Apologies to My Censor

by Mitch Moxley

  Before the shoot, Tom and I had made a bet about who would get the most e-mails, which we figured would be somewhere in the dozens. We agreed that the first to reach one hundred e-mails would have to buy the other dinner. We fantasized about receiving e-mails with photos attached of gorgeous, scantily clad women.

  The timing was good, too. I was single again.

  Earlier that month, Julia and I broke up. For real.

  She had visited Beijing for a few weeks that January. It was strange, the first week, to resume a relationship after not having seen each other for four months, but by the second week we were back where we left off.

  Before she arrived, I’d imagined us breaking up when she left, but toward the end of her stay, that seemed impossible. On her second-to-last night, however, after we returned from a bar drunk and slightly stoned, she broached the subject.

  “Sladki, we need to talk,” she said as we lay on the couch in Comrade Wu’s apartment. She said that she was nearing thirty and needed to be in a relationship that was going somewhere. With her in Moscow and me in Beijing, that didn’t seem likely between us.

  I got angry with her for bringing it up at all, even though it was obvious we needed to address our relationship. I had been thinking the exact same thing but, for the last few days, had been trying to push the thoughts aside. “Why would you ruin our time together by saying that?” I said. We went to bed that night with no resolution, and the next day we were too drained to make any decisions other than to wait and see.

  We had another teary goodbye at the airport. We hugged for longer, and this time, when I let go, I didn’t say I would see her later because the truth was, I didn’t believe it. I walked away, and when I got to the bottom of the escalator, I turned back and ran up to see if she was still there, but she was gone.

  I took a taxi to a Café Zarah, but I couldn’t get any work done. I didn’t want this to be it. I didn’t want to get married or have kids, but I wanted to be with her. I knew that. I didn’t know if I was in love with her, but I felt something like it.

  I tried to chase out the thought that we might never see each other again, and then I thought it a cruel cosmic joke that I’d found a girlfriend from Moscow—why Moscow? There were so many places I’d like to live, but not Moscow.

  “Either you move to Moscow, or we have to break up,” she said, a few weeks later, over Skype. It wasn’t exactly an ultimatum—it was the reality of our situation. It had been an agonizing few weeks, stuck in a limbo between knowing we had to break up and not wanting to do it. I couldn’t take it anymore, so I’d called her that night to see if we could get some clarity.

  “Move to Moscow? I don’t even know what I’d do there.”

  “You can live with me. Can’t you freelance here?” she said. “You know I can’t come back to Beijing. I need to finish my school.”

  She told me to take some time to think about it, and I did. For a while, for a few days even, I decided that, yes, I would move to Moscow. Moscow would be my new home. I’d move there for her.

  “Moscow?” my mom said one morning as we talked over the phone.

  “Yes, Moscow. But only for a few years, until she finishes her degree. And then we’ll move to Canada.”

  “How are you going to get her into Canada? It’s not easy to immigrate to Canada, you know.”

  “I don’t know. Maybe we’ll get married.”

  Married. This was the first time in my life I had ever uttered that word in reference to myself and in a nonsarcastic way. It scared me to say it out loud. I knew there was something special between Julia and me, and I wish we’d had more time to see where it went. But I wasn’t ready for marriage. I wasn’t ready to live in Moscow. I barely knew if I loved her.

  I was miserable for the next week. I missed her terribly, but I knew we had to end it. One evening, after steeling myself all day, I called her and said I couldn’t do it.

  The Cosmo shoot, like many China adventures, happened randomly. A few months earlier, as we walked out of a coffee shop near the Drum and Bell Towers, Tom received a phone call from a former colleague of his at a local English-language newspaper who was now an editor at Cosmo.

  “You want me to be one of your bachelors?” Tom said into his phone. “Wow, you must be getting desperate.”

  “We are,” the woman confessed.

  Tom laughed into his mobile. She asked him to bring a friend. Tom covered the phone.

