Apologies to My Censor (17 page)

There was a brief pause.

“Two hundred yuan!” someone yelled.

I couldn't make out who it was under the spotlights. Another pause.

“Three hundred!” another woman yelled.

I recognized that voice.

“Three hundred yuan? Come on, ladies, we can do better than that!” the host, Allison, said into the mic.

A long pause.

“Four hundred!”

A
looooong
pause.

“Five hundred!”

There was a bidding war between two women. Two women I knew. Two women who were at the auction entirely on my behalf.

The bidders were my two friends, who, it struck me all at once, were saving me from the humiliating fact that no one else was bidding. Thank you, Kathleen and Michelle.

Kathleen won out at seven hundred yuan. I hopped off the stage and hugged her.

“That was awful,” I said. “I need a drink.”

“You owe me,” she said.

It turned out I wasn't one of the hottest bachelors in China, after all.

13

The Beijinger

“H
ello. My name is John,” I said—slowly, painfully, enunciating every . . . single . . . syllable. “I like
tig-ers
.”

My voice-recording partner, Kristin, wasn't paying attention. I cleared my throat. She poked her head up and leaned toward the mic. “My name is Jane. I like pandas.”

“Question,” I said, reading from the text in front of me. “What animal does
John
like?”

By the spring of 2009, this is how I was making much of my money. I was writing the odd article, but without a consistent gig I needed extra income, and voice recording provided it. It was a common part-time job for native English speakers in Beijing, and it was remarkably easy. Tom recorded once in a while and had referred me to his boss, who went by either Mr. Wang or Wang Shushu (Uncle Wang), an affable fifty-something with a head of dyed-black hair.

It turned out I was quite good at voice recording—“You have strong voice,” Uncle Wang told me after my tryout shift. Basically, the job entailed sitting in a studio reading English texts that would be put on CDs and used in schools and universities throughout the country. Millions of Chinese were learning English, and voice recorders were in high demand. I recorded three or four times a week, four hours at a time, and was paid about fifty dollars an hour for my efforts.

Uncle Wang was a great boss. He used to be a medic in the army but now made his living working sometimes sixteen hours a day in the recording studio. He had a wife and son, but he told me he didn't like going home. “Come to work is very interesting,” he said, in broken English. “Money, money, money.”

The problem was, voice recording was boring to a degree I never imagined possible. The studio was a stuffy little room built into an apartment Uncle Wang rented. Occasionally, when my partner was reading a monologue, I could take a minute break and read a page of a book, but the rest of the time we recited mind-numbing dialogues and stared at a computer screen Uncle Wang had placed in front of us so we could check our voice levels and recording time. More than once, I suggested to Kristin that physicists should study the space-time continuum in that room: four hours felt like a geological epoch.

As dull as I found voice recording, it kept me in the lifestyle to which I had become accustomed. Mine was an easy life that included sleeping until I felt like getting up; long, slow days reading and writing in cafés; an hour here and there at the gym; Chinese lessons; evenings having dinner and drinks with friends or going for indulgent, two-hour, ten-dollar massages (no happy endings). Weekends were a boozy haze; Fridays and Saturdays, without question, were nights out, either at bars or clubs or house parties or all three. There were birthday parties and going-away parties and coming-back parties and (insert excuse for party here) parties. Once in a while, I would head down to Shanghai or Hong Kong for out-of-town parties. Sometimes it felt like life in China was one big party, and it was thanks to voice recording that I was able to keep it all going. Just barely.

Expat life was a never-ending adventure, and for the most part, I loved it. My circle of friends was growing. My freelance assignments, although not enough to pay the bills alone, kept me motivated, and my Chinese continued to improve. One day I remarked to Tom that I was the happiest I'd ever been in Beijing. China was addictive, and as I celebrated my twenty-ninth birthday that April, I wondered if I was too hooked now to break that attachment.

But in the midst of it all I would still get sharp pangs of reality. Once, around my birthday, I woke in the middle of the night in a state of panic and realized that I had only a year left in my twenties, that I was nowhere near where I wanted to be in my career—I had published only a handful of stories so far that year—and that I was still living a life with little responsibility, with no money, no job, no girlfriend, and no semblance of what I had once perceived as a normal life, before I got to China.

My heart was racing—it felt like there was a man inside my chest beating a bass drum. I thought: What am I doing here? Where is this all going? What
should
I be doing? I lay in bed in Comrade Wu's rental apartment, with mattress springs digging into my back, and stared at the ceiling for what felt like hours. There was no clear path ahead of me. I had one year to figure it all out, I told myself. The end of the party.

