Apologies to My Censor (8 page)

“She's Korean but from Russia.”

“Hmm,” he said. “Krussian.”

I
went out for dinner with Julia, who would forever be known among my friends at
China Daily
as the Krussian, the following week at an Indian restaurant near her apartment in Wudaokou, a university neighborhood in northwest Beijing. It was awkward at first; she looked lovely, and I was nervous. At first we had little to talk about and I thought she wasn't interested in me. She ordered Sprite—a bad sign. Good first dates should always include alcohol, I reasoned. The dinner was slow, and as I paid for the bill, I thought that perhaps this was a dead end.

On the walk home, I asked her what she usually did on weekends.

“Go dancing,” she said.

“You like dancing?”

“I love dancing.”

“That's too bad. I hate dancing.”

“Why?”

“Because I'm usually the tallest guy in the bar. When I dance, I feel like everybody's staring at me. Plus, I'm a terrible dancer. I move like this.”

I started doing an awkward robotic dance, pumping my fists up and down. She laughed.

“You are a bad dancer,” she said. Her cheeks were dimpled and rosy when she laughed, and I thought she was adorable.

We had dinner the next week, and the following Friday I went out with her and her friends. She wore a slim black and white dress, and I barely let her out of my sight. We went to a Latin club, and she even got me dancing a little. Before long, we were kissing in the corner of the club.

She came to my house that night, and my winter doldrums began to lift.

A
ll of a sudden life at
China Daily
didn't seem so bad. I tackled new feature assignments, pitched a few more freelance stories, and began to focus as best I could on learning Chinese. I met Ms. Song twice a week at my apartment and attended the two free classes she taught at
China Daily
. I even started learning Chinese characters. It was slow and painful, but at least I was making an effort.

But for every China high, there's a China low. After a few weeks, I was back to the Bad China Days. Beijing was cold in late December, and after seeing each other at least once a week for close to two months, Julia went away for vacation. I would have to work throughout the holidays.

On Christmas morning I sat at my desk, staring blankly at my computer screen and thinking about all the things I was missing in Canada. It was the first time in my twenty-seven years I hadn't been with my family on Christmas.

It was a white Christmas in Beijing, but not in the Bing Crosby sense. Outside the office windows, the sky was a toxic white haze of suffocating pollution. The hours passed by glacially. My colleagues and I took a long lunch and exchanged gifts. We tried to put on happy faces, but it didn't work.

For the first time, I was truly homesick.

E
very year during the Chinese Lunar New Year, otherwise known as Spring Festival, occurs the largest human migration on earth. In the span of forty days, almost three billion passenger trips are made around the country. Train stations become desperate seas of humanity, where anxious travelers camp for days and weeks to purchase tickets that sell out in minutes. For many of China's 200 million–plus migrant workers, the Lunar New Year is the one chance they have each year to return home, the one chance to see family and friends.

For me, escape from Beijing was imperative as well. During Spring Festival, the entire city goes on a massive fireworks binge at all hours of the day and night. For three consecutive days that February, I had been going about my routine amid constant explosions, waking up at dawn to deafening
pop-pop-pop
s, car alarms, and children squealing. For a day, the fireworks are pretty cool, an entire city of eighteen million alight with dangerous explosives that can be purchased on any street corner. After two days, it's annoying. By day three or four, thoughts creep to murder.

I was anxious to begin exploring the country again. My life felt lazy and routine: work, DVDs, dinner/drinks, rinse, repeat. I wanted some excitement, and Harbin, a city in northeast China, seemed to offer it. A colleague had visited Harbin a few weeks earlier and stumbled upon a rare attraction: bears wrestling while wearing capes. The strange event occurred at the site of Harbin's annual ice festival, which featured ice replicas of the Acropolis, the Egyptian pyramids, the Eiffel Tower, and other famous landmarks. My colleague spoke highly of the city's vodka-fueled nightlife, and taken together it seemed crazy enough to warrant a look.

I had a few days off and many of my friends, including Julia, were out of town. Through
China Daily
's travel agency, Jeremy, Ben, and I managed to buy tickets to Harbin, capital of Heilongjiang province, nine hours to the north, near Siberia.

We took a morning train and arrived in late afternoon. The temperature was minus twenty degrees Celsius. We promptly took a taxi to an ice bar on the main street and downed shots of vodka under a pair of reindeer horns harnessed to the ice wall.

