by Mitch Moxley
Soon the walls were melting. I sat down at the bar and could barely lift my arms. People tried to talk to me, but I couldn’t respond. “Are you all right?” Max asked, patting me on the back. I was not. I stumbled to the bathroom to wash my face and saw devils in the bathroom tiles.
I emerged from the bathroom, and Rob and Max laughed at me when I told them I needed to go home. I caught a cab, and when I made it back to my apartment, I took two allergy tablets in a desperate attempt to sleep it off. It didn’t work. My heart raced and I hated myself. I stared at the ceiling, eyes wide open, until the sun came up, when the panic finally subsided and I managed to get a few hours of shaky sleep.
I eventually drifted away from the Potters of China Daily. One Sunday, when I was filling in for a colleague editing the Monday paper, still hungover from a late night of boozing the night before, I grew annoyed with myself. I surely felt a hundred times better than I did in Toronto, but was this why I’d come to China? To hang out in seedy bars and coast through life either drunk or hungover? Partly, yes. But still, I thought, there must be more to Beijing life than this. The summer had been fun, but I hadn’t fulfilled my promise to make more strides with my freelance career, even though I spent large chunks of my day surfing the Internet for story ideas. My Chinese was virtually nonexistent. I could barely motivate myself to pick up the phone for the articles I was supposed to be writing for China Daily. I was partying too hard and needed things to calm down in the fall.
I eventually found more friends my age and grew less intrigued with the darker side of Beijing, avoiding the Den or Maggie’s whenever possible. But the more I got to know Potter and his friends, the more I felt I understood them and I realized they could also be decent people. A friendship like David and Potter’s struck me as truly rare. They would die for each other; they just lived by a different set of rules, lived in a different reality. They lived in Chinese Neverland—they had permanent residency, in fact.
Later, Rob and I grew apart, too, and as time went on he became increasingly isolated, spiraling into a deep depression. He stopped hanging out with many of the China Daily staff, myself included. The only people he seemed to trust were Potter, David, and a few of their friends, and he refused to attend any event that included the majority of China Daily’s expat staff.
Rob seemed to know what he was becoming and he mostly embraced it. But he had doubts. A friend relayed to me a story about one afternoon when Rob and Potter sat in the China Daily lobby, smoking cigarettes and talking. Rob needed advice. He was single, lonely, drinking too much. He was lost.
“But this is the life, right? Freedom. Doing whatever I want,” Rob said. “I mean, look at you; you’re happy, right?”
“What do you think, mate?” Potter replied. “I’m fucking miserable.”
Two years later, Potter died of a heart attack. After being laid off from China Daily, he moved to another state-owned paper that had launched an English version. He was found alone in his apartment after several days, when colleagues wondered why he hadn’t shown up for work.
After Potter’s death, his friends created something of a shrine to him in one of his favorite Beijing bars. On the wall at the back of the bar were photos of Potter and his buddies drinking Carlsberg and Johnnie Walker, smoking cigarettes, laughing it up. Living a life I would later worry might suck me in, too.
5
On Assignment
Ms. Feng’s instructions for most of the stories I wrote for China Daily were straightforward: “Find out what Westerners think.”
It was clear early on that Pulitzer Prize–winning journalism would not be expected of me as a writer for China Daily, and before long, I owned the “What Westerners Think About Stuff” beat. Property prices, Chinese products, websites about China—I was tasked to find out what foreigners thought about it all. It seemed the editors simply wanted me out of sight, out of mind, and that was fine with me.
The stories I was assigned were mostly puff pieces that would be tucked into the business section’s back pages or in a weekend supplement called Business Weekly. One of the first stories I wrote for China Daily, with a Chinese cowriter, was about an Israeli products fair downtown. We sampled olives and hummus and wine. It was a lovely afternoon, but it wasn’t a story. It shouldn’t even have garnered a brief, but we wrote a feature about it anyway, reporting—despite a total lack of substantiating evidence—that Israeli goods were taking the Chinese market by storm.
For another story, the editors sent me to Beijing’s famous Silk Street market. Silk Street, or Xiushui, had long been a symbolic thorn in the side of Western governments and companies that wanted China to crack down on counterfeit products and intellectual property rights violations. In a rare victory for legitimate brands, Chinese authorities had recently “reorganized” Xiushui to concentrate on high-quality silk while eliminating fake goods. China Daily, in fact, wrote a story declaring the market to be 100 percent free of counterfeit products.
“Find out what Westerners think about that,” Ms. Feng said.
