Apologies to My Censor (10 page)

After a lull in the conversation, Lois looked at me
with hurt eyes and said, “I read your article.” She paused. “So that's what you
think of us?”

I felt guilty and struggled to offer an
explanation.

She shrugged. “I understand. It's just different
here.”

We sat in silence, sipping our coffees and watching
the basketball game on the asphalt court in front of us. All I wanted to do was
look her in the eye and tell her that I was sorry.

But I didn't. I couldn't. Because even though I
felt awful, I knew I wasn't wrong.

Was I?

In the weeks after leaving
China Daily
, I wrestled over whether I didn't fit in at the paper
because, well, it was
China Daily
, or if my failed
tenure at the paper was because I am, by nature, exactly how I felt after the
Globe and Mail
article was published: an
asshole.

As much I would have liked to write off
China Daily
as a ridiculous charade, I concluded that
I, in fact, bore the brunt of the blame for being a Failed Propagandist. I never
gave it 100 percent—not for one day, not for one minute. I didn't even give it
close to 50 percent. I gave it about 7 percent.

Day after day, I did no work, made no effort to
make
China Daily
a better newspaper. Lois was right:
it's
different
in China. I didn't play by their
rules, I complained endlessly about working nights and editing. I bitched my way
into a writer's role and then barely wrote anything. I moaned about every
assignment I got. I didn't aggressively report anything. I blogged about the
absurdities of working in Chinese state media. I freelanced, violating my
contract.

But now that it was over I was embarrassed about my
attitude over the previous year. I had treated
China
Daily
as a joke from day one, and that wasn't fair to anyone—not to
my employers, not to my editors, not to my colleagues. And it wasn't fair to my
friends, to people like Lois. If I could have lived the year over again, I would
have done things differently. I would have tried to maintain a more open mind
and I would have worked harder.

But it was too late for that now. All I could do, I
decided, was come back to Beijing with a fresh start and fresh eyes. I wanted to
be a better
laowai
.

T
hat
April, a few days after my twenty-eighth birthday, I returned to Canada for
three weeks. As part of my contract,
China Daily
provided a car to take me to the airport: comfortable, air-conditioned,
chauffeured.

Julia texted me while I was on the way. “Have a
great time at home,” she wrote. “I'll miss you.”

“I'll miss you, too,” I replied, and I meant it.
She still wasn't my girlfriend, but we were getting there.

I flew to Toronto, on
China
Daily
's dime, and landed in a blizzard. The air was clean and cold
when I stepped off the shuttle bus downtown. Wind and blowing snow whipped my
face as I dragged my suitcase to a friend's apartment.

I fought through jet lag and went with a few
friends to a pub downtown, where I ordered the first decent burger I'd had in a
year and drank a few pints of good Canadian beer, not the watery beverage served
in China. It felt surreal to be back in Canada. The bar smelled of cleaning
products and spilled alcohol, not of cigarette smoke like Chinese bars. I caught
up on my friends' lives, but when it came time for me to explain my life in
China, and
China Daily
, I struggled to convey what I
experienced. I pointed out the obvious differences, told them about some of the
adventures I'd had, and did my best to paint a full picture.

The next morning I visited my old neighborhood—a
bohemian district east of downtown called Cabbagetown—and read a newspaper at
the café where I used to write many of my freelance articles. The streets felt
small and deserted compared to Beijing. I walked around reliving the summer of
2006, the worst summer of my life. So much had changed. I thought about the
person I was before I left for China, and the person I was only twelve months
later. It had all turned out all right. I was happier, more confident, more
excited about life—and I had China to thank.

I took a streetcar to the Chinese consulate, where
Falun Gong protesters were gathered outside, as they were a year earlier when I
first applied for a visa. It was mayhem inside, a single waiting room that felt
similar to the
China Daily
offices, dated and mute
of color, with white sunlight shining in from the windows. People jostled for a
place in the line and hollered loud inquiries in Mandarin to the employees
behind the glass.

As I waited in line to apply for a tourist visa, I
grew excited about going back to China. I was more excited about the prospect of
returning to Beijing than I had been about going the first time. It was becoming
clear that I was in no way ready to move back to Canada, that my initial plan to
stay until the end of the Olympics would soon have to be augmented.

It had been only a few days, but I was
disillusioned again with Toronto, where most conversations seemed to revolve
around organic food, careers, and complaints about public transit. After a week,
I traveled to my home province, Saskatchewan, and on to Vancouver. I enjoyed
being back in Canada, but it seemed strangely foreign now. Exchanges at
restaurants and coffee shops felt awkward and people came across as both
absurdly polite and incredibly cold; I missed the honest bluntness of Chinese
people.

