Apologies to My Censor Read online

  I could feel my heart hammering inside my chest but tried to sound composed on the phone. “That’s, that’s . . . great news,” I said. He asked me a few questions about my experience, told me a little about the job, and said to expect an e-mail shortly.

  Over the next few days, I checked my e-mail constantly, and when the offer finally came, three weeks later, I was ecstatic. One-year contract, accommodation, plane ticket each way. I was in a coffee shop and it was blizzarding outside. I wanted to laugh at the swirling snow and its attempt to keep me rooted and miserable in Toronto. I bit my fist, barely able to wrap my head around the idea of moving to Beijing. I was going to do it right this time, I told myself. Not like Japan. I was going to make this trip count.

  After the initial euphoria faded, doubts crept in. Despite the terrible year I’d had, I couldn’t help but wonder if China Daily was a step in the wrong direction. Based on the warnings that soon began landing in my inbox from foreign editors, it didn’t seem like what they were doing over there was journalism exactly, and being a journalist was the only thing I had ever wanted to be.

  As a kid, I would sit in my basement penning tales of sporting glory and intergalactic adventure, a long-haired and ear-pierced version of my young self in the role of protagonist. In high school, I interned at a local weekly paper, writing for the sports section, and during my undergraduate studies I worked at my university’s student newspaper. I loved it. Journalism, and writing in general, gave me an identity. I went on to do a master’s degree in journalism, and during my course I interned at a newspaper in Toronto called the National Post, where I continued to work after graduation.

  My dream was to live abroad and write long-form magazine articles and books, but I was realistic enough to know that those things wouldn’t come right away. At the National Post, I was placed in the business section, and although I gave it my best (at least at first), it became clear that a career as a business reporter was not my calling. I wrote stories about investing although I had no investments and no interest in investing. I reported on dividends and bonds and EBITDA and interest rates, without truly understanding what any of those terms meant. I was perhaps the world’s most inadequate business reporter, and toward the end of my contract it began to show. I made small mistakes, rarely pitched stories to my editors, and whined incessantly about my job to anyone who would listen.

  I grew anxious to get out into the world and do the writing I wanted to do. When I eventually left the paper and traveled to Asia in the fall of 2005, I wrote a few magazine articles that stirred my passions, including a dozen-page magazine feature about the legacy of Agent Orange in Vietnam. This, I thought, is what I want to do. I wanted big stories, stories I could live and feel, stories that would make a difference, stories that would take me out of an office and into places I never knew existed.

  But despite a few successes, I never figured out how to make freelance writing sustainable on that first trip to Asia, and by the time I was back in Toronto I was writing business articles again, only now I was doing it for half of what I earned at the Post. I had envisioned that at this stage of my career I would be writing for GQ or Esquire from jungle war zones and sinful foreign metropolises. Instead, I was writing weekend features about how to get a better deal on your cell phone plan.

  China was a chance at redemption. In the days after I was offered the job, I pictured myself cracking A-list publications, maybe even writing a book about my experiences at China Daily.

  At the same time, I had serious doubts. I didn’t know the language. Didn’t know much about the city or country, and I had no friends waiting for me. What if I hated Beijing? What would the job be like? Would I even be able to freelance while working at China Daily? Would I be able to make it work? Or would I be back in Toronto within a year, my tail between my legs, feeling like a catastrophic loser again?

  I couldn’t sleep the weeks before I left for Beijing, lying awake, obsessing over nothing. I had trouble focusing, my mood oscillating between near exhilaration at moving across the world and a crushing fear that I was making a terrible decision. Friends and family said it was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, that it would all work out, etc. I wanted to believe them, but moving to China? To work for a government newspaper? It seemed so ridiculous.

  One day, struggling to finish a story, I walked up the street to a bookstore to buy a Beijing guidebook. I was in a fog during the walk, oblivious to the frozen city around me. I sat down in the store with a couple of different guidebooks, and flipping through Lonely Planet’s Best of Beijing I stumbled across a section called “Newspapers & Magazines.”

