Apologies to My Censor (25 page)

I had lived in Beijing longer than in any other city since high school, and the fast-approaching five-year milestone weighed heavily on me. I felt increasingly guilty about living abroad, about being so far from my family, about avoiding responsibility. I was jealous of friends who were leaving and of those who had a plan for the future. But it's hard to leave the city that's the closest thing you have to a home, even if you'll never really belong there.

My head was a clouded mess. Days were spent killing time, filling it up in chunks—reading a magazine, cycling to the gym, Chinese class, followed by sitting in Café Zarah surfing the Internet and looking for things to tweet, and then getting a tiny burst of energy to write. At night: dinner, basketball, drinks, a movie.

It was all a blur. I wasn't really there. Not totally. In a lot of ways, I was starting to feel like I had when I left Toronto.

I
t was time to enlist my therapist: Guo Li.

Guo Li and I had been having classes together for more than three years. I use the word
classes
loosely. Mostly, I would pay her fifty yuan an hour just to sit and talk. She knew everything about me—more, in fact, than most of my Western friends in Beijing—and I knew everything about her. She was more than just my best Chinese friend; she was one of my best friends, period.

One afternoon in the fall of 2011, at a coffee shop in a mall near Dongzhimen subway station, Guo Li noticed that I wasn't my usual self.

“Mi Gao,” she said, “what's wrong? You're not normal today.”

I sighed and explained that I was feeling nervous about the future. I told her that many of my friends were leaving and that, although I still loved Beijing, I also felt stuck. I didn't know if I wanted to stay or go.

She nodded. “That's because you're
bei piao
.”

Bei piao
. I was one of Beijing's floating generation.

“I'm
bei piao
, too,” she said.

We sat in silence for a few moments, both of us lost and confused in the booming capital of China.

Guo Li tried to put me at ease. “You live a good life here, Mi Gao. You travel all the time, you have so many friends, and you're not poor. You should enjoy it. You can go back to Canada whenever you want.”

She was right, of course, but still I fretted. I saw two possible futures for myself. Scenario A: I stay in China, nine more years pass, and the clock strikes forty. Broke and alone, I reapply for a job copyediting at
China Daily
, spending my days trying to block out the hum of my ancient computer and the blinding fluorescent lights above my head, and my evenings in the Den, wallowing in middle-aged sorrow, following in the footsteps of Potter and his friends, drinking flat Carlsberg and smoking cigarettes bummed off young female interns I'm trying to sleep with. Scenario B: I return to North America, accept a job at a newspaper, and bore people to death with endless tales about the good life I used to live over in China.

Neither option appealed.

Not a day went by that I didn't weigh leaving, weigh the choice between two vastly different worlds, between two vastly different lives. I worried that if I stayed, I'd miss out on having a family and building a life for myself in a place I could call home. I worried that I'd miss out on spending time with my parents as they grew older, and with my friends as they settled into families.

On the other hand, I worried that if I left, I would never really find my way back in North America, that I would miss China so much it would consume me.

But I began wanting a more normal life—I wanted a stable job, enough money to be comfortable, a nice apartment, old friends, and a neighborhood pub. A weekly softball game with colleagues. Maybe a wife and a daughter. All those things that once terrified me and prompted me to run—the things that, when you boiled it right down, had driven me to China—all seemed strangely appealing.

What was happening to me? I wondered. Could it be that I was, finally, growing up?

D
espite all the friends I had made over the years, and all the time I had spent in the city, the expat life in Beijing could still be a lonely one. And it became clear how much it was affecting me after I met my Future Wife.

One summer night a few months earlier, at a
hutong
restaurant not far from my apartment, I spotted a girl who was, in my mind, perfect. She was uniquely gorgeous with a cool style, somehow both sexy and modest. But it wasn't just the way she looked. I felt immediately as if I already knew her, as if I'd
always
known her, even though I'd never seen her before in my life.

I was infatuated. Nothing like this had ever happened to me before. She was sitting at another table across the restaurant, with some people I knew, and I stared at her the entire night. At one point I approached her table with the sole purpose of getting an introduction. I didn't, but I did overhear her name—Maria.

The next day I flew to Canada for a few weeks, and when I arrived, I did some Facebook stalking to see if I could find her, but to no avail. Who was this girl? What was she doing in Beijing? Was she single?

Although I had no answers to these questions, I told my mom I'd found my “future wife”—I actually used those words.

“Mom, I met my future wife the other day.”

“Oh really? Tell me about her,” my mom said.

“She's only the most beautiful woman I've ever seen.”

“What's her name?”

“Maria.”

