Domestic Spaces in Post-Mao China

Unconventional, creative, and highly original, Wang Min’an’s work centers on

the assemblage of household machines that create the space of contemporary
domesticity. It offers pathways to a new understanding of how the sudden
commodification of domestic space in China beginning in the late 1980s has
transformed Chinese domestic life beyond recognition. In terms of modern urban
Chinese family life, people do not just move into new apartments; they move into
new modes of living which involve new ways of relating to the world. Wang’s
discussion on the reconstitution of Chinese domestic life – its founding moral,
aesthetic, and political values – is tremendously useful and enlightening.
In these essays, the author stages a Latourian collapse of subject and object in
adopting the point of view of both human and non-human actants. This volume
brings a new sensibility to bear on objects of modern everyday life. This work
is not a “China book,” but rather a work marked profoundly by China. Wang
experiments with the applicability of “theory” to what might be thought of as
a transcultural common life embedded in mundane technologies. The book is
particularly concerned with rescuing everyday materiality and bodily life from
the numb obscurity to which things have been relegated by modern consumerism
and bourgeois hygiene.
This book is not an oddity from the mysterious East; it is a playful experiment
in writing from a unique scholar, a leading thinker and theorist in the humanities
in China, and will be of interest to scholars and students of East Asian, particularly
Chinese, political and domestic studies.

Wang Min’an is a Professor in the School of Literature at Capital Normal

University, Beijing, China. He is a leading thinker and theorist in the humanities
in China.
Postcolonial Politics
Edited by Pal Ahluwalia
University of South Australia
Michael Dutton, Goldsmiths
University of London
Leela Gandhi
University of Chicago
Sanjay Seth, Goldsmiths
University of London

For a full list of titles please see:

www.routledge.com/Postcolonial-Politics/book-series/PP

‘Postcolonial Politics’ is a series that publishes books that lie at the intersection of
politics and postcolonial theory. That point of intersection once barely existed; its
recent emergence is enabled, first, because a new form of ‘politics’ is beginning
to make its appearance. Intellectual concerns that began life as a (yet unnamed)
set of theoretical interventions from scholars largely working within the ‘New
Humanities’ have now begun to migrate into the realm of politics. The result is
politics with a difference, with a concern for the everyday, the ephemeral, the ser-
endipitous and the unworldly. Second, postcolonial theory has raised a new set of
concerns in relation to understandings of the non-West. At first these concerns and
these questions found their home in literary studies, but they were also, always,
political. Edward Said’s binary of ‘Europe and its other’ introduced us to a ‘style
of thought’ that was as much political as it was cultural as much about the politics
of knowledge as the production of knowledge, and as much about life on the street
as about a philosophy of being, A new, broader and more reflexive understand-
ing of politics, and a new style of thinking about the non-Western world, make it
possible to ‘think’ politics through postcolonial theory, and to ‘do’ postcolonial
theory in a fashion which picks up on its political implications.
Postcolonial Politics attempts to pick up on these myriad trails and disruptive
practices. The series aims to help us read culture politically, read ‘difference’ con-
cretely, and to problematise our ideas of the modern, the rational and the scientific
by working at the margins of a knowledge system that is still logocentric and
Eurocentric. This is where a postcolonial politics hopes to offer new and fresh
visions of both the postcolonial and the political.
Subseries: Writing Past Colonialism
The Institute of Postcolonial Studies (IPCS)
Edited by Phillip Darby
University of Melbourne

Writing Past Colonialism is the signature series of the Institute of Postcolonial

Studies, based in Melbourne, Australia. By postcolonialism we understand modes
of writing and artistic production that critically engage with the ideological legacy
and continuing practices of colonialism, and provoke debate about the processes
of globalisation. The series is committed to publishing works that break fresh
ground in postcolonial studies and seek to make a difference both in the academy
and outside it. By way of illustration, our schedule includes books that address:

• grounded issues such as nature and the environment, activist politics and indig-
enous peoples’ struggles
• cultural writing that pays attention to the politics of literary forms
• experimental approaches that produce new postcolonial imaginaries by bring-
ing together different forms of documentation or combinations of theory, per-
formance and practice

7 From International Relations to Relations International (IPCS)

Postcolonial Essays
Edited by Phillip Darby

8 Gender, Orientalism, and the ‘War on Terror’

Representation, Discourse, and Intervention in Global Politics
Maryam Khalid

9 Multicultural Politics of Recognition and Postcolonial

Citizenship
Rethinking the Nation
Rachel Busbridge

10 Japanese Poetry and its Publics

From Colonial Taiwan to 3.11
Dean Anthony Brink

11 Domestic Spaces in Post-Mao China

On Electronic Household Appliances
Wang Min’an
Domestic Spaces in Post-Mao
China
On Electronic Household Appliances

Wang Min’an
Translated by Shaobo Xie
First published in English 2018
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
and by Routledge
711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2018 Wang Min’an
Translated by Shaobo Xie
Published in Chinese by Henan University Press 2015
The right of Wang Min’an to be identified as author of this work has been
asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright,
Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or
utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now
known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in
any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing
from the publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or
registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation
without intent to infringe.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Wang, Min’an, 1969– author.
Title: Domestic spaces in post-Mao China : on electronic household
appliances / Min’an Wang ; translated by Shaobo Xie.
Other titles: Lun jia yong dian qi. English
Description: Abingdon, Oxon ; New York, NY : Routledge, 2018. | Series:
Postcolonial politics | “Published in Chinese by Henan University Press
2015.” | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2017039887 | ISBN 9780415784856 (hardback) | ISBN
9781315228372 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Families—China, | Domestic space—China. |
Domestication of technology—China. | Household appliances—Social
aspects—China. | China—Social conditions—2000–
Classification: LCC HQ684 .W33713 2018 | DDC 306.850951—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017039887
ISBN: 978-0-415-78485-6 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-315-22837-2 (ebk)

Typeset in Times New Roman

by Apex CoVantage, LLC
Contents

Preface: the postcolonial and the political in Wang Min’an

by Michael Dutton and Pal Ahluwalia ix

1 Washing machine 1

2 Refrigerator 13

3 Radio 25

4 Television 35

5 Cellphone 49

6 Computer 57

7 Electric light 71

8 Contemporary household spatial production 82

9 Postscript 92

References 95
Index 97
Preface
The postcolonial and the political
in Wang Min’an1

