Apologies to My Censor Read online

  Noon—Lunch, my fourth meal of the day. Every day is the same: soggy sandwiches and fries.

  1 p.m.–3 p.m.—Work the late show, called Pacific Prime. Not much is required of me for this show, so I usually read magazines and watch events from the monitor.

  3 p.m. onward—Use my press pass to watch live events. Over the course of the Olympics I watch diving, swimming, track, basketball, beach volleyball, tennis, and more. Later, I meet friends for dinner and watch events at bars until my eyes start drooping, which is usually around 9 or 10 p.m. Most nights, I go to sleep around midnight.

  Then I do it all over again.

  It didn’t take long for some of the initial Olympics euphoria to fade, for me and everybody else I talked to. A few days after the Games began, a deranged Chinese man stabbed an American couple—including the father-in-law of the U.S. men’s volleyball coach, who died from his wounds—and their Chinese guide in the Drum tower in Beijing. (The assailant then jumped to his death.) Several elements of the opening ceremonies had been revealed as fraudulent: the fireworks shown on television were actually computer animated; minority performers were exposed as costumed Han Chinese; and a performance by an adorable young girl turned out to be lip-synched, the song actually performed by a child deemed insufficiently cute by the event’s organizers. The weather wasn’t helping, either. The city had been shrouded by smog and fog since the opening ceremony, and by Day Three it was pouring rain.

  After a few days, work started to get tedious. Sometimes it all felt like an episode of The Office. I spent full twelve-hour days looking up information on athletes and events, printing out page after page, and filing each one alphabetically in a cabinet in case one of the hosts needed to know, say, who won gold in men’s coxless pair rowing in the 2000 Sydney Olympics.

  I pointed out more than once that this information would be much easier to find, and more quickly, on the Olympics’ very own website that contained such data, or via Google, for example.

  “You can’t rely on the Internet,” Karen told me. “What if the Olympic website goes down? Or Google?”

  “I really don’t see that happening.”

  “What if the computers break down?”

  “All of them?”

  She grew frustrated. “Look, I’ve been doing this longer than you. You have to prepare for the worst, even if the worst never happens.”

  I frowned and returned to printing out documents that I would file away and never use.

  The Games went on. Michael Phelps won his first of eight gold medals. The U.S.-China basketball game drew an estimated one billion viewers. And spirits were high despite the heat and humidity and overbearing security.

  As often as I could, I went to watch events. The first one I attended was beach volleyball, hosted in a temporary stadium at the east entrance of Chaoyang Park. The stadium was heaving. My friend and I sipped one-dollar cans of Tsingtao as the announcer led the curious crowd through the wave, and cheerleaders from China and elsewhere, dubbed “Beach Babies,” outfitted in lime-green bikinis, danced to Chubby Checker. It wasn’t exactly the Olympics in the Athenian sense, but it was definitely amusing.

  A few days later, I went to the Water Cube, arriving halfway through the men’s three-meter synchronized diving event. It was packed. No surprise since the Chinese were dominating. Fans waved China’s red and yellow flag and chanted, “Zhong Guo jia you!”—“Add oil, China,” the Chinese equivalent of “Let’s go!”—and cheered politely for other competitors.

  I went to the tennis courts to watch Rafael Nadal play an unknown Russian. I sat alone in the media section and wondered if, from Moscow, Julia was watching this, too. After the match I wandered to center court to watch Roger Federer, then ranked number one in the world. I bought a can of Tsingtao and took a seat in the media section. The stadium filled up slowly, and by the end of the first set there were still empty seats near the top.

  The media section was only half full. I leaned back in my chair and rested my feet on the seat in front me. Work was done for the day and I felt wide awake despite a serious lack of sleep. I took a deep breath, looked up at the blue sky overhead, and held up my can of Tsingtao, offering a toast to nobody in particular.

