Apologies to My Censor

by Mitch Moxley

  “It used to be more fun living here, yeah,” he said. “This time is not easy. There are many problems, yeah. Sometimes business is good. Sometimes not good. This is business, you know.”

  We thanked him and exchanged numbers. Tom and I walked back down the street to the market, where Jim was still busy taking pictures. We wandered up to the second floor and browsed the stores.

  In one shop, a man sitting relaxed in a chair—the chair back leaning against a wall and his foot resting on a stool—called us into the store. He was a small man with a large, round head, a trimmed goatee, and mini-Afro. He chewed a toothpick.

  “You want to buy anything?” he said.

  I looked around the store: it had the same hip-hop clothes and Obama shirts as every other store on the floor.

  “Not really,” I said, running my hand through the hair of a curly black wig.

  He laughed. He told us his name was Kimba and he was from Niger. He said he also owned a leather goods store nearby that we should check out.

  Tom asked him how his business was doing.

  “Look, see for yourself. There are no customers. It’s shit.”

  We asked him why things were so bad, and he blamed the visa crackdown.

  “Every night police come and check passports. They go to people’s homes and break down doors. They said after the Olympics they’d normalize regulations. That’s bullshit.” He sat upright in the chair and played with his toothpick. “When I arrived here a year ago, they were welcoming. And you know, there are a lot of Chinese in Africa. In Africa, they are welcomed and they get visas, no problem. But here, it’s completely different now.”

  We thanked Kimba for his time and continued around the market. I thought about what he’d said. While China had been cracking down on visas for all foreigners since before the Olympics, racism did seem to be at play in Guangzhou. At the time there was a current of racism against Africans in China; several times Chinese had told me that they like foreigners “but not hei ren”—black people. Before the Olympics, when police were trying to clear Sanlitun of drug dealers, they did so by indiscriminately rounding up African-looking people in the bar district, including the son of Grenada’s ambassador.

  The next morning we went to Canaan Export Clothes Wholesale Trading Center, in the Christian African neighborhood. The market had opened six years earlier to cater to African traders. It was busy, but several of the shops were closed.

  In the loading area we met Chuks, who was counting stacks of jeans with his business partner. Each month the twenty-nine-year-old bought bulk clothing that he shipped back to Nigeria, where his brother sold the goods at a markup. For two years Chuks had run a successful business and created a comfortable life for himself in Guangzhou.

  He was well muscled, dressed in a formfitting navy sweater and patterned white vest. He smelled of cologne and had a Stringer Bell confidence to him. He had done well in China, but as he sorted a pile of stonewashed denim, he told us that his good run might be coming to an end. Rising costs were eating into his profits, and the visa crackdown, which traders claimed was often being violently enforced, was making it difficult to do business. He was thinking about going home.

  “It’s getting worse every day,” he told us. “Maybe some Chinese think Africans aren’t good. They don’t want too many Africans in their country.”

  Jim took some photos of Chuks, and Tom asked him and his partner more questions. I went into a nearby store that sold coats and asked the owner, a Cantonese man, if I could take a seat and have a rest. Across from me was a young African, leaning back in a chair, his legs stretched out. He was thin and had a shaved head. He nodded as I sat.

  The owner offered me a can of Sprite, and I asked the two men how they knew each other.

  “Business partners,” the Cantonese man said.

  The African man nodded again.

  “How long have you lived in Guangzhou?” I asked him.

  “Few years.”

  “You like it?”

  “I like the girls, man.”

  “You have a Chinese girlfriend?”

  “I have Chinese girlfriends. It’s too easy, man.”

  He told me his name was Chris, and he went on to explain, in great detail, how much he liked Chinese women. Eventually I steered the conversation back to his work, and he told me he was thinking about going back to Africa or somewhere else in Asia. He said a friend of his who had let his visa expire had been forced to go into hiding out of fear of the police. The friend had no options—he couldn’t work, he couldn’t leave. He was worried about going to jail.

