Apologies to My Censor

Apologies to My Censor

The High and Low Adventures of a Foreigner in China

Mitch Moxley

Dedication

For Mom & Dad

Contents

Prologue

M
y greatest
fear was about to become reality: sober dancing.

I stood atop a set of stairs at a faux-Italian
outdoor mall in Beijing, my face in full makeup and my hair styled in the weird,
poofy way of urban Chinese, wearing skinny jeans and a short-sleeve black shirt
unbuttoned halfway down my chest. Beside me was a small-time pop star from
Shandong province named Marry (two
r
's), rehearsing
the upcoming shot in a flowing white wedding dress. Next to her was a Chinese
male model with pursed lips and a perfectly trimmed goatee. At the foot of the
stairs awaited the nervous director, a cameraman, and forty-odd pairs of curious
eyes: crew members and passersby, all eagerly anticipating, I was sure, the
disaster that was about to unfold.

The camera started rolling. Beads of sweat trickled
through the stubble on my cheeks like pachinko balls as I descended into a
true-life nightmare.

I started to dance.

A few days earlier, I had been
approached on the street by a stranger and asked to appear in a music video as
the star's European love interest. As random as it might sound to be asked to be
in a music video, ridiculous incidents of this nature are not totally uncommon
in China. I once posed as one of China's 100 “Hottest Bachelors” for a special
Valentine's Day issue of
Cosmopolitan
magazine. The
vetting process was not very thorough, and by “not very thorough” I mean totally
nonexistent: the project's editors had never laid eyes on me before I showed up
for the shoot.

I should mention, however, that I'm not your
typical music video star. I'm a journalist. I'm tall and a bit lanky, and
although I've had my share of movie star fantasies, I can be terribly awkward in
front of a camera. I have certain features—say, a long neck—that can appear
unusual in pictures and on video. From certain angles my face can seem
cartoonish, and it's often when I'm trying to look cool that I look most uncool.
In the
Cosmopolitan
Valentine's special, I ended up
looking like a vampire in a checkered suit two sizes too small.

Thinking that appearing in a music video might be a
worthwhile story, I agreed under one condition: no dancing. Sober dancing is my
kryptonite. On the rare occasions when I do dance, I break out in a nervous
sweat, swing my arms awkwardly, and buckle at the knees. I'm convinced
everyone's watching me.
Look at the tall loser
freak!
I imagine them all saying.

Now there we were, filming the video's key scene,
my body writhing in awkward, robotic movements. We tried several takes, each
worse than the last. During a break, I pleaded with the director to cut me from
the video entirely and spare everybody the hassle of having to figure out how to
salvage the footage.

They begged for a few more takes. I reluctantly
agreed.

Atop the stairs once again, I looked out at the
eyes staring back to me. I became lightheaded and began to have an out-of-body
experience, where I was able to see an image of myself in my skinny jeans and
unbuttoned black shirt, my hair made up like a bird's nest. “Action!” the
director yelled, and before I could stop, my body contorted itself into a
strange little jig. I forced a stupid grin and pretended to be in love with
Marry as she lip-synched her awful, pitchy song. I could imagine what the video
might look like once edited, and where it might be played, and what my friends
would think if they ever saw it.

As these images of impending doom played in my
mind, I thought: Oh fuck, YouTube.

I
was thirty years old and this was my
life: a series of random China adventures that seemed to stretch on forever.
Toward what, I still wasn't sure.

How did it all happen? I asked myself that question
every day. In fact, I shouldn't even have been there at all—in Beijing, in
China, on the stairs of that outdoor mall.

I came to Beijing in the spring of 2007 to take a
job as a writer and editor for
China Daily
, the
country's only English-language national newspaper at the time. My journey to
China was by accident. One freezing afternoon in Toronto a few months
earlier—depressed, bored, failing as a writer, and unsure of where my life was
headed—I opened an online journalism job board and noticed a posting for a
position at a government-owned newspaper in Beijing I'd never heard of. I had
never imagined going to China, but anything was better than the state I was in.
So I applied, and a few months later, after a writing test and a brief phone
interview, I was offered a one-year contract.

In China, everything was happening. The economy was
booming, the Olympics were on the horizon, and Beijing was being transformed
into a world-class city overnight.
China Daily
was
changing, too. Somewhere in the bowels of the
China Daily
headquarters in Beijing, someone had decided the paper needed some
sprucing up before the Games. Money flowed in, the paper was redesigned and
expanded, and, in an effort to improve the quality of the writing, the
management recruited a growing team of “foreign experts” (the official wording
on our visas) from all corners of the English-speaking world. When I arrived in
mid-April, there were three dozen of us, mostly new arrivals. We were going to
play a big part in the “new”
China Daily
, they told
us. We were important.