Fortified for the cold, we walked toward the yellowish glow of Harbin's ice city, not far from downtown. Hundreds of families, bundled up in layers of winter clothing, snapped photos in front of ice sculptures and buildings lit up in red, yellow, green, and blue. I followed my colleague's instructions to the back of the ice city, where she had spotted the wrestling bears a few weeks earlier. We climbed to the top of the Acropolis and spotted the venue we sought: a rest area with Nescafé and Harbin beer signs surrounding a circuslike ring.

We pulled up to a table next to a foggy window and ordered a round of beers. Families with young children sat at tables around us, anxiously awaiting what was to follow.

The show began with a Chinese trainer leading a dozen or so mangy wolves around a ring, their gray hair a patchy mix of thick tufts and bald spots. The wolves jumped through hoops and did an assortment of other unimpressive tricks. One particularly haggard wolf was whipped by his master and took a frightened dump in the middle of the ring.

The wolves were followed by house cats that performed equally lame hoop jumps, followed by a boar that could identify Chinese characters in exchange for a snack, followed by well-groomed poodles that did nothing but sniff each other.

Exit poodles, enter two lions and a tiger. One male tiger tried, unsuccessfully, to mate with the lion, which was also male. The lion was swapped for a second tiger, and the two were led around the ring by the trainer, jumping through flaming hoops. Toward the end one tiger swiped at another and a skirmish ensued.

While there was no wrestling in the finale, there was a bear. And it wasn't wearing a cape. Instead, this poor creature in this freezing northern Chinese city was wearing women's lingerie. Extra-extra-large women's underwear and a bra.

It's true—I have witnesses.

The lingerie-wearing bear was led out by the trainer and presented with a two-wheel bicycle, which it proceeded to pedal with its short legs, doing circles around the ring. The bear followed that by skipping a rope swung by the trainer and his assistant and dunking a basketball on a miniature hoop.

Inside the Nescafé/Harbin beer tent, the crowd went wild. Kids hopped up and down on plastic chairs, clambering for more. Satisfied dads lit up cigarettes and clapped.

Our jaws were on the floor. “Well, that was fucked-up,” Jeremy said, summing up the entire episode nicely.

One member of our group, a friend of a friend from North Carolina, looked stunned. He sat hunched over his beer, shaking his head slowly from side to side. “That was just . . . wrong.”

None of us knew what to make of what we'd seen. I was somewhat ashamed to have even witnessed it. We sat in the smoky Nescafé tent drinking beer and shared a few minutes of contemplative silence.

A
lcohol, we figured, would wash away what had just taken place, and so we went out in search of Harbin's nightlife. Friends from Beijing had recommended a popular expat hangout called Blues Bar. When we arrived, there were only a few tables of young Chinese, drinking beer and playing a dice game. We ordered drinks and soon more people started arriving.

We met a group of teachers from Australia and Canada. They ordered bottles of a Chinese-made vodka that tasted like acid. I flipped over a bottle and noticed on the label that the vodka was made by Anhui Ante Biological Chemistry Co. Ltd.

“Yo, you know this is made by a chemical company,” I said, presenting the bottle to a spiky-haired Australian.

He shrugged. “I like to party,” he said, downing a glass of vodka and Coke.

The teachers took us to a club called the Box, which was packed with both Chinese and foreigners. The foreigners came from all over—the United States, Mexico, Russia, parts of Africa. Some were teaching in Harbin, some studying at the university. Whenever I traveled to places like Harbin, I always marveled that anyone would actually choose to live somewhere like that. For some reason, imagining their lives in this lonely, frozen outpost made me a little sad. I didn't even want to imagine how the search for deodorant would go down in a city as remote as Harbin.

T
he next afternoon we headed for our second animal-related adventure, at the Harbin Siberian Tiger Park, where visitors could feed live animals—including chickens, goats, and cows—to tigers and lions. The park was lively when we arrived in midafternoon, the parking lot abuzz with tour groups and families. A sign at the ticket booth said, in English, “No. 1 Adventure Bus: You'r welcome to take No.1 Adventure Bus to experience the tense feeling of looking at the tigers in close distance, viewing the thrilling scene of tigers' preying on other animals.” We pooled our money together and bought a goat for about five hundred yuan—seventy dollars.

