I’VE HEARD that one of the things that really shock foreigners, especially Westerners, visiting China for the first time is the Chinese Toilet. To be very specific about it — the Chinese Toilet Seat.
I’ve heard the same from several Filipino friends and acquaintances who have been to Chinese Cities.
I’ve been to China (i.e. Hongkong and Shenzhen) for the very first time just in February 2009 and I finally saw with my own two eyes what a Chinese toilet seat looks like. Now I understand what the fuss is all about.
It is not so much the fact that the Chinese still use “squat-style” toilet seats, but that these are still ubiquitous even in highly cosmopolitan cities like Shenzhen and, yes, even Hongkong.
Yes even in Hongkong which the classy Britons have supposedly transformed into a truly English city before they returned it to the Chinese after a hundred years.
Whereas in Hongkong most comfort rooms typically have both the Western toilet seats and the Chinese toilet seats, presumably to address the needs of both the “Mainland China” Chinese population and the rest of the Hongkong dwellers and visitors, in Shenzhen, one of the biggest, most progressive and most modern cities in Mainland China, you will hardly find any Western-style toilet seats.
Personally, I am not at all bothered by these squat style toilet seats. At least the ones I’ve seen in Hongkong and Shenzhen already have the same water-sealing mechanism found in the Western-style toilet seats we’ve all been used to. I’ve heard that in some†minor Chinese cities the toilet seat (if you can really call it that) is nothing more than a hole on the floor and.
It would be hypocritical for Filipinos to say that the Chinese toilet seat is something that we are completely unfamiliar with. In most rural areas in the Philippines, especially in really poor ones, you will still find “makeshift” toilets where the “seat” is basically still the “squat” type. You may think it ludicrous that these makeshift toilets exist even in our cities but I can wager my own comfortable and Western-style toilet seat that they do.
I must admit though that when I first saw the Chinese toilet seats in some comfort rooms in Hongkong, and then virtually exclusively in Shenzhen (yes, even in hotels, newly-built office skyscrapers, and classy restaurants), I was still taken aback somewhat.
