Apologies to My Censor: The High and Low Adventures of a Foreigner in China Read online

  Apologies to My Censor

  The High and Low Adventures of a Foreigner in China

  Mitch Moxley

  Dedication

  For Mom & Dad

  Contents

  Dedication

  Prologue

  1. Unite. Diligent. Progress.

  2. The Chinese Propagandist

  3. Foreign Friends

  4. Young Turks, Old Hacks

  5. On Assignment

  6. Bad China Days

  7. The Failed Propagandist

  8. The Big Cleanup

  9. Live from Ling Long Pagoda

  10. Dinosaur Bones and Brothels

  11. Chocolate City

  12. The Bachelor

  13. The Beijinger

  14. Rent a White Guy

  15. The “Rent a White Guy” Guy

  16. Chasing the Iron Rooster

  17. Dancing Idiot

  18. Chollywood Dreaming

  19. “Burst into Bloom”

  20. Singing Elvis for the People

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Prologue

  My greatest fear was about to become reality: sober dancing.

  I stood atop a set of stairs at a faux-Italian outdoor mall in Beijing, my face in full makeup and my hair styled in the weird, poofy way of urban Chinese, wearing skinny jeans and a short-sleeve black shirt unbuttoned halfway down my chest. Beside me was a small-time pop star from Shandong province named Marry (two r’s), rehearsing the upcoming shot in a flowing white wedding dress. Next to her was a Chinese male model with pursed lips and a perfectly trimmed goatee. At the foot of the stairs awaited the nervous director, a cameraman, and forty-odd pairs of curious eyes: crew members and passersby, all eagerly anticipating, I was sure, the disaster that was about to unfold.

  The camera started rolling. Beads of sweat trickled through the stubble on my cheeks like pachinko balls as I descended into a true-life nightmare.

  I started to dance.

  A few days earlier, I had been approached on the street by a stranger and asked to appear in a music video as the star’s European love interest. As random as it might sound to be asked to be in a music video, ridiculous incidents of this nature are not totally uncommon in China. I once posed as one of China’s 100 “Hottest Bachelors” for a special Valentine’s Day issue of Cosmopolitan magazine. The vetting process was not very thorough, and by “not very thorough” I mean totally nonexistent: the project’s editors had never laid eyes on me before I showed up for the shoot.

  I should mention, however, that I’m not your typical music video star. I’m a journalist. I’m tall and a bit lanky, and although I’ve had my share of movie star fantasies, I can be terribly awkward in front of a camera. I have certain features—say, a long neck—that can appear unusual in pictures and on video. From certain angles my face can seem cartoonish, and it’s often when I’m trying to look cool that I look most uncool. In the Cosmopolitan Valentine’s special, I ended up looking like a vampire in a checkered suit two sizes too small.

  Thinking that appearing in a music video might be a worthwhile story, I agreed under one condition: no dancing. Sober dancing is my kryptonite. On the rare occasions when I do dance, I break out in a nervous sweat, swing my arms awkwardly, and buckle at the knees. I’m convinced everyone’s watching me. Look at the tall loser freak! I imagine them all saying.

  Now there we were, filming the video’s key scene, my body writhing in awkward, robotic movements. We tried several takes, each worse than the last. During a break, I pleaded with the director to cut me from the video entirely and spare everybody the hassle of having to figure out how to salvage the footage.

  They begged for a few more takes. I reluctantly agreed.

  Atop the stairs once again, I looked out at the eyes staring back to me. I became lightheaded and began to have an out-of-body experience, where I was able to see an image of myself in my skinny jeans and unbuttoned black shirt, my hair made up like a bird’s nest. “Action!” the director yelled, and before I could stop, my body contorted itself into a strange little jig. I forced a stupid grin and pretended to be in love with Marry as she lip-synched her awful, pitchy song. I could imagine what the video might look like once edited, and where it might be played, and what my friends would think if they ever saw it.

  As these images of impending doom played in my mind, I thought: Oh fuck, YouTube.

  I was thirty years old and this was my life: a series of random China adventures that seemed to stretch on forever. Toward what, I still wasn’t sure.

  How did it all happen? I asked myself that question every day. In fact, I shouldn’t even have been there at all—in Beijing, in China, on the stairs of that outdoor mall.

  I came to Beijing in the spring of 2007 to take a job as a writer and editor for China Daily, the country’s only English-language national newspaper at the time. My journey to China was by accident. One freezing afternoon in Toronto a few months earlier—depressed, bored, failing as a writer, and unsure of where my life was headed—I opened an online journalism job board and noticed a posting for a position at a government-owned newspaper in Beijing I’d never heard of. I had never imagined going to China, but anything was better than the state I was in. So I applied, and a few months later, after a writing test and a brief phone interview, I was offered a one-year contract.