When this book was first submitted to the Routledge book series, Postcolonial
Politics, eyebrows were raised. After all, what could possibly be postcolonial
or, indeed, even political, about a book that uses Western postmodern theory to
ruminate upon a largely contemporary cultural studies topic – namely, modern
household electrical appliances? That postmodernism, cultural studies, and post-
colonialism share a close affinity is beyond doubt. Indeed, together (along with
gender and queer studies) they aided the “cultural turn” in the “New Humanities,”
helped it “jump species” to “infect” a similar turn in the social sciences,2 and
extended questions of inequality beyond class into gender, race, language, and
power relations. These three fields clearly share common ground. This, however,
is insufficient grounds upon which to claim that Wang Min’an’s work, with its cul-
tural studies focus and its postmodern theory, is postcolonial. While this kinship
is important, it is the groundedness of this study which makes this postcolonial.
It is Wang’s theoretical approach, set to work in a non-Western “site,” that
grounds the postcolonial in this work. It is a notion of site specificity or ground-
edness that is of more importance than merely area or place. Groundedness is not
just about location but about the intellectual, cultural, and unconscious baggage
that comes with it. It is this particular style of thought that Wang unconsciously
carries into his engagement with postmodern and cultural studies theory that pro-
pels it into a postcolonial knowledge encounter.
If Wang’s close reading of Chinese urban life through a postmodernist lens
opens onto a style of thought that tilts Edward Said’s epistemological and onto-
logical divide (“Europe and its other”) eastward, it is his focusing on everyday
technologies of the household that leads him to circle around and create the same
type of “knowledge effects” Gayatri Spivak says Subaltern Studies scholars pro-
duced when they attempted to capture the everyday. Wang’s work, therefore,
unconsciously veers in a postcolonial direction, pushing cultural studies and post-
modernism toward their logocentric limits. The particular tilt that Wang effects in
his approach to Western theoretical approaches comes out of the prose.
Without uttering a word, Wang frames postmodern and cultural studies theory
through the spirit of a prose style that opens onto the poetic and offers a unique
form of rumination upon that demotic “flash of the new” that suddenly appeared
in modern Chinese households as they abandoned Maoism and embraced the
x Preface
market. Reflective, creative, opinionated, and humorous, Wang uses the objects
within the modern Chinese apartment to fashion his own thoughts and reflections
upon the world around him. This style of writing carries within it the spirit of
a Chinese literary form known, in Chinese, as xiaopinwen (小品文) or xiaopin
literature.3
Xiaopinwen was a form of prose pioneered in the latter part of the Ming
dynasty by wealthy literati connoisseurs reflecting upon the way things ought to
be.4 Offering commentary and emotion, argument and opinion, xiaopinwen was
a style of writing often compared to the European essayist tradition of Michel de
Montaigne. With their flights of fancy, their whimsical, imaginative, yet thought
provoking prose, their anecdotes and allusions, their free associations and jux-
tapositions, not to mention their short essay form, these two genres did indeed
share much in common. While this might have made both xiaopinwen and Mon-
taigne biographies of the mind,5 they tell of two very differently minded styles of
thought at work.
Li Shiqiao highlights this difference when he contrasts the introspective per-
sonal essays of the Ming dynasty xiaopin writer, Wen Zhenheng, in his (1615–20)
Treatise on Superfluous Things (Zhangwuzhi《长物志》) with the very public
and highly moralizing tone of the European essayists.6 Introspective and amoral,
Wen’s Treatise, much like Wang Min’an’s book, casts no moral judgement upon
things but merely assumes or asserts them to be that way; it does not speak Truth,
only touches lightly upon it in its moments of reflection.
The reflections of both Wen and Wang are guided by the world around them
and the material things that order their worlds. For Wen, a wealthy Ming dynasty
connoisseur, the world around him was one requiring distinctions to be made in
all things. As the arbiter of good taste, his work ordered various aesthetic distinc-
tions to be made in terms of house and dwelling, flowers and trees, water and
stone, fish and fowl, chairs, beds, and utensils.7 It was upon these things and their
place within his world that Wen’s work unfolds.
Wang Min’an’s world is, of course, very different. His is not the world of
the connoisseur but that of the technician. His is a world filled with washing
machines, refrigerators, cellphones, and computers. It is a world of circuits and
charges, of speed and utility, it is of lines of flight that can turn into flights of
fancy. It is also a world in which the disciplining of the body takes on a more
mechanical form. To steal a line from Michel Foucault, the “axis of individuation”
is turned on its head.8
With Wang’s work, the Ming and Qing dynasty era Chinese connoisseur’s
reflection upon the vulgarity or purity of things gives way to a set of theoreti-
cally charged reflections upon contemporary appliances and how they contour
our daily urban existence. Theoretically, it is driven from the shadows by figures
from the heterological side of the Western canon – Nietszche, Bataille, Harroway,
Butler, Foucault, Benjamin, Deleuze, to name but a few – who are only rarely
named. Even more deeply buried is the spirit of xiaopin prose that is more than a
style of writing but as we have suggested, a style of thought. It is a style of thought
that blends the poetic and the realist, but in Wang’s hands, it threads these themes
 Preface xi
through postmodern and cultural theory to weave a tapestry of thought on contem-
porary urban domestic life through the life of the machine.
With each chapter, however, one must connect the dots, and as these dots are
connected, a picture of China’s urban biopolitical world begins to emerge through
the domestic electronic devices that produce sensory and ontological changes in
the human subject. Television sets create a static spatial relationship between sub-
ject, screen, and couch, while radio allows movement but creates a relationship
between ear and sound. Washing machines establish a domestic rhythm while the
light bulb directs the glow. In building up these sorts of connections, Wang forces
us to focus on these objects, and in so doing, he “reanimates” them. They are
brought into focus not as utensils, but as provocations to thought and a question
to ourselves. There are no grand truths revealed, no dragons slain, no conclusions
drawn, only the continuous self-generated demand to comment upon, to take issue
with, or get annoyed by a series of assertions. Slowly, as the work gains momen-
tum, one begins to connect the dots between each essay, to piece together argu-
ments that flow into one another, and to follow Wang’s path into another way of
seeing. Slowly, our mind’s-eye turns to view these everyday appliances as micro-
level machines enabling a particular form of domestication and the concomitant
transformation of everyday life.
Through the warp and woof of Wang’s prose, one catches glimpses of the
everyday, offered not as dense ethnographic descriptions, but as reflections upon
the practices, uses, and relations machines have created between one another and
with the human subject. Weaving his way from one household object onto the
next, Wang builds up a picture of the way everyday life intersects and interacts
with these material objects. Each chapter adds another point of intersection or
alignment as each chapter focuses on a different object: the washing machine,
the refrigerator, the computer, the air conditioner, and so forth. As these lines of
flight build into webs of understanding, an image of Chinese urban domesticity
does begin to appear. Wang, however, barely touches upon this, leaving it to what
he calls his afterword.
It was also only in the afterword that Wang explained why he had come to
reflect upon and research everyday domestic appliances. It was quite simple, he
tells us, it was because he spent a lot of time at home!9 While working in his
contemporary apartment, Wang began to notice the plethora of devices that had
come to control the environment around him. Electrical devices now controlled
the temperature in each room of his apartment, they refrigerated and thereby elon-
gated the life of the plants and animals he desired to eat, and through a range of
communication devices, they networked his domestic life-space, rhizome-like,
into the lives of those who lived outside his “world.” His reflections, then, are
about the broader “functioning” of these machines in relation to senses of touch,
smell, taste, sight, and sound; they are about the way these machines harness, dis-
cipline, and orientate the disposition of lives. These are reflections from within a
Benjaminesque “shock effect” because for Wang and the Chinese population who
lived through the Maoist years and into the rapid and monumental changes that
followed, these domestic appliances were, indeed, signs of the shock of the new.
xii Preface
One may not always agree with Wang Min’an’s readings, his flights of fancy, or
his opinions. Nevertheless, what can be said is that in the particular way he redirects
the gaze toward the subject-machine relation, he offers a freshness and novelty to
the topic that cannot be ignored. Who would have thought, for instance, of freezer
storage being like a dam of water, in so far as it stores and elongates the life of meat
and vegetables? Who would have thought of washing machines through their very
utility actually carving onto the surface of everyday life their own patterning or
rhythm; that the theatre of clothes, from dirty to clean, would take place on a stage
behind the glass door of the front-end loader. Here are just some of the reflections
from left field, enabled partly, I suspect, because they come out of the field of China.
Any book, Paul de Man once said, is always in part autobiographical,10 and
while Wang Min’an does not mention this, he lived through the tumultuous 80s
and 90s of the economic reform period in China. In this period in China’s large
cities, household appliances began appearing almost overnight in shops that were
themselves becoming malls. In terms of modern urban Chinese family life, people
didn’t just move into new apartments, they moved into a new mode of life that
involved satiating new material desires.
People’s attitude to “things” was changing. In the early 80s, Chinese people
would speak of their desire for the “three wheels” or sanlun (三轮) – to own a
bicycle, a sewing machine, and a watch. By the end of the 80s, the expression of
such modest desires had become a joke, and by the 90s, commodity desire had
pretty much saturated all aspects of life. This social change goes largely assumed
in Wang’s text, for he does not explain how this transformation took place, nor
offer the detail of an historical explanation. Instead, what this text offers is some-
thing far more imaginative, creative, and theoretically interesting. He offers path-
ways to a new understanding of the relationship between household goods and the
disciplining of the body. Here, one can note a Foucauldian influence in Wang’s
work, but this is not the Foucault who traces the management of populations into
liberal and neoliberal governmentality but the Foucault who follows a line of
flight from the disciplining of bodies into the biopolitical technologies of the
everyday. It is a reading of Foucault inflected by Deleuzian control society, and a
Benjaminesque moment of awakening.
It is in that moment of awakening that the aura of the appliances Wang exam-
ines seems to glow ever more brightly. This is because Wang, who lived through
the transition from Maoism to market, knows all too well just how magical these
machines were in transforming everyday life in China. To jump, in just over a
decade, from calculations undertaken on an abacus to the use of the computer,
from exerting labor on a washer board over a basin to pressing a button on an
automatic front-end loader, or to pick up a cellphone rather than struggle on a
public landline system that didn’t properly work, is to jump worlds. Little wonder
then, that these sort of transformations of domestic space had a profound effect
upon urban Chinese family values.
The domestic space, writes Wang, has always been a precondition of family
life in any understanding of family ethics, yet it has, historically, however, only
ever been considered a “subsidiary framework.” Not anymore! From the early
 Preface xiii
1990s onwards, as the boom in big city development gained white hot momen-
tum, domestic space was suddenly transformed into commercialized space. As
Wang puts it, space became a commodity that individuals could actually occupy.
It was a space that was no longer a subsidiary framework to domestic familial
ethical production, but rather a “space” that produced its own ethical comport-
ment. With the structural relations between domestic space and family ethics
turned on its head, new types of relations came to dominate the home. The old
blood-based ethical relations that had once monopolized the family household
domain gave way to the effects of new technology, which, Wang argues, became
“the biggest consideration of family and life” (189).
As passwords replaced watchwords; as mechanical items were replaced by
digital ones; as a coded set of movements, buttons, instructions, rhythms, sounds,
and visions became the habits of the everyday, they reinforced daily, hourly, and
by the minute the remorseless use of appliances within a new modern form of
family “enclosure.”
This then, is not a “China book,” but rather a work marked by China but drawn
on a broader canvas. It is site-specific rather than area studies, it is a work of postco-
lonial politics, not a book about postcolonial politics. It brings to existing Western
debates new ways of seeing and knowing. It speaks to debates about material objects
that in social theory can be traced through Ernst Simmel to Siegfried Kracauer, and
on to Bruno Latour’s Actor network theory, (ANT) and to Graham Harman and
OOO (Object-Oriented Ontology). It speaks to certain art practices too. Critical spa-
tial practice, for example, requires process-based, site-specific approaches that also
struggle to define subject object relations. It speaks to semiotics – from Barthes to
Baudrillard – but most importantly, it speaks to all these debates in a foreign tongue.
In other words, this is a book of postcolonial politics that speaks to postmodern
and cultural studies theory in a new, different, and refreshing way. It is a work that
speaks of the Chinese world but not to it. It speaks of that world in a way that allows
us to catch a glimpse of our (Western, or Western-trained) selves. This is because
the technological transformation of the Chinese urban space is not dissimilar to that
which took place in the West, it is just that in China, it was done in the blink of an eye.
What, then, is not postcolonial or political about a book that offers a radically
different reading on the everyday based on a radically different way of interpo-
lating Western theory? What is not postcolonial about a work that takes theories
drawn from the (anti-canonical parts of the) Western canon, forms them through
an engagement with non-Western modes of writing, and then delivers reflections
on our state of being in the transition into the modern?
Michael Dutton and Pal Ahluwalia

