Apologies to My Censor (12 page)

Not a day had gone by over the previous sixteen months when I hadn't thought and talked about the Games. And whenever I did, I was thrilled. I watched the city transform. And now that they were here, and I was seeing them, living them, I felt let down, not because they weren't grandiose and spectacular—they were—but because they would soon be over, and with them would go a major justification for my life in Beijing. It was as if the pillars of my China life—
China Daily
, my friends and colleagues there, Julia, the Olympics—were all gone or going, and without them I had nothing left to lean on.

Over the course of the Olympics I grew increasingly uneasy and was affected by a lingering sadness. It seemed somehow a disappointment that years of effort came down to just a couple weeks—and then what? The stadiums empty, the banners come down, the crowds go home. Would Beijing still be on anybody's radar after the Games? Would it still be on mine?

S
leep deprivation does strange things to a man. I was sleeping an average of about three hours a night, and on some nights I caught maybe an hour or two. I felt like I was the subject of a cruel experiment. On a given day I might drink eight to ten cups of coffee and eat a half-dozen meals. I felt, at times, at the brink of sanity. I needed to drain my bladder every ten minutes, and my personal hygiene was suffering. More than once I caught a whiff of my own body odor on mornings when I slept too late to wash myself and forgot to apply deodorant. The doughnut around my belly was growing by the day.

As time went on, I grew increasingly agitated and lost sight of the fact that, in reality, where I no longer lived, CBC had actually provided me with an incredible opportunity. But more often than not I felt sorry for myself, dwelling instead on the long hours, early morning, menial tasks, and little pay. When I found out that another expat worker doing a similar job was being paid $1,000 more because he'd been hired in desperation at the last minute to fill an empty spot, I almost quit.

My outlet was a young Chinese woman named Hong, who had been hired a year earlier, when she lived in Toronto, to be a sort of cultural liaison. Hong was pretty, and I had immediate fantasies of an Olympics fling from the moment I saw her, although it never came to fruition. Even though we had broken up, Julia was still very much on my mind throughout the Olympics, especially as my mental state veered closer toward instability.

Hong's job in Canada had been to prepare background information on Beijing and China, and to coach the talent on how to pronounce Chinese words and names, a task at which she failed miserably. During the actual Olympics the CBC had little use for Hong, and although she was still required to come in at dawn, she spent most of the day sleeping in a bed she had made for herself in the studio used for the late French-language broadcast.

In between our two shows, when we had a short break, Hong and I would go outside for cigarettes and I would vent. I think she liked the drama.

“You should just quit,” she said, egging me on.

“Maybe I will.”

“You should. Go for it.”

I nodded my head, rehearsing lines in my brain that I might say when I handed in my resignation.

But I didn't quit. Instead, I sulked under my breath and showed up a few minutes later each day to see if anybody would do anything about it. I was going crazy with fatigue. There were other times, though, when I snapped out of it and the gravity of the place and time hit me with full force.

One evening after work, for example, I went with a friend to the Bird's Nest to watch the men's hundred-meter sprint final, featuring the aptly named Jamaican extraterrestrial Usain Bolt. We drank cans of Tsingtao and watched one of the Olympics' marquee events. I fell asleep during the heats, but for the final I was wide awake as I watched Bolt obliterate the field, looking back and pulling up with ten meters left, arms raised, crushing his own record time. The crowd was euphoric. We had seen something historic and we knew it. I felt guilty for any bad thought I'd ever had toward the CBC, and I promised I would work harder and without complaint, a promise that lasted about a day.

“A
re you watching this?”

It was my friend Will texting. I looked over at the TV screen nearest me and saw the women's triathlon.

“Watching what? Triathlon?” I texted back.

“Liu Xiang,” Will wrote. “He's out.”

Shocked, I called Will and he told me that Liu Xiang, the Chinese hurdler who had won gold in world-record time in Athens 2004, had pulled out of the Olympics because of an Achilles injury. I went on the newswires to confirm it was true. This was massive—the biggest story of the Olympics—and the CBC had missed it. Why hadn't we cut to it? I wondered. Why are we still broadcasting the triathlon?

“Liu Xiang's out!” I hollered out to everyone around me in the studio.

“Who?” Karen said.

“Liu Xiang. The hurdler. Why aren't we covering this?”

