Apologies to My Censor Read online

  A moment later, one lion ran off with the goat’s front section, another with its hind legs, and several others fought for various body parts littered on the ground.

  The passengers in our van applauded. I felt like I’d witnessed a crime, or worse, that I’d actually paid to commit one. My stomach churned as I watched through fingers splayed over my face as tigers ate the goat’s insides.

  I looked over to Ben, who was shaking his head.

  “I’m glad we didn’t buy the cow,” I said.

  We took the train back to Beijing first thing the next morning. Even after such a short trip, I was ready to get back to the city, back to my cozy apartment, to DVDs, to Julia. But my curiosity about China grew exponentially during the trip to Harbin. Bears in lingerie, tiger feeds, industrial vodka. That’s the stuff dreams are made of. I thought that if all that and more happens in Harbin—a city of four million people, an industrial and administrative hub of northern China—what went on in China’s even more remote regions?

  On the train I jotted notes from the trip in my journal. I stopped for a moment and looked out the window at the freezing landscape.

  So many stories, I thought. So many stories to tell.

  7

  The Failed Propagandist

  I was entering the third mile on a treadmill at a gym not far from the China Daily compound, exhausted and dripping sweat, trying to shed a few pounds put on during a winter spent watching movies and eating extravagant meals. I’d recently returned from a two-week trip with friends to Southeast Asia. We relaxed on beaches, gorged ourselves, and drank liver-pulverizing quantities of beer and whiskey buckets, the effects of which hadn’t helped my already hurting physique. When I arrived in China almost a year earlier, I was in the best shape of my life. I was working out daily and eating well. My abs were visible.

  Now I was back near the two-hundred-pounds mark with no semblance of muscular definition. Showering one morning at home, I looked at myself in the mirror, pinched my love handles, and admitted to myself what several Chinese colleagues had cheerfully pointed out more than once: I was getting fat. The good news (and perhaps the main reason for my bloated waistline) was that I was, for the first time in two years, mostly . . . happy.

  Above the treadmill a television was playing CNN. Larry King was on, and his guests were former escorts and brothel owners discussing what might have been going through the mind of New York governor Eliot Spitzer when he solicited the services of a young employee of Emperor Club VIP in Washington, D.C., the month before. During a discussion about whether paying for sex is ethically wrong, and whether or not Spitzer should serve jail time, CNN cut away to breaking news. A blond anchor appeared and text flashed on the screen. “Breaking News: Riots in Tibet.”

  The anchor spoke. “Riots broke out in the traditional Tibetan capital of Lhasa today—”

  And then, suddenly, the screen went black.

  It was March 2008 and life in Beijing was good. I had a big group of friends and we spent our spare time having long dinners and plenty of drinks. Eating out is the norm in China, and the food is affordable and delicious: spicy fare from Sichuan and Yunnan, dumplings from northeast China, Shanghai noodles, Xinjiang lamb—Beijing was an amazing place to eat.

  Dinner is also a social event in China, a tradition we embraced vigorously. We would eat in gritty, smoky alleyway restaurants, or big, noisy places that served Peking duck or hot pot—thinly sliced meat, leafy vegetables, mushrooms, tofu, noodles, all tossed into a boiling, often spicy, broth. Sometimes we ate at French or Italian restaurants, Thai restaurants, or Japanese restaurants. Social life revolved around eating, and going for dinner was among the highlights of living in the city. Our groups at dinner came from all over the world, and we talked about China, politics, our jobs, our futures. Later we would go to music clubs, or little bars tucked in the hutong alleyways, or, when we were up for it, out to the lounges and clubs that continued to pop up all over the city.

  Notably absent from most social occasions was Rob. We had drifted apart in the weeks and months after the Orange Juice Incident. I’d forgiven him, but I didn’t really trust him anymore, if I actually ever did. If something as minor as that could set him off, what would happen if we really got into an argument? We still spoke and hung out sometimes, but I didn’t often reach out to him, and I got the impression he blamed me for his isolation from my group of friends at China Daily. But it wasn’t intentional. I’d just grown comfortable in my new life. I still partied a lot, but I’d cut out the drugs and had generally calmed down.

  Mine was a comfortable life. I played in a weekly basketball game, went to a pub quiz once in a while, and finally had a firm grasp of the city. I was making slow progress with my Chinese; I continued to meet Ms. Song a few times a week and did at least some homework most days. Beijing, which had once seemed so foreign, was starting to feel like a second home. I had a little over a month and a half left at China Daily, and once my contract ended, I planned to focus on learning Chinese and freelancing, and then stay for the event that had drawn most of us to Beijing in the first place: the 2008 Olympics.

  At work, I had long ago abandoned any notion of trying to change or improve the paper, and in the New Year I had decided to by and large retire as a reporter and offer my services, once again, as an editor—on the condition that I didn’t have to work the night shift.