  “The Chinese government’s favorite English-language mouthpiece,” it read, “is the China Daily.”

  I opened the Rough Guide to China and searched for mention of my new employer. China Daily was good for local listings, the Rough Guide said, but “the rest of the paper is propaganda written in torrid prose.”

  My heart, already weighed down, sank to the pavement.

  I had second thoughts up until I stepped onto the crowded Air Canada flight bound for Beijing, at which point it was too late to change my mind.

  The next morning, I sipped a cup of instant coffee, exhausted but relieved that I was finally there, in Beijing, China, watching kids outside my apartment window perform lazy morning exercises as I tried to make sense of the words, painted on a brick wall, UNITE. DILIGENT. PROGRESS.

  2

  The Chinese Propagandist

  Life in Beijing got off to a fittingly inauspicious start. On my first morning, Jenny, the Chinese staff member assigned to handle foreign editors at China Daily, took me to my state-required physical examination at a nearby hospital. On the way, we passed a commotion at a busy intersection. A crowd had gathered around a police car, and as we drove by, several men were yelling at one another.

  In the middle of the crowd, I noticed a man lying twisted, motionless, and bloody. Nobody was helping him.

  “Holy shit,” I said, my face pressed against the taxi window. “I think he’s dead.”

  Jenny giggled. She was a jittery woman in her mid-twenties with a ponytail and thick glasses. I told her that a story about a subway tunnel collapse that killed six workers in Beijing had recently made news in Canada.

  She looked at me and said, “How many dead people do you think makes the news in China?”

  “I don’t know. One?”

  She laughed again. “At least ten.”

  I offered an uncomfortable chuckle before realizing she wasn’t joking but pointing out my naïveté. In a country of 1.3 billion people, one dead pedestrian wasn’t news at all.

  The examination, required for all foreign workers in China, included a blood test for HIV/AIDS and heart monitoring. I caused some confusion when I stated my height and weight in inches and pounds, and a question about narcotics prompted a flashback to a long and regrettable cocaine-fueled night a few months earlier at a friend’s wedding in Cancún. I worried for a moment that my time in China might be over before it began.

  After the examination, I had a lunch of pork and fish with my new boss, Mr. Wang, a nervous little fellow with glasses, a bowl cut, and an oversize University of Tennessee sweater-vest. Mr. Wang, who was in charge of all foreign staff, hunched over his plate and studied the fish we were eating. He determined that it was a lake fish—“some kind of carp,” he said. He went on to talk at length about Norman Bethune, the Canadian doctor who joined Mao Zedong’s communists during the Revolution and who is a legend in China but barely known outside of it. I asked him about his vest and he told me
that he had once been a visiting scholar at the school, studying mass media. “It is very polite,” he said of Tennessee, “but conservative.”

  Mr. Wang told me I’d be working the night shift, at least to start, editing the business pages. My heart immediately sank. Editing the China Daily business section’s “torrid prose,” as the Rough Guide put it, was one thing, but doing so at night, while I wanted to be out diving headlong into Beijing’s boom, was a whole different ball game. I made a mental note: this will need to be remedied.

  After lunch, Jenny whisked me away for a tour of the office. China Daily’s headquarters were in a four-story, faded yellow building near the fourth ring road in north Beijing, far from the Forbidden City and Tiananmen Square, located in the center of the city. Guards who looked no more than twenty, wearing poorly fitting green uniforms and armed with walkie-talkies, stood at lazy attention at the front door. Everything about the place looked drab and dated, from the water stains on the outside tiles to the bizarre cubic architecture throughout. The interior was as bleak as outside, with humming fluorescent lights, gray cubicle walls, and the constant waft of onion drifting in from the canteen down the hall. Jenny sat me down at my cubicle. The chair squeaked and there were enough crumbs in my ancient keyboard to feed one of the young guards working out front.