Notes
1 We would like to thank Professors Li Shiqiao and Professor Judith Farquhar for shar-
ing their thoughts on Wang Min’an’s work with us.
2 In terms of the social sciences, think of the so-called “aesthetic turn” in International
Relations theory (Bleiker), or the “Legal Orientalism” buried within legal transfer
xiv Preface
theory (Ruscola), or even this series (Postcolonial Politics) as evidence of the spread
of these questions of a “cultural turn” beyond the borders of the humanities. On the
aesthetic turn, see Roland Bleiker (2001), “The Aesthetic Turn in International Politi-
cal Theory,” Millennium, Journal of International Studies, December, 509–533. On
Legal Orientalism, see Teemu Ruscola (2013), Legal Orientalism, Harvard University
Press.
3 On the cover of the Chinese edition of this book, the publishers classified this as being
suibisanwen (随笔散文), which is an informal style of writing that falls within xiaop-
ing literature.
4 Craig Clunas (1991), Superfluous Things: Material Culture and Social Status in Early
Modern China, Politics Press, Cambridge, 53. Clunas’ work is the seminal English
language work on this ancient tome.
5 Jane Kramer says this about Montaigne, but the argument can equally be extended to
the xiaopin literary tradition. See Jane Kramer (2009) “Me, Myself, and I: What made
Michel de Montaigne the first modern man.” The New Yorker. September 7, @ http://
www.newyorker.com/magazine/2009/09/07/me-myself-and-i 14 August, 2017.
6 Li accounts for this by contrasting the manners promoted by the Europeans in the
cultivation of social status with the social status the Chinese elite gained through the
imperial examination system. Where one demanded public and performative acts, Li
says, the other was scholarly and private. See Li Shiqiao (2014), Understanding the
Chinese City, Sage, London, 61–2.
7 These themes constitute some of the key chapters in his book Treatise on Superfluous
Things Zhangwuzhi《长物志》.
8 See Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (New York,
1979), especially pp. 192–93.
9 Basically it was because, like Wen Zhenheng, Wang Min’an spent a lot of time at
home. As a member of the scholar gentry class with significant wealth, Wen could
afford to stay at home. To write about the things around him, therefore, meant to item-
ize things in an elite home. For details of his life, see Craig Clunas (1992?), 20–5.
For his part, Wang Min’an claims it was the exploitation of one of the key privileges
of academic life that led him to material objects. “Actually, the reason I wrote this little
book is very simple: I spend most of my time at home (this is an advantage of being a
university professor).” 132.
10 Paul de Man (1984), The Rhetoric of Romanticism, Columbia University Press, New
York, 1984, 70.
1 Washing machine

