They Aren't Kidding About the Spitting

This amusing article was posted recently on nytimes.com: "No Spitting on the Road to Olympic Glory" (free registration required to read it). It talks about the ways Beijing is trying to improve its hospitality for the Olympics, including fixing the rampant bad English, getting people to line up for the subway (and everything else) instead of everyone rushing to the front in a mad dash, and getting people to stop spitting:


For all the expectations and civic pride that Beijing has attached to being the host of the 2008 Summer Olympics, the event is a source of civic anxiety, too. What if traffic is terrible? What if the weather is bad? These are worries for any host city, but Beijing also has a few more:

What if foreign visitors are forced to navigate a minefield of saliva left by local pedestrians spitting on sidewalks? What if lines at Olympic events dissolve into scrums as local residents jump to the head of pack? What if Chinese fans serenade rival teams with the guttural, unprintable “Beijing curse”?

I'm actually a little sad about cleaning up the English--it's one of my favorite things about Beijing--but I'm hopeful that they won't be able to catch every wrong word and misspelling (there are A LOT). And I've made my peace with the whole lack of lining up (an uneasy peace, but it's the same way in Korea and many, many other countries around the world). It helps that we're still in the infatuation stage with Beijing. But all the infatuation in the world can't overcome the constant hawking of loogies. I've seen (actually, heard is more accurate) men and women young and old spit anywhere and everywhere.

Here's a quote from the article that describes it perfectly:


Public spitting is a frequent practice in Beijing and even more common elsewhere in China. (The sinus-clearing, phlegmy pre-spit hawking sound is so common that one foreigner wryly dubbed it 'the national anthem of China.') Health officials, worried about communicable disease, have long tried to curb public spitting, with limited success, given that many people do not consider it unacceptable behavior.


You can't walk two meters down the street without hearing that noise, and it makes me cringe every time. The problem is, I have a thing about spit. It makes me gag when I see it, and it always has. I've heard that the spitting has already improved somewhat, but if that's improvement, I have my doubts about getting people to stop completely!