  I wandered the streets around the China Daily compound that night. I could hardly believe I was there. The setting sun had turned the sky purple, and the streets were busy with locals walking in and out of brightly lit restaurants. The air smelled of garlic and burning meat. Potbellied middle-aged men with their pants pulled high smoked cigarettes on the sidewalk while mothers fussed over small children. I was energized. I felt more optimistic about life than I had in a year.

  The next day, my second in China, I started work. I was told to shadow a balding, nervous Scotsman, a China Daily veteran who introduced me to some of the foreigners around the office. There seemed to be a clear divide in the expat staff. Some were young and international, here for an adventure and to experience the Olympic buildup. A few were wandering professionals who had spent a career bouncing from one developing world English-language paper to another. Others were lifted directly from a Hemingway novel—heavy drinkers, bar fighters, frequenters of prostitutes. Many were career expatriates, some having been in Asia for a decade or two.

  My cubicle neighbor at China Daily was a well-dressed young Chinese reporter who went by the English name Harry. He had a firm handshake and a flattop brush cut, and he spoke in robotic English. On one of my first days of work, Harry showed me a Flash presentation he’d made for his former employer, a political magazine.

  “This is for propagating at the beginning of a campaign,” he told me.

  I had no idea what he meant. The video was slick, with pictures of Chinese leaders throughout history mixed with images of battles and slogans. Chinese characters and English words—totally out of context—flashed on the screen. victory. history. I would have thought it was a joke if Harry’s facial expression didn’t betray such pride. He was beaming.

  “I love this Flash,” he told me. “It is one way in China we have of propagating. Here at China Daily, we use careful chosen words for propagating. It’s a different way.” Harry nodded. “It’s good.”

  A few days later, over lunch at a local noodle shop, Harry told me with a straight face, “There are too many foreigners in China.” Again, I would have thought he was joking had he not looked so serious. Harry had been by far the most accommodating Beijinger I’d met since arriving; he had even paid for the noodles I was eating. He shook his head. “Far too many.”

  It turned out, foreigners weren’t the only group of people Harry frowned upon. His countrymen from Shanghai were “the most disgusting people in the country, other than Taiwanese. Taiwanese want their own country,” he scoffed, moving his hand in a sweeping motion, “so forget about them. Shanghainese, they think the rest of Chinese are all peasants! They think they are the only ones who are sophisticated, that they are soooo well educated. They are disgusting.”

  The next time Harry asked me for lunch, I politely said no.

  My first friend at China Daily was a thirty-year-old Englishman named Rob. He had been at the paper for three months when I arrived and introduced himself on one of my first days on the job.

  “I heard there was another young guy here. That’s good,” he said, nodding. He told me he liked Beijing well enough but was eager to find a wingman for the weekends. “We should party sometime.”

  “Definitely,” I said.

  Rob reminded me of a balding James Bond, only in boot cut jeans instead of a tux. He had broad shoulders, blue eyes, and a wide smile of fake-looking front teeth. Rob had lived in Asia for seven years—in Japan and the Philippines before coming to China—and had slept with more women than anybody I’d ever met. His nickname at the paper, I soon discovered, was Yi Bai Wu, the Chinese word for one hundred and fifty. That was supposedly the number of women he’d bedded, although after hearing him talk I figured it was a conservative estimate.

  On my first weekend in Beijing, Rob and another coworker, an Australian in his mid-thirties named Max, took me out to a few bars in Sanlitun, Beijing’s rowdy nightlife area near the Workers Stadium. We visited a half-dozen bars, packed with foreigners and Chinese. There were dive bars, expensive bars, music bars, hooker bars, and massive, booming nightclubs that stayed open until the last customer left. We drank until four in the morning and finished the night off eating Big Macs at a McDonald’s down the road from China Daily.

  The next morning, hungover, Rob regaled me with stories of his many conquests in Asia as we strolled around town. We bought lattes in the Starbucks in the Forbidden City, and as we walked through the old imperial palace talking about women and drinking American coffee, I felt like we were pissing on two thousand years of Chinese history.

