Apologies to My Censor Read online

  Others weren’t so lucky. Several friends were forced to leave the country for the Olympics because they were denied visas. Those deemed undesirable by the Chinese government were forced out. That spring, police rounded up drug suspects in Sanlitun and temporarily shut down several bars and clubs, including the legendary Maggie’s. Rumors spread that the city was going to force all bars to shut early during the Olympics, and all patios and outdoor drinking areas would be closed entirely. The government was seemingly sapping all the fun out of the event, and the foreign press responded to these efforts by dubbing the 2008 Olympics the “No Fun Games.”

  One night after playing basketball, I went with a few friends to Kro’s Nest, a popular pizza place owned by a young American expat. The restaurant was at the north gate of Workers Stadium, near two nightclubs that had long been pillars of Beijing’s nightlife, Mix and Vics. We passed two security tents set up for the Olympics, which were still two months away. When we arrived at Kro’s, it was inexplicably closed. In a few months, Mix and Vics would be forced to shut down as well, for “security reasons.”

  We walked back through the tents toward the parking lot.

  “Stupid Olympics,” my friend lamented. “Fucking up Beijing.”

  The atmosphere around the city was changing, and it occurred to me that the Olympics might not be the party everyone was hoping for.

  As the summer went on, and my Chinese improved, ever so slightly, I became more comfortable in my classes with Guo Li. Although she had majored in English at a university in Heilongjiang province, Guo Li spoke virtually none, so our one-on-one classes were all in Chinese. During class, she would teach me a few new words from the textbook or go over a new set of Chinese characters, but mostly we chatted.

  In class, as my language skills slowly improved, I would slip into character and talk with total confidence even though I had a five-year-old’s language ability. I was developing a Chinese identity, becoming the name on my China Daily business cards: Mi Gao. Tall Rice.

  For me, Tall Rice was a mask behind which I could be whoever I wanted. (This isn’t uncommon for foreigners living in China; Peter Hessler also talked about the emergence of his China identity in his first book, River Town.) I felt totally at ease around Guo Li, and she did around me as well. She would erupt into hysterics when I mispronounced or mistook a word, as when instead of saying pi jiu (second tone on pi, meaning “beer”), I said pi jiu (fourth tone on pi, meaning “fart liquor”). She was immensely curious about my day-to-day life, and during our classes we spoke about anything and everything, often slowly and with difficulty, but the point usually got across. If something was bothering me—visa complications, struggles with work, the frustrations of being a laowai in China—I told her. She was like my therapist.

  There was no beating around the bush with Guo Li. If I had a complaint about China or Chinese people, I laid it on the table. She told me about her family, her life in Heilongjiang, and about her boyfriend. I marveled at how much she worked—often fourteen hours a day, six days a week—and I gobbled up her insights about Chinese government, society, and people. By the end of the summer, Guo Li was by far the best Chinese friend I had, and our relationship was entirely in Chinese.

  It wasn’t just around Guo Li that my China identity emerged. Even though it was a struggle to understand him, I enjoyed talking to Comrade Wu, gathering little bits of detail about his family and history. Whenever I used a new word I had learned in class during our conversations, it felt like a minor conquest. I chatted with cabbies and servers at the coffee shops I frequented. These little conversations (“How’s your day?” “Do you have kids?”) made me feel more comfortable in Beijing by the day.

  After class I would go to the gym and then sit in cafés working on my freelance assignments, which were coming at a steady pace as the world turned its eyes on China before the Olympics. I wrote a piece for the Guardian, my first story in a major newspaper outside Canada. I wrote a few stories for the Globe and Mail and the South China Morning Post, a Hong Kong–based English newspaper. I was commissioned to write a story about Beijing’s famous Snack Street, near Wangfujing, where I ate scorpions, silkworms, starfish, and lamb penis. I had consistent writing gigs for local publications, and this time around I enjoyed the freedom of the freelance lifestyle.

