In Yu Hua‘s 余华 best seller Brothers 兄弟 from 2005 (read Julia Lovell’s review here) he lets the father of one of his protagonists drown in the cesspool under a public toilet, while attempting to catch a glimpse of the behinds of the women doing their business in the next compartment:

“The scream scared the living day-lights out of Baldy Li’s father, making him lose his grip and fall head-first into the thick, viscous goo below. In seconds, the excrement filled his mouth and nose and then his lungs, and that was how Baldy Li’s father drowned.” (Yu, Hua: Brothers. Trans: Eileen Cheng-yin Chow and Carlos Rojas. London: Picador, 2010)

This scene instantly reminded me of a similar one of Mo Yan‘s 莫言 in his novel The Republic of Wine 酒国 from 1992, in which the detective anti-hero is likewise drowned in shit while dazed by drink and chasing the phantom of his lover the lady trucker:

“But before he got there, he stumbled into an open air privy filled with a soupy, fermenting goop of food and drink regurgitated by Liquorland residents, plus the drink and food excreted from the other end, atop which floated such imaginably filthy refuse as bloated, used condoms[…] The pitiless muck sealed his mouth as the irresistible force of gravity drew him under.” (Mo, Yan: The Republic of Wine. Trans: Howard Goldblatt. London: Hamish Hamilton, 2000.)

The public toilet, a dying breed in my part of the world, would make an interesting topic for sociological analysis. The invisible rules of behavior and extensive taboos surrounding it, in opposition to its indispensability in our daily lives: The poetics and profanity of the excrement.

Made comical by our own embarrassment of having to excrete the waste products of our metabolism and coupled with the pathos of death, it makes a delicious, if at the same time nauseating, literary spectacle when treated by to of China’s best contemporary novelists. Well, I’ll continue thinking about it, maybe its just shit anyway.