“What does she do?”

“Well, I haven't actually met her per se.”

A few weeks later, I was back in Beijing, and after a month of wandering the city with my eyes open, thinking of the lines I would use on her if I ever found her, I gave up hope of finding my Future Wife again.

Then one night I saw her in a bar. As soon as I noticed her from the door, my heart started pounding. My mouth was dry. I explained to my friend Gil, who just happened to be the world's best wingman, that I absolutely
must
talk to this girl. Gil agreed to approach her table with a concocted story about how we had all met on some previous occasion. After an awkward few minutes of listening to Gil's fabricated story, she snuck outside, and I followed. I introduced myself and we chatted for a few minutes. She was British and worked at an NGO in Beijing. She was about to go home for the night, and I blurted out something about getting a drink sometime. She said sure. I was euphoric.

We arranged a time. She canceled. We arranged another time. She canceled again. We ended up having lunch, and during the lunch she casually mentioned that she had a boyfriend. I was, even though I'd known this girl for all of twenty minutes, devastated.

A few months later, we would end up dating, Maria and I, and I was crazy about her. It didn't last long, though. Apparently I had seen too many romantic comedies on airplanes because I got very far ahead of myself. I was convinced she was going to be my ticket out of China. We rushed into things after she broke up with her boyfriend, and then she pulled away, drew in again, and a few months later, pulled away for the last time. I ignored all kinds of warning signs—she's too young, just twenty-four years old, too soon out of a relationship—and I paid for it in the end. She hadn't really been single since she was fifteen years old, she told me. Her last few relationships had been “really intense.” She needed to do “the whole single-Beijing thing.”

I was as heartbroken as I'd ever been in my life. As always, China had found a way to derail best-laid plans.

“D
o you want to be on a dating show?”

It was David Fu again, calling me one afternoon that fall. He had an uncle who worked as a producer, and he needed a foreigner to appear on his Shanghai-based program, called “One Out of 100.”

I might have been Bursting into Bloom as a Chinese stage presence, but in the mood I was in I most certainty did not want to be on a dating show.

David was persuasive. “They'll fly you down to Shanghai, all expenses paid,” he said. “Maybe you'll meet your future wife.”

20

Singing Elvis for the People

I
took a deep breath. And another.

Don't fight this, I thought. Embrace it
.

I was backstage waiting at the bottom of a set of stairs that led to the set of a famous Chinese dating show, called
Bai Li Tiao Yi
—“One Out of 100.” My armpits were soaked. My bladder was ready to explode.

Deep breath.

Thirteen young women waited for me onstage. Beyond them was a live studio audience, as well as a hundred-odd viewers being broadcast via webcam on a huge screen at the front of the stage, collectively producing live rankings of the male contestants from their home computers.

Beyond that, an audience of millions.

Deep breath.
Don't fight it.

I had guzzled about eight bottles of water but still felt cotton-mouthed. I desperately had to pee. Too late. I rehearsed my introduction in my head and mouthed the words to the song I had chosen to sing: Elvis's “Can't Help Falling in Love”—a song I figured appropriately cheesy for a dating show; one I could easily ham up.

Kevin, the director, a thirty-something Shanghainese hipster in yellow jeans and a purple hoodie—some kind of urban Joker outfit—joined me on the stairs.

“Mi Gao,” he said, patting me on the back, “when they call your name, walk up the stairs and onto the stage. Remember to pause under the arch and do a pose, like this . . . ” He danced a little jig. “Mi Gao,
jia you
.”

Kevin gave me a thumbs-up and walked away. I was alone.

Jia you
. Add oil.

I heard the female host speaking into the microphone from the stage.

“Let's welcome our esteemed guest from Canada, Mi Gao!”

The audience applauded. I took one last deep breath and slowly climbed the stairs to my fate.

Don't fight it.

The lights were blinding. Deep breath.

Jia you.

M
y heart wasn't into the dating show in the weeks leading up to it, but I was committed. I had almost no clue what to expect. In the days before the show, I enlisted Guo Li to watch a few episodes and brief me. I was too terrified to watch myself.

We met in a coffee shop a few days before filming. As she sat down, she reached into her purse and slipped a notebook on the table. She had come prepared.

“Mi Gao, you know that the show is very embarrassing for the men,” she told me with raised eyebrows. “You have to perform a talent—sing or dance, mostly. Then the girls say what they think of you. Most of the men get rejected. It's very humiliating.”

“Fuck. Me.”

