Apologies to My Censor Page 11

  After a few minutes he noticed I wasn’t keeping up.

  “Your Chinese,” he said, shaking his head, “is terrible.”

  He was right. My Chinese was pathetic for having spent a year in the country; it was at a level that could have been achieved after an intensive month-long course. It was something I hoped to remedy that summer, the Olympic summer. I was determined to engage with China differently, to be the better laowai I’d promised myself I would be. I wanted to meet more locals, to develop a better understanding of the city and country, and much of that had to do with getting a half-decent understanding of Chinese.

  Comrade Wu’s apartment was in the Chaoyangmen neighborhood, inside the east second ring road and near the site of the long-ago demolished Chaoyang (“Sun-facing”) Gate. My building was part of a large complex of aging six-story walk-ups, made of concrete and built for utility.

  The courtyard behind my building was a hub of activity, crowded in spring and summer with locals exercising and gossiping and walking their tiny, yapping dogs. Women wore baggy, dark-colored clothing, and on hot days the men sported T-shirts pulled up over their pale bellies, the legs of their pants rolled to the knee. A geriatric bike repairman with big, filthy hands, wearing a stained muscle shirt and torn jeans, set up shop at the courtyard gate, and business was brisk. Beijing bicycles aren’t made to last, and I visited him regularly to fix my sixty-dollar Yongjiu (“Forever”) bike.

  Just around the corner, across Chaoyangmen South Alley, were rows of old hutong alleyways, which I often explored while running or biking in the early evenings. The alleys were the best part of Beijing, full of life and history. Groups of men played cards and mah-jongg; kids walked home from school drowning in their uniforms; old women gathered in the shade of trees to talk and laugh. The alleys smelled of barbecued meat and public toilets. It seemed like the entire community was there, hanging out, living, and often when I went running, the games and chatting stopped and puzzled expressions appeared on the locals’ faces as the tall laowai darted by, singing along to songs playing on his headphones.

  My apartment, which cost $700 a month, split two ways with a journalist from New Zealand named Jon, had three bedrooms, a cramped living room, a kitchen, and a closetlike bathroom. There was no separate shower in the bathroom, so water sprayed directly from the showerhead onto the tiled floor and toilet before going down the often-plugged drain. The bathroom smelled of mold, and the rest of the apartment became onion- or garlic-scented whenever our neighbors cooked. We had two balconies, each attached to a bedroom and closed off with glass windows, rendering them useless as outdoor spaces. The walls were thick; the apartment was dead quiet and scorching hot throughout the summer, whenever the air conditioners were broken, which was often. The walk up the windowless staircase was a struggle in the heat, and I often came through the door panting and dripping with sweat.

  It had taken us a month to find the place before I went to Canada. Searching for apartments in Beijing is a nightmare, a lesson Jon and I had learned well. With the Olympics on the horizon, landlords were driving up prices, especially for foreigners, in anticipation of a flood of visitors. We looked at dozens of apartments before finding Comrade Wu’s place. I saw shoe box apartments with prison cots, and places that looked like murder scenes going for more than $1,000 a month. They were small, poorly designed, and with furniture that, as Jon put it, “commit various crimes against good taste.” Despite its drawbacks, Comrade Wu’s was a steal compared to some of the other units we saw: it was clean, minimal, and affordable. The walls were freshly painted white and it had new (fake) wood floor panels.

  We weren’t far from the main centers of activity: Sanlitun and the Central Business District were ten-minute cab rides away, barring traffic, and I could cycle to my favorite cafés in the alleys near the Drum and Bell Towers in less than fifteen minutes. We had a number of cheap, convenient local restaurants nearby, a 7-Eleven just around the corner, and a Starbucks a ten-minutes walk away, just over the second ring road.

  The apartment left something to be desired, but it was central and it helped give me a new lease on Beijing life. I had no office to go to now, no stories to edit, and I was free of China Daily. I had accepted a three-week job as a research assistant during the Olympics with the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, but until then I had nothing but time.

