in their shoes

TAKE IT OFF BY MICHELLE LAW

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