Guo Li laughed. She gave me a rundown of the show. After I introduced myself, declared my “love manifesto,” which each male guest was required to prepare, and performed my talent, each of the women would, one by one, tell me their first impressions. I would have to list my requirements for a girlfriend, which Guo Li helped me prepare: must be independent and confident; mustn't care too much about money; must have gone to college and have a job.

I would then choose which woman I liked most, and each of them would reveal to the audience if she was interested or not. Interested parties would give their pitch about why we should be together, and I could do the same with whomever I picked. If we were both in agreement, we could “validate” our love by walking offstage hand in hand. If we weren't feeling it, our love would remain “invalidated,” and we would shake hands as friends.

“Remember,” Guo Li said, “if you don't like them, say, ‘Let's just be friends.' ”

D
ating shows were all the rage in China. The most popular, called “If You Are the One,” had broken ratings records the previous year. Chinese TV was increasingly provocative, and nowhere was that more evident than in the booming dating show category. Satellite outlets, in particular, were free of the constraints placed on China Central Television, and it showed in the product. Dating shows had developed a reputation for rampant materialism and intentional humiliation, particularly of male participants, who were forced to run a gauntlet of ego destruction in the hope of finding true love, with bank statements often presented on air. In one notorious incident during an April 2010 episode of “If You Are the One,” a male contestant asked a young woman if she would be willing to ride on the back of his bicycle. Her reply: “I would rather cry in back of a BMW.”

I flew to Shanghai, jittery with anxiety. I had been told we were filming the next day, which I hoped would give me enough time to calm my nerves. Two of the show's employees greeted me at the airport and drove me to the studio, where I was taken into a private room for a briefing with two producers.

One was a short, chain-smoking man with brown teeth, the other a pretty woman of about forty. They explained the show in rapid-fire Chinese, and I caught about half of what they told me. They said they had already prepared a guitar for me. (During my initial interview with the episode's director I had made the mistake of saying I could play guitar.) They asked me if I had prepared a song, and I told them I hadn't.

“You can practice one,” the woman said. “We don't shoot for two hours.”

Two hours!?
I'd been told they were filming the following day. I started to panic.

“I don't feel comfortable playing guitar, or singing, or dancing in front of an audience. I'm not prepared.”

“Well, what's your talent then?” the man said, puffing his third cigarette.

“I don't have any special talents.”

He was getting annoyed. “Well, you have to do something, Tell a joke, read a poem, do push-ups. Something!”

I sighed. “Okay, I'll think of something. I'll try guitar. I'm just nervous.”

“Ah! Don't be nervous! It's for fun. It's to show your personality!” the woman said.

“It's a party!” the smoking man chimed in.

“If it's a party, let's get drunk,” I said, only half joking.

Down in the makeup room, I pulled out the guitar. It was cheap and out of tune, and had no outlet. One of the stagehands tried to tune it. “Good enough,” he said, handing it back to me. He'd made it worse. I rested the guitar against a wall and told him I'd think of something else.

Plan B was to indulge a lifelong appreciation for
Top Gun
and belt out the Righteous Brothers' “You've Lost That Loving Feeling,” but I figured that since I was ostensibly trying to
win
hearts, that probably wouldn't work. So I settled on “Can't Help Falling in Love” and looked up the lyrics on my phone.

After an hour of fretting, I was ushered onstage with the other male contestants—all of whom were Chinese—for the rehearsal. We were instructed to wait behind the stage at the bottom of the set of stairs. A producer told us to stop under an arch covered with flowers and do a pose, and then slowly walk down onto the stage, where a microphone waited. There we were to say our names, ages, jobs, and where we were from. We then would declare our “love manifesto”; an assistant had written mine on the back of a placard I carried with me.

When my turn came, I walked up the stairs, paused under the arch for a bow, and descended onstage to say my lines into my mic. I stumbled over my love manifesto several times. Then I took the mic and belted out a tenor version of “Can't Help Falling in Love.”

“Mi Gao, sing to the girls!” a producer interrupted.

“But there are no girls.”

“Pretend!”

I turned around and sang to a row of empty seats.

Wise men say, only fools rush in. . .

I could hear a few chuckles backstage. My voice was cracking.

. . .
But I can't help (crack) falling in love with you.

“Mi Gao, Mi Gao,” the producer said after I finished. “Do you have a shorter song? Something with more energy?”

“No, this is the only song I have.”

“Can you sing it faster?”

“It's not really a fast song.”

“Okay, okay.” He mumbled something in Chinese to another producer.

I went backstage and waited nervously. Kit texted me to see how things were proceeding. I texted back: “It's just as horrible as I imagined. Did the rehearsal. About to go on. Singing Can't Help Falling in Love. Feel like vomiting.”

