Apologies to My Censor (24 page)

19

“Burst into Bloom”

M
y meteoric rise to stardom fell somewhat short of meteoric.

Not long after the
Qian Xue Sen
movie gig, I received two calls for acting jobs—one from Cathy and another from an agent named Jackie, who had surreptitiously slipped me his business card on the bus home from the set. Cathy called about a movie, Jackie a TV show. Neither of them gave much in the way of notice—about twelve hours—and for both jobs I had previous commitments.

For several weeks afterward, I was traveling or otherwise occupied. As Daniel had warned me on the set of
Qian Xue Sen
, Chinese agents cared less about talent than about reliability. It's a one-strike-you're-out system, he told me, and I was out. My dreams of Chollywood stardom were flitting away.

But that summer, with plenty of time on my hands, I redoubled my efforts to get marginally famous, to become the poor man's Da Shan. I had a photographer friend of mine take head shots, called back the agents I knew, and started looking for more acting jobs on online classifieds.

My next potential gig came via Daniel. My phone buzzed one Wednesday night during a pub quiz. “A TV show really needs an actor for a few days starting tomorrow,” he wrote. “You available?”

I told him I was and waited for instructions. He said to call a woman named Sylvia first thing next morning, which I did, about half a dozen times. Her phone was off.

At 11 a.m., I was at the gym when my phone rang. It was Sylvia.

“I've been waiting so long for your call!” she yelled into the phone in English.

“I tried calling you like six times this morning,” I said.

“We need to meet you. Right now. Can you come now?”

“Right now? I'm at the gym now. I haven't even showered.”

“Please, hurry. Go shower now and we will be there with the van in twenty minutes!” she pleaded. “Please, it's an
urgency
!”

I rushed to the shower and hurried to the street out in front of my gym. There I waited for one hour and forty minutes before Sylvia pulled up in a van. She was accompanied by two other Chinese men—a driver and another agent—and two other foreigners: a middle-aged American named Kurt, who was from Hawaii and wore a Tommy Bahama shirt, and a Ukrainian male model. We picked up a third foreigner, a Syrian, and headed toward the outskirts of town.

“Where are we going?” I asked Sylvia.

“To the studio. It's about an hour out of town.”

“What is this show anyway?”

“A historical show. They need a foreigner to play a doctor.”

We continued driving while the four foreigners tried to figure out what we were auditioning for, piecing together potential scenarios based on the tidbits of information Sylvia had provided.

When we arrived, Sylvia escorted us into a hotel lobby near the studio, where we met a producer who offered us all cigarettes. I asked Sylvia one more time for information about the program.

“It's historical, about, I don't know how you say in English . . .
Gong Chan Dang
.”

I didn't know the word so I checked my phone dictionary.
Gong Chan Dang
= Communist Party of China. The foreign doctor, I guessed, was Norman Bethune, one of the best-known foreigners in Chinese history, a Canadian who helped Mao's Communists until his death of blood poisoning in 1939. In China, Bethune is considered a martyr, and I wondered if my citizenship would give me a leg up on the role.

Sylvia led us upstairs to meet the producer. On the way, she told us, “Don't say you don't have much experience. Say you've done movies, TV shows, commercials, okay? That will be better.”

A young producer waited for us in the hotel room. He was working on his laptop as we walked through the door; a cigarette was dangling from his lips. Beside him was an ashtray with a couple of dozen butts. Smoke filled the room. As we walked in, he looked at the Ukrainian and Kurt, the Hawaiian.

“Oh,
tai gao le
!” the producer said. Too tall.

My heart sank. Kurt and I were the exact same height, and the Ukrainian was a couple of inches shorter.

Next the producer looked at the Syrian, who was tanned, with dark stubble on his face.

“Oh,
tai hei le
!” he said. Too dark.

I sat down before he noticed my height. The producer stopped on me for a moment and turned to the agent.

“He's the best. Take him to the other room.”

Sylvia walked me to a nearby room. She was thrilled. “This is great. He likes you. Make sure to tell him you've acted.”