1
There are a variety of modes of circulation and reproduction in a domestic space.
New things are constantly brought in while unneeded articles are regularly taken
away. A home’s interior is constantly redecorated, rearranged, and recoded. Fresh
air keeps coming in to replace stale air. To keep a household in good condition, it
is necessary to ensure that things are stable and clean, hence the need for constant
recycling and circulation, which explains why the home space can always look
new and orderly. One fundamental difference between the modern and the ancient
domestic space is that the rate of circulation in the modern home is much faster,
due to the considerably increased capacity of a family to produce waste, so it is an
increasingly important part of housekeeping to efficiently remove garbage. The
law of circulation in the domestic space applies not only to material objects and
air, but to family members as well: after the husband or wife leaves the family, a
new husband or wife will appear in its midst; when an elderly person dies, leaving
his or her dear ones in deep sorrow, a baby is born into the family, greeted with
joy and thankfulness. A household unable to maintain its stability would fail to
function well. This is one major reason for ensuring good domestic circulation.
The structure of the modern home is characterized by an increasing diversity
of circulation technology and methods. Apart from the doors and windows, it has
plenty of pipes installed in it, which connect the inside with the outside. Unlike its
ancient counterparts, the modern home is full of holes, increasingly resembling
a “broken” home, an open place, one with penetrated walls. These holes lead to
the channels running from one home to another to pass out their waste. Nowa-
days garbage is no longer carried out through doors but through these hidden
pipes, and this is how the garbage of a household miraculously becomes invisible.
Moreover, modern homes are closely interconnected and serve as one another’s
passageways. With more entrances and exits than in ancient times, the modern
home is maintained by more advanced exchange and circulation technology. It
has flues and water pipes as well as toilet drain pipes and air-conditioning ducts.
Of course there are water inlet and outlet pipes for the washing machine as well.
Families living in high rises are strangers to one another, but they are mysteri-
ously integrated into a whole from top to bottom, connected by water passing
2 Washing machine
every home through drainage pipes, and by their shared drainage passageways. In
this sense, these families are not unrelated though they never meet. The concept
of neighbor has been rewritten, for what makes people recognize each other as
neighbors are no longer familiar faces, but those interconnecting pipes and pas-
sageways. Neighbors become aware of one another’s presence only when their
shared pipes are clogged. This is how modern families become an interconnected
whole through their shared invisible pipes, which echo the symphony of everyday
life in the high rises.
A washing machine, surrounded by these pipes, depends on them to do its work.
Cleaning is an ancient method of circulation, but the washing machine assembled
with pipes pushes the technology of domestic cleaning – or the technology of
circulation – to a new stage. Now laundry cleaning can be completed in the laun-
dry room at home with no external aid. A family needs to do cleaning on a regular
basis, for it is an important part of domestic reproduction. Actually, every area of a
home, every part that contributes to its overall spatial arrangement, needs regular
cleaning. The floors, the furniture, the clothes, and the people themselves ought
to be constantly cleaned – this is an important part of modern society’s consen-
sus based on its knowledge of bacteria and their devastating effects. Ventilation
and cleaning are two primary ways to keep the home environment healthy and
hygienic. In a sense, a home can be taken as a circulatory cleaning machine. The
washing machine aims to guarantee the efficiency of home cleaning. Every day,
large amounts of water flow in and out of every home through those crisscross
pipes, flushing out all the bacteria, viruses, and all forms of dirt. Cleaning seeks
to ensure purity. A household engages in regular cleaning over and over again, and
in the name of hygiene makes an effort to purge itself of dirt, just as efforts have
been made, in the name of class struggle, or for the sake of racial purity, to purge
a nation of its unneeded elements; though what is used in this kind of purging is
not water but a butcher’s knife. These two otherwise different kinds of purge serve
the same purpose: they are both intended to eliminate dirt or viruses to safeguard
cleanness, be it of a home or a nation.
If cleaning is an ancient function of water, then cleaning by way of pipes is
a modern method of circulation. Structurally speaking, the washing machine is
an essential element of the modern family. Modern residential designing always
imagines the washing machine as a spatial object, which occurs in the mind of an
architect as a small square box. Furthermore, it adds to the social meaning of the
modern home: like the refrigerator and television, the washing machine used to be
regarded as one of the central necessities for the home of a newly married couple –
a home without a washing machine is incomplete or considered to be less than
perfect and normal. However, in spite of such importance, the washing machine
never attracts as much attention as the TV, and unlike the latter, it is usually placed
in an inconspicuous corner in the home, as if it did not exist at all. As compared
with other domestic appliances, the washing machine has no demand for its loca-
tion and always allows itself to be spatially marginalized. People do not like put-
ting the washing machine in a prominent place, and always hide it as much as they
can, setting it up in a corner of the hometo ensure every space in it is maximized.
 Washing machine 3
The washing machine is not an object rich in symbolic value. The size of a televi-
sion and the capacity of a refrigerator are both an index of their functions and a
pointer to their sign value. Or, we can say, their use value is reflected through their
sign value. The quality of a washing machine, however, is hard to determine by
the eyes. It arouses no desires for sign value in the eyes. People do not care about
its sign value – instead, they only care about its functions, or about whether it is of
the single cylinder or double cylinder type, whether it is automatic, or whether it
has a drying function, whether it is able to get rid of germs, or whether it saves on
electricity – in a word, efficiency is the only consideration in selecting a washing
machine. As the washing machine is devoid of sign value, its appearance never
strikes people as a concern (generally, household appliances do not have much
sign value), and therefore the only requirement for its placement is a spot in the
home where it can be assembled with a special type of pipe. Unlike other domes-
tic facilities which only need to be connected to the power supply, the washing
machine needs to be installed with a pipe as well, which, hidden in the wall, seems
to be of an infinitely prolonged length. The pipe is not external to the washing
machine, but an integral part of it. One can also say that the washing machine is
grafted onto the pipe. In this sense it does not constitute a complete system until it
is connected to a passageway. This is how its placement is both flexible and rigid,
both casual and strict. The television is located in the living room; the refrigerator
is placed in or close to the kitchen; the air conditioner is always mounted on the
wall. All of them follow their own spatial order. But the washing machine, on the
contrary, can be placed in any hidden corner as long as it is easy to connect it to a
pipe. Its location is not determined by the user’s sense of convenience, but by the
household’s spatial structure. It only follows the grammar of assemblage, and has
no need for the grammar of spatial configuration. Indeed, there is no rule on where
to place the washing machine (it can be located in the balcony, in the kitchen, or in
the washing room, or even in the living room), such that an intruder in a stranger’s
home cannot easily find it. The washing machine is so unworthy of attention, but
nonetheless it is regarded as indispensable to every home.