The idea of turning thirty tormented me. I still felt inadequate whenever I met another journalist who had achieved more than I had. And I felt ashamed when, before voice recording came along and gave me the finances I so desperately needed, I had to ask my parents, who always remained supportive, to bail me out again, the day I looked at my bank statement and realized I was $10,000 in debt and had four dollars in my checking account.

Beijing, meanwhile, had become so familiar that it startled me when—while walking around town, or sitting in a cab, or waking up in the morning—I would think, Holy shit, I'm in Beijing. I still live in
Beijing
. The Chinese capital was my home, but it also wasn't. Canada was my home, but it also wasn't. I wanted to be in two places at once, and I still didn't know how to make that happen.

I didn't have any answers, so I made the easy choice: I stayed. If I didn't make it as a journalist, I decided, my time in China would be for naught. I needed to work harder, pitch more, write more, focus on my goals, and be more responsible with money. I became dedicated to doing those things (except, if I'm honest, the last one).

I felt an immediate weight lifted off my shoulders. I became focused on building on what I had achieved so far. I paid $1,500, borrowed from the Bank of Mom and Dad, to have a professional-looking website designed, and I got slick business cards made at Kinko's, featuring my name in both English and Chinese. I set up an office in our spare room with a desk overlooking the
hutong
below. On the desk I placed a small potted tree and a ceramic frog used for tea ceremonies that is meant to bring good luck and money, which would be a very welcome development indeed.

A
nd then I started planning my next trip: Mongolia. Jim and I had been thinking about traveling to Mongolia since the previous fall, when we reported the human trafficking story. We wanted to look at the aftermath of trafficking and interview women who had returned home. We had a few other stories in mind, and a presidential election there was on the way, so we decided now was the time.

It was a risk. We didn't have any clients for the stories, and I would be paying for the trip on my credit card. I worried about a repeat of our previous trips: coming home with stories nobody wanted to buy.

I'd had some success as a freelance journalist in China, with stories in the
Guardian
,
Foreign Policy
,
CNN
, and half a dozen Canadian publications, but I was still waiting, and hoping, to further break into the American market, which I figured was key for me to move my career to the next level.

Mongolia, I hoped, would be the ticket. The country, bordering China to the north, was underreported and increasingly relevant, sitting on resource riches that the government seemed intent on squandering. Foreign countries were clamoring to start digging, and Mongolia, once home to the greatest conquerors the world had ever seen, was worried about twenty-first-century economic colonization, namely at the hands of the growing superpower to the south: China.

Our lineup of stories included the trafficking follow-up; a piece about the mining industry; coverage of the upcoming election; and, by far the most intriguing, a report about the emergence of a neo-Nazi movement in Mongolia. The latter story was directly linked to China, which had been conducting more and more business with Mongolia, much to the displeasure of many Mongolians, who, having suffered for decades under iron-fisted communist rule as a Soviet satellite state, feared Chinese encroachment in their country.

The neo-Nazi movement was at the fringe of a very real current of nationalism in Mongolia. The young men who made up this movement were full of venom, targeted at Chinese living and working in Ulaanbaatar, the capital. They were mostly hooligans, but the threat of violence seemed real. There had been reports of Chinese business owners being assaulted in Ulaanbaatar, and one prominent Mongolian neo-Nazi was in prison for killing his daughter's boyfriend, also a Mongolian, who had done nothing more than study in China.

W
e arrived in Ulaanbaatar late at night, after a fifteen-hour delay in Beijing on account of high winds. We took a cab directly to a bar with our host, an English photographer named Peter. Around 2 a.m., we headed back to Peter's apartment, where he almost got us beaten up after arguing with a taxi driver over the fare. There was some pushing and grabbing in Peter's dark stairwell, and the driver left to go get backup while we hurried into Peter's apartment and locked the door.

It was a fitting introduction to life in Mongolia, one of the toughest countries—with the toughest people—on earth.

It was May 2009, and Ulaanbaatar had four seasons each day. Morning was spring, the afternoon summer, evening fall, and night was winter—frigid, dark, and depressing. The city was dusty and run-down. It was home to just over a million people, with half the population living in outlying yurt slums, which had inadequate everything—plumbing, services, electricity. Beyond the capital was a sprawling country of grassland, desert, and forest, home to a largely nomadic population.

