MĚI GUÓ CÈ SUǑ

After gradated from high school in Canada, I entered the United States for the first time in the summer of 2021 via the Detroit land border. The first culture shock I had in this country is that American people cannot understand the term “washroom”. Later I found out that “washroom” is “restroom” in the United States, which I thought it is a terrible yet funny term to refer to the place where humans handle their waste. Washroom, as the Canadian euphemism for referring to the location where people expect a toilet and a washbasin, did a reasonable job in interpreting the location, since people do oftentimes wash their hands in the washroom. Restroom, on the other hand, is an awful euphemism which creates nothing but confusion for non-Americans, since people rarely “rest” in the restroom and they would not think about the restroom when they need a place to rest.

Whether in Vancouver on the west coast or in St. John's, the easternmost city on the North American continent, Canadian reach the consensus to use the term washroom in four different time zone. The 8890 km land border between Canada and the United States, the longest international border on the planet, not only separates two nations from one another but also separates the unit we use, the currency we carry, the language we speak and fundamentally, the culture we have.

It took me two weeks to drive from Detroit to my new settlement, the state of California. I saw different terrain, ate different foods, and I heard different accents along the way; But one thing remains unchanged: the restroom. The restroom in gas stations, restaurants and motels that spread over thousands of kilometres were strikingly similar. The restroom or washroom, they are more than simply the place where mankind disposes their waste, they represent the culture outside of it; The way building and places are constructed, the way that people utilize different way of transportation and how people value development in a specific location, yet it is the one of the essential parts of American’s modern life but people rarely remember it and oftentimes overlooked this part of their culture.

MĚI GUÓ CÈ SUǑ(美国厕所）， the title of this project means washroom/restroom of the United States. MĚI GUÓ (美国）means the US in abbreviated form in Chinese, and it is how people usually refer to this country. There are many different ways of referring to washroom/restroom in casual settings in Chinese, but there is only one formal name for washroom/restroom, CÈ SUǑ(厕所). When putting 美国厕所 into the translation app, the result will be “American toilet”. The translation makes the title worth discussing; First, neither Canadian nor American use the term “toilet”, a term that originated from the French word toilette, to refer to the location. Second, when using “American” as an adjective, it not only means relating to or characteristic of the United States or its inhabitants, but it also means relating to or denoting the continent of America. Albeit the United States of America is the third largest nation on the planet, it does not represent the entirety of America. America is more than the United States. There are 57 countries in North America and South America. There are many different ways of referring to this place in English-speaking countries either casually or formally, within North America or outside of North America, therefore the title of the project can be translated differently according to where the audience is from.

I started MĚI GUÓ CÈ SUǑ at the end of 2021, where I photographed every CÈ SUǑ as I possibly could. As of the end of 2022, I have hundreds of photos of CÈ SUǑ in 18 states in the United States, 5 provinces in Canada, and the French territories of Saint Pierre and Miquelon which have a border with Canada. The most photo that I took outside of California were taken during my transcontinental road trip in the summer of 2022.