There were still things pulling me back, of course.
Seeing my parents sparked the guilt I often felt living in China. They had come
to visit me in Beijing the previous fall and I was in frequent contact with
them, but I knew it was hard on my mom to have her son on the other side of the
world, especially in a place that seemed to be in constant turmoil, at least
based on news coverage. It was great to see friends, too, and enjoy all the
variety Canada had to offer.

But when I imagined going back to my old life in
Canada, I quickly dismissed any fleeting notion of moving back.

“S
o,
what's it like in China?” friends would ask.

How could I answer that question?
It's amazing and terrible. Beautiful and ugly, thrilling and
boring, inspiring and infuriating.
I couldn't find a short,
sound-bite answer, so more often than not I would mumble something like “Oh,
it's great. Really interesting. Things are changing so fast.” People at home
struggled to relate to my China experience, and I couldn't blame them. Before I
left, China was this big, mostly blank canvas, except for stock images I'd seen
on television or in photos: people on bikes, hazy skies, skyscrapers, and
peasant villages. But by then I knew that China is one of those places you need
to see and feel, and more than one conversation ended with me saying, “You
really just need to be there.”

I felt somehow different and I was anxious to get
back to Beijing. It was becoming clear to me that I had made the right decision
to go to China. For all the ups and downs of my first year in China, it had made
me feel alive.

8

The Big Cleanup

A
few weeks later, in mid-May 2008, I was back in Beijing, still without a plan that lasted beyond the summer, living in my new apartment, a boxy but adequate three-bedroom owned by Comrade Wu, my old kook of a landlord.

A few days after I arrived back in the capital, Comrade Wu showed up at my apartment unannounced, as was his custom, plopped down on the living room sofa, lit a smoke, and farted. He let out a barking cough, paused, and shifted his weight to one side to scratch his ass cheek. Comrade Wu was retired and in his late sixties, from Henan province, thin as a twig with dark brown skin and massive Pete Postlethwaite cheekbones. He took a shine to me after I moved into his rental apartment, even though we could barely communicate. On this particular morning, Comrade Wu puffed on his cigarette and rattled off a bunch of Chinese I didn't really understand.

After a few minutes he noticed I wasn't keeping up.

“Your Chinese,” he said, shaking his head, “is terrible.”

He was right. My Chinese was pathetic for having spent a year in the country; it was at a level that could have been achieved after an intensive month-long course. It was something I hoped to remedy that summer, the Olympic summer. I was determined to engage with China differently, to be the better
laowai
I'd promised myself I would be. I wanted to meet more locals, to develop a better understanding of the city and country, and much of that had to do with getting a half-decent understanding of Chinese.

Comrade Wu's apartment was in the Chaoyangmen neighborhood, inside the east second ring road and near the site of the long-ago demolished Chaoyang (“Sun-facing”) Gate. My building was part of a large complex of aging six-story walk-ups, made of concrete and built for utility.

The courtyard behind my building was a hub of activity, crowded in spring and summer with locals exercising and gossiping and walking their tiny, yapping dogs. Women wore baggy, dark-colored clothing, and on hot days the men sported T-shirts pulled up over their pale bellies, the legs of their pants rolled to the knee. A geriatric bike repairman with big, filthy hands, wearing a stained muscle shirt and torn jeans, set up shop at the courtyard gate, and business was brisk. Beijing bicycles aren't made to last, and I visited him regularly to fix my sixty-dollar Yongjiu (“Forever”) bike.

Just around the corner, across Chaoyangmen South Alley, were rows of old
hutong
alleyways, which I often explored while running or biking in the early evenings. The alleys were the best part of Beijing, full of life and history. Groups of men played cards and mah-jongg; kids walked home from school drowning in their uniforms; old women gathered in the shade of trees to talk and laugh. The alleys smelled of barbecued meat and public toilets. It seemed like the entire community was there, hanging out, living, and often when I went running, the games and chatting stopped and puzzled expressions appeared on the locals' faces as the tall
laowai
darted by, singing along to songs playing on his headphones.