  “It’s fucked, man,” Chris said.

  It was a sobering experience for me talking to men like Chris. Having lived through the highs of the Olympics, and experienced the ease and riches of the Western-foreigner lifestyle in Beijing, it was startling to see how greatly the lives of Africans in Guangzhou contrasted with mine. These were the dark sides of the foreigner experience in China, which could be too easily ignored amid the constant circus of expat Beijing.

  I exchanged numbers with Chris and thanked the owner for the Sprite. I met Tom and Jim and we continued talking with traders in the market. In interview after interview, we heard the same story, one we would hear over and over again throughout our week in Chocolate City. In markets, mosques, churches, and chicken shacks, the traders told us the same thing: they were getting screwed.

  On several afternoons we found ourselves on the grounds of the large cathedral in central Guangzhou. Some days we spoke with the Africans gathered there; other times we took seats on the benches outside and relaxed in the warm air, reading our books or testing ourselves with my Chinese flashcards. By midweek I had developed a stomach bug, so I often ended up lying in the shade, rubbing my belly and running in and out of a bathroom in an annex building beside the church.

  One day we met an African man named Austin Jack. He was sitting on a step inside the church gate, reading a Bible. He was tall and broad-shouldered, well dressed, and wore reading glasses. Tom approached him while he read and asked if he’d be willing to talk, and Austin opened up immediately.

  He said the church was the only place in Guangzhou where he felt completely safe. “The moment you leave the church grounds, anything can happen,” he said. Like so many others, Austin was growing frustrated with the way the Chinese treated Africans, while the Chinese who went to Africa for work were welcomed.

  “The Chinese make money from Africa,” Austin said, “but they want to stop us from doing the same here. To me, it doesn’t make sense.”

  Austin invited us to attend church with him on Sunday and said we should interview Father Paul, who conducted Mass. He took us to Father Paul’s office next door to the cathedral, and we arranged an interview the following day.

  Father Paul’s upstairs office was large and sparsely furnished, with afternoon light flooding the room from behind his desk. Father Paul was a small Cantonese man with thick glasses and hair parted to the side. Tom and I sat across from him as he served us biscuits and tea and went into a lengthy introduction of himself. His English was terrible, and I often lost the thread of what he was saying. I gathered that he had studied in the Philippines and worked in Guangzhou for three months. There were half a million Catholics in Guangzhou, he said, but his congregation was mostly African. They used the church as a meeting place for community groups, gathering in the crumbling annex next door to play music, sing, and hold prayer groups.

  Tom and I asked him specific questions about the troubles his African congregation was having—visa woes, altercations with police, struggles with their businesses. Father Paul soon became evasive, replying to several questions with answers like “I don’t know about that.”

  After less than half an hour Father Paul had had enough of our questions. “If you want to know about them, ask them,” he said, leading us out of his office.

&nb
sp; That Sunday we attended Mass with Austin. Father Paul delivered the sermon in unintelligible English to an audience of seven hundred African traders. They listened under the cathedral’s high ceiling, chandeliers, and closed-circuit television cameras. We sat toward the back, and as I looked around at the rows of black heads, I had one of those moments that occurred every so often in China: when the reality of the situation I was in became needle-point clear—here I am, in a church in Guangzhou, China, with seven hundred African men—and I could barely believe it, thankful for whatever it was that led me there. It was for moments like this that I lived in China.

  After Mass, the congregation spilled out to the cathedral grounds and into the annex, where they danced to the rhythm of guitar and African drums for much of the afternoon.

  One evening, while strolling one of the markets, we met Hugo. Hugo was twenty-nine years old, tall and lanky and dressed in baggy clothing. He was from Aba City, Nigeria, and had a broken leg. He leaned on a cane as he told us the story of how it happened.

