Dirty Laundry

Friends, I recently read a not-so-inspirational quote that said, “Only worry about what you can control… and spoiler alert: that’s almost nothing.”

What I can’t control (but still worry about): Sunday we were informed of a confirmed case of Covid-19 in our building. The man in question was taken to the hospital via ambulance and tested a few days prior to the alert we received. We share an elevator with him, so most assuredly we occupied the same spaces while he was contagious. Perhaps repeatedly.

Since January 21st, our family has been wearing face masks, self-isolating as much as possible, working from home, attending school from home, practicing both social distancing and increased hygiene, using a bleach or alcohol solution on any touchable surface in our home, using tissue to touch anything outside our home like door handles or lift buttons, avoiding public transit if at all possible (our only mode of transportation here beyond our own two feet), eating healthy, sleeping a lot, and praying daily for good health.

And yet, eleven weeks later, which is to say seventy-seven days later (you better believe I’m counting), we are no closer to being able to move freely, go to the store, or even use the elevator to go outside and walk our dog without risk. Our risk level is only rising, as a second wave of infections hits Hong Kong and talk of a third is in the air. We have a heart patient in the house, two asthmatics, and not enough research on the long term effects of the novel coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 on those who recover to take any of this lightly.

So that quote above about worrying about what you can control, and not being able to control very much? Yeah, it feels accurate. Almost like it’s encouraging us to not worry at all… Hmm. But I like a challenge, I’m stubborn that way.

I asked my husband what he thought I could actually control, and then quickly told him I might throw something should he reply, “your attitude.” He paused thoughtfully and said we can only control the environment inside our home. The environment inside our home is WILD. We’re cooped up on the 16th floor in a flat less than a thousand square feet, no balcony or private outdoor space (heck, there’s really no private indoor space either), with a husband, two restless teenage sons, a tiny poodle, and me… stubborn, contrarian me, with a distinct allergy to organization of any kind, much to my extremely organized husband’s chagrin.

I decided to quick look around our environment and commit to conquering the first out-of-control thing I saw. Ah ha! I thought, tripping over piles of sheets and jeans and socks and windbreakers overflowing the bins outside the bedrooms. Dirty laundry it is!

Recent published studies show the novel Coronavirus which causes Covid-19 can live on fabric at least 24 hours, with certain materials harboring detectable levels for up to a week! This means that even if we wash our hands and wear a mask and use a tissue to hold onto the handrail while the bus speeds around turns, we can still pick up the virus from our clothing and face masks. It’s enough to make all of us stay home, right? Good!

 The CDC issued guidelines on doing laundry in a time of Coronavirus, which includes helpful tips like using the warmest water possible, not shaking the clothing when putting it into the machine, washing your hands after handling the clothes, and disinfecting your laundry baskets regularly. Sounds great, but doing laundry in Hong Kong is already a pain before adding in any of that! 

We used to have a family guideline to save both the planet and my sanity regarding re-wearing clothing. We would wear jeans and pants more than once before washing if they weren’t visibly soiled, same with sweatshirts, sweaters, or button up shirts worn on top of a tee shirt. That family guideline has quickly changed to if you wear it out of the house, it goes into the laundry basket when you take it off, period.

As you can imagine, it’s created quite the pile up. That photo up there? Those hampers were completely empty before we went to bed on Thursday night, all the clothes in our home except what we were wearing washed, folded, and put away. That photo was taken Sunday afternoon. It doesn’t seem possible that four people could generate that level of laundry in two and a half days, yet there it is.

While growing up, my Mom’s rule was as soon as we were tall enough to reach into the washing machine, we oversaw our own laundry. Thankfully, front loading washing machines didn’t exist in my childhood or else I would have been doing laundry as a preschooler! Instead, I’ve been responsible for washing my own clothes since age nine. While living in Macau and Shanghai, we had full time help who completed most of the household chores, and to my greatest delight this included the laundry. 

Before I go any further, you should know a majority of homes in large Asian cities are quite small and many, if not most, people have household help of some kind. In Shanghai it was common for local friends not to have a washing machine at all. A small plastic tub is used to hand-scrub soiled laundry, which is then hung to dry, generally all taken care of by the Ayi, or housemaid. Because of high rise living with no secure outdoor space, it was a common sight to see laundry hanging out the window of every building. Walking through any alley was a guarantee you were going to see someone’s underwear on display. Having an actual dryer was a luxury only expatriates like ourselves enjoyed, and even then, I had local friends plus my own Ayi scolding me for risking destruction of our clothing by using a machine to dry them! Even with the relative luxury of both a washer and dryer, both were smaller than anything you can find in America. And yet… nothing compares to what we have now in Hong Kong!

Three years ago, while looking at the still-under-renovation flat which is currently our home, the real estate agent read the box for the not-yet-installed washer/dryer and declared it to be a very large size. How fortunate, we thought! Upon moving in and trying to wash our first load of dirty clothes, we shuddered to think of what a small washer/dryer looks like if ours is considered very large. Take gratitude wherever you can find it, right?

