in their shoes

Should footwear be worn inside the house? deirdre fidge and michelle law weigh in.

Let me start by saying that it’s taken every fibre of my Chinese being to not begin this rant by screaming. Not wearing shoes inside the house is a hill I will proudly die on, from both a cultural and personal hygiene standpoint, so let’s dive in before I give myself a hernia.

If you did biology in high school, it’s likely that you did a swab test while learning about bacteria cell structures. I’m casting my mind back more than a decade now, but the memory is as vivid as ever: during one of my lessons, my teacher took a cotton bud, rubbed it over his nose, then smeared the bud across a petri dish. A couple of days later, at our next lesson, the petri dish was revealed to the class to shocked and disgusted reactions. “Look how gross my nose is!” our teacher said, holding the dish out so we could inspect the explosion of green and brown mould within. “Isn’t it crazy that the bacteria on my nose created this? I wash my face twice a day!” I’ve not been able to shake the memory since.

So when people ask me, “Is not taking my shoes off indoors that bad?” I like to counter with another question: would you eat poo from a toilet with your bare hands? And I’m not talking about your own poo, either – it would be a stranger’s poo. And you don’t know if that stranger has been sick, or what they’ve eaten, or where they’ve been, but you’ve just taken a big palm full of their poo and gobbled it right up. But how does this relate to wearing shoes inside the house, you ask?

Say you pull on your sneakers in the morning and leave your place. Outside, there’s a balled-up, snotty napkin that you kick out of your way without thinking. At the train station, there’s some spew crusted over on the platform. You steer clear of the spew, but spew splatters, and bitumen is absorbent. At work, you share a communal bathroom with your colleagues and there’s splashback on the tiles that you assume is toilet water. For lunch, you head to a food court and look for a table while shuffling over old crumbs and sauces and pigeon droppings. On your walk home from the train station, you step in some old gum. After all this, you come home and kick up your germy shoes on the coffee table/couch/bed.

That entire scenario makes me feel physically ill – a visitor not removing their shoes in my house makes me reconsider our friendship, and characters in movies wearing shoes on the bed pulls me right out of the story. (I had to stop watching To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before for that very reason. This is what happens when a white person directs a story about a half-korean family.) Call it a cultural thing, sure, but removing your shoes inside the house is just basic good hygiene. Leaving your shoes on also makes no sense. Shoes are uncomfortable! They are the brassieres of the foot! They cramp your toes and give you blisters and make your feet hot and sometimes stinky! (If you’re wearing shoes indoors because your feet smell, simply wash them, my friend.)

But I’m willing to meet you halfway. If you’re really struggling to break the shoe habit, here’s a straightforward fix: wear indoor shoes, like slippers, slides or socks, instead. All you need to do is ensure they don’t touch the outside world. Indoor footwear is also boss level because it means you aren’t picking up the dust, pet hair and old food scraps in your house and smearing those particles onto your blankets and sheets. And if that doesn’t convince you, just refer to this old Confucian saying that’s been kicking around for centuries: “HEY MATES, CONFUCIUS HERE. STOP EATING POOP WITH YOUR BARE HANDS AND GET SOME SENSE INTO YA, YOU ABSOLUTE GRUBS.” Truly, words to live by.