# Being Bottomless Among Strangers



## John S Cheung (Feb 16, 2011)

This is the very first short story I wrote.  Any comments are welcome.  

I was born in 1940 in Hong Kong, a city next to southern China.  It was a small but strategic British colony with a good harbor.  At that time, the 2nd World War was rolling over to this part of Asia.  My first childhood memory was when I was probably 3 years old. By then, the Japanese has joined the German axis in the World War. It continued its invasion of China and had occupied Hong Kong. 

At home when my mother wanted me to defecate, she would often ask me to sit on a spittoon instead occupying the only ceramics fixed toilet in the house. Spittoons were common in old China.  They are enamel-coated steel containers to be placed on the floor for people to spit into, especially their throat phlegm. To me, as this spittoon is mobile, I wouldn't sit still and dragged it around the floor. 

One day, my defecation session on the spittoon was etched in my memory. While I was sitting there bottomless, I was not at home. Standing around me were strangers, mostly adults, and some children. Why? They were neighbors from upstairs and downstairs neighbors from the same four-storey building where we lived.  They were gathering together in a common area at the building's ground floor, to shelter from air raid bombings.

The incident was clearly embarrassing even for a young child.  There I was sitting there bottomless among strangers including children. Thinking back, this must be the reason why even when as an adult, I sometimes have strange embarrassing dreams where I was walking outdoors bottomless. Gosh!


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## Shirley S. Bracken (Feb 16, 2011)

Hi John.  This story would be funny if it weren't for what was going on outside your house.  Were you scared?  I lived in Florida during the Bay of Pigs.  I felt traumatized and there weren't any bombs .


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## John S Cheung (Feb 16, 2011)

I was too young to understand what goes on outside the house.  Normally a child gets influenced by the parents, and my parents were not the dramatic excitable type.


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## Shirley S. Bracken (Feb 16, 2011)

My Dad was volatile so we were traumatized.  I was in the fifth grade during the Cuban thing.  He was building a bomb shelter.  We had bomb drills at school.


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## Gumby (Feb 16, 2011)

That must have been very traumatic for you to remember it so well, and at such a young age. I think that having a dream about walking around naked is a pretty common dream with many people, but for yours to specifically be that you are bottomless really does connect to that early experience.


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## The Backward OX (Feb 16, 2011)

Fascinating story, John, on a number of points.

I too had a defecation experience at around the same age, and during the same international conflict, but it isn't for this site. People here already know too much about me.

Who was doing the bombing by the way? If it was one of the Allies, why would they bomb an occupied city? Paris was never bombed. If it was the Japs, why?


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## John S Cheung (Feb 17, 2011)

The Backward OX said:


> Fascinating story, John, on a number of points.
> 
> I too had a defecation experience at around the same age, and during the same international conflict, but it isn't for this site. People here already know too much about me.
> 
> Who was doing the bombing by the way? If it was one of the Allies, why would they bomb an occupied city? Paris was never bombed. If it was the Japs, why?


Thanks Backward OX.  

About the bombing, see my other thread in this Forum, 'Watching Air Raids over the Hong Kong Harbor'.


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