Jim and I woke early and walked from Peter's apartment to Peace Avenue, which cuts Ulaanbaatar in two, running the length of the city. We were an odd couple, Jim and I. He was eighteen years my senior, closer to my mother's age than mine. He was bald with a stocky build, and he wore a brown leather jacket over loose button-down shirts, with baggy Levi's and big black hiking boots. He had a calm demeanor that put people at ease, and he was one of the most genuinely kind people I'd ever met. When we worked together, I always wanted to get what we needed quickly and move on. Jim, on the other hand, was slow and methodical. He wanted to take a thousand pictures when all we needed was one. It drove me insane. But somehow we made it work, pushing each other until we got the stories done and having great adventures in the process. He became one of my closest friends in China.

In late morning we met our translator, Zaya, who had been referred to us by a Beijing photographer. We had e-mailed him before our arrival and arranged to meet in a café in central Ulaanbaatar. He wore a T-shirt and baggy jeans, and was his mid-twenties with a chubby, friendly-looking face. I asked him a few questions to gauge his English and wondered if it was good enough for the assignment, but we were anxious to get started and didn't want to waste time finding a new fixer. We told Zaya our story ideas and offered to pay him twenty-five dollars a day, plus more if he drove us around in his beat-up car. He didn't speak much during our meeting, and I was skeptical that he'd be able to get anything done at all. I mistook his easygoing demeanor for laziness.

Zaya, it turned out, would be crucial to everything we did in Ulaanbaatar. Within an hour, in fact, he had a meeting set up with the leader of Mongolia's neo-Nazis.

“How did you find him so quickly?” I asked as we drove down Peace Avenue toward the department store where we were scheduled to meet the neo-Nazi.

“Ulaanbaatar is small place.” He shrugged.

We met Zagas Erdenebileg, the fifty-year-old self-proclaimed leader of Dayar Mongol (All Mongolia), one of the country's most prominent neo-Nazi groups, in a back alley behind the State Department Store. The alley was empty and shaded by the department store's back wall. When we pulled in, he was already there, leaning against a car and looking at his mobile phone. Zagas was middle-aged, short, with an average build, black hair, and a pockmarked face.

Zaya introduced us from the driver's-side window and invited Zagas to take a seat in the passenger seat of the car. The neo-Nazi leader sat in the car and started talking, and he kept talking for the better part of an hour. He refused to answer any questions directly and instead went into a long and convoluted history of Mongolia and the Nazis.

He talked. Zaya translated. I scribbled in my notebook.

“If our blood mixes with foreigners', we'll be destroyed immediately,” said Zagas, who had run for parliament, unsuccessfully, four times. He loathed the Chinese, accusing them of involvement in prostitution and drug trafficking, and revered Chinggis Khaan (aka Genghis Khan), who he said influenced Adolf Hitler, another man he professed to admire. I asked him if he considered his adoption of the beliefs of a regime that singled out and executed people with “Mongol” features from among Soviet prisoners of war to be in any way ironic. “It doesn't matter.” He shrugged. “We share the same policies.”

His rant continued uninterrupted for forty-five minutes. I got bored and doodled in my notebook. When he was through, we exited the car to say goodbye. As Jim snapped a few shots, another car pulled up in the alley, driven by a young man with a shaved head, a swastika tattoo on his chest, and a bullet on a chain hanging from his neck. This was Shar Mungun-Erdene, the twenty-three-year-old leader of the two-hundred-member Mongolian National Union. Whereas Zagas came across as a bit of a buffoon, Shar was intimidating. Maybe it was his outfit, or his youth, but he struck me as someone who was no stranger to violence.

We asked him for an interview, and he agreed to meet us the next day.

He drove up to a fountain in a public square where we'd arranged to meet, and Jim, Zaya, and I crammed into his compact two-door. I was nervous as I got in his car. The square was empty, and it crossed my mind that Shar and his storm troopers might want to teach us a lesson about Mongolia's neo-Nazis.

I asked him about his group. The MNU, he told us, took vigilante action against lawbreaking foreigners, mainly Chinese. When I asked him what kind of action, he replied, “Whatever it takes so that they don't live here.” He was trying to convey a macho vibe, but soon enough he came across as an overzealous adolescent, and it didn't take long before any intimidation I had felt about him was gone. He was, I realized, a kid—a misguided kid. At one point he opened his laptop to show us pictures of himself and his neo-Nazi buddies. Beside folders titled “Guns” and “Skinheads” were others with names like “My Car” and “Mom in Japan.”