2
People never show any interest in their washing machine at all. It never comes
into their view when it is not operating. A mere working apparatus, the washing
machine has an even frequency rate of work, and follows its own stable rhythm.
People select their preferred TV channels in accord with the program timetable,
their own mood, and their daily schedule. As for the air conditioner and electrical
fans, whether or when they are used depends on seasons and temperatures. The
washing machine, however, does its job continuously at regular intervals regard-
less of people’s rhythm of life. Our varying rhythm of life makes it necessary
for us to make choices. We may give up cooking or television, but we cannot
afford not to wash clothes. So the washing machine, following its own autono-
mous rhythm of work, discloses a stable aspect of life – it never ceases to work on
a regular basis, not even in a time of political unrest.
4 Washing machine
The washing machine has its own unique style of operation. Repetition is the
law governing all domestic appliances. The refrigerator maintains an unchang-
ing temperature, and, when exceeding the set temperature, it will bounce back
to its regular temperature. Air conditioners and electrical fans will keep blow-
ing air back and forth rhythmically. But the way the washing machine operates
points to a complicated narrative: it has a beginning, a development, a climax,
and a conclusion. That is, its process of operation is one of variations and differ-
ences. Like a story, it has ups and downs, its sound varying in rhythm: it alternates
between the lilting sound of water flowing, the intermittent buzzing noise, and the
quickly reverberating rumbling sound until finally there comes a sudden halt with
a warning signal. These sounds not only keep changing but also occur at regular
intervals – they are by no means monotonous, and can even be categorized as
music. Every kind of sound signals a different development of the narrative – the
influx of water, washing, rinsing, and spinning, and again, the influx of water,
washing, rinsing, and spinning, and then drying, as if the varying sounds have
been telling a legend of a destiny, and as if there were a drama going on in the
square box. Of course, the box closely guards the ups and downs of the narra-
tive process of washing. The drama is not to be watched but heard.1 The sounds
expressively represent what is going on in the box, externalizing the internal nar-
rative. This is a perfect phonetic combination of sound and signification, an exem-
plary case of appearance matched by meaning.
Of course, people are not interested in the internal movement of the wash-
ing machine, nor do they bother about how it operates. They only care to throw
clothes into it, press buttons, and wait till the job is done to get a shapeless mass
of clothes out of the box. Ironically, the washing machine’s entire working pro-
cess is ignored, as if the process did not exist, as if the clothes became cleaned by
themselves, although the machine’s noisy sounds have been energetically telling
its story of labor, speaking loudly of its own existence. The washing machine’s
working process is none of its owner’s concerns; actually they find its noise irri-
tating and always keep a distance from it, trying to shut it out with a closed door.
What the washing machine does and what human beings do belong to two entirely
different domains of work; the farther they stay from each other, the better. The
washing machine is a mere working apparatus. Of the different types of machines
that humankind has invented, some are used to handle things, some to handle
people. Washing machine and refrigerator are used to deal with people’s daily’s
needs and are therefore working machines; television and radio are employed to
deal with people and are therefore counted as entertainment machines. There is
another kind of machine which is used to serve people by way of dealing with
things. Air conditioners and electrical fans belong to this category. They handle
the air to satisfy people’s needs. Machines that deal with people require people’s
presence and their investment of time; as for machines that deal with things, some
need people’s presence and their investment of time (like a vacuum cleaner), and
some don’t. Machines that work of their own accord requiring no human assistance
testify to the rule of automatism. As an automatic apparatus, the washing machine
not only drives people out of its own territory, but pushes them completely out
 Washing machine 5
of this ancient domain of daily activity. More exactly, washing machines relieved
women from the painful task of washing clothes by hand.

