My father sent me a Mariners ballcap and I gave it to the junkman, who wears it with tremendous pride. Or so it seems. Once I gave him what was left of a phoned-in pizza. The deliveries of pizzas, incidentally, are made by bicycle with little hot boxes on the rear fender. Rather than thank me for the pizza, the junkman sneered and tossed it into a garbage can. He didn’t smile at me for a week after this incident. I wondered what unfathomable line I had crossed to offend him, but beyond that I didn’t really care.

My father says that if I’m making a hundred a pop teaching English to junior high school kids, just think what kind of windfall it would be if I gave the junkman five bucks now and then? Wouldn’t it be similar to giving the character Pip in Great Expectations an ersatz trust fund? Wouldn’t it confer unto me a sense of power, grace, and entitlement? This was something that never really crossed my mind and when the junkman disappeared overnight, I had to confabulate more junkman anecdotes for my father, who often seemed more interested in the junkman than in me.

I was curious about his fate as well. He just vanished into thin air. People get sick and die overnight in China. Sometimes you see them lying dead in the streets. I wondered if maybe the junkman had crawled off somewhere and died in a gutter. It seemed likely.

At the university my research project is water pollution. And as I said, Chinese tap water is most definitely not Ice Dew. The rivers are polluted by sewage, factory runoff, human and animal wastes. People like to commit suicide in the rivers and think it highly romantic. So the rivers contain poison in many guises and the surface is covered with a white sudsy foam that looks like washing detergent. The chemical oxygen demand in most rivers is high. What’s weird is the fact you can always see people fishing along the riverside. They catch fish with tumors, extra fins, or faces like Jay Leno. The lantern-jaw thing.

The cheapest, most rudimentary form of pollution control is both simple and practical. You round up a little manpower in a city where labor is almost free. You get them to dig cisterns in the channels that lead to the rivers. The cisterns temporarily contain the water, where the force of gravity allows the fecal sediment to settle on the bottom. Then you permit the relatively clean top water to enter the river systems. It’s affordable and very much a step in the right direction. Another pollution fix-up in coal-powered China, with its bad air, is the Three Gorges River Dam Project. The dam will soon replace countless coal-burning generators, supplying pollution-free electricity. In this regard China is on the verge of a legendary historical event. The world’s largest hydroelectric dam!