Apologies to My Censor Read online

  9:30—Wake up. Press snooze button.

  10:15—Walk to nearby café.

  10:30—Arrive at office.

  10:30–11:00—Check e-mail.

  11:00–noon—Surf Internet.

  Noon–1:30—Lunch with colleagues. Having grown weary of the canteen’s food, several of us often split a cab to a deli fifteen minutes away from the offices, where we relaxed over coffee long after we were expected back at work.

  1:30–4:15—Sporadic checking of e-mail, chatting on MSN, surfing Internet. Flirt with Lois.

  4:15–4:45—Coffee with other members of the foreign staff.

  4:45–6:00—Work. Mostly researching potential freelance stories that had nothing to do with China Daily.

  6:00—Home.

  China Daily and I had come to a happy truce. In September, after a lazy four months on the job, I walked into Mr. Wang’s office and asked for a raise.

  I got it.

  4

  Young Turks, Old Hacks

  It was my colleague Potter’s birthday. We got drunk.

  I didn’t know how old Potter was. He was probably in his late fifties or early sixties, though it was hard to tell since he was a heavy smoker and drinker, a lifetime of which was taking its toll. His cheeks were sunken and the bags under his eyes were large and black, as if he never slept, which was entirely possible. Potter was half Indian, half Welsh, Hong Kong–born and raised, a tiny man with a thin goatee and bald head except for a horseshoe of jet-black hair that wrapped around the back of his skull. He was cigarette slim; in the year I knew him I don’t think I ever saw him eat. He dressed immaculately in white or black collarless shirts, with black pressed trousers and polished black shoes.

  His birthday party was on a hot weeknight in midsummer. Everybody met after the late shift at the Goose & Duck, a sports bar with a Filipino cover band next to a park on Beijing’s east side. When Rob and I arrived around 11:30 p.m., the party was already in full swing.

  Potter sat in the middle of a long table beside Filipino David, a Beijing-based photographer and Potter’s good friend from back in the day in Bangkok. David had a bushy black mustache and wore a faded denim jacket even in the heat. His laugh was contagious and he came across as the friendliest guy you’d ever met. Some of the other expat staff were there along with others I didn’t know, mostly Filipinos, including a man known as the Ambassador, short for “Maggie’s Ambassador,” a name he earned due to the frequency with which he visited Beijing’s most notorious nightlife establishment, Maggie’s, a club known as a pickup joint specializing in Mongolian prostitutes.

  Rob and I pulled up chairs at the table, where everybody was eating Filipino food. Potter was drinking a bottle of Carlsberg and sipping from a bottle of Johnnie Walker Red Label that David had brought. When Potter’s glass was empty, David filled it, his arm resting over his old buddy’s shoulders.

  “Any birthday resolutions, Potter?” Rob asked. “Anything you’re going to do different in the next three hundred and sixty-five days?”

  Potter smiled. He looked like he was thinking of something witty to say, but nothing came.

  “Be a better propagandist?” Rob suggested.

  Potter laughed, a throaty chuckle that seemed to rattle his rib cage. “Yes, yes. That’s it.”

  This was my crew: a gang of misfits from around the globe—nomads, drinkers, aging journalists with young girlfriends. Wanderers with no place else to go. Runners from reality.

  In The Rum Diary, Hunter S. Thompson describes the staff of the fictional San Juan Daily News as either “wild young Turks” or “beer-bellied old hacks” barely able to write a postcard. This, more or less, was China Daily. Asia attracts the latter kind of man. Many are in or beyond middle age, reliving their youth through copious amounts of alcohol and regular (sometimes paid) intercourse with women young enough to be their daughters. I had seen them before, in cities like Bangkok and Manila and other stops in Southeast Asia. These were men who refused to grow up: the Lost Boys of Neverland. And China Daily offered what they craved most—escape.

