Everyone has their China cliche of choice that, despite annoying family, friends, and everyone, they return to again and again because life is hard and we need vents to lessen the psychological pressures of being alive. For most expats, it’s pollution, i.e. complaining about it. For me, it’s the squat toilet, i.e. hating the very concept with every poor muscle and fiber of my inevitably-sore-after-using lower body.

It’s with no small shudder that I pass along this story of a three-year-old boy who got “stuck in squat toilet,” as reported by ITN.

“Oh no, it’s happened again,” says the voice-over by Sarah Kerr. What do you mean again? This is, like, a thing?

Luckily, we then find out that she only means children getting stuck in odd places, not necessarily squat toilets. Because to be stuck anywhere else, even in railings, walls, and air-conditioning units, whew, at least it’s not a squat toilet. These filthy, filthy things.

(H/T Shanghaiist)

If you have the special misfortune of being photographed or filmed pooping in public, you’re basically guaranteed to make the news. That we would see, once again, someone pooping on public transportation is not at all surprising or noteworthy.

Sina English’s write-up, however, is exceptional.

Here’s how it began:

Whoa. Call it like it is, Chinese media. How unlike you.

“A woman shit on a bus in southwest China’s Sichuan Province on July 4,” so goes the story’s lede.

Followed by:

It was reported the old woman suffered a suddenly pain in the stomach and shit on a dustbin.

The woman reportedly apologized to fellow passengers and cleaned up after herself, so really, she probably deserves none of the ridicule that’ll go her way. Let’s see how you handle bowel pain, eh?

But man, Sina… “Woman shit on the bus in Sichuan” is really… bad. Minging, one might say. Fetid.

In case the story gets amended by a native-English-speaking editor, here is the original in full:

(H/T Alicia)

“No video this time,” we said on Tuesday about the latest public pooper in Shenzhen.

We were wrong.

Above, the video.

“Not only was this particular woman indiscriminate when it comes to choosing defecatory locations,” writes Shanghaiist’s James Griffiths, “she’s also lightning fast.” You would be too, eh?

Here’s the news report on this, because of course you want to know what other passengers think about the incident (they feel uncomfortable):

Youku vids of the above:

Yes, we too are beginning to suffer from scat fatigue, but… meh. We sort of have a theme going, and it’d be a shame to neglect it.

This one comes via The Nanfang:

A picture of a woman pooping on a platform in a station along Shenzhen’s Luobao Line has already been forwarded by three respected, Shenzhen-based microblogs: Shenzhen’s Big and Small Issues, Shenzhen Metropolitan Round-up, and Baoan Life.

No video this time. UPDATE, 5/24, 1:10 pm: Just kidding, here’s video! (Also embedded below.)

Someday, no doubt, I will be the one who needs to take a dump when there aren’t any bathrooms nearby, and a picture will find its way onto the Internet. It will be funny in all the saddest ways.

Woman takes a shit on the platform of Shenzhen subway station (The Nanfang)

What is a public sphere space? Who belongs? And what are the things that one can do in this place?

Poop?

In this video, a middle-aged woman, on an elevator in Shenzhen’s Subway Line 3, suddenly feels the call of nature, so she drops trou and takes a dump.

Her companion, a middle-aged male, stands beside her and holds a button to keep the elevator doors closed. Neither clean up the mess, because, you know, who cleans up their own poop, right?

They probably didn’t suspect a camera was rolling, and that footage would be posted online, and watched at least 79,000 times within a day. Southern News reports that the Shenzhen Metro Line Company has confirmed the veracity of the footage. The incident appears to have happened on April 22 at 3:14 pm.

We’re not sure whether this particular subway station had a bathroom. After a similar pooping incident in the Guangzhou subway — albeit involving a schoolboy, not an adult woman — Metro authorities took the step of publicizing via social media all of the bathroom locations in its underground network.

Also, it’s up for debate whether pooping in an elevator is better or worse than pooping on a train itself. Let that debate commence.

(H/T Alicia)

In many ways, it’s a story that combines everything that makes the Chinese media gush: pandas, tea, X-thousand years of culture, little children wearing cute costumes…

And poop.

Panda poop.

That’s the recipe behind what some are calling the most expensive tea ever created. Selling for an eye-popping 440,000 RMB per kilogram (about $32,000 per pound), the “Panda Tea” is the brainchild of artist/calligrapher-turned-amateur-botanist An Yanshi of Sichuan province. He’s been brewing this idea for a couple of years, and finally got it on shelves recently at a price he says will set a Guinness World Record for “most expensive tea leaves.”