It's difficult to put into context the gravity of Liu Xiang's exit from the Olympics. In China, Liu Xiang was something like LeBron James, Roger Federer, and David Beckham—combined. People adored him. Before the Olympics, a poll asked one million Chinese their wishes for the Beijing Games. Watching Liu Xiang win his second gold medal ranked first. (Holding a successful Olympics was fourth.) In China, Liu's pockmarked face was featured on billboards and advertisements everywhere, for Nike, Lenovo computers, Coca-Cola, Cadillac, a cigarette company, and more.

Of course, I knew Liu Xiang's importance—I had been in China for the previous year—but nobody else in the studio did. I was in disbelief that CBC had not covered his story, or at the very least had not turned to the event after he pulled out. It felt almost like a personal slight—
how could they do this
? I had moved over a notch on the Foreigner/Chinese Identity Spectrum.

I was up from my chair walking up and down the studio, arms flailing like a rabid monkey.

“Why aren't we covering this? This is unbelievable.”

None of my colleagues said a word. Some were avoiding looking at me entirely. After a few moments of me raving at no one in particular, one of the technical workers, a thirty-something Canadian who also lived in Beijing, pulled me to the side.

“I don't think you should say anything more.”

“Why? This is bullshit. This is the biggest story of the Olympics.”

“These people are professionals. They don't like to be told they're wrong.”

“But they are wrong.”

“Maybe. But do you hear anybody asking your opinion?”

He was right. I sat down at my post, and when my blood settled, I avoided my colleagues' eyes out of embarrassment. CBC hadn't covered Liu Xiang's heat because they didn't care. Sure, I did, but what was a huge story in China was a nonstory in Canada. From then on, I kept my opinions to myself.

I
got over Liu Xiang and so did the Chinese. The country went on to win fifty-one gold medals, the most of any country at the 2008 Olympics. The weather improved and every day of the second week was sunny and clear. As the events wound down, the consensus was that the Beijing Olympics were a success. I felt proud for the city I had seen transform over the last sixteen months, and on the last day of the Olympics, as I looked over the Bird's Nest from Ling Long Pagoda one final time, I knew that despite my fatigue, I had made the right choice to work for the CBC.

Still, I was happy the Olympics were over. I was near the end of my tether as a research assistant. One more early morning, one more Egg McMuffin, one more mundane task, and I might have snapped. By the sixteenth and final day of the 2008 Olympic Games, I desperately needed to get drunk. Very, very drunk. I sent out an e-mail to anyone in Beijing who might be up for a party, and as soon as my shift ended, I said goodbye to my coworkers and cabbed to a bar in Sanlitun to watch the men's basketball finals with Will and his girlfriend.

“It begins,” I said as I sipped my first Stella Artois as a free man.

My giddiness soon subsided, and I found myself drifting off as a group of us watched the closing ceremony on the patio of the same restaurant where we had watched the opening ceremony. More than once, I fell asleep, my chin resting on my chest before my friends woke me up and reminded me that this was supposed to be my big night, my one chance for a real Olympic party.

We moved to a club called China Doll, and I started passing out in a booth. A friend noticed this and surreptitiously slipped me a little plastic bag filled with white powder, under the table. But after I went to the bathroom for a line, I was hit with a strange anxiety, followed by a moment of clarity when I told myself that for my own benefit I should probably go home. Instead, I ignored my own advice and ordered more drinks.

Rob showed up. We hadn't seen each other in months. We caught up briefly and then he drifted into the crowd. That was the last I saw of him—not just that night but ever.

At one point I ran into a young woman I'd been friends with since my early days in Beijing, and we talked over a few drinks in our booth. Apparently the alcohol and drugs had cocooned my conscience because I managed to push aside any thought of Julia, and the two us soon took a cab to her place. We rolled around on her folded-out futon for a few minutes, but nothing happened. Sixteen days of exhaustion and malnutrition had taken a terrific toll.

I got dressed, apologized, and took a cab home.

I
woke early. I was ravenous. It was seven o'clock and I was used to having my third breakfast of the day by then. My heart raced and my brain stung. I felt guilty and slimy about the night before—all of it. I ate whatever food I had left—oatmeal, a cup of yogurt, a banana—and drank half a liter of water before trying in vain to go back to sleep.