  At China Daily, we lived cushioned existences outside the realities and pressures of our lives back at home. Everything was provided for us. We could spend weeks at a time without ever having to leave the China Daily compound, a life revolving around a piece-of-cake job, heavy drinking, bootleg DVDs, and not much else. We could eat breakfast, lunch, and dinner for almost nothing at China Daily’s canteen, a two-minute walk from our apartments (although it’s debatable whether to describe what the canteen offered as “food”). We each hired cleaning ladies to come in on weekends to tidy up our apartments and do our laundry. Reality and responsibility were things that existed outside the gates.

  Potter had spent years working copy desks in Hong Kong and Bangkok. He was now late in his career doing the same thing, at the same pay, as people thirty years his junior. His life, or what I knew of it, consisted of work, betting on Hong Kong horse races over the Internet, and drinking with his buddies until dawn.

  There were others, too. There was Wooden Tooth Dan, a boozer from Alaska I met my first day in China. His hair was disheveled, dandruff-ridden, and cut at different lengths, in some places down to the scalp, as if it had been cut with a Flowbee. His teeth were large and brown and looked like they had been carved out of driftwood. I would often see him after work walking back from the convenience store on the corner with a plastic bag filled with a dozen or more cans of beer. In the evenings, I could hear him and his young local wife screaming at each other in their apartment. The next day he would show up at work reeking of liquor so badly you could smell it from down the hallway.

  There was the white-haired man who worked upstairs at one of China Daily’s sister publications and whose name I never learned, who told stories of ’Nam even though it seemed to me he was at least a decade too young to have served there. There was one editor, a recovering gambling addict, who once won a dubious award as his country’s worst journalist after he was found fabricating stories.

  There was Rob, Yi Bai Wu—One Hundred and Fifty. Rob, my first friend in China, was half Potter’s age but on the same path to reality and morality warping and eventually dissipating like a fog. Rob was on his way there; Potter had long passed.

  Rob was at once one of the most fascinating and frightening people I had ever met. He was one of those people who would require a team of scientists monitoring him 24/7 to figure out what was going on in his brain, and even then I don’t think they’d get it right. There were times when Rob was genuinely insightful and thoughtful. You could give him a book and he would tear through it in a weekend and come in on Monday with a full report. One day he bought me a book of short stories from an English-language bookstore just because he thought I would enjoy it. Rob was a good writer and often talked about chronicling his seven years of debauchery (a book I would read). He could be philosophical, and he tried harder to learn Chinese than any other foreigner I knew at China Daily, myself included.

  At other times, his moods turned dark, often vicious. He could be combative and withdrawn, stumble home drunk at 7 a.m. with a strange girl on his arm, and otherwise tear through life like a tornado, leaving a trail of destruction in his wake. After a few months of knowing him, I became convinced he was bipolar.

  Rob had a remarkable way with women, and God help them all. He slept with dozens in the time I knew him, without remorse, including one in a hotel room in Shanghai he was sharing with me and a friend of mine, both of us trying unsuccessfully to sleep.

  When I first met Rob, he was dating a naïve Chinese girl in her early twenties. One day he decided it was over and stopped replying to her text messages. She sent him dozens that day, a rapid and teary downward spiral. I came home in the early evening to find a young woman sleeping outside Rob’s apartment door, waitin
g for him.

  “How long have you been here?” I asked.

  “Since this morning,” the girl replied, her eyes red with tears.

  I called Rob and told him about the girl waiting outside his door.

  “Just text me when she’s gone,” he said.

  And then there was me. When I arrived at China Daily, I was both appalled and thrilled by many of the men I met. Appalled for all the reasons above; thrilled because observing and drinking with them could be so entertaining, and because I figured no matter what I did I could always point to one of them and say at least I’m not like that.

  But, really, was I so different? I was also running from something, looking for escape in my own small corner of Asia. And I would be lying to say Rob’s life didn’t intrigue me. It was a guilty pleasure listening to his stories of drunken adventures and sexual hedonism. When I was heartbroken and miserable after breaking up with my previous girlfriend the year before, it was Rob’s life I fantasized about. The previous fall, single and unmotivated to date or meet anybody new, it was somebody like Rob that I needed most, to pry me out of my self-loathing by thrusting a shot of tequila in my face.