It holds a maximum of 4kg of laundry, which is 8.8 lbs. The entire basket is only nine inches deep. Usually a single load consists of what one adult person might wear on a single day from head to toe on a crisp fall day. So just for comparison: jeans, tee, sweatshirt, socks and underwear. Maybe you can fit in a couple other tees as well, depending on the thickness of the sweater. You can fit two bath sized towels and two hand towels, but not the thick and fluffy American towels, just the thin, quick dry style from IKEA. When we do sheets, it’s one sheet with one pillowcase per load. Two sheets, even without a pillowcase is a no go.

It’s an extreme water saver model, so if you shove more than I’ve described in there, it’s unlikely to get sufficiently wet and washed and rinsed as the basket never fully fills up with water to soak it. And overloading means it will likely become off-center and noisily shimmy it’s way out from under the kitchen counter. No joke.

 The quickest wash program is the Rapid 30, which takes just slightly more than thirty minutes, and the longest program is 3.5 hours. But you’re left with dripping wet clothing. The machine is also a dryer, but not an air dryer. It spins and spins while the basket heats, then it changes direction and spins the other way, sucking water out as it goes. If it successfully dries your clothes on the minimum two-hour drying cycle (maximum is SIX HOURS), it leaves your clothing stiff and crunchy, not soft and fluffy. If only my Shanghai Ayi could see the damage I submit my clothing to now! For shame!

Sounds dreadful, right? But wait, there’s more! Because it’s not an air dryer with a lint trap, just an extraction dryer, your clothing comes out of the machine dotted with specks of whatever lint has formed. So add on a few swipes with the lint roller to the already long process of doing laundry.

Surely there’s another option that doesn’t bake your clothes, you ask? Well, yes. Ladies and Gentlemen, may I humbly introduce the ugly drying rack which takes up a considerable amount of space in my living room and the dehumidifier we run under it!

My current routine is to run a load in the wash, and then hang it to dry on this rack. Then I run a second load of wash and set it to dry in the dryer. With the dehumidifier running, the clothes on the rack dry in about three hours. Hong Kong is a subtropical region prone to rain and high humidity, so without the dehumidifier running, they never dry! This routine gives me roughly two outfits or a full change of sheets in about four hours.

I hate having our clean laundry drying in the middle of our living space as much as I hate tripping over the piles of dirty laundry in the tiny space outside our bedroom doors. In our life pre-Coronavirus, we had people over almost every day. A drying rack is not the ideal centerpiece to a social gathering!

Now that we’ve cancelled having anyone at all over, the drying rack stays out until I get sick of seeing it and put it away for a few hours. And then it comes right back out because there is just so much laundry!

Sometimes I have this romantic notion of hanging our clothes and sheets outdoors to dry in nature, bringing it in warm from the Sun and smelling as fresh as a meadow. But once again, I live in humid Hong Kong. And even if I had some secure outdoor space to hang a load of laundry, there’s always the scenario my friend Christian frequently runs into hanging his laundry to dry on the roof… a freak rainstorm undoing all his hard work!

Finally, my laundry is dry. Am I now ready to fold everything and put it all away? Ha! Not so fast there! Because of the crispy state of anything dried in the dryer, and the stiff state of anything dried on the rack, 95% of it needs to be ironed to be wearable (we do not iron socks or underwear no matter how wrinkled, thankyouverymuch). And Friends, standing at an ironing board is where I draw the line on my domestic duties.

We don’t have full time help here in Hong Kong, but I do bring someone in twice a week to deep clean the bathrooms, kitchen, and floors, and to iron the impossibly high stack of clothes which are clean but not wearable in their wrinkled, crispy condition. Ironing the whole family’s wardrobe was my assigned childhood chore, and upon moving out for college, I declared I would never buy anything that needed ironing OR iron anything again! I even warned my then-boyfriend-now-husband while we were dating that ironing would not be among the tasks I was willing to do for him. But nearly a decade of living in a place where I pay someone else to do the ironing means 1) I never want to move away, and 2) I’ve broken my word and bought plenty of garments which require attention from an iron.

As mentioned before, that photo of me with the laundry baskets was snapped on Sunday afternoon. Right now it’s Wednesday afternoon, and after putting what I thought was the very last load in the wash, my youngest just walked through the door after a socially distant solo hike and dumped all his sweaty clothes into the empty hamper before jumping into the shower.

I’m already exhausted on behalf of tomorrow’s version of me who will need to do another four loads at minimum, plus a few extra since it’s time to swap the bath towels out for fresh ones.

I was a theater major who failed algebra repeatedly in high school, but even with my less-than-stellar math skills, I can tell you that if I skip a single day of laundry in our household of four adult-sized humans who, in addition to wearing clothing, also use towels and wash cloths and sheets and pillowcases, I will never, ever catch up! 

You know what? On second thought, I wish to reverse my statement about being a stubborn person who likes a challenge, take back that threat to throw something, and let my husband say what I know he wanted to:

My attitude is the only thing I can really control right now.

And worry? Who has time to worry with all this laundry piling up? Wish me luck, I’m diving in! 

Hang in there, Friends! You are not alone. More to come soon!

 

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