On the toilet habits of Mainland Chinese

In almost all public toilets I’ve seen (including the ones at the office), a waste bin is provided in each cubicle. At first, they seemed like innocent rubbish bins. However, I later realised they were much more sinister than rubbish bins- people throw used toilet paper into those bins.

Yes, the people over here do not drop soiled toilet paper into the toilet bowl; they throw them into a bin on the side. As expected, not all the paper in the bin are the colour of fresh snow- some have visible traces of… colour.


***

A Ferrari approached, young lady at the wheel. The V8 engine’s flat-plane crankshaft layout and the under-muffled exhaust system combined to produce an awe-inspiring and annoyingly loud wail.

It was bright red, the standard colour that Ferrari uses for marketing - a colour named Rossa Corsa (racing red in Italian).

As the car streaked past at a sedate 60 km/h, people turned to look at it. Its low profile, the threatening wail, and above all, the eye-catching red, drew attention to car like matter to a black hole.


***

A few days ago at the office washroom, a flash of red drew my attention. Using pure undiluted logic, I deduced that the red was not a Ferrari- the washroom was too small to hold a Ferrari.

Instead, the red came from a blood-soaked piece of toilet paper in the bin.

Despite menstrual discharge being a perfectly normal thing, it was quite a shock to see that stuff in a rubbish bin. Most of the time, they are immediately flushed out of sight and out of mind (for the males anyway).