  “Hey, Mitch, do you want to be in Cosmo for their Valentine’s special?”

  “Really? Don’t they need to see my picture first?”

  “Do you need to see his picture?” Tom asked the editor.

  She did not.

  A few weeks later, Tom and I arrived at the Cosmopolitan offices in downtown Beijing. A young woman met us in a coffee shop downstairs and escorted us to a studio on the building’s top floor, where we were greeted by a photographer from Hong Kong named Leon; Tom’s editor friend, Liu Jia; and a makeup artist and hairstylist. We were led over to the wardrobe section of the room, where a dozen men’s suits were hanging on a rack behind a curtain.

  I tried on a few jackets and held up pants over my jeans. I called over the editor, Liu Jia.

  “I don’t think these are going to fit me,” I said, holding up a pair of pants several sizes too small.

  She hurriedly flipped through the rack and pulled out a checkered suit. “Try this,” she said, closing the curtain as she left.

  The pants were snug and the cuffs of my shirt stuck out several inches from the jacket sleeves. The suit looked like something that might be worn by the pervert cokehead cousin in a mafia movie.

  I exited through the curtain.

  “Looks good!” the photographer hollered from the set.

  “It’s not really my style.”

  “It will have to do,” Liu Jia said. “It’s the biggest we have.”

  In the makeup room, a young woman applied beige powder to my cheeks and forehead. The hairstylist, meanwhile, yanked at my unruly hair with a brush. She added water and pulled at it more, trying to slick it back.

  “I don’t think that’s going to work,” I said. “My hair’s pretty thick.”

  The makeup artist offered some advice in Chinese. I didn’t understand it all, but I got the idea. “Like Mad Men,” she said.

  Once finished, I strolled back into the studio, where Tom was already in the middle of his shoot. I felt queasy watching it. The photographer had Tom doing all sorts of ridiculous poses. Laugh shots. Hysterical laugh shots. Dance shots. Lunging-at-the-camera shots.

  Tom seemed to be enjoying it. More than that, he was making it look natural.

  I sidled up to the photographer.

  “I don’t know if I can do this,” I muttered. “I mean, I can’t do this dancing stuff.”

  “Don’t worry,” he said, still snapping shots of Tom. “We’ll do what makes you feel comfortable.”

  We soon discovered that there was only one pose that made me comfortable: serious face, no smile, sitting down, hands resting easily on my legs or in my pockets. The photographer had snapped about forty of these—“Good, good, yes, sexy look, nice”—when Liu Jia approached and demanded more variety.

  “Let’s try it with a smile,” Leon said.

  “I look stupid when I smile on camera,” I protested.

  “Let’s just try it. If it’s no good, we won’t use it.”

  I smiled.

  Leon snapped a shot or two, and then he and Liu Jia conversed quietly in Chinese.

  “Okay, let’s try it without the smile again,” Leon said.

  After a few shots he asked me to try standing up. I stood and he laughed.

  “Those pants are really tight, ha-ha.”

  “Yeah, I know,” I said, tugging at the material around my thigh. “They were the biggest ones.”

&n
bsp; We tried a few more poses, some sitting, some standing, hands placed here or there, arms crossed, chin down, face tilted left or right.

  “I think we’re good,” Leon said after ten minutes.

  “I’m sorry I couldn’t do any better.”

  “That’s okay.” He flipped through photos on his camera’s screen. “Some people are just naturals. Some people . . . aren’t.”

  I wasn’t sure how to take that. “But you’ve got enough, right?”

  “I think so.” He paused. “We’ll see.”

  “But you’re definitely going to use us in the issue, right?” I asked Liu Jia. “I mean, you already took our bios. You already have our e-mail addresses.”

  “We’ll get in touch,” she said, shaking my hand. “Thank you for coming.”

  Tom and I changed out of our suits and bade farewell to Leon and Liu Jia at the elevators.

  I sighed as the elevator doors shut. “Damn it,” I said. “They’re not going to use me for sure.”

