Student Feature: The Temptation of Tap Water (by Thanh Duong)

Drink the tap water. This has encapsulated my internal monologue for the past 10 days in Mexico.
For all that everyone tells me not to drink the tap water, I cannot help but be drawn towards it. How can I
resist? After all, I have once heard that delicious agua once described by a Mexican local as something
that “probably will not kill you.” Now, my friends on the trip often tell me “you are not mentally well.
There is literally no reason to drink the tap water.” This is usually followed by them prompting me to pull
up The Google to prove their point.

I have looked this up, and while The Google is not yet perfect, the CIEE host moms who have
lived in Mérida all their life are. When asked, one host mom told me that, “I do not recommend drinking
the tap water. I have lived here for a long time, and I do not drink the tap water. Perhaps I can drink it and
be fine but eventually I will get sick. But because you are American, you will get sick.” Do you see that?
My argument has been proven incontrovertibly correct! She never said that one drink would kill me! I can
drink the tap water.

Dear audience, although addressing you directly may go against AP English Lang convention,
this is my blog and I can do what I want. You must be wondering: “What has possessed this man? For
what reason has he taken upon himself this Quixotic fixation on Mexican tap water?”
I must disappoint you. Honestly, I don’t care about tap water. My generation has a tendency to
dress up their lives with a healthy dressing of irony, and with it, they have a blank check to avoid showing
themselves as anything vulnerable– or honest. Really, we do things because we think it’s funny. For me,
there’s almost something cartoonish about desperately holding back sipping the bizzarro liquid for an
entirely stupid reason.

But behind the funny water is part of something I do care about. Mexico– this country I’m in–
exists only as an idea. Culture is not the physical appearance of a nation, it is its inner movements,
composed of a hundred million people who struggle against history in their own unique way. The specific
contradictions that differentiate a Mexica-descended person from anyone else is why I am here. I came so
that I could learn about Mexico’s inner world, and when I learn that, I would not just know the country, I
would understand it.

I could explain the cenotes, the market, the plaza, the colonial architecture, or the cow brain tacos,
but to be blunt, I can only engage with those things as a tourist can. And I don’t really care about that. I
do not still understand Mexico, and I most likely will never completely understand Mexico in the way that
matters. But still, there’s been worthwhile things.

On Tuesday this week, me and my friends went out trying tacos. We ordered one of every taco on
the menu so that we could take turns sampling increasingly bizarre cow parts( eyeballs come highly
recommended.) When we walked out of the shop, it had just rained, and the sun was setting on tropical
Yucatan in that way I remember only happening in my Vietnam. The sun’s glare was refracted ever so
slightly by the water vapor still mingling. A streak of yellow-melding-on-red mixed with the
environment’s lighting so that it seemed as if the whole world was a shade of dusk, and the sidestreet was
playing music while the workers laughed as they made tacos. For a moment, I thought that the country
was beautiful. I realized that if I lived here, I could learn to love the land, just as I had learned to love the
land in Texas.

Really, I think that if I really understood the place, the tap water would stop being a quirky tourist
thing and become just another part of living. It would become part of the idea of the culture as much as I
would become part of it. At that point, I practically would be one with tap water. Therefore, I could drink
as much tap water as I’d like, and there would be no consequences! Ergo, I could drink all three forms of
Mexican water and transform into a giant water iguana!