cutting in line, a mere .74 percent claim to be free-spirited spewers. This looks like the March of Progress.