  So it was with some surprise when I bought the Valentine’s issue of Cosmo from a Sanlitun newsstand on a chilly afternoon to find my picture on page thirty-six of the Valentine’s special. I was thrilled. I might have looked like a vampire, but I was the Don Draper of vampires. I was among the top one hundred hottest bachelors in the most populous country on earth, a country of 1.3 billion people, including about 700 million men. Forget one in a million; I was one in seven hundred million. Never mind that I had been asked out of desperation.

  After the issue was published, we waited for our flood of e-mails. But the electronic levees held. A day passed, a few days, nearly a week. Neither Tom nor I received a message. We scaled our bet down from first to reach one hundred to first to reach fifty. And then the first to get to twenty-five. First to ten? Whoever got the first e-mail received a pint of beer, we agreed.

  Tom got the first e-mail. He rejoiced. I fumed. The next day I received a message from a Yahoo account with the subject line “from cosmo”:

  Hi, Moxley;

  I am ———, come from cosmo. could you make frined with me ?

  with the best wishes.

  from ----

  As the days passed, more e-mails arrived in my inbox, never a flood but a steady stream. Over the next few weeks I received dozens of messages from women named Daisy, Sunny, Coral, Evan, Lucy, Cherish, Princess, and more. Some notes were short and to the point (“hi, I saw your picture”; or, “I am Chinese girl. Do you like China?”), some were complimentary (“I saw you there with mature and polite. I like that kind of guy.”), some confusing (“Your name sounds like my favorite Micky, but you looks more serious than him :)~”).

  Several girls e-mailed both Tom and me the same message, and a couple sent group messages to the entire cohort of one hundred bachelors. Some asked if we could be friends. Some if we could be lovers. One asked me not to call the police on her:

  HI

  MY NAME IS ———, I AM A CHINESE GIRL. I AM A NURSE IN ———, FUJIAN. YOU KNOW FUJIAN. IT IS VERY BEAUTIFUL, AND I HOPE YOU CAN COME HERE.

  OH YOU MAY FEEL SO STRENGE, WHY I KNOW YOUR E-MAIL. BEAUSE I SAW A BOOK AND IN IT THERE IS YOUR PICTURE, AND MY ENGLISH TEACHER COMES FROM THE SAME COUNTRY WITH YOU, AND DID THE SAME JOB BEFORE. SO I WANT TO TELL YOU IT, JUST IT. . . . PLEASE DON’T CALL POLICE, BECAUSE I AM NOT A BAD GIRL, THANK YOU

  A few were from gay men. One sent photos of himself in military fatigues. Another wrote from the e-mail address iamhomo@---.com:

  So are you gay or not?

  A tiny minority included photos—including one voluptuous woman (who might have been a man) in a sexy nurse outfit. Each message was a tiny thrill, and my and Tom’s competition intensified. Whenever we received a new note, we would announce it by yelling to each other across Comrade Wu’s place, where Tom had recently taken a room, or by texting taunting messages.

  In the end, neither Tom nor I cracked a hundred; I topped out at eighty, edging out Tom by a few messages. (He never bought me dinner.) But with all the online attention, I was gaining the confidence I needed to tackle the dating scene in the analog world.

  The weeks after Julia and I broke up were terrible. I felt gutted. But deep down, I knew I had made the right call. I ached—and would for months to come—but as spring arrived, I grew increasingly comfortable with my newfound independence.

  Still, I reentered the dating game with some trepidation. After two years in the capital, I’d learned that dating in China was considerably different from dating in the West. Most foreigners lived in China for a finite period—a few months, a year, a few years—and for that reason the expat lifestyle often felt a lot like college. There was a lot of binge drinking and random hookups. Relationships tended to be short and sweet. Many people, like Julia and me, learned the hard way that maintaining a serious relationship between two individuals from different corners of the globe in a foreign city could be difficult, especially when both parties planned to eventually leave. Once burned, many people, like myself, were wary of making the same mistake twice. As a result, there were a lot of single expats in Beijing. And for a single man in his twenties, it could be a lot of fun.

