On Water And Its Effects

I drink a lot of water. Like a lot. Really a lot. So much water that my behavior can be classified as a medical condition. But I drink it ice cold. These days, my water consumption is under control and I drink only — only — five or six liters per day.

I used to drink more. So much ice cold water that I would order it from multiple convenience stores so no single store would realize my problem. So much ice cold water that I marched to the bathroom several times an hour, and stayed there longer than anyone else. So much ice cold water that even in summer, I wore winter jackets to deal with the drop in body temperature that left me shivering.

That was last summer. I would be sitting at my desk, with a 1.5L bottle of Nongfu Springs right out of the office fridge, shaking slightly as I tried to work. Fall, and my birthday, came; my colleagues got me a fur-lined Russian hat to stop me shivering. But I knew I couldn’t go on like this in Shanghai winter. I would have to change. I would have to drink — ugh — hot water.

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Hot water in China goes far back into history, part of the traditional Chinese medicine prescriptions as well as folklore, and, probably, practical considerations when diseases like cholera and dysentery were common.

But you didn’t boil it at home. Before there were convenience stores, there were hot water stores — thousands of them in the big cities of China, where people went to get hot water, warm water, room temperature and cold water to drink or bathe with. In Shanghai, the shops were named after the “tiger stoves” that vendors used to heat water (the name laohu zao is supposedly a reference to the “eyes” and “tail” of the stove, though it’s hard to see the resemblance). Poor people went to the shop directly and maybe loitered at one of the seats if they could afford tea; rich people had the water delivered directly to their homes.

That corresponded with Chiang Kai-Shek’s push in the 1930s for a “new” set of principles to live by, called the New Life Movement, emphasizing the four virtues: decorum (礼, li), rightness (义, yi), integrity (廉, lian) and a sense of shame, or right and wrong (耻, chi). Boiling your water fit into his movement.

Around the same time, Mao and his soldiers were on the Long March, boiling their water to keep healthy, a habit he’d then go on to impose on the entire country through a series of public health campaigns beginning in the 1950s — by all accounts, this is when the craze for hot water, now available from tiger stoves installed in all workplaces, schools and transportation facilities, really took off.

By the 1980s, tiger stoves had mostly died out in Shanghai and water ration coupons were a thing of the past. Today, tiger stoves exist almost exclusively in museums or wonderfully outdated teahouses like the Qibao Cha Guan, a relic in Minhang District, but the availability of hot water in China has not waned.

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I bought a taxi-driver tea flask for my new beverage. The first sip of hot water was terrible. It burned my lips and tasted like the inside of my mouth. It was like kissing myself. But always compulsive, I kept going, until, by the end of the first day and maybe a dozen flasks of hot water, I began to like it.

Cold water left me tense, my muscles tightening and shivering to keep me warm. It closed, or focused, my mind. Hot water was the opposite. On the English-language internet, people claim hot water will cure everything from acne and dull hair to obesity and premature aging. I don’t know about all that. But hot water relaxed me. It opened my mind.

As winter progressed and I became more and more used to drinking hot water, I started to enjoy it. Because of the temperature, I could not gulp it, which meant I drank less, and spent less time peeing. My hair didn’t change — I shave my head anyway — and I stayed fat, but it became easier to poop. My core muscles were now loose and relaxed instead of freezing and tense; the hot water opened more than just my mind.

Spring came. I experimented with putting a few loose tea leaves into the water but found I missed the clean absence of flavor. Tea was too distracting. After just a few months, I had learned to appreciate a small glass of scalding liquid.

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In America, where I’m from, hot water is reserved for old people who get cold easily. A few health nuts promote it on the internet as a life hack for whatever ails you, a natural tonic free from the tap. But otherwise it’s unheard of. The only hot water we drink is the kind that’s been brewed into coffee, and no one believes it’s good for you. Any benefits of drinking hot water are anecdotal — I couldn’t find a single study in English in the academic journal databases. It’s just not a thing.

In India, where the sun is punishingly hot, drinking hot water for digestion is part of the Ayurvedic tradition. According to its rules, boiling water “enriches it with energy and it gains a quality that in Ayurveda is called sukshma (penetrating)” one source I found enthused, saying that the hot water allowed “deeper penetration into the physiology.”

In Korea, among other countries, restaurants serve big pitchers of ice-cold water even in the middle of winter, and they don’t seem to be afflicted with nationwide constipation, acne and flat hair. But take your pick.

Do I look better in winter? Is my digestive system at 100% when I flush it with hot water? Are more water-soluble “toxins” released from my body when the water is hot?

Could I even tell?

Like ghosts and aliens, the effects of drinking a particular temperature of water may only be visible to true believers, people who have already convinced themselves of the benefits of either ice-cold water to cool and prevent overheating, or of hot water, to maintain vigorous circulation.

Much has been made about the Chinese obsessions with hot water: the kettles in every hotel room, the dispensers on trains and airplanes, the government program to put boilers in every state-owned company starting in the 1950s or 1960s. And of course, it’s true. But less has been said about the fully stocked fridges of China’s convenience stores, and the millions upon millions of rows of cold water (and other beverages) that they represent. It’s not just me drinking cold drinks; clearly China is changing. If kai shui is king, cold water must be queen.

Me? I drink it all. For all my consumption, I am not a snob. My first choice is always Nongfu Springs, mostly for the design of the label, but give me C'estbon, Hanyang Spring, or pretty much anything besides Evian — at the quantities I drink, I can’t afford to be high-class. And when winter rolls around, I can no longer afford to be a cold water princess, shivering alone in my icy castle.

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Summer finally came around and as the temperatures increased, I began The Switch. My body craved water right from the fridge, and I packed my glass hot water flask away for next year. My muscles began to contract once again until one hot week in June, when everyone was complaining about the stifling Shanghai heat, I found myself shivering in my office, reaching for a sweatshirt. I spent so much time in the bathroom I started to develop an opinion on the geometry and industrial design of urinals. I am just waiting for the day Nongfu Springs calls and offers me the spokesman role I so clearly deserve.

Until then, see you in the bathroom.

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