  I spent most nights with Julia, but before long she was getting ready to move back to Moscow. Our breakup was inevitable, and although I had prepared for it all along, it hit me for real one afternoon a few days before she left.

  We spent the day together at my apartment and later took a cab to the Silk Market, where she wanted to buy presents for family and friends at home. I dropped her off, and as the cab pulled away, I broke down. It was over and I knew it. She was my best friend in Beijing and would be my girlfriend for only forty-eight more hours.

  It felt like everything was ending. Not just her and me, but the summer, one of the best of my life, was coming to an end, too. I had spent the last three months trying not to think beyond August, but now, as the Olympics approached, I was left with a big, empty fall ahead of me.

  That night was her going-away party. We went with her friends to an all-you-can-eat Japanese teppanyaki restaurant. We drank warm sake and Asahi beer, and after dinner the group of us walked to Sanlitun. Her friends went into a club while Julia and I sat huddled in a doorway at street level, rethinking our future together even though we both knew better. Should we try to make it work? She could come back next summer. Or maybe I could move to Moscow. But even through the haze of alcohol, we knew the answer. We decided that, after tomorrow, we would be done.

  I stayed at her place the last night she spent in Beijing. I slept terribly that night. Once again, Beijing, always reinventing itself, would be a new city in the morning.

  On the cab ride to the airport, we barely spoke. The window was down and I stroked her hair until we arrived at Terminal Two. I helped her with her bags and walked her to check-in.

  “I’ll see you soon,” I said, although I had no idea if that was true. We held each other for several minutes, her tears dampening my T-shirt, and then I pulled away, told her to call me when she arrived, and took a cab home.

  The week after Julia left was awful. The city felt even lonelier. My friend Will, whom I’d lived with in Japan, came to town with his girlfriend, and it was a welcome distraction. But I still wondered from hour to hour whether Julia and I had made the right decision. As for what would happen to me once the Olympics were over, I was too drained to even consider it.

  A week before the opening ceremonies, I went to the Olympic Green to meet my coworkers and pick up my press pass, which would serve as my visa for the duration of the Games. Thousands of volunteers had already been mobilized, and journalists—21,000 of them—were arriving from around the world. My cabdriver dropped me off at the wrong gate, and it took me more than an hour to find the correct entrance, on the opposite side of the sprawling Olympic Green. When I finally arrived, a CBC employee met me at the security check with my pass and escorted me to the main press center.

  There I met Dave, the head writer for the two shows I would work on throughout the Olympics. Dave was a quiet, friendly man of about fifty who had worked many Olympic broadcasts. He wore shorts, sneakers, a golf shirt, and baseball cap—an outfit he would wear every day throughout the Games. He seemed kind and decent, a good boss, and I liked him right away. He introduced me to the staff and filled me in on the details of my work, which sounded like an intern’s job description: monitoring newswires, looking up information about athletes and events, and doing whatever the head writers and researchers required of me.

  Dave walked me over to Ling Long Pagoda, where I would be working. Ling Long was a seven-story tower with studios on each floor overlooking the Olympic Green. The CBC’s set had already been built.

  “That chair cost two thousand dollars,” Dave said, pointing to the anchor’s chair.
r />   I sat down and swiveled. It was a fantastic chair—red and made out of some high-tech, super-firm mesh.

  “So we’ll be working on two prime-time shows that air in Canada at six p.m. every night,” Dave told me. “That means an early start here.”

  “How early?” I said.

  “We’ll need you here by four in the morning.”

  I almost puked in his face.

  9

  Live from Ling Long Pagoda

  Ten . . . nine . . . eight. . .

  I took a sip of lukewarm Sol beer. Projected images played on a brick wall across from the balcony of the Saddle, a Mexican restaurant and bar in Sanlitun where I was gathered with a half-dozen friends. The Olympics had arrived. Another sip. The city was a sweatbox, about ninety degrees and humid. The crowd was silent as we watched the countdown, which was happening live a few miles to the north. There, in the Bird’s Nest, musicians banged drums that illuminated when struck, forming numbers that counted down to the Olympics’ auspicious official beginning at 8 p.m. on August 8, 2008.