On our bus were children as young as five, their curious eyes pressed against the window. We toured the park, where tigers dozed in the cold surrounded by chicken feathers, until we reached a feeding ground. We watched as a park worker in the Jeep in front of us threw a live chicken out of the passenger-side door. (Passengers couldn't actually feed the animals themselves.) A tiger snatched the chicken in its teeth and ran off into the bushes.

Our bus continued into the African lion's den for the goat feed. As soon as we entered the gate, hungry female lions swarmed our minibus, jumping up and pawing at window. Kids wailed. Parents laughed nervously. At the front of the bus a park worker prepared our goat, which looked concerned.

It all happened so fast. Goat tossed out the door . . . lions pounce . . . chaos . . . goat reappears . . . a lion's jaws clamp down on the goat by the neck, another lion snatches it by the back . . . goat bleats, its stomach exposed . . . another lion, sensing opportunity, bites the goat's bare belly . . . guts explode.

A moment later, one lion ran off with the goat's front section, another with its hind legs, and several others fought for various body parts littered on the ground.

The passengers in our van applauded. I felt like I'd witnessed a crime, or worse, that I'd actually paid to commit one. My stomach churned as I watched through fingers splayed over my face as tigers ate the goat's insides.

I looked over to Ben, who was shaking his head.

“I'm glad we didn't buy the cow,” I said.

W
e took the train back to Beijing first thing the next morning. Even after such a short trip, I was ready to get back to the city, back to my cozy apartment, to DVDs, to Julia. But my curiosity about China grew exponentially during the trip to Harbin. Bears in lingerie, tiger feeds, industrial vodka. That's the stuff dreams are made of. I thought that if all that and more happens in Harbin—a city of four million people, an industrial and administrative hub of northern China—what went on in China's even more remote regions?

On the train I jotted notes from the trip in my journal. I stopped for a moment and looked out the window at the freezing landscape.

So many stories, I thought. So many stories to tell.

7

The Failed
Propagandist

I
was
entering the third mile on a treadmill at a gym not far from the
China Daily
compound, exhausted and dripping sweat,
trying to shed a few pounds put on during a winter spent watching movies and
eating extravagant meals. I'd recently returned from a two-week trip with
friends to Southeast Asia. We relaxed on beaches, gorged ourselves, and drank
liver-pulverizing quantities of beer and whiskey buckets, the effects of which
hadn't helped my already hurting physique. When I arrived in China almost a year
earlier, I was in the best shape of my life. I was working out daily and eating
well. My abs were visible.

Now I was back near the two-hundred-pounds mark
with no semblance of muscular definition. Showering one morning at home, I
looked at myself in the mirror, pinched my love handles, and admitted to myself
what several Chinese colleagues had cheerfully pointed out more than once: I was
getting fat. The good news (and perhaps the main reason for my bloated
waistline) was that I was, for the first time in two years, mostly
. . . happy.

Above the treadmill a television was playing CNN.
Larry King was on, and his guests were former escorts and brothel owners
discussing what might have been going through the mind of New York governor
Eliot Spitzer when he solicited the services of a young employee of Emperor Club
VIP in Washington, D.C., the month before. During a discussion about whether
paying for sex is ethically wrong, and whether or not Spitzer should serve jail
time, CNN cut away to breaking news. A blond anchor appeared and text flashed on
the screen. “Breaking News: Riots in Tibet.”

The anchor spoke. “Riots broke out in the
traditional Tibetan capital of Lhasa today—”

And then, suddenly, the screen went black.

I
t was
March 2008 and life in Beijing was good. I had a big group of friends and we
spent our spare time having long dinners and plenty of drinks. Eating out is the
norm in China, and the food is affordable and delicious: spicy fare from Sichuan
and Yunnan, dumplings from northeast China, Shanghai noodles, Xinjiang
lamb—Beijing was an amazing place to eat.

Dinner is also a social event in China, a tradition
we embraced vigorously. We would eat in gritty, smoky alleyway restaurants, or
big, noisy places that served Peking duck or hot pot—thinly sliced meat, leafy
vegetables, mushrooms, tofu, noodles, all tossed into a boiling, often spicy,
broth. Sometimes we ate at French or Italian restaurants, Thai restaurants, or
Japanese restaurants. Social life revolved around eating, and going for dinner
was among the highlights of living in the city. Our groups at dinner came from
all over the world, and we talked about China, politics, our jobs, our futures.
Later we would go to music clubs, or little bars tucked in the
hutong
alleyways, or, when we were up for it, out to
the lounges and clubs that continued to pop up all over the city.