  My bosses assigned me to edit a weekly business supplement, a job I split with another foreign editor. The assignment involved editing about six or seven features a week, almost all of which I saved for Wednesday, the day before the section went to print. My role at the paper was so slight that I no longer appeared on the work schedule e-mailed to foreign experts every week. To make the most of my free time, I picked up the pace of my freelance work, contributing travel stories and other features to Canadian publications and local magazines. Editors back home were realizing I was in China, and assignments were slowly starting to come to me. I still hadn’t reached the level where I wanted to be, still hadn’t cracked big American publications, but I felt for the first time since I came to China that I was on the right track.

  The rest of the time I read U.S. presidential campaign news, chatted with friends and colleagues online, surfed various blogs about China, and took extraordinarily long lunches with Ben and Jeremy. As far as I knew, my editors didn’t know about my freelance work, and they seemed content to let me coast through to the end of my tenure at the paper.

  From the beginning, I knew I wouldn’t renew my contract with China Daily, even if they offered—by late winter it was clear they would not. Who could blame them? If I was my editors, I would have fired me. But with the Olympics just around the corner, many expat editors were jumping ship for better jobs or no job at all, so they could enjoy the Games without other obligations. My neighbor in the business section, an Australian woman, had recently told Mr. Wang she wouldn’t be coming back when her contract ended in April. Mr. Wang, shocked upon hearing the news, leaned forward and rubbed his forehead. “Another problem,” he said.

  But even with an exodus of foreigners, there was no way Mr. Wang could justify keeping me around afterward, even if I wanted to stay. I had grumbled my way into a role of doing basically nothing, and as the end of my contract approached, I knew one of two things was going to happen. One: My last day would arrive without any mention of renewing my contract; there would be a little going-away party; and off I would go. Or two: Mr. Wang would call me into his office and tell me they were getting rid of the business writer position e
ntirely.

  My editors must have wondered what I did with all those hours sitting in my cubicle, but nobody said a thing. Finally, in my third week back from my trip to Southeast Asia, one of the business editors, an avian-looking woman who had shown utter disdain for my existence as a China Daily business writer since my first day on the job, approached my desk.

  “Your contract ends next month,” Bird Lady said. “You’re going back to your country?”

  I smiled. “I haven’t decided yet.”

  She frowned and walked away.

  A few days later, Lois said she heard I was going home.

  “Why does everybody think that?” I said.

  She shrugged. “I don’t know. They just do.”

  I hadn’t actually told any of my Chinese colleagues my plans, and my guess was that Bird Lady and Lois had been tasked to figure out my intentions. Chinese are generally averse to confrontation—as I had learned when I called out Ms. Song for handing out my test to class eight months earlier—and if my editors could find out through the grapevine that I was going back to Canada, they could avoid the awkwardness of officially letting me go. I liked this approach. So I started to spread the word that I was going freelance.

  Julia and I, meanwhile, had managed to maintain a weekly dinner/movie/sex, no-strings-attached relationship. It was perfect. I liked her and it was the first time since my last girlfriend that I had even remote feelings for anybody. I was buoyed when she texted, and I looked forward to seeing her. We held hands when we walked down the street and e-mailed each other when one of us was out of town. I was happy with the rhythms of my life in China, and she was part of that. But I still wasn’t ready to call her my girlfriend.

  That started to change one night that spring. As we sat in my living room talking, she let slip that a few months ago she had been seeing somebody else. She was allowed to, of course, and so was I. But hearing her say it was unsettling. She noticed and pulled away.

  “I’m sorry, but . . . I’m not your girlfriend,” she said. “We’re just having fun. Right?”

  I told her I agreed. “It’s okay, you didn’t do anything wrong. I guess I just never thought about it.”

  The next day at work she was all I could think about. I opened her Facebook page and browsed her photos. I saw pictures she had posted after a trip to Thailand. There was one image in particular: a black-and-white of her on a beach. She was lying on her side, wearing a striped summer dress, her face in profile looking out to the sea. She looked impossibly beautiful and it stirred all kinds of emotions. I thought to myself, You’re lucky. You shouldn’t take this for granted.

  She meant more to me than I realized, and I wondered if I was ready for a relationship again. The problem was, in a few months she would be gone, back to Russia to finish university. And I didn’t know where I’d be at all.

  On March 14, 2008, riots broke out in Tibet. It began as an annual observance of Tibetan Uprising Day, which commemorates the 1959 rebellion against the Chinese government. Street protests led by monks descended into rioting, burning, and looting, and spiraled into violence, perpetrated mostly by Tibetans on Han Chinese. Police cracked down to halt the violence, and there were fatalities on both sides.

  Finger-pointing began immediately, with the Chinese government claiming the riots had been orchestrated by the Dalai Lama, and Tibetans in exile blaming what they perceived as illegitimate rule from Beijing. The riots might have been happening fifteen hundred miles from Beijing, where life went on as normal, but it was the biggest news story coming out of China and the main topic of conversation around the office.