3
Almost everyone believes that the invention of the washing machine signals an
important aspect of women’s liberation. It spells women’s release from a major
part of domestic drudgery, removing the necessary connection between women
and laundry washing, freeing them from the habitual posture of bending their bod-
ies low to wash. Just as Donna Haraway has noted, “Up till now (once upon a
time), female embodiment seemed to be given, organic, necessary; and female
embodiment seemed to mean skill in mothering and its metaphoric extensions”
(2004: 38). One can say that the washing machine has destroyed the conventional
image of the female, and washing clothes is no longer connected with a fixed
image, or is no longer associated with a certain female posture. Gone forever is
the portrait of a woman who, sitting on a low stool in front of a wooden basin
filled with water and a load of clothes, her head bent low, keeps rubbing clothes
hard with both hands, her back moving up and down. This is not only a picture
of a toiling woman, but also a classic cultural image of womanhood. A series of
metaphoric implications are inscribed in this image: women are deeply involved
in domestic tasks, doing tedious and repetitive jobs, their bodies continuously
bent, hands perpetually engaged in manual labor, day in and day out, tolerant and
uncomplaining. The washing machine abolishes the association between clothes
and female labor, eliminating the identity-related symbolic significance implied
in the connection. The advent of the washing machine eventually severs women
from the cultural memory of female suffering and suppression. Actually clothes are
always associated with women, which is not only manifested in the labor process
of laundry cleaning, but also finds expression in clothes shopping as well as in
clothes exhibitions. Clothes constitute the core of many women’s pleasure, while
washing clothes ruins such pleasure. Clothes shopping and clothes washing are
two opposed forms of experience, but the washing machine breaks down the oppo-
sition, rendering clothes a pure, unalloyed, uncompromised pleasure. It enables
women to fully enjoy wearing clothes without having to wash them by hand.
Nothing is as closely gender-related for women as clothes washing. It seems to
be part of what women are born for.2 There is certainly a historical reason for it:
women have for centuries been assigned to engage in all forms of domestic tasks
and the tradition of women looking after laundry is a continuation of the ancient
male and female division of labor. The job of washing clothes, which is done in
the home, demanding more patience and carefulness than physical strength, has
been assigned to women, just like outdoor tasks, violent and risky, fall on the
shoulders of men. Nowadays, many traditional forms of indoor labor are being
taken over by men, or, shared between men and women, such that gender and
spatial boundaries of labor are disappearing – men are found working in kitchens
which were previously women’s exclusive territory. But prior to the invention of
the washing machine, washing laundry (even folding, ironing, and packing up
6 Washing machine
laundry) has been a persistently closed domain, to which no man was admitted.
Why? Perhaps it is because clothes from the very beginning were culturally coded
as gendered articles – it is not only a matter of gendered differences between male
and female clothes; actually, one can say that, in a sense, all clothes are concep-
tualized as feminine. Clothes seem to be intrinsically feminine, as if they possess
a woman’s character traits. The reason clothes have been historically regarded as
feminine was because they, ornamental in nature, are objects for caressing, touch-
ing, and watching; they are tender, light, and soft things, fetish objects. Isn’t there
a correspondence between clothes’ warm softness and women’s warm softness?
The clothes’ softness seems to be an invitation to women and is incompatible
with men: should a man be allowed to touch and rub feminine soft clothes with
his coarse hands? Only women are to be trusted with clothes (including men’s
clothes).
Moreover, clothes and the human body make up a perfect assemblage. They
exist for each other and are interdependent. They are so closely related, such that
clothes, particularly underwear, are regarded as part of the body, or imagined
as its skin, as if anything that has been worn by a person carries his or her per-
sonal smell. Female clothes are derivative marks of the female body instead of
mere textile commodities – even the piece of underwear which, displayed in the
shop window, has had no intimate contact with any female body is no exception.
Besides, clothes carry the smell of the body’s excretions (which is the reason they
need cleaning), hence accentuating the connection between clothes and the human
body. The uncleanness of clothes is equivalent to the uncleanness of the body
wearing them. Our traditional culture has developed a set of taboos on the female
body, which is protected from exposure. As the derivative marks or symbols of
the female body, female clothes are naturally guarded from men’s prying eyes and
rough hands; they have to be handled by women themselves. Indoor cleaning in
general has long been de-gendered, but laundry washing had persistently stayed
within women’s sphere of work till the advent of the washing machine.
Moreover, due to the peculiarly intimate relationship between clothes and the
body, laundry cleaning is the last to have been commercialized, and many people
today still refuse to allow their own clothes to be handled by anyone outside the
family. Even prior to the invention of the washing machine, laundry cleaning was
never really commercialized in China. Clothes were only to be handled within
the household. Despite the fact that washing clothes is so cumbersome, and so
much of it is pure drudgery, it has always been a task limited to the family; to
the female members of the family (or the housemaids). The advent and spread of
washing machines makes people even more reluctant to allow laundry cleaning to
be commercialized. Ironically, the expanding market of washing machines only
manages to prevent laundry cleaning from being commercialized (clothes sent to
commercial public laundries remain limited in amount and kind). While making
and selling clothes has always been a major part of commercial business, wash-
ing clothes remains largely a domestic task and has little to do with commercial
business. The washing machine works efficiently in the home and what it cleans
is no more than one family’s laundry. It does its job following a regular schedule.
 Washing machine 7
The way machines handle clothes and the way women handle them are entirely
different. A woman, before methodically and patiently washing a piece of cloth-
ing, will search it, look it over, determine its category, find out its dirty spots, and
look into every detail of it. To wash a piece of clothing is to explore every part
of it. Clothes reveal their secrets not when they are being worn but when they
are being washed: their pockets are pulled out to be inspected – many secrets
of the pockets are divulged when being washed. This is how an elaborate tax-
onomy of clothes is developed and practiced in the process of washing clothes:
which are classified in terms of inside and outside, part in comparison with part,
outer clothes and underwear, jackets and pants, men’s wear and women’s wear,
children’s wear and adults’ wear, different family members’ wear, etc. Laundry
washing is a moment of reviewing and sorting a family’s clothes. Only the woman
in charge of a household’s laundry is able to acquire the total knowledge of a fam-
ily’s clothing, and only she is able to tell each piece’s history and destiny.
A woman’s spectrum of affectionate feelings for her family is registered by
her experience of their clothes. When rubbing and washing her family members’
clothes, she seems to be touching and caressing their bodies, hence her varying
emotional investment in washing each particular piece of clothing. To be sure, the
act of washing clothes is highly mechanical, but that does not mean the washer
undergoes no subtle and intriguing psychological change – when her hands move
from her mother-in-law’s clothes to her children’s clothes, she undergoes an emo-
tional change from resentment to love. Clothes are hierarchized not only when they
are being worn, but when they are being washed as well. In a woman’s view, the
household’s laundry cleaning has to follow her own coded language, her own order,
and her own nuanced emotional experience. Of course, the washing machine has its
own grammar as well, but it is neutral and shows no emotions for neutral clothes.
The process of laundry washing is a process of depersonalization. The grammar
of the washing machine has nothing to do with its objects, and it never collapses
the boundary between its objects and itself. Rather, it obeys its given grammar of
assemblage, ignoring the difference of clothes: once put into the washing machine,
all kinds of clothes are equal in front of it and are treated indifferently, regardless of
distinctions in price, identity, and gender, and regardless of whether they be worn
inside or outside. When thrown into the washing machine, all the clothes are stirred
into an indifferent mass of matter, rejecting any claim on privilege. The status of the
wearers of the clothes, the sense of propriety, dignity, and ornamental value attached
to them, as well as the sign value of the brand names, all these are ruthlessly shat-
tered by the washing machine. This is the dark underside of clothes.