  In China, everything was happening. The economy was booming, the Olympics were on the horizon, and Beijing was being transformed into a world-class city overnight. China Daily was changing, too. Somewhere in the bowels of the China Daily headquarters in Beijing, someone had decided the paper needed some sprucing up before the Games. Money flowed in, the paper was redesigned and expanded, and, in an effort to improve the quality of the writing, the management recruited a growing team of “foreign experts” (the official wording on our visas) from all corners of the English-speaking world. When I arrived in mid-April, there were three dozen of us, mostly new arrivals. We were going to play a big part in the “new” China Daily, they told us. We were important.

  Before I left Canada for Beijing an e-mail landed in my inbox from a friend’s father, who was working in Chinese state media at the time. “It’s important to know that journalism here ain’t quite the same as over there,” he wrote. “Not by a long shot. It’s journalism with ‘Chinese characteristics.’ ” Shortly after, I received another message from an American editor at China Daily. “Just so you don’t have any illusions about this, China Daily is a State-owned newspaper, as is all media in China. That means you would be dealing with two ultimate bosses: (1) The Information Office of the State Council and (2) the Propaganda Department of the Communist Party of China.”

  In other words, despite my official position as writer and editor for China Daily’s business section, I was essentially accep
ting a job as a propagandist for the government of the People’s Republic of China.

  My original plan was to stay for just over a year, work out my contract, have some fun, stick around for the Olympics, and return to normal life. China was meant to be a break. A chance to reboot.

  Almost four years later, I was dancing like a robotic idiot in a Chinese music video, and self-admittedly addicted to the random, chaotic nature of expatriate life in China. Normal life had most definitely not resumed. Among other adventures, I had crisscrossed the country doing journalism, sat front row to the Olympics, posed as a fake businessman, indulged in many a booze-fueled night, and paid to feed a goat to a hungry lion. Along the way I learned that there is no such thing as normal life for a foreigner in this crazy, exhilarating, intoxicating nation. You might settle into a routine, and the things around you start to seem ordinary and mundane, but then you blink and find yourself in the middle of a surreal situation, such as running hand in hand through an imitation Italian mall with a wannabe pop star. You remember that you’re in China, that you’re at the new center of the universe.

  Friends of mine in China often compared our foreigner experience to Peter Pan’s Neverland: a fantasyland where you never really have to grow up, and if you’re not careful, you might never leave. I was, like many others, one of the Lost Boys of Chinese Neverland. By the fall of 2010, when in the course of a few weeks I filmed a music video, traveled the length of China by train, almost died hiking on a mountain, and fielded calls from Hollywood producers over an article I wrote, I wondered if I would ever go home, or if I was lost in China forever.

  The country had changed me. I was, in ways both figuratively and literally, a different person from the one who arrived in China. I’m shy in front of a camera. I don’t smile in pictures. I certainly don’t dance. The person in the video wasn’t the man who stepped off the plane in Beijing in the spring of 2007. That man, when asked to star in a music video, would have said something along the lines of . . . “Hell no.”

  I was the person China had helped create.

  I was Mi Gao. Tall Rice.

  1

  Unite. Diligent. Progress.

  During those first jet-lagged days in Beijing, three and a half years before, I would wake early, make a cup of instant coffee, and watch the spectacle unfolding outside my kitchen window. On the basketball courts across from my apartment, several hundred middle school students stood in rows wearing matching blue and white tracksuits and lazily swung their limbs in unison as horrible Chinese pop music blasted from the loudspeakers. If there was ever a more half-assed display of mass calisthenics, I’d never seen it.

  A coach hollered commands through a megaphone while teachers in baggy trousers and sports jackets did laps on the track. On the brick wall beside the basketball courts, words painted in English read, Unite. Diligent. Progress. The whole display was astonishing. I took pictures on my cell phone camera for future reference, sipped coffee, and soaked in the strangeness of it all.

  China wasn’t my first foray into life abroad. In the fall of 2005, I finished a contract with a newspaper in Toronto and set off to work as a freelance writer in Asia. Earlier that year, I’d taken a three-week vacation to visit my childhood friend Will in Nagoya, Japan, where he was working as an English teacher. During that trip I managed to sell a number of stories to newspapers and magazines at home. Freelancing seemed promising, and I left Toronto that September confident that I could easily survive overseas.

  That fall, I traveled to Vietnam, Thailand, and the Philippines, freelancing a few articles for foreign publications. Between each trip, I would return to Japan and stay at Will’s place. We would party all weekend, recover from our hangovers by watching movies, relaxing in onsen bathhouses, or going to the beach, and then do it all over again. During one of our more epic nights, an all-night affair in Nagoya, we set off a fire extinguisher in an elevator, covering ourselves in salty-tasting pinkish powder as the door closed on us. Life was great.