  Not long after I came back to Beijing, I enrolled in a Chinese language school across the ring road, signing up for six to ten hours of class each week and making a pledge to myself that I would do homework this time. The day I enrolled at the school, I told the secretary I had studied Chinese for a year, and the school tailored a lesson plan for someone who had not only studied but also learned Chinese for a year. But studying and learning are two entirely different things, which I soon found out.

  My teacher was a twenty-seven-year-old woman from Heilongjiang province in northeast China, named Guo Li. She was a sweetheart, with a pretty face, dimpled cheeks, and a bowl cut of black hair. She was tiny and looked barely older than a teenager. During our first lesson it became clear that my Chinese was not up to par; nearly everything Guo Li said passed over my head. After a few minutes, she threw her hands up in exasperation and said, in Chinese, “Have you been in China for a year? Or a day?” I immediately liked her.

  Meanwhile, with so many of my former colleagues having departed Beijing for home or elsewhere, I was spending more time with Julia. We started spending a couple of nights a week together, and before long it was three or four times a week. In late May, we went with a group of her friends for a weekend trip to Inner Mongolia, where we rode horses and ate roasted lamb and went drinking in the town’s karaoke bar. She was planning on returning to Russia to finish university at the end of July, and as we lay in bed in a local family’s guesthouse that night, I told her I would miss her when she left.

  “I’ll miss you too, sladki.”

  “Sladki? What’s that mean?”

  “It means sweetheart in Russian.”

  After that, she called me Sladki all the time, and I adored it. (I liked it better than when she said my real name, which in her Russian accent sounded more like a screech—“Meeeeetch.”) At some point, we started calling each other boyfriend and girlfriend and we spent almost every night together. We took turns staying at one another’s place. We went to Xi’an to see the Terracotta Warriors. We had sex in the bushes at the base of the Great Wall during an all-night rave.

  She was lovely, and even though we were very different people, we made a great couple. I gave her the confidence she sometimes lacked. She gave me comfort and a sense of calm.

  She was my first girlfriend in two years, and our relationship felt good. But always lingering, and always ratcheting up the intensity, was the fact that in less than two months, she would be gone.

  I was happy, but I was also adjusting to the burdens of taking care of myself after a year of living like an infant under the supervision of a Chinese government newspaper. China Daily handled everything even remotely difficult in our lives—problems with our apartments, visas, logistics. We had a network of people attending to us. I had gotten used to being supported over the year and almost forgot that day-to-day life in China can be infuriatingly difficult.

  Now I was on my own as a freelancer, and even a menial task could became a huge hassle. One day, for example, I needed a D battery. I tried a few little shops near my place. Nothing. The 7-Eleven down the street. No luck. I biked across the ring road to a market and tried four or five stalls before I found the battery I needed. A task that would have taken five minutes in North America took close to forty-five minutes in China, even after a year.

  I was also having constant problems with my apartment. Only one of the three air conditioners in my place blew cold air, and the one that did, which was in my bedroom, leaked buckets of water. I called Comrade Wu four times over a week before he finally fixed the leak. Less than a week l
ater, it was dripping water again. After several more phone calls, Comrade Wu finally came back with a few workers. I tried to explain in my broken Chinese that I had woken up that morning with a huge puddle of air conditioner water on my floor. He raised his eyebrows, offered a half smile, shook his head from side to side, and conveyed what he was thinking with no words at all: “Enough with your laowai bitching!”

  To solve the problem, the workers drilled a hole through the bedroom wall to the balcony, flakes of paint and bits of cement falling into a pile on my desk, and then fed the air conditioner hose through the hole and into a bucket they placed on the other side. I would need to empty the bucket every second day.