  I don’t want to speak about their dating experiences on behalf of foreign women in Beijing, but I can say that many of my female friends complained about the talent pool of foreign men in the city. A few of my best women friends called their pub quiz team “The Goods Are Odd”—“the goods” being Beijing’s population of foreign guys, “odd” being the best way to describe them. Beijing did indeed draw a strange assortment of expats, and there was no shortage of young Western men who wanted to use their time in China to mostly get drunk and chase girls.

  Foreigner-Chinese dating was a whole other world unto itself. As a disclaimer, I should say that there are many successful, loving, long-term foreigner-Chinese relationships. But in my experience, I found that dating between foreigners and Chinese could be complex and often volatile. The very concept of “dating” is entirely different for many Chinese; in fact, very few actually date at all. In the West, a single person might try out different partners without commitment, dating several people at once. Sex is usually introduced into the equation long before there’s any mention of “boyfriend” or “girlfriend” or “exclusive” or “relationship,” and most definitely before “love.”

  In China, it can be the exact opposite. “Love” might be uttered at the very beginning of relationship, via text message, or in wild, teary declarations after the first date. In the West, couples ease into relationships; in China, they dive in headfirst. A lot of foreign men living in China take advantage of this dynamic, but the aftermath is usually nasty. I tried my best to avoid dating anyone who was interested in a serious relationship when I wasn’t, but I learned the hard way, more than once, the stark differences between East and West concerning matters of the heart.

  Not long after I had arrived in China, almost two years earlier, I met a nice young woman with the English name Mary who attended business school at the university across the street from China Daily. She was pretty and smart and spoke perfect English. We met one Saturday night at the Noodle Shop, while my friends and I were drinking at a table across from her and some of her classmates. My initial intentions were straightforward: to take her home. She withstood my initial charms but agreed to meet me for coffee later that week.

  After I sobered up and we went for our coffee, I knew that we wouldn’t be more than friends. She was sweet, but she was too young and a bit naïve and I didn’t want to take advantage of that. We met for coffee a few more times, and one evening we went for a stroll by the polluted river near China Daily. She told me about her family and friends and said she was moving to Shanghai after graduation to work for a European shipping company.

  She complained openly about the Chinese government, and I was surprised by her hostility toward it.

  “You know, a lot of s
tudents apply for Communist Party membership. But I didn’t.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because I don’t believe in it.”

  “Really? Do you think China would be better off with a democracy?”

  “Of course it would be better. I think ninety-five percent of Chinese people believe that.”

  I enjoyed talking to her and regretted that she was moving. We could have been friends, I thought. But I could tell she was thinking differently. She seemed to be looking for some assurance that I found her attractive.

  We walked back to the university and sat on a bench near the basketball courts. She was silent for a few moments and then turned to look at me.

  “Can I ask you something?” she said.

  “Okay.”

  “What do you think of me?”

  “I think you’re great.”

  “Do you like me?”

  “Sure, I like you, but to be honest, I’m not looking for a relationship or anything.”

  She looked toward the empty basketball courts.

  “So we’re friends, right?” she said.

  “Yeah, we’re friends.”

  A few days before she left for Shanghai, we went for coffee at the university. I wished her luck, shook her hand, and we said goodbye.

  Later that night, I was playing pool with Rob in Sanlitun when my phone rang. The voice on the phone explained that she was Mary’s friend.

  “Where are you? Mary is very drunk,” she said. “She wants to talk to you.”

  “Me? Why?”

  “I don’t know. She just says she wants to talk to you. She’s very drunk.”

  “I think maybe you should take her home and have her call me tomorrow.”

  A few minutes later, Mary called me herself. She was weeping and said she had to see me right away. She said she was downstairs from the bar I was in, waiting for me.

  When I found Mary in the busy alley below, she was almost hyperventilating. Her eyes were red and makeup-smeared.