  Not a day had gone by over the previous sixteen months when I hadn’t thought and talked about the Games. And whenever I did, I was thrilled. I watched the city transform. And now that they were here, and I was seeing them, living them, I felt let down, not because they weren’t grandiose and spectacular—they were—but because they would soon be over, and with them would go a major justification for my life in Beijing. It was as if the pillars of my China life—China Daily, my friends and colleagues there, Julia, the Olympics—were all gone or going, and without them I had nothing left to lean on.

  Over the course of the Olympics I grew increasingly uneasy and was affected by a lingering sadness. It seemed somehow a disappointment that years of effort came down to just a couple weeks—and then what? The stadiums empty, the banners come down, the crowds go home. Would Beijing still be on anybody’s radar after the Games? Would it still be on mine?

  Sleep deprivation does strange things to a man. I was sleeping an average of about three hours a night, and on some nights I caught maybe an hour or two. I felt like I was the subject of a cruel experiment. On a given day I might drink eight to ten cups of coffee and eat a half-dozen meals. I felt, at times, at the brink of sanity. I needed to drain my bladder every ten minutes, and my personal hygiene was suffering. More than once I caught a whiff of my own body odor on mornings when I slept too late to wash myself and forgot to apply deodorant. The doughnut around my belly was growing by the day.

  As time went on, I grew increasingly agitated and lost sight of the fact that, in reality, where I no longer lived, CBC had actually provided me with an incredible opportunity. But more often than not I felt sorry for myself, dwelling instead on the long hours, early morning, menial tasks, and little pay. When I found out that another expat worker doing a similar job was being paid $1,000 more because he’d been hired in desperation at the last minute to fill an empty spot, I almost quit.

  My outlet was a young Chinese woman named Hong, who had been hired a year earlier, when she lived in Toronto, to be a sort of cultural liaison. Hong was pretty, and I had immediate fantasies of an Olympics fling from the moment I saw her, although it never came to fruition. Even though we had broken up, Julia was still very much on my mind throughout the Olympics, especially as my mental state veered closer toward instability.

  Hong’s job in Canada had been to prepare background information on Beijing and China, and to coach the talent on how to pronounce Chinese words and names, a task at which she failed miserably. During the actual Olympics the CBC had little use for Hong, and although she was still required to come in at dawn, she spent most of the day sleeping in a bed she had made for herself in the studio used for the late French-language broadcast.

  In between our two shows, when we had a short break, Hong and I would go outside for cigarettes and I would vent. I think she liked the drama.

  “You should just quit,” she said, egging me on.

  “Maybe I will.”

  “You should. Go for it.”

  I nodded my head, rehearsing lines in my brain that I might say when I handed in my resignation.

  But I didn’t quit. Instead, I sulked under my breath and showed up a few minutes later each day to see if anybody would do anything about it. I was going crazy with fatigue. There were other times, though, when I snapped out of it and the gravity of the place and time hit me with full force.

  One evening after work, for example, I went with a friend to the Bird’s Nest to watch the men’s hundred-meter sprint final, featuring the aptly named Jamaican extraterrestrial Usain Bolt. We drank cans of Tsingtao and watched one of the Olympics’ marquee events. I fell asleep during the heats, but for the final I was wide awake as I wa
tched Bolt obliterate the field, looking back and pulling up with ten meters left, arms raised, crushing his own record time. The crowd was euphoric. We had seen something historic and we knew it. I felt guilty for any bad thought I’d ever had toward the CBC, and I promised I would work harder and without complaint, a promise that lasted about a day.

  “Are you watching this?”

  It was my friend Will texting. I looked over at the TV screen nearest me and saw the women’s triathlon.

  “Watching what? Triathlon?” I texted back.

  “Liu Xiang,” Will wrote. “He’s out.”

  Shocked, I called Will and he told me that Liu Xiang, the Chinese hurdler who had won gold in world-record time in Athens 2004, had pulled out of the Olympics because of an Achilles injury. I went on the newswires to confirm it was true. This was massive—the biggest story of the Olympics—and the CBC had missed it. Why hadn’t we cut to it? I wondered. Why are we still broadcasting the triathlon?

  “Liu Xiang’s out!” I hollered out to everyone around me in the studio.

