Airing My Laundry in China

Matthew Engel recently wrote a piece in the Financial Times I found quite funny in light of the way we in China live compared with the expectations for quality of life in the United States. It seems a woman in a small town in Pennsylvania has been told twice by city fathers her neighbors are upset with her hanging her clothes to dry in her yard – including her bloomers. Americans figure its weird, if not a bit distasteful, to be hanging your (albeit clean) laundry out to dry. Of course, when I was growing up in the sixties and seventies, that’s pretty much anyone ever did in the neighborhoods in which I was raised. In the Asian neighborhood in which I lived as a kid in Hawaii, there was even a public clothes line upon which all the neighbors in the block hung their underpants to dry.

Now, though, nearly every American has a dryer to do the job wind power once performed; ironically, on properties that on average are far larger than they were in the sixties and seventies. A battle of seemingly religious proportions has broken out Stateside, with non-electric drying types accusing electric-drying types that electric-dryers claim 6% of electricity usage in the USA.

Of course, in China, which has a smaller energy footprint per capita than the States, it would be odd to look at a bank of apartment buildings anywhere in China and NOT see rows of wet clothes saluting drivers and pedestrians alike. Including my own. It makes me think that if the U.S. really wants to gain a role as a world leader in a global green movement, it may find itself one day forced to air its laundry – clean, hopefully.