Domestic life

Housework is 家务 jiāwù. 家 jiā is the house; 务 wù is the business one is put in charge of, the one in 任务 rènwu, the task, and in 服务 fúwù, service. 家务, literally “the business of the house” ⟶ housework. We say 做家务 zuò jiāwù, “to do the business of the house”. The furniture, the utensils and the rooms are on our page Inside the home. Here, we clean them.

扫 sǎo, to sweep, is the hand 扌 and the broom 帚 zhǒu, whose ancient forms show a bundle of branches tied together, head down. The same 帚 turns up in 妇 fù, the married woman, once written 婦: 女 the woman, 帚 the broom. The woman with the broom, then. That is the explanation you read everywhere, and it is to be taken with a pinch of salt: several specialists see in this 帚 the ritual broom used to purify the ancestral temple, which is not the same thing as the morning chore. I cannot decide.

In ancient China, you were not first taught to read: you were taught to sweep. The Analects of Confucius report that the young pupils of Zixia knew how to 洒扫应对进退 sǎsǎo yìngduì jìntuì (our page Chapter 19 of the Analects of Confucius): “The disciples of Zixia know very well how to sprinkle and sweep the ground, to answer those who call or question them, to come forward and to withdraw”, Couvreur translates. Note the order of the first two gestures: 洒 sǎ, to sprinkle with water, comes before 扫, to sweep, because on a floor of beaten earth a dry stroke of the broom only throws the dust into the air. The detail is concrete. The lesson less so: in Ziyou’s mouth it is a reproach, these children hold the branch, 末 mò, and not the root, 本 běn.

Today people quote, in the same spirit, 一屋不扫，何以扫天下 yì wū bù sǎo, héyǐ sǎo tiānxià, “if a man does not sweep his own room, how could he sweep the empire?”. Only, that is not what the original text says. In the 后汉书 Hòu Hàn shū, the young 陈蕃 Chén Fān receives a visitor in a courtyard left to itself and is asked why he does not sweep for his guests. He answers 大丈夫处世，当扫除天下 dà zhàngfu chǔ shì, dāng sǎochú tiānxià: a man worthy of the name sweeps the empire, what would he do with a single room? And the visitor takes him for a remarkable boy. So the modern proverb has turned round the moral of the story it claims for itself. Who turned it round first, I have not found.

The big clean, for its part, has its date: 腊月二十四，掸尘扫房子 làyuè èrshísì, dǎn chén sǎo fángzi, on the twenty-fourth of the twelfth month the house is dusted and swept before the New Year (our page Festivals). The pun carries everything: 尘 chén, the dust, is pronounced like 陈 chén, what is old, and the end-of-year cleaning is called 除陈布新 chú chén bù xīn, “remove the old, spread out the new”. Then be careful: during the first days of the year one no longer sweeps, on pain of pushing one’s luck out of the door along with the dust.

Two verbs for drying. 晾 liàng is to put out in the air; 晒 shài is to expose to the sun, and the character says so with its 日 rì. A Chinese block of flats is recognised by the duvets hung out of the windows as soon as the weather is fine. In the lanes of Shanghai, the bamboo poles loaded with washing were called the 万国旗 wànguóqí, “the flags of all the nations”. And 晒 has taken on a brand new meaning on the networks: 晒照片 shài zhàopiàn, to show off one’s photos, 晒娃 shài wá, to show off one’s child. It is said that this meaning comes from the English share, heard as 晒; it is a pretty idea, but I am not sure of it.

垃圾 lājī, rubbish, is read lèsè in Taiwan, with the same two characters: it is one of the best-known differences of pronunciation between the two shores. Since 2019 Shanghai has been sorting its waste, and the rest of the country has followed, with its vocabulary: 干垃圾 gān lājī dry waste, 湿垃圾 shī lājī wet waste, 可回收 kě huíshōu the recyclable. The volunteers posted by the bins asked the question that became famous, 你是什么垃圾 nǐ shì shénme lājī ? It is translated as “what sort of rubbish are you bringing?”, but one also hears “what sort of rubbish are you?”, and that is precisely why it made the whole of China laugh.

Who does all this work? The question is asked there as it is here, and we came across it when we spoke of the couple and the children (page Couples and children). The cities have their 钟点工 zhōngdiǎngōng, paid by the hour, and the word 家政 jiāzhèng, literally “the government of the house”, now serves as a shop sign for a whole sector, with its agencies and its training courses.

The recent fashion is called 断舍离 duànshělí: 断 duàn cut off what comes in, 舍 shě throw out what is lying about, 离 lí detach yourself from what you keep out of habit. The word comes from the Japanese 断捨離 and settled into Chinese in the 2010s. As for 一尘不染 yì chén bù rǎn, “not a grain of dust”, it was first a Buddhist formula: the 六尘 liù chén, the six dusts, are the objects of the senses that soil the mind. The compliment paid to a well-kept house comes from there.

The fact remains that housework is the only work in the house whose result cannot be seen. Done well, it is invisible. And the dust comes back.

Click on any character on the page: its stroke order is shown stroke by stroke, with the arrow that gives the direction of the movement.