To the editor:
The final grades are in. The official papers are signed, sealed, and delivered to the appropriate bureaucrat in the appropriate office. The numbers will be crunched, stomped, munched, maligned, misstated, restated, and regurgitated. And my students will enter their third year of school. For me, a clean slate awaits me in the form of a new class of first-year students. Yes, I will have some break time and work to keep me busy. Lots of colleagues wish to hear how I managed to pull off the production of six Shakespeare plays in a land that knows little of the Bard. It was fun.
Today is Laundry Day. It is a chore that bores through the monotony of house work. I have assembled my implements of torture and now commence the dreaded process. For over 80 years, U.S. residents have had laundry machines of varying degrees. Today, most homes have a washer and dryer. This is how they are sold — matched pairs like husbands and wives. China is making vast leaps on the cultural timeline as it enters the 21st Century. Laundry is complicated.
A typical pattern in the U.S. is for one outfit to be worn once then put in the hamper for washing. Once a week the clothes are sorted into the whites and darks and thrown into a machine where they are washed, rinsed, and spun. Then they are put in another machine where they are heated, fluffed, rolled, and finally dried. The whole process takes about two hours. Then with our added leisure we pursue hobbies and put on weight. So simple!
In my first year of teaching here in China I learned that we have many more clothes than our Chinese counterparts. The school I was teaching at was fairly conservative. Conservative here means that it adheres to ways of the impoverished. Students slept in unheated dorms, took showers in a communal shower building, and washed their clothes by hand. As I was to discover, the Chinese concept of a drying machine is very ecologically friendly and totally unpleasant in its laziness.
Nearly every job advertisement for teaching here extolls all the perks that are given to teachers. Apartments, appliances, travel allowances, and pay rates are all given high priority. At the end of an advertisement is a description of job duties: teach English or some other language. In the list of appliances you will see microwaves, hotwater heaters, washers and dryers. As I learned, the concept of a dryer as we know it in the U.S. is alien to people here.
If you want to have dry clothes, you hang them up and wait for Mother Nature to get around to them. I am all for a quality of environmental life that includes doing what I can to use less energy. But I must admit that the idea that you can get clothes dry by hanging them on a line is anathema to the fast paced life in today’s world. On a sunny day when the weather is warm and the wind moderate, such quaint exercises as putting up the wash seem ideal. A simpler time and place come quickly to mind.
Reality intrudes. First, the effort to keep the newly washed clothes from touching the ground and picking up dirt; the time necessary for the sun to do the job, the temperature, and as so many of my parents’ generation can tell you putting up washing in the winter time is a freezing hell. So it came as a surprise when I was shown what the drying machine was. A simple clothesline strung between two beams on the porch of the apartment. A common complaint of my women students was that the boys were too lazy to wash their clothes and hang them up. Smelly! yet here was the dilemma, trying to explain that there were machines to do this work! I might just be from Mars!
Yes, Line dried clothes do seem to have a scent that is next to impossible to get from a machine. But for all of that effort; give me a twirly box and a heater, time’s a-wasting! Now that I live twenty-two stories up there are even more issues with line drying. Outside my building is a rack. There are some small metal circles that hold laundry poles. As I get ready to do the wash I look like Sancho Panza preparing to serve his squire Don Quixote! I have three or four lances that hold to the rack, ropes and chains to keep the clothes tied to the poles. Every piece that gets hung out must be tied and anchored before you even think of putting it out. Failure to do so can result in your knickers meeting up with Grandma’s sweet nothings on a lower level. The social life of errant clothing is not amusing. Especially when you have to go knocking on a stranger’s door.
It’s off to battle the laundry beast, I take my poles, straps, whips, and chains and proceed to the field of battle. All that I need now is the trumpet salute. Enter the Great Don Quixote: Slayer of vile shirts; flayer of flannel shorts; slicer of sleeves, and no shirker of shirts! After washing the clothes, a half hour or so of stringing them up on a pole like trout on a string, the lance is lowered to the sound of pounding drums and: Charge! Piercing the nose ring of that bull on the opposite end of the field, the lance is ensconced in its own pocket to rest while the fair clothes flutter like so many maids’ fluttering favors. But woe to the pants that slip form the clips; the legs sailing out into the sky like some Olympic athlete in the broad jump, only to be snagged by a new neighbor, perhaps even to be purloined!
Alas, the day is half gone and the thunderstorm comes. Nature is not satisfied until she has washed your clothes! So much for the eco-friendly clothes dryer. So this Don Quixote de la Mancha has much to do about clothing. It truly can wring one’s collar.
Orpheus Allison
Shanghai, China
orpheusallison@mac.com