  Seven . . . six. . .

  That morning I had watched the sun rise over the Bird’s Nest, climbing from behind silhouetted rows of apartment buildings to reveal one of those end-of-times Beijing days that can be understood only when experienced firsthand. Through the haze the sun appeared “lurid red,” according to a story that came across the newswire I was monitoring. Far corners of the Olympic Green were barely visible from my station at Ling Long. A good day to open the biggest Olympics in history it was not.

  Despite the pollution, the significance of the day couldn’t be denied. The seven-year wait was coming to an end. Welcome, World, read China Daily’s front-page headline that morning. China’s moment had arrived.

  I had been working for a week in preparation for today, living on coffee and adrenaline, worn down but excited that it was finally here. During work, surrounded by my countrymen, I watched montages of previous Olympics and I would get butterflies.

  Outside the studio, volunteers in matching teal shirts and gray cargo pants gathered throughout the day. Security was everywhere. I saw girls in pink dresses and shirtless young men rehearsing on the practice track outside the Bird’s Nest for the opening ceremonies, which would be attended by dignitaries from around the world. On my way to lunch I saw the entire U.S. men’s basketball team leaving the press center: Kobe Bryant out front signing an autograph on a volunteer’s shirt; LeBron James trailing behind listening to music on earmuff headphones. It was surreal to know I was a part of the event the world was watching, that I had somehow ended up in the middle of it.

  Five . . . four. . .

  Starting tomorrow, I would begin my early morning shift at Ling Long Pagoda. The work was not glamorous—digging up data on athletes, keeping the head writers and hosts informed and happy, answering obvious questions about Beijing and China—but it offered a unique opportunity to contribute to the spectacle in some small way. Sometimes I needed to remind myself how lucky I was, especially when I was furious at having to work so early. Which was often.

  I ended my shift on August 8 late in the afternoon, after ten hours of preparing cue cards for the hosts and filing information on athletes that might be needed during one of the next day’s shows. As I waited for a cab to take me to Sanlitun, George W. Bush’s motorcade drove by.

  Three . . . two. . .

  I was at the Saddle, drinking Sol and watching the countdown, a tequila shot readied for when the drummers hit one. I felt nervous and proud, as if, somehow, these Olympics belonged especially to me. They had been such a huge part of my life for the previous sixteen months. I had seen the city shift and come together for this event. It was the common thread each of us in the city possessed; I felt as if everyone who lived in Beijing, both Chinese and foreigners, could claim these Olympics as their own.

  One. . .

  Tequila burned my throat and fireworks bloomed throughout the city. We cheered and hugged and high-fived. The ceremony that followed was a spectacle like nothing I’d ever seen before. China had gone all out. We watched in awe.

  Later, as the teams entered the Bird’s Nest, I looked at my watch and groaned. My friends ordered more rounds of drinks and talked about where they were going to party that night.

  I wouldn’t be able to join them, however. My alarm was set for three in the morning, when my own sixteen-day Olympic marathon would begin.

  I rolled out of bed after four hours of sleep and put on a pair of camouflage shorts and a Nike T-shirt I’d worn the day before. Wardrobe was of little concern to those of us who worked long hours behind the scenes preparing the Olympic broadcast that our friends and families would watch from their living rooms at home.

  I guzzled water and forced myself to do fifteen push-ups beside my bed in a futile attempt to wake up. I washed my neck and face, tried to sort out my hair, ate a bowl of oatmeal, and brewed a pot of coffee to put in a go-cup for my ride to work.

  The street sweepers were spraying down Chaoyangmen South Street as I hailed a cab and drove north toward the Olympic Green. As we pulled onto the fourth ring road in north Beijing, I could see the red glow of the Bird’s Nest. The Water Cube next door was fluorescent blue. Ling Long Pagoda was lit from top to bottom like a Christmas tree.