So what role does the panda poop play? Professor An used it to fertilize plants whose leaves were eventually picked and dried for the tea. He set up operations around a panda refuge, allegedly pouring nearly 10 tons of panda-based fertilizer into the project.

The result, he claims, is a cancer-fighting tea made from a “national treasure.” An says that pandas eat leaves that contain cancer-fighting elements, and since the pandas themselves are unable to fully digest those leaves, the anti-cancer agents remain present in their droppings. Bury that poop near a bush, and leaves from said bush will naturally combat cancer… right?

Even the Chinese media aren’t biting. There’s a bit too much gooey cultural nonsense even for them. The creator even went through the trouble of photographing kids in panda hats picking the leaves, but what kind of publicity did this generate? The good people at Hualong Net titled their article, “Don’t make children sales props for ‘Panda Tea.’” Caixun has also written a takedown. Journalists who took a sniff of the fabled Panda Tea probably came away looking like this:

Matt Sheehan is a broadcast journalist in Beijing. You can reach him at mattsheehan88@gmail.com or @mattsheehan88.

This raises a very, very important question: does poop really belong in the “recyclable” side of the trash bin? Biodegradable isn’t the same as recyclable, is it?

At least he’s not doing it inside a subway carriage.

(Sina Weibo user @粤语最盏鬼, h/t Will Crook)

UPDATE, 7:28 pm: Mr. Crook sends this along: it appears that Guangzhou Metro has posted on its official Sina Weibo account the locations of bathrooms throughout the subway network. “Hurry and pass this to your nearby friends,” it writes.

It manages to avoid all mentions of what’s happening in the picture above. Well played, Guangzhou Metro.

Kids do the darndest things. From everybody’s Sina Weibo accounts, this:

Well that escalated. Lookee from subway to plane cabin.

That’s the opening line to the post introducing the image, featuring a kid squatting in the aisle of an airplane and dropping a deuce. Most commenters seem unhappy that the parents would allow such a thing to happen, but hardly surprised. Here’s a toddler pooping in a Taiwan airport, here’s a toddler pooping in a Shenzhen hospital, and the image that started it all — the “subway” reference in the above blockquote — here’s a kid pooping on a moving train.

Other places we expect to see toddlers embarrass their parents with their bowels, ranked from most likely to most desired:

• Funeral parlor
• Public bus
• Teacher’s desk
• Fruit basket
• Doorstep of Fang Binxing
• Xi Jinping parade route
• Moon bounce castle

Hey, parents… it might be time:

(H/T RFH @MissXQ)

Ah yes, another moment in Chinese poop history. In a Taiwan airport recently, someone snapped a picture of a toddler defecating onto a newspaper in the middle of the ground, reportedly with a bathroom nearby. Culture, right? What can ya do? The photograph found its way to Facebook and then Taiwan’s NOW News, and people are kind of unhappy.

SCMP’s Amy Li has the story:

“There aren’t enough public toilets in China and the ones they do have are usually dirty,” commented a Taiwanese blogger, “This might explain mainlanders’ poor hygiene habits.”

“This is  a typical mainland parent who spoils their children,’’ said a mainland netizen on China’s twitter-like Sina Weibo.

“This is so embarassing, ” said another mainland blogger.

We can only say, by way of counterpoint, that at least the kid’s mother had the courtesy to lay down a paper for easy disposal. And look at how young he is! You can bet this kid won’t be pulling shit like this when he’s ten.

Oh wait.

Outcry at mainland mother who let son defecate at Taiwan airport (SCMP)

The Chinese, that’s who.

Fecal therapy has often been used to cure gut trouble in cows and horses. Books on traditional Chinese medicine mention giving it to people by mouth to cure diarrhea in the fourth century; one book called it yellow soup.

YELLOW SOUP. You gotta give it to that fourth-century Western media: they may not have been masters of typeset, the inverted pyramid of news writing, or the printing press, but they sure knew their racially insensitive epithets. Signing off.

<Moments later>

<Muffled off-camera voice> Wait, what? Hang on, Buck, you’re telling me that “yellow” is a reference to the color of the actual treatment? Uh-huh. Well I’ll be damned, you learn something new every day. Right. Yeah ok, gotcha.

An update on our previous report. I have just been informed that “yellow soup” is in fact a reference not to the generally accepted color of Asian people’s skin, but the poop they ingested to treat diarrhea. We regret the error. Signing off.

(H/T Rob D.)

The boy who pooped on a crowded Guangzhou subway last week — rather unceremoniously nicknamed the “Little Shit Brother” (in this video, it’s rendered as “pooping emperor,” as brother and emperor are pronounced the same) — is still fresh on people’s minds. We know this because that boy might have directly caused a fight to break out in a Shenzhen hospital on Saturday.

