Issue #155 Everyone’s (a) Toilet

Everyone’s (a) Toilet

Zairong Xiang

155_xiang_01

Pieter Brueghel the Elder, The Dutch Proverbs, 1559, detail. License: Public Domain.

Issue #155
June 2025










Notes
1

Zhuangzi, “Knowledge Rambling in the North,” trans. James Legge (1891), with author modifications. See .

2

See China’s mid-twentieth-century “Patriotic Health Campaign” (爱国卫生运动), or India’s “Swachh Bharat Mission” (Clean India Mission) launched in 2014 to eliminate open defecation in rural areas.

3

This remained true until a “real” Louis Vuitton toilet reportedly worth a hundred thousand dollars was made, which the author discovered in his attempt to locate a better-quality image for the text than the “poor image” he collected in 2017 from the Internet Archive. See .

4

Byung-Chul Han, Shanzhai: Deconstruction in Chinese, trans. Philippa Hurd (MIT Press, 2017). See also Lesia Prokopenko, “The Gum You Like: A Letter from the Western Borders of Shanzhai,” Syg.ma, December 23, 2021 .

5

Brazilian quasi-equivalent of “shanzhai.”

6

Zairong Xiang, “Shanzhai: A Theory of the South?” trans. Stephen Nashef, in South of the South, no. 1 (2020) .