  For the most part, I was grateful to be in China during the Olympic summer, but that didn’t stop me from wanting an elevator, a kitchen with an oven, a shower that didn’t spray directly onto my toilet, a washing machine that didn’t eat my clothes. A landlord that didn’t drop in all the time. It felt overwhelming at times, dealing with the little things on top of studying and working. China offered many things but rarely peace of mind.

  A major headache of pre-Olympics Beijing was dealing with visas, another problem I hadn’t had to bother with while working at China Daily. After my “foreign expert” visa expired, I returned to China on a thirty-day tourist visa, which I could renew twice at the Public Security Bureau in Beijing. That would take me up to the start of the Olympics. I asked the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC), my Olympics employer, if they would sponsor me for the Games themselves, and they said they would look into it, but they never got back to me.

  In China, visas could be bought. Many foreigners lived for years on gray-market visas, found through shady visa agents who, thanks to connections or money or both, were able to obtain official visas for foreigners not officially employed in China. I had made inquiries with friends while I was still working at China Daily and was directed to look at the online classifieds of local English-language listings magazines. There I found dozens of ads promising tourist or business visas in exchange for a fee. But according to online forums, these gray-market visas were getting harder to come by as the Olympics approached, and those still available were increasingly expensive.

  Since I had already accepted a job during the Games and was desperate to see the event after witnessing the buildup, I didn’t have much of a choice. One afternoon I met a middle-aged Englishman named Simon, whom I’d found via an ad offering yearlong work visas. He was a short man with flushed cheeks and large glasses. He had been working in Beijing for the better part of a decade, running a trading business with a Canadian business partner. He procured visas “on the side,” he said, through government contacts he’d made over the years.

  I was nervous as I handed him $1,000 and my passport, and he could tell.

  “Don’t worry,” he said. “We’ve never had a problem getting visas, and if we do, we’ll give all your money back—full refund.”

  He said he would get back within a few days to tell me how it was proceeding. When by the following week I hadn’t heard from him, I started getting worried. I called him one afternoon and he assured me there was no problem: my visa would be ready shortly. A few days later he called me back. He said there was a small snag and asked me to meet his business partner, the Canadian, the following day.

  The Canadian, a skinny, ratlike man from Calgary, sat across from me in the lobby of his office, not far from China Daily. His forehead glistened with sweat.

  I had a bad feeling.

  “We can get your visa, but we want you to do us a favor,” he said.

  “What kind of favor?”

  “We want you to import a car from Hong Kong under your name. It’s for tax reasons. Foreigners don’t have to pay taxes on imported cars. Mainlanders do.”

  I had heard of this before, but usually foreigners who agreed to this scheme got paid several thousand dollars for the risk, on top of a free visa. But I wasn’t going to get paid, and my visa was still going to cost me $1,000. Simon and the Rat, I guessed, would make a killing.

  I didn’t know what the repercussions would be if our plot was uncovered, and I wasn’t anxious to find out. I didn’t want to miss the Olympics, but my gut told me to run.

  “If you’re uncomfortable with this,” the Rat said, “we’ll give you your money back.”

  I asked for my money back.

  As the days passed and the Olympics fast approached, I e-mailed the Olympic press center, which dealt with foreign reporters, and explained my situation. I asked if there was any way I could still apply for a journalist visa. They replied that if I had a press card, which the CBC would be providing for me at the start of the Olympics, then I automatically had a visa for the duration of the event, but it wouldn’t kick in until a few days before the Games. Until then, I could stay in China on my current tourist visa, which I still needed to renew every thirty days.

  I thought the problem was solved, but my visa woes weren’t over. I was able to renew my tourist visa in June, after the first thirty-day period, with no problem. Not so after sixty days.

  “There have been some changes,” the woman at the Public Security Bureau told me when I visited in mid-July, three weeks before the Olympics.

  The building, which served as police headquarters, was located on the north second ring road. On the second floor, where visas were handled, swarms of foreigners lined up at dozens of numbered windows, waiting their turn with visa officers who seemed to put extra effort into their miserable demeanor. It was chaos, and for the first time in my China existence I came face-to-face with the juggernaut of Chinese bureaucracy.