My apartment, which cost $700 a month, split two ways with a journalist from New Zealand named Jon, had three bedrooms, a cramped living room, a kitchen, and a closetlike bathroom. There was no separate shower in the bathroom, so water sprayed directly from the showerhead onto the tiled floor and toilet before going down the often-plugged drain. The bathroom smelled of mold, and the rest of the apartment became onion- or garlic-scented whenever our neighbors cooked. We had two balconies, each attached to a bedroom and closed off with glass windows, rendering them useless as outdoor spaces. The walls were thick; the apartment was dead quiet and scorching hot throughout the summer, whenever the air conditioners were broken, which was often. The walk up the windowless staircase was a struggle in the heat, and I often came through the door panting and dripping with sweat.

It had taken us a month to find the place before I went to Canada. Searching for apartments in Beijing is a nightmare, a lesson Jon and I had learned well. With the Olympics on the horizon, landlords were driving up prices, especially for foreigners, in anticipation of a flood of visitors. We looked at dozens of apartments before finding Comrade Wu's place. I saw shoe box apartments with prison cots, and places that looked like murder scenes going for more than $1,000 a month. They were small, poorly designed, and with furniture that, as Jon put it, “commit various crimes against good taste.” Despite its drawbacks, Comrade Wu's was a steal compared to some of the other units we saw: it was clean, minimal, and affordable. The walls were freshly painted white and it had new (fake) wood floor panels.

We weren't far from the main centers of activity: Sanlitun and the Central Business District were ten-minute cab rides away, barring traffic, and I could cycle to my favorite cafés in the alleys near the Drum and Bell Towers in less than fifteen minutes. We had a number of cheap, convenient local restaurants nearby, a 7-Eleven just around the corner, and a Starbucks a ten-minutes walk away, just over the second ring road.

The apartment left something to be desired, but it was central and it helped give me a new lease on Beijing life. I had no office to go to now, no stories to edit, and I was free of
China Daily
. I had accepted a three-week job as a research assistant during the Olympics with the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, but until then I had nothing but time.

N
ot long after I came back to Beijing, I enrolled in a Chinese language school across the ring road, signing up for six to ten hours of class each week and making a pledge to myself that I would do homework this time. The day I enrolled at the school, I told the secretary I had studied Chinese for a year, and the school tailored a lesson plan for someone who had not only studied but also
learned
Chinese for a year. But studying and learning are two entirely different things, which I soon found out.

My teacher was a twenty-seven-year-old woman from Heilongjiang province in northeast China, named Guo Li. She was a sweetheart, with a pretty face, dimpled cheeks, and a bowl cut of black hair. She was tiny and looked barely older than a teenager. During our first lesson it became clear that my Chinese was not up to par; nearly everything Guo Li said passed over my head. After a few minutes, she threw her hands up in exasperation and said, in Chinese, “Have you been in China for a year? Or a day?” I immediately liked her.

Meanwhile, with so many of my former colleagues having departed Beijing for home or elsewhere, I was spending more time with Julia. We started spending a couple of nights a week together, and before long it was three or four times a week. In late May, we went with a group of her friends for a weekend trip to Inner Mongolia, where we rode horses and ate roasted lamb and went drinking in the town's karaoke bar. She was planning on returning to Russia to finish university at the end of July, and as we lay in bed in a local family's guesthouse that night, I told her I would miss her when she left.

“I'll miss you too,
sladki
.”

“
Sladki?
What's that mean?”

“It means sweetheart in Russian.”

After that, she called me Sladki all the time, and I adored it. (I liked it better than when she said my real name, which in her Russian accent sounded more like a screech—“
Meeeeetch
.”) At some point, we started calling each other boyfriend and girlfriend and we spent almost every night together. We took turns staying at one another's place. We went to Xi'an to see the Terracotta Warriors. We had sex in the bushes at the base of the Great Wall during an all-night rave.

She was lovely, and even though we were very different people, we made a great couple. I gave her the confidence she sometimes lacked. She gave me comfort and a sense of calm.

She was my first girlfriend in two years, and our relationship felt good. But always lingering, and always ratcheting up the intensity, was the fact that in less than two months, she would be gone.

I
was happy, but I was also adjusting to the burdens of taking care of myself after a year of living like an infant under the supervision of a Chinese government newspaper.
China Daily
handled everything even remotely difficult in our lives—problems with our apartments, visas, logistics. We had a network of people attending to us. I had gotten used to being supported over the year and almost forgot that day-to-day life in China can be infuriatingly difficult.

Now I was on my own as a freelancer, and even a menial task could became a huge hassle. One day, for example, I needed a D battery. I tried a few little shops near my place. Nothing. The 7-Eleven down the street. No luck. I biked across the ring road to a market and tried four or five stalls before I found the battery I needed. A task that would have taken five minutes in North America took close to forty-five minutes in China, even after a year.

