Whose Traces Can Be Called History

A secondhand coat arrives at your home. The plastic bag is sealed well; the seller says it has already been washed and disinfected. After you open it, you still hold it a little farther away first, smell it, and then throw it into the washing machine by itself.

That round of hot water is not only for washing away stains. Often, there is no stain at all. The coat may even be cleaner than your own. What you really want to wash away is an invisible previous body: his sweat, his room, his wardrobe, the fact that he once raised his arm in this coat, squeezed onto the subway in it, leaned against a chair back in it, or even simply the fact that he was once inside it.

This is where dirt is hardest to deal with. It does not necessarily have evidence, but it has history.

Bad acts still require narration. Why did someone do wrong, where exactly was the wrong, were there extenuating circumstances, can there be compensation, is there remorse? At least there remains a road toward language. Dirt, however, rarely waits for narration. When a strand of hair floats up in soup, the hand stops first, the stomach contracts slightly first, and only then does thought arrive to explain: perhaps it is not so serious, perhaps it is only hair, perhaps heating has already made it safe enough.

But the first reaction has already happened.

I do not want to mock that recoil too easily. Disliking dirt is first of all a way for the body to protect itself. Human beings did not survive by poetically embracing filth. Washing hands, handling excrement, isolating sources of infection, managing food and water—these really have saved countless bodies. The power of public health lies precisely in how it drew the invisible routes of transmission: flies traveling from the toilet to food, fingers carrying germs toward the mouth, wastewater circling around and returning to the human gut.

Cleanliness is also often a form of care. Someone boils an infant’s bottle, washes out the spittoon by an elderly person’s bed, wipes the blood from raw meat off the kitchen cutting board, clears away the vomit just left in a hospital corridor. These actions are not elegant, and are not suitable for being written into beautiful metaphors, yet they allow life to continue. Without this trivial, repetitive labor that smells of disinfectant, many forms of tenderness would have nowhere to happen.

So I do not want to stand in a room that someone else has already cleaned and demand that everyone immediately give up their defenses. People do not want to wear a stranger’s clothes, do not want to eat soup with hair in it, do not want shoes stepping into the bedroom; none of this needs to be judged by theory. The first recoil is sometimes only a recoil. It may be crude, quick, and not noble, but it is not necessarily evil.

The trouble lies in the second reaction.

How do I explain that recoil? Do I keep it within the realm of risk and hygiene, or do I let it keep growing, until it becomes a judgment about a person, a way of life, a kind of body?

Dirt is not only a material state; it is also a history of contact. Once an object is imagined as having touched that place, absorbed that smell, belonged to that kind of person, it is no longer merely stained in the present moment, but seems to carry a past that cannot be fully cut off. Stains can be seen, but contact history reproduces through imagination. Precisely because it is invisible, it is even harder to prove that it has disappeared.

There is a much-quoted sentence in anthropology: dirt is matter out of place. Mud is not dirty on the road; it becomes dirty by the bed. Hair is not dirty on the head; it becomes dirty in the bowl. This judgment is so clear as to seem almost simple, but dirt in everyday life is stickier than an error of classification. It is not merely that something has crossed a boundary, but that a certain relation has come too close. The outside world enters the home, a stranger’s body enters the wardrobe, the imagination of the toilet approaches the dining table, and the smells of poverty, illness, aging, and labor approach the respectability we work so hard to maintain.

That is why the small area by the door becomes so important. Shoes stop there, like at a little customs checkpoint. Outside there is dust, rainwater, cigarette butts, dog urine, subway platforms, hospital corridors; inside there are floors, beds, children’s hands, the sense of safety that lets one walk barefoot. Of course taking off shoes has hygienic reasons, but it also divides the world in two: here is the place where one may lie down; there is the place that requires vigilance.

This line cannot simply be abolished. A home with no boundaries at all will quickly cease to feel like a home. But once the line is drawn, there is a temptation: to explain it as natural, to explain the people inside the door as people more worthy of protection, and the people outside the door as people closer to contamination. We make this kind of line-drawing gesture every day, usually without calling it politics or ethics. We only say: do not bring dirty things in.

But some people, too, will be placed outside this line.

The most dangerous thing about dirt is that it wears the coat of hygiene, yet often does the work of social distance. Certain occupations are considered dirty, certain living environments are considered dirty, and certain foods, traces of illness, old clothes, weary postures in public space can also be pushed away together with the people behind them. Moral language at least still recognizes the other as an actor: what did he do, why did he do it. The language of filth is sometimes more cruel: it reduces a person to an environmental problem, like an odor, garbage, or mildew, waiting to be cleared away.

A great deal of cruelty happens in just this way. It does not say it is cruel; it only says it loves cleanliness. It does not say it looks down on anyone; it only says it cannot stand that smell. It does not admit that it is excluding a certain kind of life; it only says this place should be tidied up.

But conversely, simply praising mixture is also too easy. Dirty things do not become harmless because we give them an ethical halo. Caregivers know wounds must be cleaned; cooks know raw and cooked foods must be separated; people with weak immune systems know that boundaries are not prejudice, but a condition for staying alive. If a society forgets these things, it will hand the most vulnerable people over to the most romantic people to be harmed.