  “What kind of changes?” I asked the woman at the counter.

  “You must have twenty thousand yuan in your bank account in order to renew your visa. And you must provide a bank statement.”

  Neither of these requirements had existed even a few weeks before. “Okay. I’ll print off a statement from my Canadian bank account.”

  “No. It must be Chinese bank account.”

  “What?”

  “Must be Chinese account.”

  I thought about this for a second. “So let me get this straight. Foreign tourists who want to visit China for thirty days must have over three thousand dollars in a Chinese bank account in order to obtain a visa?”

  “Correct.”

  I looked at the date on my watch and the date on my visa.

  “My visa expires tomorrow,” I said. “I’ve got one day to open a Chinese bank account, deposit twenty thousand yuan, and then bring a statement to you.”

  “Yes.”

  “That’s impossible.”

  The woman shrugged. “It’s the only way.”

  I left the PSB and tried to think. I would only be able to withdraw about $1,500 from my own accounts because of daily withdrawal limits, so I’d need to borrow. I called anybody I could think of who might be able to lend me money. Julia lent me $500, and a friend from China Daily happened to have $1,000 in cash on hand at his apartment. I rushed to Bank of China and opened an account, depositing $3,000. But in order to get a certified statement of funds, the cashier said I needed to freeze my account for five working days.

  In sum: I was (supposedly) a tourist in China, on a thirty-day visa, and I needed to present proof that I had $3,000 in funds in a Chinese bank account that I wouldn’t be able to access for a full week of my thirty days in the country.

  Bad China Days.

  I wasn’t the only foreigner having a nightmare with Chinese visas in the lead-up to the Games. Hundreds of people from around the world were denied visas to attend the event, many for no apparent reason at all. Why China would deny visas to ordinary people who only wanted to watch the Olympics, which are supposed to symbolize global camaraderie, is anyone’s guess. My hunch was that Chinese officials thought of the Beijing Olympics as their party, no one else’s, and they didn’t want too m
uch foreign riffraff around causing trouble.

  The visa woes were exemplary of something much bigger: Beijing’s big Olympic cleanup. It had been happening for years—painting old apartment blocks, ripping up streets and sidewalks, curtailing citizens spitting and line-jumping, closing down factories near the city—but in the months before the Games began, efforts were ratcheted up. It was evident right down at hutong level, where old ladies in my neighborhood sat stoically on small stools at all hours of the day, armed with keen eyes and red armbands that said “Public Security Volunteer.”

  It was on a deeply personal level that I felt the Big Cleanup. One day in June, I traveled to Lido to buy movies at Tom’s DVD store. Tom’s had become a huge part of my Beijing life, since my free time was divided between 1) drinking, 2) cheap massages, and 3) watching movies.

  On this day I was looking for the new Indiana Jones movie, but when I arrived, Tom’s was closed. I asked two Chinese men loitering outside the antiques store upstairs what was going on, and they said something about inventory. But Tom’s had been closed for inventory a few weeks before, and I wondered how much inventory a bootleg DVD store could possibly do. Then a few days later, I read in a city magazine that a DVD vendor in Sanlitun had recently been fined 10,000 yuan and put in jail.

  As the Olympics neared, police presence increased around the city. At the traffic rotary on the second ring road near my apartment, cops pulled over drivers all day, checking IDs to make sure out-of-towners had permission to be in Beijing. As a six-foot-three foreigner living in China, I always stood out. But it wasn’t until the lead-up to the Olympics that I really felt out of place. From reading the news, it didn’t seem that China wanted foreigners there at all. I was never paranoid living in China, even as a journalist, but I did wonder from time to time, as I cycled through the rotary on my way to Chinese class or elsewhere, what would happen if one of the police officers pulled me to the side and asked, what, exactly, I was doing in China. Thankfully, that never happened.