  “The knock on the door came very early in the morning and I knew straightaway it was the police,” he said. “They’d been raiding homes and taking people away since August, so I knew they’d found me. My visa was expired. I jammed the door shut and jumped out of the apartment window.”

  He landed hard on the concrete below, shattering his right leg. He was in agony.

  “The police left me there for ten hours before taking me to the hospital.” He had a twelve-inch scar on his leg and what he figured was a permanent limp. But he insisted he wanted to stay in China.

  “It’s still easier to make a living here than in Nigeria.” He sighed. “But it’s a frightening place to be.”

  Throughout our week in Guangzhou, everybody told us we needed to speak to Pastor James. If you were an African in Guangzhou and you had a problem, you called Pastor James. After several phone calls and much convincing by us, Pastor James invited Tom and me to meet him at his apartment in a prosperous suburb a half-hour drive from the city center. No photos.

  His wife greeted us when we arrived. She was short and stocky with her hair pulled back into a ponytail, tight against her scalp. She seemed nervous and avoided our eyes as she spoke.

  “Pastor James is eating,” she whispered. She nodded toward her husband, who was sitting at a table in the kitchen, about five feet away. He didn’t look up, didn’t say hello, didn’t so much as acknowledge our presence. “He’ll be with you in a moment.”

  She sat us down on a couch in the living room next to the kitchen, where Pastor James continued to eat. She put on a DVD of an African minister delivering a sermon on Revelation 1:5. Tom and I watched in an awkward silence and Pastor James’s wife gave us apples while we waited. Occasionally, Tom and I exchanged glances—glances that said, “What the fuck is going on?”

  Pastor James—dressed in a red Adidas hoodie, black corduroy pants, and black leather shoes—joined us after another fifteen minutes. He placed a chair across from us as we sat on the couch, apple cores in our hands. He was cross-eyed, and when he began talking, it was difficult to discern to whom he was speaking.

  Pastor James was from Nigeria and had preached the Gospel in Guangzhou since 2004. He used to have a good space he used for a church, but the authorities closed it down in 2007. Now the church moved around, sometimes cramming into hotel rooms.

  “It’s not easy. This is a communist country. Religion is still underground.” He described his role as part pastor, part social worker. “Every day I receive calls for help from people in trouble,” he told us, adding that some Africans bring it on themselves by “engaging in dubious things,” like selling drugs. He said that most Chinese were friendly and that he had many Chinese friends. “They just don’t want us to spoil their country.”

  When the interview was finished, Tom and I caught a cab downtown. Pastor James was the last of the interviews we needed. We had spoken with dozens of traders during the week and listened to and recorded their stories. Jim had incredible pictures and we had all the angles covered. We had a great story. Now we just needed to sell it—easier said than done.

  We took the train back to Beijing. In our sleeper cabin that night, I watched The Sopranos on my laptop and chatted with Tom about our stories. We were both happy to be going back to Beijing, back to our expat fantasy lives. The trips had made me more excited than ever to be living in China, and they helped take my mind off Julia, who was living several time zones away and whom I wouldn’t see again for months.

  Throughout the trip we marveled at how liberating our freelance lives were. As relatively well-off foreigners in China, we had so much freedom while so many others around us did not. Living in China at times felt like being a spoiled child who was allowed to run rampant. At the same time we had the freedom to escape to the comfort and safety of our lives in Beijing, or to our lives back in Canada, or America, or England.

  The day we arrived back in Beijing, I went to a friend’s apartment for Thanksgiving dinner, as far away from the miseries of Chocolate City and the Eighteen Sauna in Macau as could be imagined. It occurred to me that this was the nature of expat life as I knew it. Living in a bubble. I could take a peek outside of it, but before long it sucked me right back in.

  As fall became winter, Tom and I met every day at Café Zarah, a small coffee shop near the Drum and Bell Towers that served as our de facto freelance office, to work on our pitches. We started at the top, e-mailing Time, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Guardian, the Times of London. Every editor we contacted told us we had great stories, really moving, but just not for them. Good luck elsewhere. We worked down the list of publications, but nobody seemed to want the stories. Sex, it turned out, did not necessarily sell, and neither did the woes of Africans in China. Whatever the case, for several weeks we couldn’t find a home for the stories.

