This is a story about a small incident that took place when I was about four years old. I used to play daily with my friends in our community of tiny half-dilapidated apartments, and that day, I was playing with a particularly large group of friends near the rows of Japanese plum trees on the community premise. I usually played with girls, but on that particular occasion, there were a few boys mixed in the group. Their mothers were also accompanying us.
I was playing house with my friends as usual when I saw the boys going to pee in the bush nearby. That was nothing new among us. Even my close friends and I would often pee in the bush whenever we were playing outside and didn’t want to bother going back home for bathroom. But what amazed me that day was that the boys seemed to pee in a different way than us girls. Instead of squatting, they just stood there and peed.
Intrigued, I immediately ran to the mothers who were standing next to us.
“I want to do that, too!” I shouted, joining the que of boys.
“You want to pee, too?” asked one of the mothers. “You can go behind there.”
“No,” I said eagerly. “I want to do like them!”
“What?” She blinked her eyes in surprise.
“I want to stand and pee like them.”
“I don’t think that’s a good idea,” answered my friend’s mother, laughing.
“Why not?”
She might have wanted to say, “because you are a girl,” but thankfully, she didn’t. Instead, she gave me a permission to try out this alternative peeing style.
Once I tried, however, it wasn’t really comfortable for me to stand while peeing. I preferred my old squatting style better.
Satisfied with my experiment, I ran back to my friends to continue our play house activity.
“So, how was it?” My friend’s mother asked me as I left, to which I answered,
“I didn’t like it much!”
That was the only time I stood and peed. I was so happy with my squatting style that never again did I feel the need to try the other one.