  Rob was nobody’s role model, but in some ways, during those early days in China, he was exactly what I needed. He provided an avenue to escape.

  On the night of Potter’s birthday party, after the Goose & Duck we ventured to the Den, Potter’s favorite haunt. The Den was a classic Asia expat bar, filled with single, middle-aged men drinking Carlsberg and eating burgers and pizzas while watching English Premier League soccer, the kind of place where waitresses flirted with you no matter how drunk or ugly you were. The other half of the crowd were Mongolian prostitutes, and Potter claimed to have been with all of them.

  We sat at a long table and ordered rounds of beer and shots of tequila and whiskey. A replay of Ali and Fraser’s Thrilla in Manila played on one of the televisions as cigarette smoke floated through the crowded bar. The Den had the vibe of the Mos Eisley Cantina in the first Star Wars—where we first meet Han Solo. I got the impression that the people in this bar had all done some things, had been places. People at the Den had secrets.

  We talked about our jobs and Potter spoke nostalgically about his time in Bangkok and Hong Kong. “Beijing is a backwater,” he said. I asked him what he thought about working at China Daily. He shrugged. “It’s a job.”

  Around 2 a.m. we went to Maggie’s. I had never been to Maggie’s but had heard its legend. The club was a Beijing institution, the embassy of Beijing’s down and depraved. It was the Den on steroids, the bar of choice for foreign businessmen looking for action, for older expats in need of a nightcap at four in the morning, and for Mongolian hookers looking for after-hours freelance business. If the Den was the Mos Eisley Cantina, Maggie’s was the garbage pit in the Death Star.

  As we strolled through the dark, smoky club, fat foreigners in boxy suits wrapped their meaty hands around the waists of young Mongolians. The bottom of a beer bottle was downed, and a new couple would walk hand in hand out of the club and back to whichever hotel was home for the night.

  We made our way to a pool table at the back of the bar. Rounds of drinks were ordered, and we chain-smoked cigarettes. There were more women in the bar than there were clients, and each potential customer had two or three women competing for them. The Ambassador seemed to know every girl in there, and he introduced every one that came by to Potter.

  “It’s his birthday,” he told them, patting their lower backs. “Give him a kiss.”

  The seediness left me feeling hollow, and after a few drinks, I had seen enough. I took a cab back to China Daily to sleep while the others stayed until dawn. I ran into one of the foreign editors the next morning outside the building, and he sheepishly told me he had solicited the services of a Maggie’s working girl. “It’s all part of the rich tapestry of life,” he said.

  Rob and I hung out most evenings. Sometimes we joined Potter and the others at the Den and other bars around town. Other nights we stayed in Rob’s apartment, drinking beers and watching American movies on pirated DVDs.

  Often we found ourselves at the main China Daily hangout, the Noodle Shop, across the street from our compound. The Noodle Shop had a name, but nobody ever bothered to learn it. So it was simply the Noodle Shop. The rumor was that the Noodle Shop was owned, operated, and frequented by Chinese gangsters. I doubt that gossip was true, but it made a good story to everyone I brought there.

  In the evenings it was packed with noisy and drunken locals, who sometimes stayed until dawn. Peanut shells and green pea pods littered the floor, and bottles of beer collected on the tables by the dozens. The noodles were oily and the meat skewers—the ubiquitous Beijing street snack called chuan’r—were of questionable quality. Once I bit down on a chunk of soggy denim in a bowl of beef noodles. After that, I stopped ordering food from the Noodle Shop.

  Fights were common. I strolled by the Noodle Shop one evening after work to find two ambulances, each containing a Chinese man with bloodied gauze wrapped around his head. On the cement outside were thick pools of blood and shards of glass from smashed beer bottles. Two China Daily foreign experts once fought outside the Noodle Shop. Both men were drunk; one called the other’s girlfriend a “whore,” for no apparent reason, and blows ensued. One participant had a hip injury and weighed 140 pounds soaking wet; the other was Wooden Tooth Dan, who was already a dozen drinks deep, possibly more. I didn’t see the fight, but the next day a colleague described it as “the most pathetic display I’ve ever seen.”