This is also why I remain hesitant toward many beautiful critiques. They are sometimes too eager to tear down boundaries, and forget that boundaries do not serve only exclusion. The gloves in a hospital, the separate cutting board in a kitchen, that bit of awkward distance during an infectious disease outbreak—none of these can be fully explained by class taste or the rhetoric of mysophobia. Boundaries may be cold, but they may also save lives; they may humiliate people, but they may also protect someone who cannot withstand infection.

The question is not whether there should be boundaries, but whether, after the boundary, there is still discernment.

The body is faster than ethics. Smell is faster than concepts. Fear is faster than sympathy. We do not judge filth in a quiet classroom, but in the second when we smell an odor, see a stain, or touch a sticky door handle. That second is very short, so short that it almost does not allow complexity; and precisely because of this, it is especially easy to borrow. Advertising borrows it, telling us that truly respectable people should have no sweat, no pores, no kitchen grease. Urban management borrows it, turning certain vendors, scavengers, and people sleeping on benches into problems of city appearance. Everyday prejudice also borrows it, compressing a stranger’s life into a smell, a patch, a piece of clothing one does not want to approach.

At this point, the distance between patina and disgust suddenly appears very thin.

Hand marks on antique furniture can be called time; the darkened surface of bronze can be called history; the musty smell of old books can be called an archival feeling. The dust of secondhand bookshops, the dim fragrance of wooden cabinets, the deliberately sprayed incense in vintage stores can all package the past as an atmosphere that can be approached and purchased. But the smell of a stranger’s sweat, the depression in the mattress of a rented room, the yellowing of unknown origin around the collar of secondhand clothes—these are rarely allowed to possess the same narrative.

They are all old. The difference is whose bodily residue can be called history, and whose bodily residue can only be called dirt.

An old object must pass through institutions, aesthetics, stories, prices, or class repackaging before it has a chance to become a sense of age instead of contamination. Otherwise, it is only residue left behind by someone else’s life. We like time, but may not like the way time truly passes through bodies. We like history, but often hope history has already been polished, deodorized, and framed, preferably without carrying the previous person’s armpits, kitchen, sickbed, and the sound of slippers.

This is not to say that all residues deserve to be preserved, nor that all cleaning is violence. In art restoration, there is a restrained reminder: cleaning is not always restoration. Some deposits, oxidation, old repairs, and traces of use have already become a layer of the object’s skin. Overcleaning may not return it to its origin, but erase its life history. Placed back into everyday life, this idea becomes unsettling: what exactly are we trying to wash away? Bacteria, smell, risk, or the fact that a thing once belonged to someone else?

When we say something is as good as new, sometimes we are also praising a kind of amnesia.

Clean spaces are also rarely clean out of nowhere. Behind the doors of office-building bathrooms there are cleaning schedules; before the mall opens, mops have been pushed across the tiles; garbage trucks pass the back gates of residential compounds before dawn. Garbage has not disappeared, only been taken away; wastewater has not disappeared, only entered the pipes; smell has not disappeared, only been assigned to certain people who are seen less often.

The brighter, more odorless, and more freshly wiped a place appears, the easier it is for the labor of contact behind it to become invisible. Sometimes cleanliness is not the absence of dirt, but dirt that has been transferred elsewhere, arranged for someone else’s hands, someone else’s lungs, someone else’s early morning. We step on shining floors and rarely think that shine, too, is a history of contact, only its owner’s name has been wiped away.

This gives me a hesitant respect for cleanliness. It is not a word that can be simply praised, nor a word that can be lightly criticized. It is care, and also exclusion; it protects the body, and may also protect respectability; it deals with real risks, and may also push away adjacent relations we do not want to acknowledge. It is more like an everyday art of discernment, requiring people, before wiping, washing, isolating, or discarding, to try to understand what exactly they are handling.

I still do not want to romanticize dirt. Hair in soup is still nauseating; public health still needs boundaries; care and food safety cannot be solved by tolerance. Some things should be washed, some things should be thrown away, some places should be disinfected. The world is not made clean by posture.

But I also increasingly distrust that too-rapid sense of cleanliness. It compresses complex relations into a bodily reflex, making people take half a step back before they have understood anything. Worse still, it often makes people think that after taking that half step back, the matter is already over.

Perhaps mature cleanliness is not the elimination of all traces, but learning to distinguish. Which things truly harm the body, and which merely injure our imagination of respectability; which boundaries protect vulnerable people, and which only keep vulnerable people outside the door; which stains should be washed away, and which stains are in fact reminding us that the world was not born from a disinfection cabinet.

But this distinction is not stable. It is hard for us to make an accurate judgment every time we frown. The method I can think of is not beautiful, only slower: let the first reaction happen, but do not immediately seal it into truth; let the hands wash themselves, but let the eyes not hurry to see someone as a stain.

The secondhand coat turns round and round in the washing machine. The water grows cloudy, then is drained away. The coat will become easier to accept, and this is good; we do need such procedures. I only hope that after pressing the start button, I can still pause for one more second and think: what exactly did I just want to wash away?

Was it disease, risk, smell, another person’s body, or some kind of adjacency I am unwilling to admit?

The first recoil perhaps cannot be abolished. But the second judgment after the recoil should still be completed by ourselves.