I have collected a small pile of socks that don't have matches.
The other day as I was tossing more unpaired socks onto the pile, I turned to Andrew and just said: "I wonder what happened to the other socks?"
He said: "You've never heard 'The dryer ate them' ?"
Upon hearing that, I busted out laughing, and commented that it was no wonder I had ever lost any socks in Taiwan.

No one had a dryer in Taiwan, or perhaps in all of Asia, at least not in my generation. I remember how my mom would place long sticks of bamboo horizontally way over head on the balcony for drying clothes. We even had a long stick of bamboo with a metal prong on one end that looked kind of like a letter Y, so we could use it to lift and take down clothes.
That was what we did growing up, so did everyone else.
On beautiful summer days, if you were down on the streets and looking up, shirts, sheets, pants, towel would be flying gently on the bamboo sticks secured by wooden or plastic cloth pins. For undergarments, they were hung on a bamboo stick only about hip high for privacy.
I  loved taking down clothes after they've been dried in the summer heat, they smelled of sunshine and freshness.
And on wintery days, we still line dry our clothes. We especially watched out on rainy days, which happens a lot. Sometimes we had to take the clothes into the house to dry; when that happens, we just had to improvise.
In the winter, the clothes that finally get dried are stiff, they don't have that lovely touch or smell.  And if we were preoccupied and waited past 5 o'clock in the afternoon to get to our dried clothes, the humidity would get into them, then all our efforts would be frustrated.  I think it was just such a big job to get the clothes all dried in the winter months, so when my mom shouted "Hurry, it's 5 o'clock!" we all just understood the severity of the situation and dropped everything to help taking down the clothes.
It was just a way of life, we did it, and my parents are still doing it. So is everyone else in Asia and other parts of the world. I dare say 'missing socks' is only largely a Western phenomenon, and especially an America phenomenon.

There is an old Chinese saying,"Watch heaven and eat rice." It relates to people in olden times who are mostly farmers, and that farmers can only do as well as the heaven would bless them to do. I think it kind of applies to drying clothes on the balcony.

I just found this article called: Is your clothesline illegal, to read click HERE