  “Who?” Karen said.

  “Liu Xiang. The hurdler. Why aren’t we covering this?”

  It’s difficult to put into context the gravity of Liu Xiang’s exit from the Olympics. In China, Liu Xiang was something like LeBron James, Roger Federer, and David Beckham—combined. People adored him. Before the Olympics, a poll asked one million Chinese their wishes for the Beijing Games. Watching Liu Xiang win his second gold medal ranked first. (Holding a successful Olympics was fourth.) In China, Liu’s pockmarked face was featured on billboards and advertisements everywhere, for Nike, Lenovo computers, Coca-Cola, Cadillac, a cigarette company, and more.

  Of course, I knew Liu Xiang’s importance—I had been in China for the previous year—but nobody else in the studio did. I was in disbelief that CBC had not covered his story, or at the very least had not turned to the event after he pulled out. It felt almost like a personal slight—how could they do this? I had moved over a notch on the Foreigner/Chinese Identity Spectrum.

  I was up from my chair walking up and down the studio, arms flailing like a rabid monkey.

  “Why aren’t we covering this? This is unbelievable.”

  None of my colleagues said a word. Some were avoiding looking at me entirely. After a few moments of me raving at no one in particular, one of the technical workers, a thirty-something Canadian who also lived in Beijing, pulled me to the side.

  “I don’t think you should say anything more.”

  “Why? This is bullshit. This is the biggest story of the Olympics.”

  “These people are professionals. They don’t like to be told they’re wrong.”

  “But they are wrong.”

  “Maybe. But do you hear anybody asking your opinion?”

  He was right. I sat down at my post, and when my blood settled, I avoided my colleagues’ eyes out of embarrassment. CBC hadn’t covered Liu Xiang’s heat because they didn’t care. Sure, I did, but what was a huge story in China was a nonstory in Canada. From then on, I kept my opinions to myself.

  I got over Liu Xiang and so did the Chinese. The country went on to win fifty-one gold medals, the most of any country at the 2008 Olympics. The weather improved and every day of the second week was sunny and clear. As the events wound down, the consensus was that the Beijing Olympics were a success. I felt proud for the city I had seen transform over the last sixteen months, and on the last day of the Olympics, as I looked over the Bird’s Nest from Ling Long Pagoda one final time, I knew that despite my fatigue, I had made the right choice to work for the CBC.

  Still, I was happy the Olympics were over. I was near the end of my tether as a research assistant. One more early morning, one more Egg McMuffin, one more mundane task, and I might have snapped. By the sixteenth and final day of the 2008 Olympic Games, I desperately needed to get drunk. Very, very drunk. I sent out an e-mail to anyone in Beijing who might be up for a party, and as soon as my shift ended, I said goodbye to my coworkers and cabbed to a bar in Sanlitun to watch the men’s basketball finals with Will and his girlfriend.

  “It begins,” I said as I sipped my first Stella Artois as a free man.

  My giddiness soon subsided, and I found myself drifting off as a group of us watched the closing ceremony on the patio of the same restaurant where we had watched the opening ceremony. More than once, I fell asleep, my chin resting on my chest before my friends woke me up and reminded me that this was supposed to be my big night, my one chance for a real Olympic party.

  We moved to a club called China Doll, and I started passing out in a booth. A friend noticed this and surreptitiously slipped me a little plastic bag filled with white powder, under the table. But after I went to the bathroom for a line, I was hit with a strange anxiety, followed by a moment of clarity when I told myself that for my own benefit I should probably go home. Instead, I ignored my own advice and ordered more drinks.

  Rob showed up. We hadn’t seen each other in months. We caught up briefly and then he drifted into the crowd. That was the last I saw of him—not just that night but ever.

  At one point I ran into a young woman I’d been friends with since my early days in Beijing, and we talked over a few drinks in our booth. Apparently the alcohol and drugs had cocooned my conscience because I managed to push aside any thought of Julia, and the two us soon took a cab to her place. We rolled around on her folded-out futon for a few minutes, but nothing happened. Sixteen days of exhaustion and malnutrition had taken a terrific toll.