The scene: a sick boy, just one and a half years old, loses control of his bowels in the waiting room of a children’s hospital. This is rather normal, considering the boy is so young and he’s at this hospital specifically because he has diarrhea.

But someone in the waiting room chides the parents, and the phrase “pooping emperor” is used.

“When the child was defecating, I went to get a trash bin, you’re here yapping and yapping,” the father says at the video’s start.

“He was just saying on the Internet there was a ‘pooping emperor,’ wasn’t talking to you. He was talking to me,” says someone else, a woman surnamed Zhang.

“My child is just one and a half, you call him ‘pooping emperor’” the father angrily shouts. “You have character, you’re a doctor, are you?”

Zhang, who wishes to stay anonymous, explains that the boy was actually very close to the bathroom, and that she and her husband only kindly reminded the parents of this fact.

The kid’s mother was very unhappy, and according to Zhang, said, “We’re going to do it here, what you gon’ do about it, what you gon’ do about it?”

And then, Zhang’s husband offhandedly remarked, “No wonder on the Web they’re all talking about Guangzhou subway’s ‘pooping emperor.’”

That was the last straw for the boy’s parents, who were already stressed out by their young child’s illness. A fight ensued, during which Zhang’s clothing got ripped.

Forgive us if that picture looks like it belongs on a sexychat site.

(H/T The Nanfang)

This is one of those stories that Chinese netizens would probably prefer to keep bottled up within the confines of Chinese social media, considering mainlanders already have a reputation for being shameless when it comes to public defecation.

On Saturday, someone posted onto Sina Weibo a picture of a boy pooping on a crowded Guangzhou subway train. “I was shocked today,” the person wrote. “This is what I saw on Subway Line 3. That’s right, the kid in the corner is defecating. And a really big load!!” Apparently this happened during rush hour with the parents were standing nearby.

People have been flinging the mud ever since. As translated by Ministry of Tofu, some select comments on Weibo:

maymay有只猪：Brain-dead!  A national disgrace!!!

小萱草：I saw this pic on FB (Facebook). The comments are 100% unanimous, saying ‘Not surprising for Chinese’!!!

Wynn：This is truly a matter of education within the family!!!

LL猫猫侠：Was it terribly smelly?

sanzond：This kid is poorly brought up. At 10, he should have understood things. Why didn’t he clean up the poop he left? Even my 3-and-a-half-year-old daughter knows one should not litter in public places.

猫娘_Fan：An ill-bred son is the fault of the father!

月岛免免: what kind of person is he? Worse than dogs! Even my dog knows how to withhold.

可正的老婆：Why do I feel very funny? The young boy looks really serious.

宝宝是只柴犬：With such a parent, the kid is truly worrisome.

We wouldn’t be so quick to castigate the kid, who is reportedly only 10 years old. The incident certainly looks bad, and reflects poorly on those of us who, sitting comfortably right now, believe we could never be rendered so pathetic by untimely bowel movement. But hey, raise your hand if you’ve never, ever pooped in your pants after, say, age eight (when you knew the feeling of shame).

Those with your hands up, stop lying. Unless it’s really true, in which case — listen, hate to break it to you, but karma’s gonna catch up and you shit’s gonna explode, and I sure hope no one nearby has a camera phone when it happens.

Of course, since TV news gets 80 percent of their stories from Weibo these days, the subway defecating boy made TV station news everywhere. Poor kid.

Southern Metropolis Daily has the story of a baby found in the squat toilet of a Dongguan shoe factory yesterday (that hurt to write). The picture you see above comes from The Nanfang, which tells us:

Police immediately began an investigation to locate the child’s mother. Officers from Liaobu Hengkeng Police Station searched the factory’s dormitories, asking whether any of the workers had been pregnant recently.

They were told that Chen Yuehua, a 15 year-old worker, had appeared pregnant and had spent a long time in the toilet that morning. When police located Chen, who comes from Guangxi Province, her skirt was covered in blood but she denied the allegations, claiming she had recently put on weight because she had eaten too much.

If there is a silver lining to any of this, it’s that the baby appears to be healthy and has been put up for adoption. It’s a good thing that newborns are, in the words of Liu Dong, head of the hospital’s emergency department, “too large to fully flush down.”

Now you’ll excuse me while I dump this half-eaten plate of food in front of me.

Showcasing the best in Asian-related memes. Sources: We Know Memes, China Memes.

I don’t mean the baby, though it is hilarious. Look to the negative space…

Holy shit – a great red vortex of it!

Both pieces are by Gao Xiaowu. In case you’re wondering, the baby sculpture is called “Baby,” and the mound of poop is called — yup, you guessed it — “Soft Violence.”