Before I left Canada for Beijing an e-mail landed
in my inbox from a friend's father, who was working in Chinese state media at
the time. “It's important to know that journalism here ain't quite the same as
over there,” he wrote. “Not by a long shot. It's journalism with ‘Chinese
characteristics.' ” Shortly after, I received another message from an American
editor at
China Daily
. “Just so you don't have any
illusions about this,
China Daily
is a State-owned
newspaper, as is all media in China. That means you would be dealing with two
ultimate bosses: (1) The Information Office of the State Council and (2) the
Propaganda Department of the Communist Party of China.”

In other words, despite my official position as
writer and editor for
China Daily
's business
section, I was essentially accepting a job as a propagandist for the government
of the People's Republic of China.

M
y original plan was to stay for just
over a year, work out my contract, have some fun, stick around for the Olympics,
and return to normal life. China was meant to be a break. A chance to
reboot.

Almost four years later, I was dancing like a
robotic idiot in a Chinese music video, and self-admittedly addicted to the
random, chaotic nature of expatriate life in China. Normal life had most
definitely
not
resumed. Among other adventures, I
had crisscrossed the country doing journalism, sat front row to the Olympics,
posed as a fake businessman, indulged in many a booze-fueled night, and paid to
feed a goat to a hungry lion. Along the way I learned that there is no such
thing as normal life for a foreigner in this crazy, exhilarating, intoxicating
nation. You might settle into a routine, and the things around you start to seem
ordinary and mundane, but then you blink and find yourself in the middle of a
surreal situation, such as running hand in hand through an imitation Italian
mall with a wannabe pop star. You remember that you're in China, that you're at
the new center of the universe.

Friends of mine in China often compared our
foreigner experience to Peter Pan's Neverland: a fantasyland where you never
really have to grow up, and if you're not careful, you might never leave. I was,
like many others, one of the Lost Boys of Chinese Neverland. By the fall of
2010, when in the course of a few weeks I filmed a music video, traveled the
length of China by train, almost died hiking on a mountain, and fielded calls
from Hollywood producers over an article I wrote, I wondered if I would ever go
home, or if I was lost in China forever.

The country had changed me. I was, in ways both
figuratively and literally, a different person from the one who arrived in
China. I'm shy in front of a camera. I don't smile in pictures. I certainly
don't dance. The person in the video wasn't the man who stepped off the plane in
Beijing in the spring of 2007. That man, when asked to star in a music video,
would have said something along the lines of . . . “
Hell
no.”

I was the person China had helped create.

I was Mi Gao. Tall Rice.

1

Unite.
Diligent. Progress.

D
uring
those first jet-lagged days in Beijing, three and a half years before, I would
wake early, make a cup of instant coffee, and watch the spectacle unfolding
outside my kitchen window. On the basketball courts across from my apartment,
several hundred middle school students stood in rows wearing matching blue and
white tracksuits and lazily swung their limbs in unison as horrible Chinese pop
music blasted from the loudspeakers. If there was ever a more half-assed display
of mass calisthenics, I'd never seen it.

A coach hollered commands through a megaphone while
teachers in baggy trousers and sports jackets did laps on the track. On the
brick wall beside the basketball courts, words painted in English read, Unite.
Diligent. Progress. The whole display was astonishing. I took pictures on my
cell phone camera for future reference, sipped coffee, and soaked in the
strangeness of it all.

C
hina
wasn't my first foray into life abroad. In the fall of 2005, I finished a
contract with a newspaper in Toronto and set off to work as a freelance writer
in Asia. Earlier that year, I'd taken a three-week vacation to visit my
childhood friend Will in Nagoya, Japan, where he was working as an English
teacher. During that trip I managed to sell a number of stories to newspapers
and magazines at home. Freelancing seemed promising, and I left Toronto that
September confident that I could easily survive overseas.

That fall, I traveled to Vietnam, Thailand, and the
Philippines, freelancing a few articles for foreign publications. Between each
trip, I would return to Japan and stay at Will's place. We would party all
weekend, recover from our hangovers by watching movies, relaxing in
onsen
bathhouses, or going to the beach, and then do
it all over again. During one of our more epic nights, an all-night affair in
Nagoya, we set off a fire extinguisher in an elevator, covering ourselves in
salty-tasting pinkish powder as the door closed on us. Life was great.