I was also having constant problems with my apartment. Only one of the three air conditioners in my place blew cold air, and the one that did, which was in my bedroom, leaked buckets of water. I called Comrade Wu four times over a week before he finally fixed the leak. Less than a week later, it was dripping water again. After several more phone calls, Comrade Wu finally came back with a few workers. I tried to explain in my broken Chinese that I had woken up that morning with a huge puddle of air conditioner water on my floor. He raised his eyebrows, offered a half smile, shook his head from side to side, and conveyed what he was thinking with no words at all: “Enough with your
laowai
bitching!”

To solve the problem, the workers drilled a hole through the bedroom wall to the balcony, flakes of paint and bits of cement falling into a pile on my desk, and then fed the air conditioner hose through the hole and into a bucket they placed on the other side. I would need to empty the bucket every second day.

For the most part, I was grateful to be in China during the Olympic summer, but that didn't stop me from wanting an elevator, a kitchen with an oven, a shower that didn't spray directly onto my toilet, a washing machine that didn't eat my clothes. A landlord that didn't drop in all the time. It felt overwhelming at times, dealing with the little things on top of studying and working. China offered many things but rarely peace of mind.

A major headache of pre-Olympics Beijing was dealing with visas, another problem I hadn't had to bother with while working at
China Daily
. After my “foreign expert” visa expired, I returned to China on a thirty-day tourist visa, which I could renew twice at the Public Security Bureau in Beijing. That would take me up to the start of the Olympics. I asked the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC), my Olympics employer, if they would sponsor me for the Games themselves, and they said they would look into it, but they never got back to me.

In China, visas could be bought. Many foreigners lived for years on gray-market visas, found through shady visa agents who, thanks to connections or money or both, were able to obtain official visas for foreigners not officially employed in China. I had made inquiries with friends while I was still working at
China Daily
and was directed to look at the online classifieds of local English-language listings magazines. There I found dozens of ads promising tourist or business visas in exchange for a fee. But according to online forums, these gray-market visas were getting harder to come by as the Olympics approached, and those still available were increasingly expensive.

Since I had already accepted a job during the Games and was desperate to see the event after witnessing the buildup, I didn't have much of a choice. One afternoon I met a middle-aged Englishman named Simon, whom I'd found via an ad offering yearlong work visas. He was a short man with flushed cheeks and large glasses. He had been working in Beijing for the better part of a decade, running a trading business with a Canadian business partner. He procured visas “on the side,” he said, through government contacts he'd made over the years.

I was nervous as I handed him $1,000 and my passport, and he could tell.

“Don't worry,” he said. “We've never had a problem getting visas, and if we do, we'll give all your money back—full refund.”

He said he would get back within a few days to tell me how it was proceeding. When by the following week I hadn't heard from him, I started getting worried. I called him one afternoon and he assured me there was no problem: my visa would be ready shortly. A few days later he called me back. He said there was a small snag and asked me to meet his business partner, the Canadian, the following day.

The Canadian, a skinny, ratlike man from Calgary, sat across from me in the lobby of his office, not far from
China Daily
. His forehead glistened with sweat.

I had a bad feeling.

“We can get your visa, but we want you to do us a favor,” he said.

“What kind of favor?”

“We want you to import a car from Hong Kong under your name. It's for tax reasons. Foreigners don't have to pay taxes on imported cars. Mainlanders do.”

I had heard of this before, but usually foreigners who agreed to this scheme got paid several thousand dollars for the risk, on top of a free visa. But I wasn't going to get paid, and my visa was still going to cost me $1,000. Simon and the Rat, I guessed, would make a killing.

I didn't know what the repercussions would be if our plot was uncovered, and I wasn't anxious to find out. I didn't want to miss the Olympics, but my gut told me to run.

“If you're uncomfortable with this,” the Rat said, “we'll give you your money back.”

I asked for my money back.

A
s the days passed and the Olympics fast approached, I e-mailed the Olympic press center, which dealt with foreign reporters, and explained my situation. I asked if there was any way I could still apply for a journalist visa. They replied that if I had a press card, which the CBC would be providing for me at the start of the Olympics, then I automatically had a visa for the duration of the event, but it wouldn't kick in until a few days before the Games. Until then, I could stay in China on my current tourist visa, which I still needed to renew every thirty days.