  But things started to sour shortly after Christmas. I realized there was no way I could sustain myself on the pathetic earnings of a freelance writer, especially when I was blowing wads of cash partying until 7 a.m. in one of the world’s most expensive countries, and jet-setting across Asia to write stories I wouldn’t be paid for until months afterward. I decided to settle in Nagoya and find work as an English teacher. I soon learned, however, that they didn’t hand these jobs out at the airport as I had originally thought. Most of the turnover at English schools occurred during semester breaks, and I was looking during the middle of the semester. Job opportunities were scarce, and several weeks went by with not so much as an interview. My parents were putting cash into my account to keep me afloat. (This, sadly, would become a recurring theme in my life over the next few years.)

  Other parts of my life were disintegrating as well. I had a girlfriend back in Canada, and our relationship was slowly drawing to a close. So it was with mixed emotions that I left for Japan that September. “I need to do this,” I told her a few days before I left. And I did—I needed to travel while I was still young, to see if I could make it as a writer. Although we were officially broken up, we talked and e-mailed regularly while I was away, and we ended up in a relationship purgatory where neither of us really knew what was going on but we were too afraid to talk about it. The uncertainty weighed on me every day I was abroad. Over time, my calls home grew more infrequent, my e-mails shorter and more distant until it became clear I was losing her, at which point I began to panic.

  Meanwhile, I developed a mysterious infection during my trip to the Philippines over Christmas that caused a rather horrible case of acne, something I’d never had in my life. Acne combined with a looming quarter-life crisis is an unfortunate and miserable combination. By mid-January, back in Japan, I was sleeping until noon, drinking too much, and putting very little effort into finding work. I showed up to one interview hungover and half an hour late, and I wasn’t able to answer a question about the grammatical difference between “I ate a hamburger” and “I have eaten a hamburger.” When I got turned down for a job teaching kindergartners at a school inexplicably called the Potato Academy—despite a master’s degree and a once-promising career in journalism—I decided it was time to cash in my chips and head home.

  When I returned to Toronto, things didn’t get much better. I spent the summer subletting a room in a house full of crazies fit for a sitcom. I was working as a freelance reporter, and after a few months of writing business articles I didn’t care about and wandering around alone, counting the cracks in the pavement, I figured this must be the loneliest profession on earth.

  Most days I sat alone in coffee shops with my laptop open on the table in front of me, back hunched, struggling to find the motivation to perform even basic work-related tasks, such as opening a Word document. Sometimes the thought of walking from my apartment to the coffee shop was too draining, and I would work in my tiny third-floor room, which had a slanted roof and no air-conditioning. Many mornings, I didn’t bother to get dressed. I checked my e-mail obsessively, because the Internet seemed to be my only companion. The solitude, the apartment, the heat, the roommates—I was slowly suffocating.

  My girlfriend and I made a valiant effort to make it work when I got back to Canada, but we were running on fumes. We tried out all of our little inside jokes and old quirks, but they felt forced now. I was twenty-six and terrified of domestic life: dinner parties with other couples, weekly so
ftball games, a neighborhood pub filled with grumpy boozehounds, kids—kids! I wasn’t ready for any of that, and neither was she. We loved each other, but by mid-July we were officially done.

  My social life, meanwhile, had diminished greatly from the last time I lived in Toronto. As a freelancer, working alone, I had fallen off my friends’ radar—not that I was trying very hard to engage with anybody—and most nights after spending the day in my own head, I would watch episodes of Entourage, lying in bed in the throbbing heat of my claustrophobic room, noting the many discrepancies between Vincent Chase’s life and my own, wondering where it all went wrong.

  I began to exercise obsessively to sweat out my anxiety. I went to the doctor even if it was only a minor ailment (thank you, Canadian health care), just to fill my day. I started to see a therapist and do yoga, trying in vain to clear my head. I sometimes replied to personal ads on Craigslist to kill time. I did drugs on weekends whenever they were around, as a temporary balm for my hurting brain. I was twelve thousand dollars in debt and earning not much more than the summer in college when I worked as a dishwasher, which now ranked as only the second-most demoralizing period of my life.

  One morning in the winter of 2007, I was sitting in a Starbucks in Toronto working on a story when my cell phone rang. It was a long-distance number I didn’t recognize. On the other end was an American who said he worked as an editor at China Daily in Beijing. It had been months since I’d submitted my résumé and weeks since I wrote the editing test. I assumed they’d forgotten about me.