  Anger in China was vented on instant messenger. Almost all my Chinese colleagues’ messenger statuses read “[Heart] China.” My former cubicle neighbor, Harry, who had long since left China Daily for another government employer, wrote as his status message, “CNN go to hell!” The network had become synonymous with what many Chinese perceived as an anti-China bias in the Western media. Some Westerners in Beijing feared an anti-foreigner backlash not seen since 1999, when NATO planes accidentally bombed the Chinese embassy in Belgrade, killing three Chinese reporters and sparking outrage across China.

  Some of the hostility toward the West became directed at us, China Daily’s foreign friends. One day a reporter lectured Jeremy that the West was interested in separating Tibet from China because of the geographic advantages of having an American puppet state close to China, Pakistan, and India.

  That same week, I met Lois and two other China Daily reporters for drinks in a bar near the Drum and Bell Towers, in the center of the city. Over casual conversation, I told them I was having trouble figuring out a visa for the summer, and one of the reporters said the Chinese government shouldn’t have allowed so many foreigners into the country in the first place.

  Lois, whose opinions I valued, said that foreigners’, and especially the Western media’s, opinion of Tibet was informed by “ignorance” and that they shouldn’t be allowed to have an opinion at all because “they haven’t been there.”

  “Have you?” I asked.

  “No,” she huffed. “That’s why I don’t have an opinion.”

  She did, of course. Everybody did, and those opinions were being expressed with more hostility every day. In the States, a Chinese student at Duke University had become a public enemy in China simply for encouraging dialogue between pro-Tibetan and pro-Chinese protesters at her university. Chinese nationalists on the Internet threatened to dismember her and posted her parents’ home address in Qingdao, which led someone to put a bag of feces on her parents’ front steps. A New York Times article said the events had forced the girl into hiding.

  I forwarded the Times article to Lois, and she said it was simply another attempt by the Western media to smear China.

  “What’s the point of this article?” she said. “To make all Chinese protesters look like idiots?”

  Getting news about Tibet from within China was getting more difficult each day. I was still able to get information from the sites of many mainstream English-language news organizations, but the Chinese government was blocking some Internet and television reports about Tibet. Google searches would produce “Not Found” messages. The Economist, which had one of the only Western reporters in Tibet during the riots, was sporadically blocked. YouTube was down, and so were the proxy servers that we usually used to access blocked websites.

  The state media’s take on the Tibet riots was the polar opposite of international media reports. “The state media has tightly controlled its coverage to focus on Tibetans burning Chinese businesses or attacking and killing Chinese merchants,” the Times wrote. “No mention is made of Tibetan grievances or reports that 80 or more Tibetans have died.”

  China Daily, meanwhile, ran a front-page story under the headline TIBET RELIGIOUS LEADERS CONDEMN LHASA RIOTS, provided by Xinhua, the state newswire service. It quoted the Panchen Lama condemning the riots as “sabotage acts.” Of course, the Panchen Lama is handpicked by China. The Dalai Lama, the Tibetan holy leader in exile, was characterized in state media reports as being little more than the leader of a gang of petty thugs.

  On page three of the same day’s paper, China Daily published another Xinhua story with the headline FEARS AND TEARS IN HOLY PLATEAU CITY. The story referred to a school damaged by “saboteurs” and “vandals carrying backpacks filled with stones and bottles of inflammable liquids” who “smashed windows, set fire to vehicles, shops and restaurants along their d
estructive path.” According to an official quoted, the chaos was “masterminded by the Dalai clique.”

  One afternoon, I sat at my desk watching a news conference given by Chinese premier Wen Jiabao at the National People’s Congress, as it played on a television mounted to the wall beside me. A crowd of Chinese reporters and editors had gathered. Someone turned up the volume. Everyone around me was quiet.

  During the press conference, questions focused on Tibet. Wen’s answers were stock and predictable.

  “The events in Tibet caused by a few people were meant to undermine the Olympic Games,” the premier said. But he promised the Games would go off smoothly—a showcase of the new China. “During the Olympics,” Wen said, “the smiles of 1.3 billion Chinese will be reflected by the smiles of people around the world.”

  As he spoke, I found myself growing irritated with my colleagues, who nodded along in agreement. I was also ashamed that I worked at a newspaper that was presenting such a lopsided account of what were truly horrible events—for both sides. And as I watched the press conference, the Chinese premier glossing over the chaos that was happening on the other side of the country, I knew that at China Daily, his message was front-page material.

  The riots exposed fault lines between China and the West, fault lines that were worsened by Olympic torch relay protests. The relay, called the “Journey of Harmony,” was to last 129 days and span 85,000 miles—the longest relay since the tradition began in 1936. The torch would be lit in Athens, pass through six continents, stopping at Mount Everest on the border of Nepal and Tibet, and ending in Beijing on March 31, 2008.

  The name “Journey of Harmony” was becoming more ironic by the day. The torch relay resulted in “violence and farce” in London (according to the Daily Mail) and “waves of chaos” in Paris (New York Times). In San Francisco, protesters scaled the Golden Gate Bridge and unfurled pro-Tibet banners before the torch even touched down in the city.