But things started to sour shortly after Christmas.
I realized there was no way I could sustain myself on the pathetic earnings of a
freelance writer, especially when I was blowing wads of cash partying until 7
a.m. in one of the world's most expensive countries, and jet-setting across Asia
to write stories I wouldn't be paid for until months afterward. I decided to
settle in Nagoya and find work as an English teacher. I soon learned, however,
that they didn't hand these jobs out at the airport as I had originally thought.
Most of the turnover at English schools occurred during semester breaks, and I
was looking during the middle of the semester. Job opportunities were scarce,
and several weeks went by with not so much as an interview. My parents were
putting cash into my account to keep me afloat. (This, sadly, would become a
recurring theme in my life over the next few years.)

Other parts of my life were disintegrating as well.
I had a girlfriend back in Canada, and our relationship was slowly drawing to a
close. So it was with mixed emotions that I left for Japan that September. “I
need to do this,” I told her a few days before I left. And I did—I needed to
travel while I was still young, to see if I could make it as a writer. Although
we were officially broken up, we talked and e-mailed regularly while I was away,
and we ended up in a relationship purgatory where neither of us really knew what
was going on but we were too afraid to talk about it. The uncertainty weighed on
me every day I was abroad. Over time, my calls home grew more infrequent, my
e-mails shorter and more distant until it became clear I was losing her, at
which point I began to panic.

Meanwhile, I developed a mysterious infection
during my trip to the Philippines over Christmas that caused a rather horrible
case of acne, something I'd never had in my life. Acne combined with a looming
quarter-life crisis is an unfortunate and miserable combination. By mid-January,
back in Japan, I was sleeping until noon, drinking too much, and putting very
little effort into finding work. I showed up to one interview hungover and half
an hour late, and I wasn't able to answer a question about the grammatical
difference between “I ate a hamburger” and “I have eaten a hamburger.” When I
got turned down for a job teaching kindergartners at a school inexplicably
called the Potato Academy—despite a master's degree and a once-promising career
in journalism—I decided it was time to cash in my chips and head home.

When I returned to Toronto, things didn't get much
better. I spent the summer subletting a room in a house full of crazies fit for
a sitcom. I was working as a freelance reporter, and after a few months of
writing business articles I didn't care about and wandering around alone,
counting the cracks in the pavement, I figured this must be the loneliest
profession on earth.

Most days I sat alone in coffee shops with my
laptop open on the table in front of me, back hunched, struggling to find the
motivation to perform even basic work-related tasks, such as opening a Word
document. Sometimes the thought of walking from my apartment to the coffee shop
was too draining, and I would work in my tiny third-floor room, which had a
slanted roof and no air-conditioning. Many mornings, I didn't bother to get
dressed. I checked my e-mail obsessively, because the Internet seemed to be my
only companion. The solitude, the apartment, the heat, the roommates—I was
slowly suffocating.

My girlfriend and I made a valiant effort to make
it work when I got back to Canada, but we were running on fumes. We tried out
all of our little inside jokes and old quirks, but they felt forced now. I was
twenty-six and terrified of domestic life: dinner parties with other couples,
weekly softball games, a neighborhood pub filled with grumpy boozehounds,
kids—
kids!
I wasn't ready for any of that, and
neither was she. We loved each other, but by mid-July we were officially
done.

My social life, meanwhile, had diminished greatly
from the last time I lived in Toronto. As a freelancer, working alone, I had
fallen off my friends' radar—not that I was trying very hard to engage with
anybody—and most nights after spending the day in my own head, I would watch
episodes of
Entourage
, lying in bed in the throbbing
heat of my claustrophobic room, noting the many discrepancies between Vincent
Chase's life and my own, wondering where it all went wrong.

I began to exercise obsessively to sweat out my
anxiety. I went to the doctor even if it was only a minor ailment (thank you,
Canadian health care), just to fill my day. I started to see a therapist and do
yoga, trying in vain to clear my head. I sometimes replied to personal ads on
Craigslist to kill time. I did drugs on weekends whenever they were around, as a
temporary balm for my hurting brain. I was twelve thousand dollars in debt and
earning not much more than the summer in college when I worked as a dishwasher,
which now ranked as only the second-most demoralizing period of my life.

O
ne
morning in the winter of 2007, I was sitting in a Starbucks in Toronto working
on a story when my cell phone rang. It was a long-distance number I didn't
recognize. On the other end was an American who said he worked as an editor at
China Daily
in Beijing. It had been months since
I'd submitted my résumé and weeks since I wrote the editing test. I assumed
they'd forgotten about me.

“The bosses were impressed with your editing test,”
the man said. “I can't say for sure, but it looks good.”

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.