I felt awful, and it wasn't just the hangover. As I walked around town that day, it became clear that something was missing. There was a void in post-Olympics Beijing, and it was evident from the moment the Games ended.

I was alone and trying to come up with ways to kill the day, but in the pit of my fattened stomach was the weight of despair. The Olympics, one of the main reasons for coming to China, were done. Whenever I'd felt down in the previous year, whenever I felt lonely or frustrated or had a Bad China Day, I could always say, Oh well, the Olympics are coming. Now they were gone, and so was my girlfriend and most of my friends. Beijing didn't just
feel
like a ghost town, as it had some days that summer; it
was
a ghost town now.

I had a foot massage and went to a movie. On the way home I walked past a busy market, my head in a daze as I watched foreign visitors using their last hours in China's capital to buy cheap goods to give to their friends and family back home, where they would all be in a day or so.

But not me. I was still here. For those of us left in the city, there was a sense of gloom, and it lasted for days, weeks, even months, and throughout that time I had one terrible question always—persistently—lurking in my brain.

What now?

10

Dinosaur Bones and Brothels

I
n the weeks after the Olympics, my options were limited. As the financial crisis hit in North America, the journalism job market was bleak, and I wasn't enamored of the prospect of going back to the grim existence of a freelancer in Canada. I looked for work in Hong Kong, where a few friends had moved, but heard much of the same. Hiring freezes, layoffs. Apply again in a few months.

I was stuck in Beijing and anxious about what to do. The Olympics had worn me down, and I was slow to get back into the freelance groove. The previous sixteen months had gone by so fast, and I was finding that, as I expected, I was missing the comforts of
China Daily
.

I missed Julia, too. We had stayed in touch over the course of the Olympics, and now that they were over, I decided I would visit her for a week in Moscow. The Russian embassy in Beijing had other ideas, however. Only foreigners with resident permits, which I lacked, could apply for a Russian visa. My travel plans were thwarted, so Julia and I came up with Plan B: a week in Thailand.

Tanned and stunning, she met me at the Bangkok airport, and the next day we traveled to Koh Phangan, a popular island in the Gulf of Thailand and home of the Full Moon Party. We rented a bungalow on a quiet beach, and for a few days I let go of all my apprehension about life in Beijing.

We spent the week swimming, riding around the islands on motorbikes, drinking, and sleeping in. It was heavenly, but with each day the weight of knowing we would soon have to say goodbye again grew heavier. When we parted ways at the airport after seven nights together, neither of us brought up the obvious question—what were we doing? We cried and kissed and said goodbye, and she told me she would come visit me in Beijing during her winter break. We didn't say it, but we were now, unofficially at least, in a long-distance relationship.

While I was still in Thailand, a friend e-mailed asking if I wanted to work for an English-language news magazine in Beijing. The publication, called
Asia Weekly
, was owned by a journalist from England, Jasper Becker, who had lived in China for decades. It covered Asia from the Beijing office and was based on the same concept as the
Week
, a popular British news digest. The pay wasn't great, but it was a respectable publication. I figured I could work at
Asia Weekly
for a few months, continue freelancing in my spare time, wait out the financial crisis, and plot my next move.

I returned to Beijing and started the new job, and for the first time since the Olympics, I felt stable. I had friends at the office and the work was interesting. I restarted Chinese classes with Guo Li, whom I now met for private lessons at a Starbucks near my home. I bought Chinese character flash cards that I carried with me everywhere, flipping through them whenever I had a spare moment. I started thinking of freelance stories I could work on. I was rejuvenated.

Three weeks later, the magazine folded.

Asia Weekly
had been in financial trouble for some time, and Jasper spent months trying to secure financing. When the last of a string of potential deals fell through, he decided the magazine couldn't continue. Perhaps down the road he might bring it back to life, but for now it was being shuttered.

The afternoon Jasper told us he had run out of money and was suspending publication, the staff went to a bar in Sanlitun and drank beer and tequila shots until we could barely walk. We would worry about work and money later, we figured.

