I also make my tea from Ice Dew, though in China there are these water heaters all around, in the hall, in the kitchen, in almost every conceivable locale. The cookers are like television sets in America—everywhere, in every nook and cranny, just everywhere. But most of the older cookers do not boil. They cook tap water just to the brink of boiling. Let me hazard an educated guess on the water temp as about 210 degrees Fahrenheit. That’s unreliable because I don’t trust the water cookers and don’t use them in the first place; it’s like Russian roulette. I’m just trotting out a number. But certain bugs thrive in 210-degree water. Those extremophile bacteria that live near volcanoes in South America for instance. I mean you might get Ebola or Guinea worms from drinking that shit.

I won’t go on about this like some obsessive. I’m not a germ freak, just a careful, prudent person. The almost-boiled tap water is probably sterile but you can see things floating around in it, spooky things, and I just can’t go that route. There is heavy sediment that sinks to the bottom of the cup, like sand and gravel; there are indecisive mid-mug floaters that don’t know up from down and so just hang suspended there; and finally there’s a scummy layer of frothy debris at the very top. It rests there in a layer of foam. I’m not a microbiologist but I would imagine there are millions of invisible things, too. So boiled or not, why take the risk? Not only is Ice Dew a cheap alternative, it’s guaranteed bug-free. I have emailed this information to my father, back in the States, and he thinks I go too far with it. He’s tired of hearing long digressions about water. He warned me about going to China in the first place.

My dad prefers hearing various other  horror stories, stories with an element of danger, and then he writes me warnings he’s gleaned from the Lonely Planet guide to China. Like when I wrote I was going on a side trip to Urumqi, he wrote back, “Danger! Red Alert! Avoid west gate into city! It is filled with a congregation of pickpockets and aggressive robbers who like nothing better than to get you from behind, slash your backpack with a razor, and you are none the wiser as they truck off with your worldly goods.” I’m like twenty years old and I’m getting this. I passed through the west gate at midnight and it was completely tame, a cakewalk.