  I got dressed, apologized, and took a cab home.

  I woke early. I was ravenous. It was seven o’clock and I was used to having my third breakfast of the day by then. My heart raced and my brain stung. I felt guilty and slimy about the night before—all of it. I ate whatever food I had left—oatmeal, a cup of yogurt, a banana—and drank half a liter of water before trying in vain to go back to sleep.

  I felt awful, and it wasn’t just the hangover. As I walked around town that day, it became clear that something was missing. There was a void in post-Olympics Beijing, and it was evident from the moment the Games ended.

  I was alone and trying to come up with ways to kill the day, but in the pit of my fattened stomach was the weight of despair. The Olympics, one of the main reasons for coming to China, were done. Whenever I’d felt down in the previous year, whenever I felt lonely or frustrated or had a Bad China Day, I could always say, Oh well, the Olympics are coming. Now they were gone, and so was my girlfriend and most of my friends. Beijing didn’t just feel like a ghost town, as it had some days that summer; it was a ghost town now.

  I had a foot massage and went to a movie. On the way home I walked past a busy market, my head in a daze as I watched foreign visitors using their last hours in China’s capital to buy cheap goods to give to their friends and family back home, where they would all be in a day or so.

  But not me. I was still here. For those of us left in the city, there was a sense of gloom, and it lasted for days, weeks, even months, and throughout that time I had one terrible question always—persistently—lurking in my brain.

  What now?

  10

  Dinosaur Bones and Brothels

  In the weeks after the Olympics, my options were limited. As the financial crisis hit in North America, the journalism job market was bleak, and I wasn’t enamored of the prospect of going back to the grim existence of a freelancer in Canada. I looked for work in Hong Kong, where a few friends had moved, but heard much of the same. Hiring freezes, layoffs. Apply again in a few months.

  I was stuck in Beijing and anxious about what to do. The Olympics had worn me down, and I was slow to get back into the freelance groove. The previous sixteen months had gone by so fast, and I was finding that, as I expected, I was missing the comforts of China Daily.

  I missed Julia, too. We had stayed in touch over the course of the Olympics, and now
that they were over, I decided I would visit her for a week in Moscow. The Russian embassy in Beijing had other ideas, however. Only foreigners with resident permits, which I lacked, could apply for a Russian visa. My travel plans were thwarted, so Julia and I came up with Plan B: a week in Thailand.

  Tanned and stunning, she met me at the Bangkok airport, and the next day we traveled to Koh Phangan, a popular island in the Gulf of Thailand and home of the Full Moon Party. We rented a bungalow on a quiet beach, and for a few days I let go of all my apprehension about life in Beijing.

  We spent the week swimming, riding around the islands on motorbikes, drinking, and sleeping in. It was heavenly, but with each day the weight of knowing we would soon have to say goodbye again grew heavier. When we parted ways at the airport after seven nights together, neither of us brought up the obvious question—what were we doing? We cried and kissed and said goodbye, and she told me she would come visit me in Beijing during her winter break. We didn’t say it, but we were now, unofficially at least, in a long-distance relationship.

  While I was still in Thailand, a friend e-mailed asking if I wanted to work for an English-language news magazine in Beijing. The publication, called Asia Weekly, was owned by a journalist from England, Jasper Becker, who had lived in China for decades. It covered Asia from the Beijing office and was based on the same concept as the Week, a popular British news digest. The pay wasn’t great, but it was a respectable publication. I figured I could work at Asia Weekly for a few months, continue freelancing in my spare time, wait out the financial crisis, and plot my next move.

  I returned to Beijing and started the new job, and for the first time since the Olympics, I felt stable. I had friends at the office and the work was interesting. I restarted Chinese classes with Guo Li, whom I now met for private lessons at a Starbucks near my home. I bought Chinese character flash cards that I carried with me everywhere, flipping through them whenever I had a spare moment. I started thinking of freelance stories I could work on. I was rejuvenated.