Apologies to My Censor (4 page)

“Maybe.”

And then on to the next word I didn't remember.
Soon I would bring up the latest
China Daily
gossip,
knowing Ms. Song would take the bait, or I might complain about whatever recent
injustice I perceived I had suffered at the hands of
China
Daily
. Two hours later, I was one hundred yuan (fifteen dollars)
poorer and no closer to knowing any Chinese.

China Daily
began
offering group classes twice a week with Ms. Song. About eight foreign experts
initially attended the classes. Seven of us were beginners, while one colleague,
an American in his mid-twenties named Jon, who worked in the Web division, was
upper-intermediate. Classes were a mix of Jon and Ms. Song speaking in Chinese,
and the rest of us chatting in English.

I decided that regular testing was the only way I
would scratch the surface of Chinese, so I paid Ms. Song extra to prepare weekly
tests based on what we had studied in our private classes. A few days after the
first test I was waiting for the
China Daily
group
class to begin when Ms. Song arrived carrying a stack of papers.

“We are having a test today,” she said.

She handed out a sheet of paper to everybody in the
class, and when she got to me, I noticed it was the same test I had paid her to
make for my private classes. I should have let it slide, since I was paying her
a total of eight dollars a week to make the tests.

Let it slide I did not.

“Ms. Song, I have a bone to pick with you,” I said
as my classmates scribbled on the sheets of paper.

“A bone to chew?”

“A bone to
pick
.”

“What's a bone to pick?”

“It's an expression . . . never mind.
Anyway, the thing is, I paid for you to make these tests for
me
, not to make them for everybody in the class. If I
knew you were going to hand out tests in the class, I wouldn't be paying you to
make them for me.”

Ms. Song's eyes widened. For a second I thought she
was going to cry. She said nothing.

“Uh . . . I'm sorry,” I said, instantly
regretting being a baby. “It's really not a big deal. I just thought I'd, you
know, I thought I'd let you know how I felt.”

After class, Jon approached me at the elevator.

“Hey Mitch, I think Ms. Song was really
embarrassed.”

“I wasn't really angry. I just thought she
shouldn't use tests for the class that I'm paying her to write for me.”

“Yeah, I know, but in China there's a certain way
of dealing with things like that. It's a face thing.”

A face thing. Face is an enigma central to Chinese
culture. It would take me years to figure out how to navigate the labyrinth of
face, but I figure it essentially works like a currency. Face can be given and
taken away, in small, medium, or large increments. The giving and taking of face
can be deliberate or accidental. By confronting Ms. Song in class, I had taken
away her face. Or at least that's what I understood.

Later that day an e-mail arrived in my inbox with
the subject “paper case.”

hi mitch:

i am ms. song. i want
to explain the paper giving to you. i think i should say sorry to you,
because i havent tell you i gave the paper to other class. But i don't think
i am wrong.

i am very happy you
love to study chinese very much, so i want to help you. i hope all of my
student can speak chinese very well, actually, i dont care about you money,
i just want you can get improve and feel more fun with studing chinese,
yesterday i spent 2 hours to make you paper, comperad you payment i think i
spent more time maybe i shouldnt tell you this but i just want you to
understand me, i hope you kown you are my student also friend.
. . .

i think you shoud not
talk to this thing in my class, you made me so embarrassing, except you and
me nobody know this, and i can not explain in the class using everbodys
time. so mayby because of you words somebody will misunderstand me, thinking
about me is a cheater. anyway, that's why i give the paper to basic class, i
hope you, friend of mine, can understand me.

I might have been lost in Chinese class, but being
an asshole, it turned out, translated into any language.

U
nmotivated to work or learn the language, I needed a break—from the
city, the heat, from
China Daily
. A friend from
Canada was coming to town, and we decided to make a weekend trip to a former
German colonial town on the coast called Qingdao, where an annual beer festival
was about to begin.

On the flight from Beijing, I was reading a book
and sitting beside my friend George, a former colleague from Canada, when the
plane shook violently. It felt as if we had collided with another plane. A few
seconds later we hit turbulence so bad it made the cabin lights flicker. The
flight crew hit the deck and the toddler behind me started to wail. Beside him,
an old man laughed hysterically, as if to say,
I knew man
couldn't fly!

The trip went all downhill from there.

I was excited about Qingdao. The
Rough Guide
described the city as some kind of
Bavarian wonderland. Chinese colleagues had sung its praises, too: beach city,
boomtown, beer festival. “The port city of Qingdao in the east of Shandong
province makes a remarkable first impression,” the
Rough
Guide
said. “Emerging from the train station and walking north with
your eyes fixed on the skyline, you could almost believe you had got off at a
nineteenth-century Bavarian village, nestling on the Yellow Sea.”

As far as I could tell, the only thing Bavarian
left in Qingdao was the rain and the German guy who stole our cab during a
torrential downpour our second night in town. Every number listed in the
Rough Guide
was incorrect (seven digits instead of
eight) and the hotel it recommended, and where we stayed, smelled of bad
seafood, as did much of Qingdao itself. Our room, at one hundred dollars a
night, overlooked the city's busiest intersection, which meant that as of 7 a.m.
we were greeted with the whistles, honks, and hollering of a thousand
umbrella-wielding Chinese tourists marching up and down the boardwalk.

Our first night in Qingdao, after a day spent
walking around town in the rain, we went to Tsingtao Beer Street. (Qingdao is
known for its beer and is famous for the popular brand Tsingtao.) The beer
festival was kicking off the next day, so visiting a street of beer seemed
appropriate. Beer Street was packed, lined with indistinguishable seafood
restaurants. There were some suspicious smells, but the food was good: tiny
clams, garlic shrimp, grilled fish, all washed down with fresh beer brewed
across the street.

