A students' dorm

The rules

The rules for room assignments put first- and second-year students in doubles while third- and final-year students had single rooms. Double rooms were a little longer and narrower than nine-by-twelve, with an aluminium-framed window in the wall opposite the door and two desks by the window arranged so the inhabitants of the room could study back-to-back. To the left of the door stood a steel bunk bed.

The furniture supplied was sturdy and simple and included a pair of lockers , a small coffee table, and some built-in shelves. Even the most well-disposed observer would have had trouble calling this setting poetic. The shelves of most rooms carried such items as transistor radios, hairdryers, electric carafes and cookers, instant coffee, tea bags, sugar cubes, and simple pots and bowls for preparing instant ramen . The walls bore pin-ups from girlie magazines or stolen porno movie posters. One guy had a photo of pigs mating , but this was a far-out exception to the usual naked women, girl pop singers or actresses. Bookshelves on the desks held textbooks, dictionaries and novels.

The filth of these all-male rooms was horrifying. Mouldy mandarin skins clung to the bottoms of waste-paper baskets. Empty cans used for ashtrays held mounds of cigarette butts , and when these started to smoulder they'd be doused with coffee or beer and left to give off a sour stink. Blackish grime and bits of indefinable matter clung to all the bowls and dishes on the shelves, and the floors were littered with instant ramen wrappers and empty beer cans and discarded lids from one thing or another.

It never occurred to anyone to sweep up and throw these things in the bin. Any wind that blew through would raise clouds of dust. Each room had its own horrendous smell, but the components of that smell were always the same: sweat, body odour and rubbish. Dirty clothes would pile up under the beds, and without anyone bothering to air the mattresses on a regular basis, these sweat-impregnated pads would give off odours beyond redemption. In retrospect, it seems amazing that these shitpiles gave rise to no killer epidemics.

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