4
Washing clothes and cooking are usually the two most important types of man-
ual labor in the home. But then why is it that laundry washing can be done by
machines while cooking cannot? Though it is done manually, laundry washing,
unlike other forms of physical work, has never been looked upon as a form of
craftsmanship. It does not belong to the category of art. Few people would say
8 Washing machine
they enjoy doing laundry, or they have expertise in washing clothes. Actually the
practice of washing clothes does not even count as an occupational field. Nor have
we ever heard of anything like masters of laundry washing. As long as what the
hand does requires no artistic skills, it can be performed by the machine. One can
say that machines hold sway where art is absent. What laundry washing involves
is a pair of hands continuously rubbing clothes, reaching into the depths of their
interiority, violently ravaging them. It is certainly not intended to destroy them but
to give them a new look. It may serve to give vent to resentment, or may involve
a moderate degree of violence, or a subtle emotional release, but it demands no
skills and what is required of it is nothing but patient labor of hands. As such, the
task of laundry washing can be easily taken over by the machine. Our hands are
capable of performing various kinds of jobs, and laundry washing is the least cre-
ative and most unskilled task. What the hands do at this moment, having nothing
to do with the brain, is only a result of mechanical reflex responses.
As a matter of fact, whatever involves exquisite and dexterous handwork, and
whatever requires creativity, can be conceptualized as an artistic activity. The
defining feature of art is none other than creativity – here arises the distinction
between machine performance and artistic activity. Of the two primary domestic
domains of manual labor previously mentioned, laundry washing falls more on
the side of mechanical performance, whereas cooking is more of an artistic prac-
tice. Expertise in cooking has to be achieved through training, and that is why
there are numerous culinary schools in the world. Apart from professional cooks
known as chefs, there are a large number of online or TV cooking courses as well.
Culinary art seems to abound in unfathomable secrets, and is an infinite field of
experience, knowledge, and potential worth continuously exploring. Not every-
one finds it easy to command the art. As a specialized field of work performed by
using the tongue and hands, cooking brings the pleasure of creativity. It follows
no unchanging grammar, offering people enough space for fully exercising their
creative imagination, rewarding them with a sense of fulfillment. This is why
many people have a passion for culinary art. During the entire process of cook-
ing a meal, people use all kinds of machines such as rice cookers and microwave
ovens, but some core elements of the process are beyond any machine’s capacity
to handle, for they exclusively depend on talent and creative ingenuity, the hand’s
intuitive ability to determine the perfect amounts of ingredients, and the sensi-
tivity of the tip of the tongue to slight nuances in food. The practice of laundry
washing is an entirely different story. It has never been an art, and what it requires
is simply physical labor. It has no rule to follow, or, more precisely, it only needs
to follow some rigid rule, the rule of repeatedly applying cleaning chemicals onto
clothes, which involves no knowledge and skills. There have never been training
courses on laundry washing – people need to take no training to be able to do it.
With no requirement for imagination and creativity, the task of laundering clothes
can be easily done by machines.
True, machines are gradually replacing human hands in the field of labor, but
what is actually replaced are the functions the hands are reluctant to perform.
The hands have the will to act or not to act. They are involved in so many fields
 Washing machine 9
of work. They are not only the primary human organs for touching the external
world, but the only ones that are able to reach every part of the human body
itself. Highly sensitive, the hand is at once a tool for tedious labor and a source
of pleasure. Its movement is both an instinctual, passive mechanical response and
an act of active creativity. In some situations it integrates labor with pleasure,
seeking pleasure through labor. Sometimes the hand is full of desire; sometimes it
is seized by fear, and sometimes it is extremely excited or completely tired out.
Only when the hand has no desire, or when it is fatigued, or when what it does is
a mere passive response, can machines be used as a substitute for it. On the one
hand, machines are standardized and capable of achieving the level of precision
that the hand is unable to reach no matter how hard it tries; on the other, machines
are extremely mechanical and rigid, unable to display even the minimal degree of
dexterity and creativity of the hand. The machines have no end of stamina, way
more than the hand does, but they are neutral and can never have the hand’s exqui-
site sensitivity – this is one of their fundamental differences, which can be best
illustrated by the example of the washing machine. In the process of laundering
clothes, the hand is not required to be creative and only needs to have stamina; it
is weary and bored. The fatigued hand calls to be replaced by the machine. The
washing machine was invented to provide the kind of standardization, endurable
labor power, and neutrality that the hand is never able to achieve, to deliver the
hand from what it is reluctant to do. The birth of innumerable machines leads to
the liberation of the hand.
However, the distinction between machine and hand does not mean that they
cannot approach each other; rather, it spells a special relationship between them.
Machines’ relationshipwith hands as their replacement attests to their separation,
a distance maintained between them as strangers. Actually there is a more exten-
sive connection between them, for they may form a close relationship of assem-
blage, or of complementarity. They are inseparable from each other – this is a
major form of their relationship. Machine and hand rely on one another, and nei-
ther is complete without the other. When hands are assembled with automobiles,
electrical drills, lathes, cellphones, or with vacuum cleaners, such an assemblage
does not mean the increased power of hands or machines, but the emergence of
something new and difficult to define, the emergence of a new ability, a novel
thing called hand-machine. Moreover, hands are associated with action, and work
is the raison d’être for the existence of hands (people always say, “work with your
hands”). If our hands constitute the condition of possibility of our action, if our
action is usually the action of our hands, then either as a replacement of hands,
or as an assemblage with them, the acting machine always treats the hands as its
object of imagination, and is always born in their view. In the case of the wash-
ing machine, hands are almost the only object of the machine’s imagination: the
washing machine exists to replace hands; it is not a hand, but at the same time,
what it does is no more than what a pair of hands do – washing clothes (only the
artist has the ability to change its function – one of Huang Yongping’s classic art-
works changes the washing machine into an instrument for cleaning books instead
of clothes). In this sense, a machine is not an object external to human beings,
10 Washing machine
or something irrelevant to them; rather, to borrow terms from Bruno Latour, the
machine is a “quasi-object,” or a “quasi-subject,” which deconstructs the binary
opposition between subject and object.