“Actually, I was in a movie. And a music video.”

“Great! We'll put that on your résumé.”

“My résumé?”

In the hotel room Sylvia asked me to upload my head shots onto a memory stick while she crafted a fake résumé for me in Chinese. A few minutes later, the producer entered and asked me to stand.

“How tall are you?”

“I'm 190 centimeters”—six foot three.

“Hmm. That's okay, we'll tell the director you're 180.”

“But won't he notice—”

The producer darted out of the room, a cloud of cigarette smoke trailing behind him. Sylvia grabbed my shoulders and pulled my face close like she was going to kiss me. “It's looking good,” she said. “
Really
good.”

Sylvia treated us to lunch as we waited for the director's word. I was feeling optimistic. “This could be good for you,” Kurt said, slightly forlorn, as we ate at a Korean restaurant next to the hotel. “Apparently, it's a recurring role.”

Half an hour later, back in the hotel lobby, the first producer came down to deliver the news.

He spoke in Chinese. “Did you eat enough? Good. So here's the thing. You guys didn't fit.” He looked at me. “The director said you're not quite right. You're too tall. Sorry, really sorry.”

We were all slightly annoyed with Sylvia on the ride home. A simple question—how tall are you?—could have saved us all four hours of our time. I asked Sylvia once more what, exactly, the producers were looking for in the role of doctor, other than someone shorter than me.

“They want a forty-five-year-old man,” she replied.

I had just turned thirty-one.

A
n agent called me one Saturday night as I sipped champagne at a friend's wedding. A movie was being shot, he said, and the producers wanted to meet me the next afternoon. I asked if I needed to wear anything special or if I would be auditioning.

“No, nothing special,” the agent said. “They just want to meet you.”

The next afternoon, hungover from a long night of drinking champagne, I showed up at a studio near Beijing's Central Business District to find that it was, in fact, an audition, but not for a movie. The job was for a promotional advertisement for a Chinese television company called Blue Ocean Network. BON broadcasted English-language programing to the United States. My old roommate Tom had worked at BON before moving back to the United Kingdom the previous year, and I still had several friends at the station. I really didn't want any of them to see whatever end result would come of this, and I considered backing out and going home to nurse my hangover.

I told one of the Chinese producers that I had expected to be meeting about a movie and he waved his hand. “No, no movie. No movie.” The director asked me to stand in front of a green screen and walk from left to right, front to back, pretending to look at things off in the distance. Then he asked me to walk in place, facing the camera, and act as if I was looking at the Forbidden City just beyond. There was some grumbling about the fact that I'd worn shorts and a T-shirt, and about my beard, and after a couple of minutes of walking in place, the director thanked me and said he would get in touch.

I got the part on the condition that I shave my beard. After much complaining, I relented. The shoot took up a Sunday, and I was paid $200 for my troubles. All I had to do was walk around in front of a green screen pretending to look at things that weren't really there.

It was my first and only starring role.

M
y friend David Fu, a Chinese-American who worked in the film industry, hooked me up with a spot on Beijing Television. They wanted a foreigner to more or less humiliate himself by performing Chinese opera in front of a television audience of millions.

I was instructed to meet at 4:30 p.m. at the Beijing TV studios downtown. Paul, Kit, and Annie came along with me, interested as they were in watching me embarrass myself. We met Ms. Li, a producer on the special National Day holiday show on which I was to appear. She escorted us into the building and brought us onto the set. The show was called
Guang Rong Zhang Pang
, which translated roughly into “Glorious Burst into Bloom.” The studio was dark, with a black and purple backdrop, and purple, pink, and white star-shaped strobe lights illuminated the stage.

A few dozen people had gathered in the audience, but more than half the seats were left empty. They were old ladies mostly, and several of them were growing impatient. “When does filming start?” one belted out. “It's almost rush hour!”

We sat. We waited. My palms were sweaty. Ms. Li told me I would be called onstage and instructed to do various poses and movements common in Peking Opera.

“Will I have to sing?” I asked.

