One of the distinct features that I noticed while walking down the alleys of Beijing was all the laundry hanging outside of people’s windows. The colorful undergarments added pigments to the austere looking grey apartment buildings. I also grew up in Seoul, where everyone air dries their laundry also. It was only when I got to college in the US that I learned how to use a dryer.
So the cartoon attempts to capture how Asian families don’t use dryers even when they move to the States. This particular character tries to use it as a storage cabinet.
But what great irony! As a child doing chores, I was always annoyed by the fact that our apartment was so small that there was little space to hang our laundry in the veranda. One of the reasons why I dreamed of living in a large house in the US was so that I could have all the space to hang laundry. Little did I know that your laziness grows proportionately to how large your house becomes. In the great nation of America, with all the space and land galore, we use dryers because… It is the more civilized, more sophisticated, more energy-consuming way to dry clothes!