You do not flush the toilet paper in country. Don’t even think about it. This is not a suggestion like back in the old US of A where the placard in the Hooter’s restroom kindly asks that you not flush anything other than toilet paper—no paper towels, tampons, dental floss, Q-tips, cigarettes butts—but you just know you can get away with it. In Vietnam, they mean it. The plumbing can’t take it. Seriously, if you flush the toilet paper, the pipes will clog and the toilet will overflow. This will be particularly unpleasant because the toilet has just been the scene of a gastrointestinal emergency like none you’ve ever lived through before because you’re new in country and are prone to gastrointestinal emergencies precisely ten minutes after eating or drinking coffee. Also, your lovely AirBnB host will become angry and far, far less lovely. The evacuative emergency phase will pass. The unloveliness of your angry AirBnB host whose plumbing you’ve just wreaked havoc on (again) will haunt you forever. 

This information can be a real eyebrow raiser when researching what it’s like in Southeast Asia. At least, it was for me. Because I’ve worked in enough restaurants to know that the young Mexican and Central American guys who bus the tables and wash the dishes and who are new to the States have also learned to not flush the toilet paper and simply put the used paper in the trash. This can be pretty off-putting for the unsuspecting diners who don’t have a handle on cultural relativism and find this practice, when they enter the restroom, gross at best and deeply distressing at worst. I, on the other hand, am a sophisticate. Educated. Enlightened, even. I like to think I have a pretty decent grasp on cultural relativism. Plus, I’m on Prozac. So I found the suggestion that I would also have to engage in this practice slightly less distressing and gross than how I imagine your typical Hooter’s patron finds it.

That was, of course, before I discovered the secret in the Southeast Asian plumbing sauce: the mighty bidet. And by bidet I mean the hose that’s right there next to the toilet that you use to clean yourself after the, frankly, truly pretty awful gastrointestinal emergency that just transpired, that is just like the sprayer attached to your basic-style kitchen sink that you use to rinse vegetables and dishes and sometimes hot spaghetti noodles if you’re the type of heathen who thinks you should rinse your pasta in cold water after cooking rather than tossing it right in with the sauce to bring it just up to al dente before serving. The toilet paper’s there for drying, folding, and placing neatly into the bin next to the toilet for later disposal. 

Sure, performing this operation without getting water all over the floor and the front of your pants, which makes it look like you’ve peed yourself and which you’re gonna have trouble explaining, takes practice. But once you’ve mastered it, I think you too will find the Asian method much more civilized than the barbaric European and American way. Genteel, even. If we ever make it back to real life, I’m definitely installing a Southeast Asian-style bidet in the bathroom at the house. And maybe in some of the other rooms as well for when I’m old and infirm. Just in case. They’re that good. 

A couple weeks into my tour there was a slight bidet malfunction incident I should mention. And so I will. After a tasty street-food lunchtime snack of bánh tôm—a seriously good fried shrimp cake in which the shrimp still has the shell on but which you won’t mind that you dip in a sweet-and-sour fish sauce—and an hour of reading The Things They Carried to brush up on my Vietnam War slang on a bench looking out on Hoàn Kiếm Lake, I decided it was time to hop on a GrabBike, head back to the apartment, hit the head, and enjoy a little early-afternoon bidet action. Gina decided to stay and sweat profusely and read and walk back in a bit. I think she walks to spare the expense of the motorbike. This is one of the few things we disagree about pretty regularly. I think she’s wrong because the expense is, seriously, like a dollar strong American, and when you consider also motorbike, this one turns out to be a no-brainer. 

And so my plan goes perfectly: motorbike shows up within seconds, we cruise uptown with no traffic incident that would put to the test the really ill-fitting green helmet they give you and which I wear proudly on my head like a yarmulke, which is at this point like the bottom of a baby who, weirdly, has had its bottom shaved smooth, my head, that is, up the elevator, into the loo, business done with neither urgency nor distress, and it’s time to enjoy the pièce de résistance. Except that when I go to use the bidet, the sprayer pops spectacularly off of the hose, which sort of whips around in a live firehose that is not being manned by firemen sort of way, and the bidet water sprays me basically all over, my clothing soaked to an extent that would be very difficult to explain, indeed, and now the floor is also flooded with way more water than is typical, and after the Oster Professional Fast Feed Clipper with Adjustable Blade SNAFU I was totally mortified to have to inform our lovely host that I’d flooded the place in a freak bidet accident that, as she very graciously put it, “Can happen to any one at any time.”