“Maybe. Maybe not. I'm not too sure.”

“You don't know?”

“No. It's up to the host.” She scurried off.

Eventually the host arrived. And then the three guests: female Peking opera performers. As filming began and they started the interview, I still didn't know what I would be encountering upon being called onstage. After twenty minutes, the host asked the audience if anybody wanted to come up and learn some Peking opera. This was my cue. Ms. Li nodded and I stood to go onstage.

There I introduced myself to the audience, and one of the performers handed me a baton and tried to teach me how to twirl it. Easy enough. A few minutes later I went back onstage and learned a little dance, which went considerably better than my music video routine. In the end, I was not required to sing.

I sat down, satisfied with my performance. An old lady tapped me on the shoulder and whispered in my ear.

“Hen lihai!” she said. Very formidable.

She presented me with a little notebook and asked for my autograph. I signed it, in Chinese characters: Mi Gao.

D
uring the National Day holiday week, in October 2011, I gave a speech at my former assistant's wedding. Her name was Wei Xiao Ming, and she and her new husband, who went by the Anglicized name Mex, were married in a village of two hundred families not far from the North Korean border. (“Most of the villagers have never seen a foreigner before,” the groom told me when I arrived.)

I read the speech, in Chinese, in front of a curious audience of locals in Mex's family's backyard as sappy music played in the background. Despite my growing show business CV, I was so nervous my hands were shaking and I lost my place a few times. The host, a man in his thirties wearing a sparkling jacket that looked like fish scales, helped me find my spot each time.

“Wei Xiao Ming and I started as colleagues,” I said, “but now we've become very good friends. I'm happy she's found such an amazing husband. He's very handsome, isn't he?” The crowd cheered. “The bride's very beautiful, isn't she?” They cried even louder. “I wish them one hundred years of good luck and a long life together. Thank you.”

When the speech was over, I looked at Xiao Ming in her white wedding dress, standing on a stage in a tiny corner of northeast China, and she was crying. It was by far the most satisfying moment I would have in front of an audience in China.

T
hroughout those months I felt like I was living two separate lives. One was my Facebook life; the other my real life. Facebook life consisted of all the random adventures I was having in the name of writing—chasing acting gigs, starring in music videos, mumbling a line in a Chinese movie. People left comments congratulating me on living such an interesting life and wishing me luck in my next pursuit. But Facebook life wasn't really
my
life. It was Tall Rice's.

Real life was something different. During the summer and fall of 2011, I was growing increasingly anxious about my future, about when and how I would leave China, and what I would do once I was gone. As Tall Rice, I was experiencing more adventures than I had ever thought possible. But in my real life, I kept asking myself, was I still happy in China? I struggled to find an answer.

Things were changing in Beijing. I had been in the city for four and a half years, and many of the core friends I'd made over the previous few years had left or were thinking about leaving. We had lived a life of prolonged adolescence, and now people were growing up. Social engagements were growing fewer and farther between, and people were pairing up and settling down. Some of my best friends were seeking jobs back home or applying for graduate school. On bad days it seemed like my Beijing life, which I had loved so much, which had given me an identity, was crumbling before my eyes.

My dating life was practically nonexistent except for the odd drunken one-night stand, sometimes spaced months apart. Why date when you know that someday you won't be here anymore? Partying, so key to life in China, was losing its shine. The wasted journalist abroad was getting boring and cliché.

When I first arrived in Beijing, I would walk into a bar and not know a soul. It was exhilarating.
Who are these people
, I wanted to know,
and why are they here?
A few years later, I did know. I'd walk into a bar and recognize dozens of people. Now that was starting to change. The wave of foreigners who had come to witness the buildup and aftermath of the Olympics—my wave—was being replaced by a new one of people coming from all over the world for the opportunities China afforded. They were excited to be here and they were young. Sometimes in bars and nightclubs I was starting to feel like Matthew McConaughey in
Dazed and Confused
—“I get older, they stay the same age.” I would look around and notice that I was the oldest person in my group—by about five years. And I wasn't even that old.