Notably absent from most social occasions was Rob.
We had drifted apart in the weeks and months after the Orange Juice Incident.
I'd forgiven him, but I didn't really trust him anymore, if I actually ever did.
If something as minor as that could set him off, what would happen if we
really
got into an argument? We still spoke and hung
out sometimes, but I didn't often reach out to him, and I got the impression he
blamed me for his isolation from my group of friends at
China Daily
. But it wasn't intentional. I'd just grown comfortable
in my new life. I still partied a lot, but I'd cut out the drugs and had
generally calmed down.

Mine was a comfortable life. I played in a weekly
basketball game, went to a pub quiz once in a while, and finally had a firm
grasp of the city. I was making slow progress with my Chinese; I continued to
meet Ms. Song a few times a week and did at least some homework most days.
Beijing, which had once seemed so foreign, was starting to feel like a second
home. I had a little over a month and a half left at
China
Daily
, and once my contract ended, I planned to focus on learning
Chinese and freelancing, and then stay for the event that had drawn most of us
to Beijing in the first place: the 2008 Olympics.

At work, I had long ago abandoned any notion of
trying to change or improve the paper, and in the New Year I had decided to by
and large retire as a reporter and offer my services, once again, as an
editor—on the condition that I didn't have to work the night shift.

My bosses assigned me to edit a weekly business
supplement, a job I split with another foreign editor. The assignment involved
editing about six or seven features a week, almost all of which I saved for
Wednesday, the day before the section went to print. My role at the paper was so
slight that I no longer appeared on the work schedule e-mailed to foreign
experts every week. To make the most of my free time, I picked up the pace of my
freelance work, contributing travel stories and other features to Canadian
publications and local magazines. Editors back home were realizing I was in
China, and assignments were slowly starting to come to me. I still hadn't
reached the level where I wanted to be, still hadn't cracked big American
publications, but I felt for the first time since I came to China that I was on
the right track.

The rest of the time I read U.S. presidential
campaign news, chatted with friends and colleagues online, surfed various blogs
about China, and took extraordinarily long lunches with Ben and Jeremy. As far
as I knew, my editors didn't know about my freelance work, and they seemed
content to let me coast through to the end of my tenure at the paper.

From the beginning, I knew I wouldn't renew my
contract with
China Daily
, even if they offered—by
late winter it was clear they would not. Who could blame them? If I was my
editors, I would have fired me. But with the Olympics just around the corner,
many expat editors were jumping ship for better jobs or no job at all, so they
could enjoy the Games without other obligations. My neighbor in the business
section, an Australian woman, had recently told Mr. Wang she wouldn't be coming
back when her contract ended in April. Mr. Wang, shocked upon hearing the news,
leaned forward and rubbed his forehead. “Another problem,” he said.

But even with an exodus of foreigners, there was no
way Mr. Wang could justify keeping me around afterward, even if I wanted to
stay. I had grumbled my way into a role of doing basically nothing, and as the
end of my contract approached, I knew one of two things was going to happen.
One: My last day would arrive without any mention of renewing my contract; there
would be a little going-away party; and off I would go. Or two: Mr. Wang would
call me into his office and tell me they were getting rid of the business writer
position entirely.

My editors must have wondered what I did with all
those hours sitting in my cubicle, but nobody said a thing. Finally, in my third
week back from my trip to Southeast Asia, one of the business editors, an
avian-looking woman who had shown utter disdain for my existence as a
China Daily
business writer since my first day on the
job, approached my desk.

“Your contract ends next month,” Bird Lady said.
“You're going back to your country?”

I smiled. “I haven't decided yet.”

She frowned and walked away.

A few days later, Lois said she heard I was going
home.

“Why does everybody think that?” I said.

She shrugged. “I don't know. They just do.”

I hadn't actually told any of my Chinese colleagues
my plans, and my guess was that Bird Lady and Lois had been tasked to figure out
my intentions. Chinese are generally averse to confrontation—as I had learned
when I called out Ms. Song for handing out my test to class eight months
earlier—and if my editors could find out through the grapevine that I was going
back to Canada, they could avoid the awkwardness of officially letting me go. I
liked this approach. So I started to spread the word that I was going
freelance.

