It’s not the spitting per se

Years of playing ultimate Frisbee made me no stranger to spitting. There’s nothing like high intensity aerobic action to get the phlegm moving. So I can’t say that I find the Chinese habit of public spitting in of itself to be offensive. I’ll admit to being overwhelmed by the sheer volume of all that expectorated snot multiplied across a dense population, the product of which glimmers like a bed of shell-less oysters over the streets and sidewalks and sometimes on floors and walls. But spit alone is not enough to push me over my very high squeamishness threshold (a threshold, mind you, that once was brooched but not breeched when I witnessed the Hostages ultimate team in 1981 accepting their 3rd place trophy by hocking lougies on it and licking it clean. Gross, but I kinda liked it).

So far I can tolerate other unfamiliar grossness, like the open-trousered, bare-butted babies and the concomitant re-classification of baby pooh as a benign byproduct of childhood and, therefore, permissible to excrete any and everywhere. This practice violates my postulate that if it looks like shit and smells like shit, you can safely guess what it is, yet I have been able thus far to stomach it (if I begin to see it happening too close to where I actually have to eat or live, I’ll probably change my mind on that one, but for now, I’m keeping my cool). I’m even handling the open-stall public restroom squat toilets where the pits are so close together you‘re likely to rub knees with your neighbor and exchange a few friendly splashes on your feet.

No, it takes more than that to trigger my gag reflex, and the Chinese have the formula. It’s the work up to the act of spitting that unnerves me, like nails on a chalkboard. The gutteral sounds and gesticulations that go into working up the wad are what make me cringe. It’s often initiated by lowering the ubiquitous cigarette as the shoulders raise up and the grating sound begins: Phlegmatic hawking, percolating, bolus forming, full-body cocking, and a vocalized launching customarily followed up with snot rockets and blowing the last clinging slime into one’s hands and rubbing them any old where. That, my friends, grosses me out. Try enjoying your lunch, ignoring the captured crickets in the box by the door screeching above the fray of shouting slurping snorting hoards and the dense smell of cigarettes and rancid fry oil and coal smoke, only to be jarred back into an awareness of just how foreign this all is to you by the rasping plegmy throat calls of your neighbor hocking a slimy yellow one at the ground next to you. I haven’t let everything get to me, but that sound has a way. It has a way.