Into the World:
The Random Thoughts in My Mind

For many people, a squat toilet represents backwardness. In the olden days, a hole in the floor opened up to a smelly cesspit, from which farmers shoveled excrement into their fields for free manure. Grimy public bathrooms in third-world countries are almost always portrayed by broken, dark squatters with flies buzzing above. In contrast, Japan, commonly portrayed as the pinnacle  of advanced toilet culture, is represented by heated seats and remote-controlled bidets on sitters, with squating toilets ( washiki or "Japanese-style" in the local parlance) relegated increasingly to the oldest houses and schools.

The 30-year-old man in the black-and-white photo smiled at me, his happiness at perhaps his first time in Beijing for work still visible more than 60 years after the fact. Yet, moments later, I found myself ripping the beautifully preserved photo in half; the arbitrary split in the brittle paper ran through that very smile, a stark reminder of a sudden but entirely unceremonious goodbye. By the hundredth rip, I had become mechanical, pieces of old photos, alongside scraps of diary entries with neat handwriting and certifications of all kinds, so unemotionally falling into the black garbage bag below.