The drinking water saga

The frustrations of living in another culture are frequently caused by the barriers of a different language and customs. Even the simplest tasks can become a battle, and my attempts to ensure a regular supply of water is one such campaign. After being in China for a year and a half, I still don’t have a 100% reliable system to ensure a steady supply of drinkable water so fundamental in the sweat inducing heat of the sub-tropics.

Tap water in China, as I’m sure you know, is not considered safe to drink. Even after washing-up, with copious amounts of dishwashing liquid under running cold water as I am yet to see a kitchen with plumbed in hot water, our Chinese friends fastidiously sterilise all eating implements. This is usually done in stand-alone units, however it took me a while to realise that what I thought were under-bench ovens in display kitchens were state-of-the-art, dishwasher-like, sterilisers.

Boiling water is an option, but not in the quantities we need, so bottled water is the answer. Our apartment came with a water cooler, which heats water too, and an empty water bottle. The key is to ring the company listed on the bottle and get them to deliver a new one to replace the empty one. Difficult! My Chinese is just not up to it.

I enlisted the help of a young Chinese women, who worked with me, to ring and arrange a delivery time. The problem was my instructions seemed to get confused by the two layers of communication. Often the delivery just never happened, or occurred after the time agreed. On one occasion, after the third attempt to get water delivered and finally having to leave the flat, I received a phone call. I dutifully explained, in Chinese, that I did not speak Chinese. I received a second call; again I explained, in Chinese, I only spoke English. A little while later there was another call from a young man speaking accented English asking if I wanted to buy something. No, I don’t want to buy anything over the phone!! He persisted until I finally realised he was asking did I want to buy water, and was trying to communicate that the delivery person was at our apartment and I should let him in. It was 4 hours after the delivery time and I was on the other side of town! I found myself resorting, again, to lugging home a couple of days’ supply of 3 or 4 1.5 litre bottles, at ¥3 each.

While I was impressed with the tenacity of the caller and the fact the water supplier had bothered to find an English speaker confident enough to use the phone, the fact remained; we rarely received water when we needed it. After much discussion with other foreigners a theory emerged; the failure of this arrangement had to do with a lack of a relationship with the water supplier. I have a relationship with my work colleague so she’s happy to help me, but she doesn’t have a relationship with the water people, and they certainly don’t have one with me so they have no incentive to deliver on time the first time.

(Click for a larger image)

With this theory in mind I decide to take another approach; find a new supplier locally and build a relationship with them face-to-face. I walk the streets around the vegetable market in our emerging neighbourhood. Many of the new shops are vacant, but I find a place with both gas and water bottles piled up, a motor bike and very little else. I pull out pre-prepared notes of what I might have to say, or be asked, laboriously written in characters as well as pinyin. The lithe women looks at me blankly when I ask for water, her plumper husband looks at me blankly. I pull out my written notes and the man walks away. Maybe they only understand Mǐnnánhuà, the local dialect, maybe they can’t read? I feel utterly defeated, but I can’t give up and am about to start an elaborate charade when the man returns with the young women from the tea shop next door - she can speak workable English. It looks like we will have water after all. I buy 2 new bottles of water; ¥30 for each bottle, refundable on return, and ¥8 for 18.9 litres of water. The wiry woman follows me to the apartment on the motor bike and carries both bottles up 4 flights of stairs. I can barely lift one on to the cooler.

As we got used to each other I find we can communicate through my poor Chinese. I have to remember that in this part of China there are still people who have never met a foreigner let alone spoken to one. The people I meet here maybe as nervous as I am and could hear my fragmented and accented Chinese as some weird foreign language they can’t possibly understand. Indeed I’m sometimes approached by locals and find, with a shock, the reason I can’t understand them is that while I’m trying to interpret Chinese they are actually speaking English.

We still have some delivery problems but at least now I can deal with it directly and they do look a little abashed if they have forgotten and immediately race round with new bottles. So, despite obstacles of language, culture and expectations, we now have a reasonably reliable water supply.