Apologies to My Censor: The High and Low Adventures of a Foreigner in China

by Mitch Moxley

  Walking back to my apartment one afternoon, I ran into an Australian editor named Martin, who was in his forties with a friendly smile of smoke-stained teeth and wiry gray hair. Martin had been in Beijing for more than a year. “Things are changing here,” he told me, pointing to the influx of foreign staff. “Sure, it’s a drab government paper. China Daily doesn’t break news because the government doesn’t break itself. But it’s changing.” He mentioned a few recent stories that had been critical of the government, before noticing the skepticism creeping on my face. “You’ll have a ball here,” he said.

  But I had my doubts. It only took a few weeks for my initial high to wear off and I started to dread going to work. When I arrived in Beijing, I wanted life at China Daily to be crazy, movie-premise crazy, communist spies leaning over my shoulder, filtered e-mails, phone taps, and threatening late-night altercations with men in Mao suits. In my imagination, I would be a fly on the wall and expose the massive state propaganda apparatus from within. The book would be huge—maybe I’d be kicked out of China and return to Toronto, triumphantly, just in time for my book launch. China—and China Daily—promised so much for me, and more than anything it promised escape from the boring, depressing, and uninspiring life I had been leading in Canada.

  So it was a massive disappointment to discover that my job was, above all else, boring, depressing, and uninspiring. The office wasn’t crazy at all. A little nutty, maybe, but more in a funny ha-ha sort of way than a Stalinist Russia way.

  My shift was quite possibly the worst in global journalism. The office at night was eerily silent—I could hear the buzz of the lights and every tiny squeak of my chair. Not many people worked evenings, and few of them were among the dozen-odd young foreign staff I would see at lunchtime in the canteen and around the China Daily campus. While I toiled at my desk during the warm spring evenings, I was sure the rest of my colleagues were out getting drunk and having the time of their lives.

  As I settled into my new routine, I soon began to miss things about Canada. I missed my friends back home, and my ex-girlfriend, and my family. After work, I would return to my apartment and watch episodes of The Wire on my computer for hours, wondering if I’d made the right decision to take the job at all.

  As if the universe was trying to remind me that China would not always be an easy place to live, I soon experienced my first vicious bout of Beijing belly. Every foreigner gets this illness at some early point during his or her stay, and I was no exception. Mine just came at the worst possible time, sparked, I suspect, by a considerable portion of Gongbao jiding—Kung Pao chicken—I’d eaten the night before.

  The onset happened as my new couch was being delivered. The apartments China Daily provided were nice enough, but they were sparsely furnished—a TV, a few uncomfortable pleather chairs, a bed with a thin blanket. Mine was spacious, with a bedroom, dining room and kitchen, and a living room. But it also felt empty. So a few weeks into my tenure at the paper I followed the lead of the other foreign staff and made a trip to IKEA.

  I strolled through the massive store—the second-largest IKEA in the world at the time—with patrons who didn’t so much shop as they did lounge on the couches, nap in the beds, snap photos, and order absurd amounts of food at the cafeteria. Fighting my way through the masses, I bought a small couch, a few towels, some lamps, and other odds and ends to make my place feel a little more like home.

  A few days later, I was set to have my first class with a Chinese teacher, named Ms. Song, who taught the expat staff at China Daily. She was coming to my apartment at 10 a.m., around the same time I had arranged for IKEA to deliver the couch. At about 9:50 a.m., I got a call from some workers at the base of my building ready to bring up the couch. In the elevator on the way down, I felt a rumble in my gut. I have never experienced anything as sudden and lethal as the pain that developed in my stomach that morning. When I met the workers at the foot of my building, I was ready to explode.

  I rushed them into the elevator, and they struggled to get the couch to fit. Everything seemed to be happening in slow motion. The door shut. I watched the lights above the elevator door. Two . . . three . . . four . . .

  I burst out of the elevator on the eighth floor, flung open the door to my apartment, and pointed the deliverymen toward the living room. The explosion that occurred once I got in the bathroom was inhuman. It was rapid-fire, machine-gun diarrhea. It sprayed all over the toilet, the floor, the walls. Not to mention all my clothes.

  Once all was said and done, I took one of my new IKEA towels and wiped up what I could. I sprayed down the bathroom with the shower head, threw my underwear and socks in the garbage, and put my jeans back over my still-filthy legs. There was a knock on the bathroom door, and some chattering in Chinese. I opened it a crack to find a small Chinese woman I’d never seen before looking back at me with curious eyes, standing in front of the crew of IKEA deliverymen.

  “Ms. Song?” I asked, my forehead damp with sweat.

  She nodded.

  “Nice to meet you,” I said. “I’ll just be a minute, okay?”

  “They want to know if they can go,” she said, nodding toward the workers.

  “Uh, yeah, tell them they can go.”

  I shut the door and washed myself off as quickly as I could. I wiped up whatever was left on the floor with a second brand-new IKEA towel, dried the sweat from my face, and reluctantly made my way out of the bathroom, praying that Ms. Song didn’t have to use it.

  “Okay,” I said nervously. “Maybe we should go to a café for the lesson? It’s not very good light in here. I just need to change into shorts first. It’s very warm today.”

  We walked to a nearby coffee shop, and for the duration of our two-hour class, my first Chinese lesson ever, I couldn’t stop wondering if Ms. Song was noticing the pungent smell of shit wafting off my legs.

  One of my frustrations at work was that many of the stories I was assigned to edit at China Daily didn’t make sense. Talking to the Chinese reporters often left me even more confused, so I would often clean up the copy or rewrite it entirely without actually understanding the point of the story, and then send it along to the Chinese sub-editor. If I didn’t understand what was going on in the story, they certainly didn’t.

  China Daily features, a colleague told me, were to be positive and “happy.” News involving the Three T’s—Taiwan, Tibet, and the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre, all highly combustible issues—was tightly controlled, and anything remotely sensitive was so biased it became laughable. On one occasion, at a meeting with the business editors, I was told China Daily would not write stories about Germany for the time being because Chancellor Angela Merkel had recently met with the Dalai Lama. Thus the world’s fourth-largest economy, according to China Daily, had simply vanished.

  This type of “journalism” went on in spite of the China Daily Code of Journalism Ethics, which had been included in a booklet I had received upon arrival: “Factual, Honest, Fair, Complete.”

  Before I came to China, I wondered if working at a state-owned newspaper was a step in the wrong direction. Now I wondered if it wasn’t a giant leap. Among foreigners in Beijing, China Daily was a laughingstock. And although I’d had hopes of serving in a mentor role to the Chinese reporters, imbuing them with all the vast wisdom I’d gained in journalism school and in my brief career as a reporter, nobody at China Daily seemed especially interested in what I had to say. Foreign experts’ editorial suggestions were routinely ignored; we had next to no input about what went into the paper. That applied especially to me, one of the youngest foreigners on staff.

  Meanwhile, my freelance ambitions were dead upon arrival. The city and country were so enormous and confusing, I had no idea what to write about. Every time I came up with an idea I thought would sell, I discovered within the span of a five-minute Internet search that the story had been done—about five years earlier. After two months in Beijing, I h
adn’t sold a single freelance article. When I told some of my foreign colleagues about my book idea, they laughed. “You and everybody else,” one scoffed.

  At work, I went through the motions, but it was difficult to take the job seriously. A regular feature in the paper called China Scene gathered unusual stories from around the country. Many of them were obviously exaggerated, and some days I was asked to edit these on top of the business pieces. China Scene could be highly entertaining, but editing these puzzling little blurbs was certainly not what I had in mind when I embarked on a career in journalism.

  Speaking, Dancing Parrot Wins Bird Skills Competition

  A thirty-six-year-old parrot that can speak and dance won the all-round title at the first China Bird Skill Competition in Yuelushan, a scenic spot in Changsha, capital of Hunan Province, on Tuesday.

  The parrot can also push a cart, do sums, distinguish the denomination of renminbi and play on a swing.

  Participants included babblers, quails, mynahs and doves.

  Something had to change.

  3

  Foreign Friends

  Tall Rice was born on a business card.

  A month after I started at China Daily, I went to the business editor—a tiny, middle-aged woman with graying hair named Ms. Feng—and asked to be moved to the day shift as a writer. “I’m a writer,” I told her. “I was hired as a writer. I want to be a writer.”

  Before granting my request, Ms. Feng wanted to test my reporting chops. She assigned me to accompany a Chinese reporter to an interview with a foreign executive of a major American company. (It would be a fateful interview, though I didn’t know it at the time.) For the meeting I needed business cards, which are essential for formal interactions in China, handed over proudly with two hands at every introduction. But before I could get business cards, I needed a Chinese name.

  I enlisted one of my cubicle neighbors, a Chinese reporter who went by the English name Lois, to help me. Lois was a lovely twenty-seven-year-old who accepted my request with vigor and spent the better part of an hour scribbling different characters on a piece of paper, trying to create my perfect Chinese name.

  As I edited a story, she slipped the paper on my keyboard. There were two characters written on it.

  “That means rice. That means tall, or high. It’s Mi Gao,” she said.

  “Rice Tall?”

  “Tall Rice is better.”

  Harry peaked his head over the cubicle wall. “Ha! That’s a stupid name.”

  “No it’s not!” Lois insisted. “Mi, because your name’s Mitch. And Gao because you’re tall. And the characters are beautiful.”

  They were beautiful characters. “Mi Gao. Tall Rice.” I thought for a second. “It’s great. I love it.”

  Although when said aloud it could be confused for the Chinese word for “rice cake,” my new name was fitting, since as far as I could tell I was the tallest employee at China Daily. Introductions to members of the Chinese staff I had not yet met usually included compliments about my height, and word traveled quickly that there was a tall guy working at the paper. Basketball is massive in China—millions play and it’s the NBA’s second-biggest market. Since Yao Ming’s emergence as an international star, China had fallen in love with basketball, and the folks at China Daily were no exception. The paper hosted a game on Saturday at nearby courts and put a team together to play against other media companies and government departments around the city.

  Not long after I started working at the paper, a member of the Chinese staff came by my desk to recruit me. I told him I’ve played my whole life, and I would be happy to play with the team. That Saturday, I went to the outdoor courts at the university across from China Daily with a dozen or so members of the staff, mostly Chinese and a few foreigners who hadn’t played much basketball. I am six foot three, and other than Rob, who was about my height, I was several inches taller than anyone else on the court. My shooting and driving abilities played well in the Chinese game, in which absolutely zero defense is played. The hoops were about nine and a half feet high, which meant I could dunk. This caused quite the stir.

  Within a few weeks I was the basketball sensation of the three-square-block area around China Daily. I wish it was because I’m a naturally gifted athlete, but basketball in China is simply different from the Western game. For one, in North America players don’t often wear jeans. On the indoor courts where we sometimes played, a layer of dust covered everything, so you didn’t so much run down the court as you did skate or ski. Players often refreshed themselves between games with a cigarette, which they smoked inside the building at the edge of the court.

  Soon after my debut, China Daily organized a game with a team from the Ministry of Health. Our captains had recruited another basketball talent, an Australian in the features section named Ben. He would be our point guard. The excitement around the office was palpable, and the paper’s Chinese-language monthly newsletter ran a Q&A with me—or rather my new alter ego, Mi Gao.

  China Daily: Please give some comments on our basketball club.

  Mi Gao: I think more games need to be arranged against teams outside China Daily. A couple of times I was told we had a game only to show up at the gym to find it was a scrimmage against other players from China Daily. Real games will help us play better as a team.

  CD: What did you learn or benefit from our basketball club?

  MG: I learned I am the tallest person at China Daily.

  A few days before our game against the Ministry of Health, the foreign editor came to my desk and told me with great disappointment that the game had been postponed.

  “What happened?” I asked.

  “They found out you could dunk,” he said solemnly.

  “But I can’t actually dunk on a regulation net.”

  He shrugged. “They want a month to prepare.”

  The extra preparation proved futile: we played the game a month later and pummeled them. I didn’t dunk.

  The interview with the foreign businessman that Ms. Feng had assigned was scheduled to last three hours on a Friday morning, the one day of the week I worked the day shift, editing the opinion pages. I mentioned this to the reporter, a husky man with a bowl cut who was surnamed Lu, the week before the interview, and he said it was no problem; we’d cover my questions first and then I could step out and return to the office to work my shift.

  The interview came and went, and I awaited word from editors about my hoped-for switch to the day shift as a writer. The night shift did not suit me; it made me feel comatose and envious of anybody who worked normal hours. I was still struggling with freelance story ideas, and I hoped that moving to a reporting position would propel me into action. There was an exciting world to explore beyond the China Daily gates, and I felt like I was being robbed of the opportunity to get out into it. I focused all my resentment on China Daily.

  “Anybody who believes China Daily is a real newspaper is fooling themselves,” I told Rob on one of my bad days. “It’s a fucking joke.”

  A few weeks after my interview with the foreign business executive, the time came for my two-month evaluation. Mr. Wang, of the Tennessee sweater vest, sent the evaluation in an e-mail and asked me into his office for a meeting. “This is an overall reevaluation of your work, which was done among copy editors and editors who have been working with you in the past months,” the e-mail read. “On the basis of the assessment sheets collected, we got the following results. Your average score is 10.25 out of 20
points, which is 51.25 out of 100 points.”

  Fifty percent? What had I done wrong? It would be a lie to say I was enjoying the work, but I arrived on time, did what was required of me, and hadn’t heard any complaints up until now.

  I pulled up a chair in Mr. Wang’s office as he leaned over his keyboard and browsed the document he’d sent me. “Everything is okay . . . editing skills are fine . . . headlines . . . attitude . . . We are happy.” He said the editors had decided to make me a writer in the features section.

  “But why is my score so low?” I asked.

  Mr. Wang dodged the question. “I can tell you’re a bright young man and I look forward to seeing more of your stories.” He played with his glasses. He looked nervous and I decided to press him.

  “But fifty percent. I’m just curious to know why the editors ranked me so low. What are they unhappy with?”

  Mr. Wang hesitated for a moment. “There is some concern,” he said, “that you walked out of an interview.”

  I shook my head. “Excuse me? Walked out of an interview?”

  “Yes, with a foreign business executive.”

  “What? No. I mean, I left the interview early, yeah, but I had cleared that with the reporter in advance.”

  “The reports I have been given indicate that you walked out of the interview. I will look into it, but for now we look forward to seeing more of your good stories in the paper.”

  The next day I approached Lu, the reporter I had accompanied to the interview, and told him about my evaluation. “They’re upset because I left the interview early,” I said.

  “Yes.” He smiled sheepishly. “Some people thought that was”—lowering his voice to a whisper—“quite rude.”

  “Rude? I cleared it with you before we went! What did you tell them?”

  He waved me off. “I will talk to them,” he said, continuing to type on his computer.