Apologies to My Censor

by Mitch Moxley

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

  “Do 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.

  My 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.’ ”

  Dating 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 Fall
ing 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.”

  The 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.”

  Music 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.

  Much 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.

  Then, under the lights and with adrenaline coursing through my body, I had an experience not unlike the music video, where I felt like I wasn’t really there, that instead I was watching it all happen. The anxieties and worries and doubts about my life in China, my life in general, were momentarily gone, and all of a sudden I was struck with disbelief at the moment in which I’d found myself—thirty-one years old on a dating show, a Chinese dating show, still there in that wild nation after all these years.

  Later, in the weeks and months that followed, whenever I thought about the strange episode, whenever I told the story, I would be reminded of all the other unbelievable places and situations I’d somehow fallen ass-backwards into over the years, and I would ask: What if it all just didn’t happen? What if, instead of opening China Daily’s online job posting while sitting in a Toronto coffee shop on a horrible winter afternoon, I had simply folded up my laptop and gone home? What if, after China Daily offered me the job, I’d simply said, “Nope, that’s just too fucking crazy,” and stayed put? What if the financial crisis, which pinned me in Beijing, hadn’t happened? What if I had followed through on one of the innumerable times when I got so sick of China I swore I was going to go home?

  So many moments
were now seared into my memory and forever would be: walking home from the China Daily offices on a warm summer night, puffing a smoke bummed from a colleague after working the late shift; looking out my window at Comrade Wu’s place, watching a hazy sunset, counting down the days until the Olympics and waiting for Julia to come over; the trips—Xinjiang, Harbin, Erlian, Macao, Guangzhou, and everywhere in between; standing on the stairs of an outdoor mall, filming a music video and trying my best to lower my heartbeat; lying in bed wide awake after nearly dying on a Sichuan mountain, trying to make sense of it all. This moment, too, standing onstage being vetted by thirteen Chinese women, would be permanent. I would have it with me forever.

  China was an incredible place at an incredible time, and I had lived through it. I had lived it. I was living it. For almost five years, I had been searching high and low for stories about China I could write and bring to the world. But the story was there the whole time: it was the life I was leading. And in the days after filming a Shanghai dating show—when I became a minor celebrity in my hutong neighborhood, when my neighbors started calling me Comrade Mi Gao—I realized that it was a life to be grateful for.

  I realized something else that fall, in weeks after appearing on “One Out of 100,” which would turn out be one of the last random China adventures in a long line of random China adventures that once seemed to stretch on forever.

  I realized I was ready. I was ready to go home.

  Wherever that turned out to be.

  Epilogue

  FALL 2012

  Almost a year after singing Elvis on a dating show, after more than half a decade in China, I did what I should have done on my first day: I enrolled in an intensive Chinese language program. And the first thing I learned at school was that despite all the time I’d spent in China, despite the few thousand dollars I’d invested in private schools and countless hours in cafés with Guo Li, my Chinese language ability was still, as Comrade Wu once joyfully pointed out, terrible.