I wrote this a few months back but find these sentiments as applicable as ever.
I rode the elevator down with hacking-up-a-lung guy today, and every once in a while he would snarl again, hocking and snorting until I wanted to throw up. I don’t usually have to be in such unavoidably-close proximity to him; he lives next door, and usually I only hear him through the apparently-thin walls of our bathroom. He often hacks and spits in what I can only assume is his bathroom with a shared wall with ours. Until the other day, though, I don’t think I had the delight of hearing him in person.
Spitting is the thing that everyone talks about as the thing that bugs them about China. For a long time, it didn’t get to me. But there comes a time when the most resilient person feels personally violated by the loogy-hocking of another in a taxi or an elevator. It’s nice of you to open the car door to spit outside, but I would have liked to avoid hearing your nasal issues at all.
Spitting doesn’t describe it, though. That’s something you do when you sip a bad drink or laugh so hard that the soda comes out of your mouth. No, the thing I encounter is guttural and full of flem, hocking with a vengeance. It’s as if the person is trying to get any and all of the mucus that has not yet reached the stomach and bring it back up, clear out the esophagus for better things, I suppose.
So now it bothers me, and it bothers me that it bothers me. I took pride in having a non-reaction while other foreigners around me winced. It never occurred to me that this is something that could grow to bother you, like an cute habit that becomes annoying once you’ve been dating for two years. I never considered the spitting cute, but I was once able to look at it a cultural thing that was simply to be accepted; it’s not like I was required to do it myself.
To be fair, it’s not everyone. In fact, I think the whole “cleaning up spitting” tirade that Beijing went on before the Olympics really did have an affect. It only takes one person in a small space to make you uncomfortable, though.
In writing this, I have become highly aware of my own nasal cavity, and I cannot figure out if I’m imagining the mucus traveling down my throat or am truly starting to experience the disgusting nasal aftermath of living in a city within a country with the worst pollution. Today is good; I can see quite far into the distance, and this morning before dawn I even noticed Guo Mao 3 all the way downtown. That really does mean it’s a good day, and yet I feel I may have condemned myself to an earlier death than otherwise would have been by breathing this all in.
How have you dealt with the spitting thing? Does it bother you, have you grown beyond that, or is it a changing annoyance as mine seems to be?
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Being a third culture kid as I am, I learned how to hack a loogy at age three. My dad and I went to the outdoor morning produce market and the man behind the counter spit a big one onto the dirt next to us and the next thing my dad heard was a tiny and frail flem noise from my young throat. I guess I was a natural. (To be clear, I no longer hack loogies)
The worst for me was a 15 minute cab ride with a driver who spent the whole time making horrible hacking noises that made y skin crawl, without ever actually spitting…. couldn’t wait to get out of that cab!!!!