The atmosphere, however, was not as appetizing.
When I went to the washroom, the floor was covered with urine, and though it was
a one-man bathroom, two drunken men invited themselves in and peed in the drain
while I used the Western-style toilet. One of them gave me a thumbs-up. Later,
as we ate dinner, a man beside us placed his index finger on his left nostril
and blew a wad of snot on the ground, his nose inches from our bowl of
shellfish. Meanwhile, an old lady in an apron emerged from the kitchen, sat in a
chair, and picked her nose as we ate our shrimp.

At this point, we were still giving Qingdao the
benefit of the doubt, assuming there was more to the city than met the eye.
After a good night's rest, George and I figured, we would discover the city's
true charm. But Qingdao had other ideas. As soon as we decided to leave Beer
Street, the rains came. It poured from 10 p.m. until past 2 a.m., flooding the
streets. It was clear we were in for a long weekend.

The next day the rains continued and we were slow
moving. After lunch we took a bus to the Beer Festival, where we sat at a table
drinking bottles of German beer as a waitress tried to sell us chicken feet and
duck liver. Around us were several hundred drunk Chinese huddled at picnic
tables under a large circus tent. Onstage, a performer in a black tank top and
ripped jeans, with a beer gut and Elvis hair, swung his hips and punched the air
to the tune of horrendous pop music played at what was surely a dangerous
decibel.

At around 7 p.m. we decided the Beer Festival was
beyond salvaging and headed back downtown. After the aforementioned German stole
our cab, we eventually made it to our destination and decided to unwind with a
pizza and a massage. We headed to a four-star hotel near ours and ate a pizza
with toppings that included sausage, lettuce, and corn.

Then we went downstairs to the “spa.” I should have
known something was amiss when two young women took George and me to separate
rooms, at which point my masseuse, whose thong was exposed at the back of her
jeans, began to massage nothing but my lower abdomen and inner thigh, moving
slowly inward.

“You want?” she said, eyebrows raised.

I shook my head. “Bu yao, xie xie.” No, thanks.

I covered my eyes with my hands and tried to will
away what was happening in my pants.

She typed the number 1,200—about $150—on her phone
and showed it to me. “Okay?”

“No, thanks.”

She pouted and typed 600. “Okay?”

“No, thank you. Just massage.”

George was having a similar problem. “Mitch, what's
happening over there?!” he cried from the other room.

“She's trying to jerk me off!” I hollered.

“Me, too!”

George successfully fought off the happy ending,
but my masseuse was loath to give up. She keyed 300 into her phone. “Okay?”

“No, I don't want that!” I said.

She threw up her hands in exasperation. The rest of
the massage was terrible. She spent most of the time unenthusiastically kneading
my back with one hand, and text messaging with the other.

A
fter
waking the next morning to more rain, George and I went across town to drink
coffee at a Starbucks. We basically just wanted to kill the day before boarding
the flight back to Beijing. By midafternoon the clouds broke for the first time,
revealing a lovely blue sky. Of course, we were wearing jeans and shoes, and too
far from our hotel to change into shorts and enjoy the weather.

A few hours later, we were sitting on the plane,
having never set foot on the beach during our weekend beach getaway, and looking
paler than ever.

D
uring
the weeks that followed I did very little work at
China
Daily
. The editors would assign me a story, I would take two weeks to
write it, and then the story had a 50 percent shot at going to print. Throughout
the summer and into the fall, I wrote maybe three or four stories. The rest of
the time I did whatever I wanted.

It became clear to me during that time that the
influx of “foreign friends” to
China Daily
was
little more than window dressing, not much different from the coats of paint
they were throwing up on apartment buildings around the ring roads to beautify
the city before the Games. We were a small part of the biggest public relations
campaign in history—Beijing's Olympic makeover.

To that end,
China
Daily
brought in people with
real
journalism experience. In the past, the foreigners at the paper were travelers,
university students on summer break, or outright nut jobs. One foreign expert,
whose career at
China Daily
lasted two weeks,
frequently and firmly made known his belief in aliens and claimed to have
fourteen doctoral degrees, one of which was being suppressed by the Vatican. Now
the foreign experts appeared legally sane, or at bare minimum did not talk
openly about their belief in aliens. We were told we would have real influence
at the paper and that we could help decide its direction. But in the end, what
China Daily
really wanted was for us to sit
down, shut up, and edit. There were changes, but they were glacial and
superficial. It was a sugarcoating, and we were the sugar.

Periodically the foreign staff would discuss the
ethics of working at
China Daily
. Some felt we had a
responsibility to make the paper better. Others disagreed. “There's nothing
wrong with what we do,” my friend Max, the Australian, said one night as we
strolled around the
China Daily
compound. “You have
to realize what this is. We're not a newspaper, mate. We're PR. You have to give
the bosses what they want.”

He was right, and once I accepted that fact I could
tolerate working at
China Daily
. I was no longer a
journalist, but I could be one in my off-hours. By midsummer I had sold a few
freelance articles, and I became determined to do better. I would be like a
media Batman: propagandist by day, journalist by night.

Although I would always have my issues with
China Daily
, I eventually began to appreciate the
unique experience for what it was and to enjoy myself. And I still hoped that I
could, in some small way, change the paper for the better, to make it somehow
more palatable, to blur the line between propaganda and journalism until a
reader might barely know the difference.

“How does it feel to be a government propagandist?”
a woman asked me once at a bar in Beijing, barely masking her contempt. It was a
question I received often, and I answered her honestly: “Great!” It had become a
reason to be in China during an incredible time, a chance to be a part of
history.

Since my editors asked very little of me, that's
what I gave them, and in the slow, sweltering weeks of summer I settled into a
lovely routine in my new career as a wallflower. Sometimes, out of sheer
boredom, I would offer to edit a story, but mostly my days looked like this: