Apologies to My Censor (23 page)

“With your eyes,” Eric translated. “Look blue with your eyes.”

The directions were specific: hold the ice cream like so; walk like this; keep your head down; don't use your hands or shake your head. We did four takes, and each time I thought I'd nailed it. The director thought otherwise. With each take, he looked increasingly worried until finally he glanced at his watch and said, “Good enough.”

I
was a star once. I was twelve years old, in seventh grade, and I had been cast as the lead of my elementary school's Christmas musical, called
Small One
. The play was based on a children's book about a young boy and his beloved donkey. I played the boy. I sang songs (
Small one, small one, small one for sale . . . one piece of silver, small one for sale . . .)
and acted my heart out. We did an afternoon and an evening performance, and both earned standing ovations as robust as strong coffee. I remember spotting my grandpa in the audience as he sprang up from his seat before anyone else, slapping his big hands together with a great force. It was the proudest moment of my young life.

The next year I was cast as Tiny Tim in our school's rendition of
A Christmas Carol
. But something had changed that year: the onset of puberty. As the boy in
Small One
, my voice was high and angelic. Not so as an adolescent. My voice cracked and couldn't decide between high and low. My performance was a disaster, and as I stood onstage struggling through my numbers, within me was growing a lifelong fear of performing.

A fear that would only be exacerbated by what was about to happen.

M
arry changed into a white wedding dress, and for the last of my scheduled scenes, the three of us were positioned atop a set of stairs in the middle of the mall. Eric explained that we were to simply walk behind her while she pretended to sing her song, which blasted from a pair of speakers. There was then a long conversation in Chinese between the director, his assistant, and Marry. I couldn't understand all of it, but I did catch one fateful phrase:

Tiaowu
. Dancing.

My ears perked up, and so did Eric's. He hurried over, cigarette in hand, and told the director, “No—Mitch can't dance.” The director spoke in Chinese, and Eric translated. “You don't have to dance, just walk to the music. Like this.” He made dancing movements.

“That's dancing!” I protested.

Eric laughed. “I know, I know. Just, you know, move to the music. Not dancing. Just moving.”

My heart was racing now and sweat circles were forming in my armpits. During the first take, which seemed to span the length of a Chinese dynasty but was probably no more than thirty seconds, I was back in my metal clothes. I moved like RoboCop.

When the director yelled cut, Eric said, “Mitch, you're very nervous. You're doing like this.” He imitated my RoboCop dance. “Try to act like you're flirting with her. Like you're having fun. More natural.”

“But I'm not having fun and it's not natural.”

The second take was as bad as the first. The assistant director pointed out the obvious—that I was awful. The director asked for one more take.

“Look,” I said, “it's not going to get any better than this. This is really awkward for me. I said I didn't want to dance; you want me to dance. That last take was as good as it's going to get.”

Marry told me that I needed to be “more manly—like cool man.” She grabbed my arms and said: “Do you like me?”

“Sure, why not,” I said.

“Well, then you have to act like you like me.”

“If you wanted an actor, you should have paid for an actor. I'm not an actor.”

She threw up her arms in exasperation. Viko begged for one more take. I looked over at Marry sitting on the pavement nearby in her white wedding dress, looking near tears. I was clearly ruining her big video. I just wanted to leave, to go home and wash off the humiliation. The jury was in with its verdict: I was the worst unpaid costar in the history of low-budget Chinese pop music videos.

Through clenched teeth, I agreed to one more take.

A
bout a month later I was riding my bike through the city when I received a text message from Viko. “Hi Mith!” he wrote, misspelling my name. “The video you did with Marry is finished! I will send it to your e-mail. You are very handsome ;)”

My heart skipped a beat. When I got home, I opened my laptop and followed the link Viko had sent. My roommates, Paul and Kit, gathered around to watch. As we waited for the video to download, I wondered if I should even watch it. I swallowed.

The video, called “Le Seine,” opens with bright, overexposed shots of Marry on the veranda followed by images of what I assume Viko and the others thought was Europe. (Curiously, the video's version of Europe is home to Yankee Stadium.) Then, there I am, doing an awkward little jig on the stairs beside Marry and Derek. My scenes are brief. The three of us appear running through the mall, and then I'm “looking happy” walking down the hall with ice cream in hand. If I do say so myself, the shot where I was to “look blue” is a real tour de force. My dancing part was almost entirely cut from the final edit, except for the odd glimpse of my arm or chin at the corner of the frame.

“This is amazing,” Paul said, looking over my shoulder.

“Fine work,” Kit chimed in.

I don't appear in the video's last three minutes. Total screen time was about thirty seconds, and I'm amazed they managed to salvage that much. In the credits I was listed as “MITH (CANADA).”

“I think we have a new nickname for you,” Kit said, struggling not to laugh.

“What's that?”

“The man . . . the Mith . . . the legend.”

18

Chollywood Dreaming

S
ome people toil for years to crack the movie business. In China, it took me five hours.

One wintry Sunday evening a few months later, in early 2011, I opened an online classifieds page looking for acting jobs and found a want ad for foreign extras needed to play journalists, police officers, FBI agents, and military personnel in a Chinese movie. I sent out an e-mail with a photo and bio at 7:30 p.m. I listed under experience acting in a Chinese music video and modeling for
Cosmo
.

At 12:30 a.m., sitting in the front seat of a taxi headed home with Paul and Kit, I received a phone call from a woman named Cathy who had an air of desperation in her voice. She said she was a casting agent and was urgently looking for foreigners for a shoot the next morning.

“Do you consider yourself fat?” she said, totally deadpan.

“Hmm. No.”

“So you're not very big?”

“No. I'm tall, athletic . . . I'm not small. But I'm not fat, either.”

“Okay.” She paused. “Do you think you could play a police officer?”

I thought about it for a second. “Sure.”

“Can you come at six a.m. tomorrow?”

“Wow. That's pretty early.”

“I know it's not much notice,” Cathy sighed, “but we have scientists. They're seventeen years old—”

“You have seventeen-year-olds playing scientists?”

“No—
seventy
! Not seventeen. And they get up very early. It's no problem.”

I paused
.
“Okay,” I said, “I'll do it.”

“Do you consider yourself a good actor?” Cathy asked through the phone. “Could you say some lines?”

“I don't know if I'm a good actor. We'll have to see.”

“Could you say some lines?”

“Sure.” I winked at my roommates, who were listening to the conversation and holding back laughter in the backseat of a taxi. “I could probably say some lines.”

And so began my brief career in Chinese cinema.

T
he music video had left me shell-shocked. In the weeks after filming, I periodically glanced at want ads online and found plenty of small-time acting and modeling gigs, but I was reluctant to seek them out. I would compose an e-mail and attach a few photos, but as I was about to hit send, I would picture myself standing beside Marry, atop the stairs at the outdoor mall and dancing like a moron as the director and crew looked on in horror. I would think to myself, You're a journalist, for chrissakes, and then I would delete the e-mail.

But I was on to something. It occurred to me in the months after the “Rent a White Guy” article that people in the West might want to see the lighter side of China. They wanted a break from news of growing economic might, postapocalyptic skies, excesses of the rich, and hardships of the poor. I figured that as a writer, by slipping into the character of Tall Rice and chasing the rabbit down the rabbit hole—seeking out the most offbeat, unusual, only-in-China adventures I could find—I could offer a glimpse into the
other
China, the surreal place where my friends and I lived. This, I decided, would be my new beat: Chinese Neverland.

I put concerns about my dignity aside and began looking for roles in Chinese movies.

T
he movie business was booming in China. Box office returns in 2010 topped $1.5 billion, a 64 percent increase from the year before, making China's movie market on target to be the world's second largest by 2015. The industry, sometimes dubbed “Chollywood,” pumped out 526 films in 2010 (compared to 754 in the United States), and the government announced plans to more than double the size of the entertainment industries, including movies and television, over the next five years.