  The Olympic Green was already buzzing. A small line had formed at the security check, and inside, the press center journalists were sitting at the computer stations the Beijing Organizing Committee had provided, finishing their opening ceremony stories. I ordered a second coffee from the McDonald’s inside the press center and hopped on a golf cart that ferried me to my post at Ling Long.

  The opening theme song the CBC used on the first day of the 2008 Olympics in Beijing was the same one the network had used since I was old enough to remember watching the Games. As I sat in the studio at six o’clock in the morning, the anthem was all it took to forget that I had already been working for two hours, that I had slept only four hours the night before, that I was already exhausted after a week of preparations, and that I still had fifteen very early mornings to go.

  I watched the opening montage on a monitor and glimpsed the host on set—a legendary Canadian hockey commentator named Ron MacLean. I had grown up watching Ron MacLean on Hockey Night in Canada, the CBC’s flagship NHL broadcast, quibbling with his costar, the loud-mouthed former coach Don Cherry. I remember seeing them when I was only a kid, watching Wayne Gretzky–era Edmonton Oilers games in my basement with my dad.

  I watched MacLean on set, sitting on his $2,000 chair and preparing to go on air, and soaked up the theme song. I got a little misty-eyed. In a few hours, events would begin. This was huge.

  My days as a research assistant during the Olympics went like this:

  3:00 a.m.—Alarm. Push-ups. Eat yogurt and a banana, prepare coffee, hop in a cab to the Olympic Green.

  3:50 a.m.—Arrive at press center. Head downstairs to McDonald’s to grab a latte from McCafé. (I swear by McCafé. At Ling Long Pagoda the only coffee available tasted like bile after a few cups. McCafé lattes saved me on many mornings.)

  4:00 a.m.—Arrive at Ling Long Pagoda. Monitor newswires and international media for anything that might be useful for the show. Look for information about major events coming up that day and analysis of the previous day’s events. Send anything useful to Dave or the head researcher, a kind, intense woman named Karen. Continue monitoring the news throughout the morning.

  (One of the first things I noticed about the international media’s coverage of the Beijing Olympics was just how bad some of the parachute reporting was—that is, journalists who arrive in a place they know nothing about but write about it as if they do. The New York Times commented on the oddities of Chinese cuisine. The Toronto Star lamented Beijing’s ancient alleyway neighborhoods—about five years too late. Countless newspapers and magazines pointed out Beijing’s butchered Chinglish signage. The
se stories had Beijing-based foreign reporters in hysterics. One night a writer friend pointed out that bureau reporters highlighting other journalists’ clichés had become the biggest cliché of all. But I often got frustrated with some of the reporting in international media as well. A year in Beijing had made me defensive of the way the city was presented.)

  5:30 a.m.—Make toast with peanut butter. Drink third cup of coffee.

  6:00 a.m.—The prime-time show begins. I watch Ron from the monitor and wait for instructions from Dave and Karen. During events or commercials, the three of us scurry to find any useful information Ron might need for the upcoming segment.

  7:00 a.m.—One of the tech guys comes by my station and takes my order for breakfast from McDonald’s—my third breakfast of the day. (Over the course of the Olympics, I would put on about ten pounds.)

  7:00 a.m.–12:00 p.m.—Do whatever Dave and Karen ask of me, which is often very little. I try to sleep at my desk, or sometimes sneak outside for fresh air, even though it is strictly forbidden while the show is on air. It had been explained to me that I might be needed at any time to find information for the hosts whenever they needed it. “If they call on us for anything, we need to have it right now—right now,” Karen had said to me, snapping her fingers. I soon learn that this rarely happens, and every once in a while I grant myself a break. That is, until one day when Dave confronts me after I leave the studio for fifteen minutes. He tells me through quivering lips that I must never leave during a broadcast. Ever. I’m a prisoner of Ling Long Pagoda.