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Years ago, a travel companion revealed to me his colorful sex life in the mainland. He had business concerns all over the country, and kept a mistress in every one of the cities where he had an office. The women he had were mostly young students from established academies. Pretty, stylish; what people in mainland like to call qizhi. Everything was perfect, except one tiny little problem that bothered him: the girls' toilet habits. "They like to squat," he resigned. "Once I opened the bathroom door and I saw her squatting over my sitting toilet."

A squat toilet, obviously, is a toilet used in a squatting, rather than sitting position. There are several types of squat toilets, but they all consist essentially of a hole in the ground. Any Hong Kongers who dare to venture outside their hotels in the mainland would soon encounter one of these, and a lot of them would be disgusted by these relics from the "age of backwardness".

What these Hong Kongers do not know is that a squat toilet is also known as the Arabic, French, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Iranian, Indian, Turkish toilet, or Nile pan. Our former-colonial masters happened to have an issue with squat toilets, and thus we perceive them as pre-modern, despite the fact that a whole lot of people around the world, no less from industrial and "cultured" countries such as France and Japan, are still using them every day.

In 2010, special squatting toilets were installed in the Rochdale Exchange Centre in the Greater Manchester area to cater to a large Muslim Asian community there whose members preferred to use the squat toilet. "It just shows that the people of Greater Manchester are becoming more cosmopolitan and global-minded," said the owner of the centre as he explained the reason behind the new arrangements in an interview. "These don't necessarily fit with the perception of the British toilet, as they're definitely more European."

If multiculturalism seems too relativistic, we can always return to the good old-fashioned ideals of the Age of Enlightenment. Also called the Age of Reason, the movement's purpose was to reform society by applying reason - rather than tradition, faith and revelation - and advanced knowledge through science. In this vein, it can perhaps be argued that a sitting toilet is more modern, because it is newer and therefore represents "progress". The assumption behind this claim is that the latest is always the best, an assumption that a consumer society such as ours must accept as a self-evident truth. If there is the slightest of doubt about supremacy of iPhone 5 over iPhone 4S, capitalism as we know it today will fall apart.

However, although marketing is also called a science today and is taught in respectable universities as a subject in its own right, enlightened folks like Bacon and Newton had something more robust in mind. Recently, Stanford University released a piece of medical research suggesting that most people here have been pooping wrong their entire lives. According to researchers at Stanford, compared with a sitting posture, squatting helps prevent constipation and colon cancer.

In fact, man, like his fellow primates, has always used the squatting position for elimination. Infants of every culture instinctively adopt this posture when playing, resting and relieving themselves. Although it may seem strange to someone who has spent his entire life deprived of the experience, this is the way the human body was designed to function.

The term "modernity" takes on universal characteristics that spring from Western cultural hegemony. Its most serious shortcoming was the assumption that European values derived from European experience were universal truths and such truths gave licence to world dominance. Hong Kong's understanding of "modernity" is even more narrow, as we are unfamiliar with the broader European tradition.

Ever since the May Fourth Movement in 1919, many Chinese thought that the only path to regain the nation's lost glory was to emulate the West. Anything with "Chineseness" was thought to be traditional and thus backward. However, if the Brits poop the wrong way, they can err on other counts too. If Manchester could install squat toilets for Asians and Muslims, shouldn't we rethink our current politics of exclusion?

The author is a member of the Commission on Strategic Development.

(HK Edition 10/04/2012 page3)