Hollywood had taken notice. Chinese-U.S. coproductions were on the rise, and Christian Bale, Kevin Spacey, and Keanu Reeves were among the stars who had sought projects in China. So eager were American studios to crack the Chinese market that MGM edited out the Chinese villains from its
Red Dawn
remake, replacing them with North Koreans. Studios couldn't afford to offend the officials who decided which twenty-odd foreign films were allowed to play each year on Chinese screens, whose numbers were growing at a rate of four per day.

The nightmare of my first foray into the Chinese entertainment industry prevented me from sleeping that night. I tossed and turned until my alarm rang at 5:30 a.m. I showered, drank a cup of coffee, and took a cab to our allotted meeting place.

There were more than a dozen foreign extras waiting in the lobby of the Kunlun Hotel in downtown Beijing. Cathy, a short woman with a round face and a knit wool cap sitting crookedly atop her head, spotted me immediately as I entered through the lobby's revolving doors.

“Mi Gao!” she shouted, reaching out her hand. She spoke to me in English. “Nice to meet you. Oh, you're not very fat. You can't play the police officer. He'll play the police officer.” She pointed to a husky middle-aged man sleeping on a couch in the lobby. “You can play a military officer. But we'll have to cut your hair. . . . Not too short . . . just a little on the sides. . . . . One week, back to normal!”

I tried to protest, but she brushed me off and told me to go make friends with the other extras. I took a seat on the couch beside the dozing man, whom Cathy woke and instructed to see the casting director to see if he was fat enough to play the cop.

After a brief delay on account of a crew member's diarrhea, we piled into a minibus and drove to a studio on the outskirts of town. We were a grab bag of expat males: white-haired Americans with southern accents (the “scientists,” I was told); some well-groomed Italians; and a couple of burly Eastern Europeans. The soon-to-be police officer was Bulgarian. I sat beside Cathy with the hope of ingratiating myself to her and landing more movie gigs. I learned that her biggest achievement as a casting agent was finding the body double for Brendan Fraser in
The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor
, which had been filmed in Shanghai a few years earlier.

Cathy briefed me on the movie we were filming. Called
Qian Xue Sen
, the film was based on the true story of the Chinese rocket scientist of the same name, who, in the 1950s, after making significant contributions to the American missile and space programs, was accused of being a communist spy and forced to escape back to China, where he started up the country's own rocket program. On this day, we were filming scenes from Qian's time in the United States, which is why so many foreigners were needed. The movie was funded by the behemoth China Film Group, to the tune of $9.5 million—no small sum for a Chinese project. Several crew members and an actor were brought in from the States; they had apparently worked on the series
Lost
, a fact of which Cathy was quite proud.

Before arriving at the studio, we stopped at a decrepit hotel on the outskirts of the city, where the crew was staying. Cathy ushered us upstairs to a makeshift makeup room, where a group of foreigners were getting haircuts.

I watched the military cuts being bestowed on the heads of my fellow extras, and I suffered a mild panic attack. Haircuts in China are always a risky proposition, and I'd had a number of devastating experiences over the years. Once I walked out of the salon looking like a marine, although I repeatedly told the bored-looking stylist “not too short.” My hair became a running joke among my friends for the next two weeks.

I pleaded with Cathy to spare my hair, but she insisted it would just be a trim. It wasn't. The stylist removed his clippers and took the sides down to the width of a nickel, leaving the top intact. He doused my head with hair spray and pulled big wads of hair over to one side. (The next day a friend said of my hair: “It looks a little Hitler Youth.”)

Beside me, a young man who had arrived in the morning with a head of wild red hair was being sheared like a sheep.

“Did you know they were cutting your hair when you signed up for this?” I asked.

“Nope,” he said, looking terrified as his ginger locks tumbled to the floor.