5
The washing machine’s rumbling noise can turn the home into a workshop. There
are many ways of classifying different types of labor: there are, for instance,
domestic labor and labor outside the home. The latter has always been regarded
as of decisive importance, for it is more productive (the progress and operation
of a society seems to depend on it), more formal (there are restrictions, regula-
tions, and rituals for it), more socialized (collaboration among members of a large
group), and more necessary – it is a family’s important financial support. Wages
are measures of labor outside the home as well as the solid, palpable fruits it bears.
Therefore labor has been conventionally thought of as what is done outside the
home, whereas the labor done in the home has been overlooked, for it has none
of these features and benefits. The home has always been imagined as a place of
dreams, warmth, relaxation, and rest, a closed, autonomous space that has noth-
ing to do with labor. The paradox of the modern home is that, in order to turn it
into a non-labor place, it has to be a site of productive labor in the first place.
Domestic labor is intended to give the home an atmosphere of restfulness. As the
modern home constantly expands its housing area, constantly replenishes its stock
of material things, and constantly makes the best use of space, it becomes a site of
productive activity. The greater demand a family has for domestic space, the more
it needs to engage in spatial production. A modern home is not only a place of
rest and recuperation, but a site of production as well. Repetitive domestic labor
transforms the home into a factory, a residential factory. People work hard in this
factory to make it more fit to live in.
There always has to be someone engaged in domestic production. People either
retire from labor in the public space to fully engage in domestic labor in the home
space, or hire someone else to do domestic tasks for them to ensure that they have
time and energy for work outside the home, or, they divide their time between
labor at home and outside, ceaselessly shuttling between the domestic and the
outside space. What the home stages is not a fixed opposition between the space
of rest and that of labor, but their dialectical exchange. It is to serve the needs of
these two types of spaces that various kinds of domestic appliances have been
invented. What the TV and air conditioner create is a space of rest; what is created
by the washing machine and vacuum cleaner is a space of labor; as for the refrig-
erator and microwave oven, their job is to bridge the two opposed spaces. The
washing machine is an instrument of production in this new factory of a home.
It closely resembles the production machine in the classical sense of the term. It
produces noise, efficiently operating and slightly shaking in a domestic corner.
All this turns the home into a traditional workshop.
As the home is an autonomous space, domestic labor, apparently, is nothing
compulsory. Rather, it is highly flexible, and what determines its intensity and
 Washing machine 11
efficiency are the will and habit of the subject of production instead of institu-
tional regulations. Besides, every family member is potentially a subject of
domestic labor. Unlike factory labor, there is no standard for domestic labor, nor
is it definitely rewarded or recognized. As a result, there is always war at home,
always someone complaining or bargaining. Domestic tasks are always the cause
of quarrels in the family, and the home as a workshop or a zone of production
is a site of crisis caused by labor division. Strangely, however, of all forms of
domestic labor, the least controversial is laundry washing, which is regarded as
what women are destined for. Therefore the invention as well as the improvement
of washing machines is good news to women. Today, it is impossible for women
to imagine a life without washing machines. Though it was only a few decades
ago that washing machines began to make their way into modern homes, their
emergence quickly delinked laundry washing from women. However, women’s
emancipation from the task of washing clothes by hand does not afford them time
for rest or recreation. The time women previously spent laundering clothes is now
used for other types of domestic labor.
Indeed, the increasing presence of machines in our life does not bring us more
time on our hands. Our home is saturated with all kinds of machines, but that does
not in the least relieve us of any domestic labor. Perhaps the truth is that machines
create more work for us to do instead of less. Today, the production, consump-
tion, and operation of machinery leave the world exhausted with work. Machines
are doing a great deal of work for mankind, but it has to be carefully attended to.
The birth and disappearance of machines never happens suddenly and quietly
like a ghost. Every machine’s invention, production, and demise involve tens of
thousands of people. Every machine ushers in a large, long chain of production.
Women no longer need to use their hands to wash clothes, but they have to use
them to take care of the washing machine. Machines are autonomous and decide
on their own speed, keeping people running desperately after them. Fundamen-
tally speaking, machines do not liberate our hands; rather, they control them, cre-
ate new jobs for them – except for their basic autonomous behavior, our hands are
assigned to a new task: they have to follow the machines’ action and rhythm of
movement. With automobiles, we no longer need to walk as much but we have to
use our hands much more strenuously. Machines do not reduce our working time,
but require us to turn out more products of labor.
What is gone following the invention of the washing machine is not only the
taxing tedium of laundering clothes by hand, but also the pleasure it used to bring
to women. Decades ago, prior to the advent of washing machines, washing clothes
was women’s major way of socialization, and this was especially true of rural
women. Every day, women walked out and met at the same place at the same time
(usually at the lakeside or riverside) to wash clothes. Clothes floating, flapping,
and tumbling in the water, the merry noises of women’s chattering and giggling
happily joined with the noise of the water. This was the moment when a world
of freedom and autonomy was born for women, freed from their family and men.
This world holds the secrets that are only shared among women. Here and now
washing clothes is not their real concern; what matters is the pleasure of meeting
12 Washing machine
and chatting, which relieves them of the tedium of domestic drudgery. This was
a beautiful cleaning moment, a moment shared among the women obliviously
enjoying themselves. Perhaps, in a certain situation, or during a certain dark phase
of her life, for a woman to get up in the early morning, walking out to the riverside
to share her innermost fears and worries with other women was her heart’s only
ray of hope for the day.

Notes
1 There are two types of washing machines manufactured in China today: the pulsator
washing machine and the tumbling-box washing machine. The top-loading pulsator
washing machine was used in most of the Chinese households in the twentieth century.
It has no glass door and its inside cannot be seen from outside. It is only recently that
the tumbling-box washing machine with a glass door has started becoming popular in
China.
2 Prior to the invention of the washing machine, there were almost no men doing clothes
washing in China.
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