  I was a stranger in a strange place, and even though I was hardly alone, I felt unique simply for being there. The city’s global prominence was growing. The Olympics were on everybody’s mind, and I was there to see it.

  When I came home that night, after spending the evening walking around the city with Rob, I sat at my computer and wrote for hours, recording the details of the beginning of my new life.

  Although I was hired as a writer, my initial duties were editing, or “polishing,” as it was known around the office. I started work at two-thirty in the afternoon and ended around eleven or eleven-thirty. During the empty hours before work I would take long walks around the China Daily building (almost all of the foreign editors lived in an apartment complex next door), or go to a nearby gym, which, like everything else in Beijing, smelled of onions. My apartment, the office, people’s breath. It all smelled like onions.

  Everything was new and strange and exciting. The streets, the sounds, the unique Beijing energy—it was invigorating. One morning, I stopped at a narrow, polluted river near my office. Old people walked up and down the banks, slapping their backs and doing strange exercises. One elderly woman massaged another with her fists. A city worker raked the ground around a small tree while debris floated in the toxic-looking green river behind him.

  Each day was a small adventure. I had arrived in Beijing armed with an arsenal of Chinese words that topped out at one: ni hao—hello. To communicate, I relied on colleagues, maps, and body language, which I discovered did not work very well in China. Ordering food was a crapshoot, especially if restaurant menus lacked pictures. During my first week in the city, I stopped for lunch at a restaurant across the street from China Daily, where the waitress presented me with a menu featuring columns of Chinese characters. I was hungry and too proud to walk out without ordering, so I simply pointed at random to an item I felt fell in an appropriate price range for a lunchtime meal for one. What arrived was a massive metal bowl filled with spicy red broth, bony chicken, and vegetables. It was delicious, and it could have served five.
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br />   Despite the language barrier, I did my best to explore. Rob and I bought cheap bicycles, and on a Saturday morning we rode south to Chang’An Dajie (Avenue of Eternal Peace), Beijing’s main artery, a wide boulevard lined with government buildings. We cycled west past Wangfujing, a popular pedestrian street, down to Tiananmen Square and the Forbidden City, where tourists in from the countryside took photos of a portrait of Chairman Mao. We headed south through the winding hutong alleyways, many of which faced demolition as the Olympics approached. In late afternoon we arrived in Dashilan’r, a former slum that was being renovated into a tourist attraction. We had a late lunch of pork with green pepper, ground beef and green beans, spicy tofu, and dumplings dipped in vinegar, and we drank throat-numbing rice wine and Yanjing beer with a gregarious restaurant owner.

  One morning, I cycled along the north fourth ring road, not far from the China Daily compound, to the Olympic Green. Finishing touches were being put on the National Stadium, better known as the Bird’s Nest, and the National Aquatics Center, aka the Water Cube—self-congratulatory national backslaps that stood honor to China’s rise. The Olympic Green was surrounded by a blue metal wall. Workers in yellow construction hats squatted on the surrounding pavement, slurping noodles from metal bowls. Around them were the temporary barracks in which they slept, and the trucks and diggers and bulldozers they worked in by day. Visitors peered through cracks in the blue wall and hoisted digital cameras over the top, snapping pictures of the nearby future.

  At night, during those early days, I would stand on my balcony smoking cigarettes and looking out at the glowing city, and my heart would thump. Beijing—home to emperors and tyrants and thousands of years of history—was my new home. It was an incredible feeling.

  Walking back to my apartment one afternoon, I ran into an Australian editor named Martin, who was in his forties with a friendly smile of smoke-stained teeth and wiry gray hair. Martin had been in Beijing for more than a year. “Things are changing here,” he told me, pointing to the influx of foreign staff. “Sure, it’s a drab government paper. China Daily doesn’t break news because the government doesn’t break itself. But it’s changing.” He mentioned a few recent stories that had been critical of the government, before noticing the skepticism creeping on my face. “You’ll have a ball here,” he said.