The director, Kevin, arrived and asked me how I was doing. I told him I was nervous about the song.

“Don't worry, Mi Gao,
jia you.
”

Add oil, indeed.

I chatted with the other contestants as I waited. They were all in their twenties and had come to Shanghai from across China for the show. Several stood out as being confident and good-looking. Others were so awkward and shy that I was sure they were picked simply to be humiliated. (I wondered where I fell in that spectrum.) All of the contestants were single, and they were dead serious about landing a woman.

One of the men, named Guo, a handsome twenty-eight-year-old from Shanghai dressed in a sharp suit, and whom one of the producers had nicknamed “the boss,” asked me if I was looking for a girlfriend, too.

“Not really,” I said. “I just thought this would be a good story to tell my friends back home.”

He nodded.

“What about you? Are you looking for a girlfriend?” I asked.

He looked at me like I was an idiot. “We're looking for
wives
.”

T
he filming began. I was scheduled to appear second to last, but I was too nervous to watch the early contestants. From the dressing room I could hear applause and laughter onstage. A young man singing. Girls giggling.

I chain-smoked an assistant's cigarettes and, after an hour of waiting, gathered up the courage to watch some of the proceedings from the side of the stage. I consumed many bottles of water. I smoked more cigarettes.

“Mi Gao,” Kevin said after another half hour. “You're on.”

M
usic blared. I squinted under the lights. Walking up and then down the stairs, I stopped under the arch, paused, and bowed toward the audience.

I walked down the stairs and through the line of single women toward center stage. I smiled at the girls as I walked past, winking at the prettiest—she was in the middle of the row, with a tiny white dress and flowing black ponytail.

I approached the mic and introduced myself to the audience.

I'm Mi Gao.

I'm from Canada.

I live in Beijing.

I'm a travel writer.

I'm thirty-one.

I believe that. . .

I read the back of my card, where a producer had scribbled my “love manifesto.”

I believe that on the road of li—

I stumbled over the words and started again.

I believe that on the road of life, fate brings people together.

The hosts chuckled.

“Mi Gao, did you write that yourself?” the female host asked, smiling knowingly.

“Ha. No, they wrote it for me.” I pointed over my shoulder toward backstage. The audience laughed. The girls laughed. I shrugged my shoulders.

So far, so good.

The host asked me a few questions. I answered as best I could.

“What's your talent, Mi Gao?” the woman said.

“Well, I'm going to sing a song. But I didn't prepare, and I'm
very
nervous.” I tapped my chest in front of the mic for a mock heartbeat. “So before I sing, I'm going to do some exercises. Okay?”

“Of course,” she said.

I stepped away from the mic and took a deep breath. Something was happening. Something strange. I noticed, for the first time, that I wasn't nervous at all. I was totally calm. I was almost—
almost
—having fun.

I looked back to the girls and said, “Just a second.”

Then I dropped to the floor, in front of the contestants, the hosts, the audience, and millions of TV viewers, and did push-ups. Ten of them.

The audience howled. They were mine.

“Jia you!” I said, taking the mic from the stand.

I burst into song.

Wise men saaaaay. . .

I walked down the line of girls, making eye contact with each of them until I got to the last line of the first verse.

. . .
falling in looooove wiiiith—

I stopped and paused. I looked up and down the row, and then back to the audience.

“I can't decide. They're all so beautiful!”

The audience roared.

I broke into the second verse, the last I'd bothered to memorize, finished it with a flourish, and joined the hosts at the front of the stage, satisfied that, at the very least, I hadn't totally bombed.

The female contestants went down the line and told me their first impressions. A lot of it I didn't understand. One asked if I would teach her English, another if I could show her around Canada. One liked my beard.

When all of them were done, the female host asked me to pick which one I liked. I wasn't to say it aloud, only to press a digit on a mobile phone she held in her hand. I looked up and down the line of thirteen contestants. Since I knew nothing about these women, not even their names, I picked the best-looking. She was tall with a wide smile and big eyes, wearing a dress so small it could have been a nightie.

The prettiest it was. Number seven. My hand was shaking as I touched the screen.

M
uch of the next half hour was a blur. There was a question-and-answer portion. I listed off my requirements, and, I would learn later, when the episode aired on November 11, 2011—11/11/11, which happened to be Chinese Singles Day—all but one of the contestants revealed to the audience they were no longer interested in me after I said I didn't want a girl who liked money.

It all felt so surreal and I smiled to myself at the story I would later tell friends. I was proud of myself for pulling it off and thrilled that my Chinese was good enough to do it. Five years of lessons had paid off.