I woke at dawn the next day with a debilitating hangover, no job, no prospects, and no Olympics on the horizon. I had no money left after Thailand and wouldn't until I got my one and only paycheck from
Asia Weekly
. My roommate, Jon, had recently left the city and I was covering the rent at Comrade Wu's place by myself. After a year of being financially comfortable at
China Daily
, and with a steady flow of funds throughout the summer, I would now need to call my parents and ask for help. I struggled to get back to sleep as questions swirled around in my foggy brain.
Why am I still here? What am I doing with my life? What should I be doing?
These questions were too big to answer—I didn't even know what I wanted to do with my morning. Beijing felt empty again after a short reprieve. A long winter awaited.

O
nce again, my options were few. There are three kinds of work for a foreign journalist in Beijing: state media, such as
China Daily
; international bureaus, which are sparsely staffed and tough to crack; and freelancing. With no desire to reenter the state media and no job offers in international media, I reluctantly resumed my career as a freelancer.

The staff of
Asia Weekly
continued to go into the office after the magazine folded, a way to provide us newly unemployed a semblance of routine. One of the magazine's editors was Tom Mackenzie. Tom was the same age as me, from the United Kingdom, Jude Law–handsome and with a good reporter's instinct. We had met through friends on my first weekend in Beijing, a year and a half earlier. Tom had arrived in the city in early 2006 and, like me, had put in his time in state media before joining
Asia Weekly
. Tom and I got along well and had become good friends over the summer.

Only minutes after Jasper told us he was closing the magazine, as the staff absorbed the news in silence, Tom popped his head over his computer and called my name from across the office.

“Mitch,” he said. “Trip?”

I didn't know what he had in mind—or how I would pay for it—but I didn't care. I was in. We decided we would report a few stories while on the road, but which stories, and where, we had no idea. After a few brainstorming sessions, we were still without a plan.

Tom and I realized this trip would have to be more than just an adventure. We were both in our late twenties and not where we wanted to be in our careers. Tom wanted to be in broadcasting; I wanted to be writing features for international publications. We both knew that to take our careers to the next level we needed to establish names for ourselves, and we felt like we were running out of time. Whatever stories we were going to report, they needed to be good.

A week after he shuttered the magazine, Jasper took the
Asia Weekly
editors for lunch. He apologized for what had happened and said he was confident we could all make it as freelancers if we resold our stories in different markets.

“Don't look for stories that all the foreign press is doing,” he told us. “Make sure to repackage the stories and sell them three, four times. And remember, sex sells.”

Sex sells . . . Back at the office after lunch, Tom and I thought about sexy stories we could sell. And then it came to me: Maggie's—the nightclub frequented by lonely expat businessmen, certain
China Daily
foreign experts, and Mongolian prostitutes.

Maggie's, which had recently reopened after being shut down throughout the Olympics, had never brought me anywhere near sexual temptation. The few times I'd gone there left me feeling depressed and guilty, but ever since the night of Potter's birthday party, I had been curious about the club and the Mongolian women who frequented it. I had never spoken with any of the Maggie's girls about anything substantial, but I wanted to know their stories. Why, with so many available Chinese women, so many
poor
Chinese women, were the working girls who populated Maggie's, the Den, and other hookup bars in Beijing frequented by expats Mongolian? How did they end up in China? What brought them? Maggie's had been closed during the Olympics, and rumors had surfaced about several murdered Maggie's regulars, all Mongolian prostitutes. It was a story waiting to be written.

Tom and I did some research online. We found the U.S. State Department's Trafficking in Persons report and read that trafficking was a growing problem, with between 3,000 and 5,000 Mongolian women and girls lured or forced into prostitution in foreign countries each year. Many were recruited by deceit, often by friends and relatives, and the vast majority ended up in China. Many came to the bars and karaoke rooms of Beijing, Shanghai, and other major Chinese cities; others ended up farther south, in the saunas and casinos of Macau, the Las Vegas of Asia.

We found a story posted online by a nongovernmental organization about human trafficking in a city on the Chinese side of the Mongolian border, called Erlian. Neither of us had heard of it. We learned that Erlian was known for dinosaur bones discovered in a dried salt lake in 2006, and that it was the city in which the trans-Mongolian train—en route to Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia's capital, and Moscow—stopped to switch gauges.

According to the story, Erlian, a thriving oil town, was also a major human trafficking hub, the first stop before victims traveled farther inland, and the last stop for human trafficking victims, who, fearing discrimination at home, had no other place to go after being trapped in brothels abroad. The article told of streets in Erlian lined with brothels and of abused trafficked women who lived and worked in tiny, filthy apartments.