A
fter some toast and instant coffee, Cathy corralled us back into the bus and we drove to the studio. I sat beside a blond Canadian from Winnipeg, named Daniel, who was the same age as me. He ran his own business in Beijing and did acting as a side gig. He had recently starred as the foreign villain in a Chinese movie and was negotiating for a recurring speaking role on a TV show.

“You don't need to be talented,” he told me as we drove. “You just need to be available when they call you. It's a very low bar.”

We pulled up to a large brick building. Inside, in the dressing room, a number of young aides started handing out outfits. They quickly ran out of military officers' uniforms, so my role was changed to FBI agent.

“It's a better role,” Cathy insisted. “Very cool.”

She flashed a thumbs-up and I changed into a baggy gray suit.

We were brought into a massive soundstage built into a former factory next door. The set was made to look like a 1950s-era FBI office, complete with old newspapers, ashtrays, and file folders marked
CONFIDENTIAL
. The studio was not insulated, and it was freezing; the crew wore bulky winter coats and warmed their hands with their breath. The director and art director scurried about, placing the small army of FBI agents and military officers behind desks, in semi-hidden offices, and around a big table, in the middle of the set, covered with stacks of documents.

Cathy, for some reason, was in a state of near panic, insisting that we all be quiet and still as the scene was set up. She seemed keen on making a good impression on the American crew members.

“Shut up!” she hissed, grabbing my arm as I chatted quietly with one of my costars. “They're from
Hollywood.
”

My role was simple: stand at a desk pretending to talk to a young French guy who totally did not look the part, and then I would be called to another desk where a thirty-something European military officer would instruct me to grab “that document.” I then walked over to the big table at the center of the set, where a group of older scientists were examining the papers looking for evidence of Qian's Communist sympathies. I had to bring the document back to the officer.

After a few takes the director told me to “say something” to the scientist when I picked up the folder. One precious, unscripted, mumbled line. He inserted a small mic in my shirt. It was official: I had a speaking role.

I just need to take this book for a minute.

T
he night before, my roommate Paul had offered some advice based on my last acting role: try to relax. I noticed how nervous the French guy was and thought to myself, Don't worry, kid, follow my lead. After all, I was practically already a music video star. And this time, I didn't have to dance.

I tried to get into character, repeating in my head:
I'm a thirty-year-old FBI agent. I'm on my way to the top. I just need to take this book for a minute.

We did the take about a dozen times and I varied my line with every take: “I need to borrow this book for a second . . .” “I need to take this off your hands for a minute . . .” “Just let me grab this folder for a few minutes.”

I nailed it.

A
fter the scene wrapped, we drank instant coffee in the parking lot outside the studio. I chatted with fellow extras about the usual expat male topic—women—and had a prison lunch of soggy eggplant, cabbage, chicken parts, some sort of rice gruel, and donkey meat flatbread.

“Acting is waiting,” one of the extras said at some point in the afternoon, stating the obvious.

Several hours had passed since my one glorious line. It was getting late in the afternoon, and I was starting to doubt I'd be called upon again. It was freezing outside, so I went to the wardrobe room, where several extras had already gathered, and had a nap.

I woke half an hour later. Everybody around me was still asleep. I leaned back in my chair and put my feet up on a radiator, looking out the window at the pale winter sky. What a day, I thought. This place could be incredible.

C
athy roused us at 5 p.m. and said it was time to go home. She tried to dodge paying me the money she'd promised, saying she would meet me at a café downtown in the next few days, but I refused to leave before she handed it over, which she eventually did.

My line didn't bump me up a pay grade. Cathy paid me the standard 500 yuan (seventy-seven dollars), and a few minutes later I crammed into the minibus heading back downtown, fantasies of Chollywood stardom floating in my head.

A
s with the “Rent a White Guy” story, I sat in Café Zarah one afternoon and wrote out the tale of my day as a film star. It was another unique take on the expat experience in China. Again, I pitched the article to the
Atlantic
, and the magazine took it.

These were the stories the world wanted to read. I'd found my niche. My career was going great.

Everything else, unfortunately, was turning to shit.