  These were supposed to be our big stories. I had been so convinced they would sell that I became increasingly disillusioned with every rejection. “I just don’t know what we’re doing wrong,” I told my parents over the phone one night.

  But, in fact, we had done everything right. We had good stories, we did the research, we believed in our subjects, and we reported them well. And we did eventually sell the stories. The trafficking piece was published in the weekend magazine of the South China Morning Post, an English-language newspaper in Hong Kong, and the Chocolate City feature appeared in GlobalPost, a start-up Web magazine. Both were solid publications, just not one of the marquee brands we’d been aiming for. I was proud of the pieces, if a bit disheartened, and the trips confirmed for me that China was filled with fascinating and heartbreaking people and places. Even though the stories weren’t the monster successes we were hoping for, the trips gave us confidence that we were good reporters and that if we kept looking hard enough, we would find the stories we wanted.

  A few weeks later, one of the Africans I’d interviewed in Guangzhou called me. I was riding my bike on the way to meet friends for dinner. At first I couldn’t place who he was, but then it clicked. It was the man I’d met in Canaan market—Chris, the cool Nigerian who told me about his fondness for Chinese women as we drank Sprites with his Cantonese business partner.

  “He’s dead,” he told me, his voice distant on the phone. Chris said that a friend of his, the friend he’d told me about that day in the market, the one who had been forced into hiding, had died.

  “What happened?” I asked.

  “The cops, they came to his home, they chased him, he jumped from the balcony. He was still alive, but nobody helped. The police wouldn’t take him to the hospital for twenty-four hours. He died. He fucking died, man. You have to tell people, man. You have to write about this. Can you help? Can you?”

  I couldn’t. There was nothing I could do, really, except write the story we’d gone to report, a story that would likely have no real impact whatsoever. And suddenly it all felt so
futile. We had gone to Erlian and Macau and Guangzhou to tell the stories of people who couldn’t tell their own, to expose injustices. But the only thing we had exposed, I felt, was the vast divide between the lives they led, and the ones we did.

  12

  The Bachelor

  “You look like a vampire,” Tom said.

  “Did you bring that suit? Or was it theirs?” our friend Alex chimed in with a laugh as the three of us drank pints one Saturday afternoon in the winter of 2009. “It’s pretty hideous.”

  I rubbed my temples. A vampire in an ugly suit was not the image I wanted to project as one of Cosmopolitan magazine’s 100 Hottest Bachelors in China. Unfortunately, Tom was correct; I looked like a character from True Blood. The magazine’s art department had gone a little heavy with the makeup; my face looked powder-white, my eyes dark, as if I was suffering from a terrible hangover. My hair was jet black and styled to look a little like Charlie Sheen circa Men at Work. I wore a navy and white striped shirt under a double-breasted, tan-gray checkered suit. I looked gaunt and smug.

  I flipped back to Tom’s picture, a page before mine.

  “Yours isn’t much better, Tom,” I said.

  Tom’s photo, like mine, took up half a glossy magazine page. He looked slightly drunk, with a wide smile and his hands out in front of him, palms down, as if he was performing some kind of mating dance or trying to regain his balance.

  “At least I don’t look like a corpse,” he said.

  “I was going for a brooding look.”

  It was nearing Valentine’s Day and the issue—an annual supplement to the Chinese edition of Cosmo—had arrived on newsstands across the country. More than one million copies, the editor told us. Beside our portraits were brief bios, including hobbies (mine: watching movies, playing basketball, reading, playing guitar); what we like in a woman (funny, confident, not too tall, not too short); the words we live by (“treasure every day”—which the editors had made up on my behalf); as well as our e-mail addresses.