J
ulia
and I, meanwhile, had managed to maintain a weekly dinner/movie/sex,
no-strings-attached relationship. It was perfect. I liked her and it was the
first time since my last girlfriend that I had even remote feelings for anybody.
I was buoyed when she texted, and I looked forward to seeing her. We held hands
when we walked down the street and e-mailed each other when one of us was out of
town. I was happy with the rhythms of my life in China, and she was part of
that. But I still wasn't ready to call her my girlfriend.

That started to change one night that spring. As we
sat in my living room talking, she let slip that a few months ago she had been
seeing somebody else. She was allowed to, of course, and so was I. But hearing
her say it was unsettling. She noticed and pulled away.

“I'm sorry, but . . . I'm not your
girlfriend,” she said. “We're just having fun. Right?”

I told her I agreed. “It's okay, you didn't do
anything wrong. I guess I just never thought about it.”

The next day at work she was
all
I could think about. I opened her Facebook page and browsed her
photos. I saw pictures she had posted after a trip to Thailand. There was one
image in particular: a black-and-white of her on a beach. She was lying on her
side, wearing a striped summer dress, her face in profile looking out to the
sea. She looked impossibly beautiful and it stirred all kinds of emotions. I
thought to myself, You're lucky. You shouldn't take this for granted.

She meant more to me than I realized, and I
wondered if I was ready for a relationship again. The problem was, in a few
months she would be gone, back to Russia to finish university. And I didn't know
where I'd be at all.

O
n
March 14, 2008, riots broke out in Tibet. It began as an annual observance of
Tibetan Uprising Day, which commemorates the 1959 rebellion against the Chinese
government. Street protests led by monks descended into rioting, burning, and
looting, and spiraled into violence, perpetrated mostly by Tibetans on Han
Chinese. Police cracked down to halt the violence, and there were fatalities on
both sides.

Finger-pointing began immediately, with the Chinese
government claiming the riots had been orchestrated by the Dalai Lama, and
Tibetans in exile blaming what they perceived as illegitimate rule from Beijing.
The riots might have been happening fifteen hundred miles from Beijing, where
life went on as normal, but it was the biggest news story coming out of China
and the main topic of conversation around the office.

Anger in China was vented on instant messenger.
Almost all my Chinese colleagues' messenger statuses read “[Heart] China.” My
former cubicle neighbor, Harry, who had long since left
China Daily
for another government employer, wrote as his status
message, “CNN go to hell!” The network had become synonymous with what many
Chinese perceived as an anti-China bias in the Western media. Some Westerners in
Beijing feared an anti-foreigner backlash not seen since 1999, when NATO planes
accidentally bombed the Chinese embassy in Belgrade, killing three Chinese
reporters and sparking outrage across China.

Some of the hostility toward the West became
directed at us,
China Daily
's foreign friends. One
day a reporter lectured Jeremy that the West was interested in separating Tibet
from China because of the geographic advantages of having an American puppet
state close to China, Pakistan, and India.

That same week, I met Lois and two other
China Daily
reporters for drinks in a bar near the
Drum and Bell Towers, in the center of the city. Over casual conversation, I
told them I was having trouble figuring out a visa for the summer, and one of
the reporters said the Chinese government shouldn't have allowed so many
foreigners into the country in the first place.

Lois, whose opinions I valued, said that
foreigners', and especially the Western media's, opinion of Tibet was informed
by “ignorance” and that they shouldn't be allowed to have an opinion at all
because “they haven't been there.”

“Have you?” I asked.

“No,” she huffed. “That's why I don't have an
opinion.”

She did, of course. Everybody did, and those
opinions were being expressed with more hostility every day. In the States, a
Chinese student at Duke University had become a public enemy in China simply for
encouraging dialogue between pro-Tibetan and pro-Chinese protesters at her
university. Chinese nationalists on the Internet threatened to dismember her and
posted her parents' home address in Qingdao, which led someone to put a bag of
feces on her parents' front steps. A
New York Times
article said the events had forced the girl into hiding.

I forwarded the
Times
article to Lois, and she said it was simply another attempt by the Western media
to smear China.

“What's the point of this article?” she said. “To
make all Chinese protesters look like idiots?”

Getting news about Tibet from within China was
getting more difficult each day. I was still able to get information from the
sites of many mainstream English-language news organizations, but the Chinese
government was blocking some Internet and television reports about Tibet. Google
searches would produce “Not Found” messages. The
Economist
, which had one of the only Western reporters in Tibet
during the riots, was sporadically blocked. YouTube was down, and so were the
proxy servers that we usually used to access blocked websites.