Tom and I searched the Internet for any similar articles written in the mainstream press. We found nothing. This was a great story, we thought, and we started plotting our strategy to report it. We drew up a list of potential contacts and threw out a few possible dates for a trip to Erlian, where we would, somehow, get into the brothels and find trafficking victims.

Tom and I contacted several NGOs to find out more. They confirmed the problem and filled in some of the blanks. Most of the victims were uneducated and desperate for a way out of poverty. Some were already prostitutes but had been misled about pay and conditions; others were enticed by advertisements in local newspapers promising overseas scholarships or vague offers of employment. Recruiters usually had contacts in destination countries—often women who had once been trafficked themselves.

As soon as the women reached their destination countries, NGO workers told us, they were routinely abused, physically and mentally. Many were beaten, forced to take drugs, raped, and repeatedly sold. Trafficked women often found themselves in a system of “trapped bondage,” in which employers demanded repayment for travel and other costs. The debts could be crippling. Some girls ran away, but most, lacking money, travel documents, and help of any kind, were forced to stay for several years.

Some women who found their way back to Mongolia continued to suffer. Many needed counseling for depression and treatment for sexually transmitted diseases. They were shunned by their families. With no work experience and few options, some returned to what they knew, becoming traffickers themselves or returning to prostitution in cities like Erlian.

Our plans continued to move forward. Tom contacted a friend of his named Esso, a former Mongolian journalist who lived in Beijing, where she was raising her two teenage sons. She would come along as our translator.

We got in touch with a photographer, Jim Wasserman. Jim was a forty-six-year-old from Philadelphia who had worked for news outlets around the world. He'd been freelancing in Beijing for three years. We decided to meet at a bar in the Holiday Inn in Lido, a place known as a hangout for Mongolian prostitutes. Over beers, we told Jim about our idea—travel to Erlian and later south to Macau to write a story we hoped to publish in a major American outlet. He was up for it.

In an attempt to get a head start on our reporting, we tried talking to some of the Mongolian girls who had gathered in the bar. They were happy to chat, but not about their stories.

“This could be tough,” Tom said.

In truth, I wondered if we would be able to get the story at all. We didn't know what we would discover in Erlian, and I was skeptical that we would even find trafficking victims, let alone get them to talk to us. But jobless and broke, I figured we had nothing to lose.

“Don't worry,” I lied, taking a sip of my pint. “We'll figure it out.”

T
he night bus from Beijing to Erlian smelled of feet and body odor and cigarette smoke. Passengers sprayed cans of air freshener to mask the cocktail of odors, but to no avail. It was after midnight and outside it was cold and black.

There were about fifty other passengers on board, most of whom were speaking Mongolian. They carried with them large red, white, and blue plastic sacks wrapped in masking tape and packed with cheap goods bought from Beijing markets to sell back home, across the border.

Everybody was crammed into rows of bunks. I couldn't sleep. Lying at awkward angles trying to squeeze my stretched frame into the tiny bed, I tried to read a book to the glow of a pocket flashlight held between my teeth.

We arrived in Erlian at 5 a.m. in the dark and cold, still in China but barely. A cabbie took us to a hotel. When the night attendant showed us a room, cockroaches scurried under the beds. I had stayed in hostels with cockroaches and worse in my travels, but after the long and sleepless bus ride, I needed something more comfortable. We all did. The second hotel the driver showed us was passable, with clean rooms and hot showers. Beside the beds in our rooms was a sex kit with condoms and various pleasure enhancing ointments—the first sign of Erlian's sex trade.

After a few hours of sleep, we set off for the city's market. Within minutes, we were approached by two gnarled old Inner Mongolian women with black teeth who asked if we were looking for girls. It was before noon. We told them no but asked where we would find them. On the north side of town, they told us, on Golden Bridge Street.

We continued walking through the city. In Erlian's center square was a statue of a naked woman with flowing hair holding a globe extended in a palm, the paint chipped and yellowing. It's the kind of kitsch you expect to find in China's forgotten cities, but this one stood apart from the statues of Mao and other heroes of Chinese history. We asked locals what it was supposed to symbolize. The beauty of Mongolian women, they told us.