Jooho Lee: Learning about individuality, sitting or standing

After a particularly heavy meal at English House, I stepped into a bathroom to take care of some things. As I headed toward a stall, however, I was dismayed to spot two feet belonging to a friend of mine under the door. His feet were pointing toward the toilet, so I waited for a bit.

After a couple of incomprehensible minutes of awkward silence, I finally worked up the courage to ask him, whose feet remained in the same position, "Yo, are you about to flush or are you just getting started?"

His reply: "I'm wiping."

It took a couple of seconds to sink in. "You wipe standing up?!" He replied, "Don't you? Everybody does it standing up."

Then, like a bolt of lightning across the dark desert sky, it hit me. I was so enraptured, so engrossed, so captivated by it that I completely forgot I had something to do myself. I had just relearned one of the most important lessons we can learn in our lifetimes.

You see, I was born in South Korea and lived there until I was 10. Back in the late '80s, my family would buy paper towels at the one store that sold American goods in our neighborhood. We would use them, then wring them out and dry them for reuse.

This mentality also translated into respect for toilet paper. My mom taught me to remain seated, fold my toilet paper neatly in layers on my lap, wipe, look, fold, reuse and repeat the process until I was finished.

You may grimace, but you'd be surprised how many people do it this way on our campus today.

I thought the entire world did it this way. That is, until our family crossed the Pacific to America, where things were very different.

For one thing, the toilet paper in public restrooms was dispensed in little four inch squares, single ply. I simply could not get a nice, long strand of toilet paper from the dispenser. How was I to fold it into a nice square to begin the process? Instead, I would have to layer them to achieve the same effect as my folded square. So Americans wipe differently, I thought.

But this remained only a hypothesis. I had no legal means to test its veracity.

It was not until college, where the spirit of inquiry and open discussion reigns supreme, that I was able to flesh the matter out in full with my fellow students. We figured that, mathematically, each person living in Stouffer College House could do it differently without even knowing this was the case.

Isn't it amazing how much something so basic and private can teach someone? You can go your whole life thinking that everyone else does it just one way: your way. How many other aspects of the very constitution of your being also go unquestioned with respect to those of other people?

You knew that people were different from each other, of course, but more important, this one small matter of personal hygiene also hints at a more fundamental aspect of living in a civil society.

As an individual living in this so-called liberal democracy, I could not care any less about how someone else goes about their business on the john. If I opened my eyes to the political-ness of living together, on the other hand, perhaps I should.

We may be individuals in the liberal sense, but to understand individuals in relation to ourselves, we must understand, as I did, the republican notions of the indispensability of our innate ties to different groups.

These groups go beyond ethnicity, of course, and it is true that all individuals are parts of many different groups simultaneously. It is therefore important to try to understand how the make-up of an individual stands in relation to his or her group identity for proper community building.

But there is an even more pressing need -- to recognize, as liberals, that individuals cannot be entities unto themselves, even at the most unquestioned levels of our daily lives. May wipeage serve as a reminder to us all.

Jooho Lee is a junior History and Political Science major from Los Angeles, Calif.

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