  Mostly we drank beers and vented about work. We debated about the quality and direction of the paper, about whether there was anything we could do to improve it, about whether we were just wasting our time, wasting away at China Daily. And then we’d order another round.

  On weekends, Rob and I were wingmen. Most of the other China Daily guys were not very adventurous when it came to nightlife, sticking mostly to pubs popular with expats, like the Den. The crowds at these places tended to be older and depressing, and Rob and I were eager to explore some of the more youthful nightlife destinations.

  To say that we went out “a lot” would be a drastic understatement. For me, living in China was a chance to say “yes” to everything. Yes to drinking, to smoking, to partying until dawn. Yes to it all. Beijing was cheap and we were well paid and free to do anything. It was liberating and terrifying.

  Longtime expats liked to wax nostalgic about the old days of the city’s nightlife, before the clubs took over. In the years before I landed in Beijing, a good night out largely meant huddling on plastic chairs in dingy bars, where people sipped bottles of lukewarm Tsingtao and “just got drunk,” as a friend who had lived in Beijing for five years told me.

  Those days were fading. There were still dingy bars along Sanlitun Bar Street and surrounding Houhai Lake, but many of the more popular bar districts had been demolished to make way for apartment blocks and shopping malls, and bottles of Tsingtao were being swapped for bottles of Chivas mixed with ice tea, a Chinese club staple. The holes-in-the-wall were being replaced by lounges, hutong bars, pubs, and massive nightclubs. These clubs, with names like Angel, Babyface, Coco Banana, Vics, and Mix, were often packed seven nights a week with hundreds of people, mostly Chinese, drinking in private booths and dancing until dawn listening to some of the world’s top DJs. New bars and clubs seemed to open every other week, and it was impossible to keep track of which ones were cool at a given moment. The Olympics were still a year down the road, but the party was well under way.

  There were plenty of drugs in Beijing—cocaine, ecstasy, hash. It was all available, and it was easy to find, a fact I immediately found alarming. I had been smoking pot periodically since my early teens and had experimented with mushrooms and ecstasy by the time I was twenty. A few years before moving to China, I started taking coke from time to time. But for me, coke comedowns were brutal, life-ques
tioning nightmares that took me two or three days to get over. In Toronto, before I left for China, I was doing coke every few months and it was something I was looking forward to escaping in China, where, it being an authoritarian state, I assumed drugs would be scarce.

  Not so. The first night I went out in the city, Rob, Max, and I were approached on the street by a half-dozen African men in the darker sections of Sanlitun. Trade between China and Africa was booming, and thousands of Africans were coming to China to buy cheap goods to sell back home. Some who didn’t make it as merchants ended up on the streets of Sanlitun selling drugs, and they did so in the open. Nobody seemed to be trying to stop it.

  “Pssst. Yo, what’s up,” they would say. “You good? Need anything?”

  About once a month we supplemented our nighttime activities with “extracurriculars.” Although I had been hoping to avoid drugs, I struggled to do so once I arrived in Beijing, and they seemed to be everywhere. Since what I was looking for in Beijing most of all was escape, narcotics fit nicely into the equation.

  The quality varied. One hot July night, we bought ecstasy from a Nigerian drug dealer on Lady Street, a bar area near the American embassy. We met him after dinner and he led us around the corner, where he pulled out a small plastic bag filled with baby blue pills. We bought two each. (On the way to get a cab, Rob pulled into a sex shop to buy some generic version of Viagra. “For later,” he said.)

  We went to a bar in Sanlitun and I popped my first pill. An hour later, nothing had happened. Frustrated, I told Max I was going to take the other. “I would wait a little,” he said. “See if the first one kicks in. I’m feeling it.” I ignored Max’s advice and swallowed the second pill with a swig of beer.

  Soon the walls were melting. I sat down at the bar and could barely lift my arms. People tried to talk to me, but I couldn’t respond. “Are you all right?” Max asked, patting me on the back. I was not. I stumbled to the bathroom to wash my face and saw devils in the bathroom tiles.