Stories of the Middle Kingdom

Cleanliness and Culture

The Japanese are known for cleanliness. I do not live in Japan.

The country where I live had a very bad century in the 1900's. Poverty dictated that many of them had (and some still have) dirt floors in their village homes. This is not their fault, it is just a fact of life.

No one mops a dirt floor. In fact, some people like to spit on the dirt floor, pour dish water on the dirt floor, etc. I probably would too. (I would not spit though, yuck.)

Building construction policies obviously do not mandate that windows or doors be weatherproof. Dirt and coal dust blow in. It gets on your furniture and in your nose. It is not the fault of any one person, it is just a fact of life.

I need help cleaning my house. So I have a lady who comes to my house once a week for three hours to help mop up some of the coal dust. It takes pressure off of me knowing that at least once a week, things will be clean.

The problem is that the people who are willing to do this kind of housecleaning work are village ladies who, as you may have guessed, live in homes with dirt floors and have different ideas of what it means for something to be clean. They mean well, but trying to teach them my standards has proven extremely frustrating.

For example, in Bedrock, the housecleaner would never dust just a mere week's worth of dust. It still looked relatively clean to her. Most people feel the oil spatter behind the stove is too hard to clean, a lost cause, and so she would never clean that (I did though).

My new housecleaner in Bamboo Forest likes to pick a certain room, usually a room like my bedroom that no one is going to see besides Mimi and myself, and spend all three hours in it, cleaning every nook and cranny over and over, to the neglect of the entire rest of the house. The next time she comes back, she goes to that same room, because it is dirty again, and again spends three hours cleaning that room. The rest of the house gets worse and worse.

I try to impose logic on her. But she doesn't understand my logic, nor do I understand hers.

The next time she comes I tell her, "do not go in my bedroom." She smiles, says okay, then goes in my bedroom.

I try to be polite. "No, really, don't clean this room today." "But it is dirty," she replied. I said, "Well, so is the REST OF THE HOUSE!"

She again agreed, and continued cleaning my bedroom.

I said, "can you come to the living room and clean it, since I have guests coming this afternoon?"

"Okay," she said, as she continued cleaning my bedroom.

My face twists in a pained expression and I want to pull my hair out as I dig deep within my soul looking for a way to communicate with this woman.  Alas, apparently she understands facial expressions better than she understands words.  She went to the living room and cleaned it quickly in the fifteen minutes left in her three-hour shift. And since then, I have never had another problem with her cleaning the entire house. She seems more relaxed and happier, and I am too.  Go figure.