I arrived at the Silk Market to find the place full, from floor to ceiling, with fake products—jeans, jackets, shoes, underwear, everything. Whatever one wanted, it was all there, and it was almost all counterfeit. The silk was real, so I was told, but there were no foreigners buying it. In fact, fake stuff was exactly what foreigners wanted. “I just want cheap crap to bring back as presents,” one young American told me. (I did a little shopping myself, buying a pair of knockoff Calvin Klein underwear.)
The next morning at China Daily, I relayed my conclusion that the reason foreigners went to Xiushui was for cheap knockoffs, not expensive silk. I was wearing the evidence.
“You can’t mention counterfeit,” the Business Weekly editor said. “We could get sued.”
“But the stuff is counterfeit. The whole market is counterfeit.”
“But the government has really cracked down on the intellectual property rights issue, sooooo . . . ,” he trailed off.
After some debate with my editor, I was allowed to report that foreigners liked the market for its “low-cost goods.” All mentions of knockoffs were stripped from the story.
While writing government-friendly puff pieces took up most of my workweek, Friday was the one day I still worked an editing shift, polishing the China Daily opinion pages. Many of the articles weren’t so much arguments supported by fact but rants supported by nothing. Many violated everything I had ever learned about journalistic ethics, including China Daily’s own code: “Factual, Honest, Fair, Complete.” It was sometimes hard to stomach editing the opinion pages, but I didn’t have much choice. I knew any complaints would fall on deaf ears.
The articles themselves proved tricky to edit. When articles I edited for the business section were poorly written, I would return them to the reporter for rewrites before I took to editing the story. I couldn’t do this with the opinion pages, however; the authors were often senior editors or important Chinese academics from leading universities.
One day I edited an op-ed praising China’s state-required college entrance exam—the bane of every senior high school student in the country. Universities selected students based almost entirely on their exam scores. The story was repetitive and nonsensical. It was the fifth of seven stories of a thousand-plus words I was supposed to edit that day, and I was getting fed up. I completely rewrote the story, which we were discouraged from doing. I removed all redundancies, awkward sentences, and unnecessary jargon. The resulting story was about half the length of the original. Although it still lacked a point, at least it was written in clear, proper English.
Late in the afternoon, one of the opinion page’s editors, a friendly middle-aged Chinese man with a gap-toothed smile, approached my desk. He removed his glasses and sighed.
“Moxley,” he said, confusing the order of my names. “We have a problem. You have polished too much. We cannot fit the stories on
to the page. It’s too short.”
“A lot of it was repetitive,” I said. “In some paragraphs the author was trying to make one point but saying it in four different ways. So I changed it to one way.”
“Yes, the polishing is okay, but we cannot fit it on the page.”
After a few moments of stalemate, I agreed to redo the edits. As the editor walked away I opened the original story. Without making any changes, I sent it back to him, the word-for-word original—the same way it ran in the next day’s paper.
Nobody said a thing.
The next week I showed up at work, and Harry, my anti-foreigner, anti-Shanghainese, anti-Taiwanese deskmate, was gone. My new neighbor introduced himself as Wang—“just Wang is okay,” he said. (For newcomers to China, keeping track of people surnamed Wang can be daunting.) Wang was the same age as me, thin and bespectacled, with immaculate hair parted to the side. He was a Communist Party member, he told me, not because he was necessarily interested in politics or the Party but because it was key for career success. Membership mostly entailed spending the odd weekend away at Party conferences, where officials would drone on about policy and ideology for hours. Wang covered natural resources for the paper, and he was good at his job. He worked the phones all day and filed clean copy.
One Friday, a few weeks later, I noticed Wang was proofreading the opinion pages I had edited. Initially I took this as a slight to my work, and then I became nervous that my bosses had figured out that I didn’t actually read the proofs.
“Why do they need you to work as a proofreader anyway?” I asked. “You’re already working all day as a reporter.”
“They need me to look for political mistakes.”
“Political mistakes? Like what?”
“Like Taiwan and Hong Kong, for example. Or another example: the other day there was a reference to South Korea as ‘Korea.’ That is not acceptable. Because there are two Koreas, South Korea and North Korea, and one Korea cannot represent both Koreas. If we have that, North Korea will call China Daily and be very upset with us.”
“I see.”
I pulled out a proofreading sheet and found a story that mentioned Taiwan as a Chinese province.
“Hey, I found a political mistake here. Shouldn’t this say ‘China and Taiwan,’ which are two separate countries? Like North and South Korea?”
Silence. Wang grabbed the paper and held the sheet of paper inches from his glasses.
“I’m joking,” I said.
Wang just laughed nervously.
I was much better suited to the day shift, and my mood perked up accordingly. Working from ten to six improved my social life, but I still wasn’t finding much in the way of freelance success. I wrote a piece about China’s stock market for a Canadian business magazine, and I was commissioned a few stories for local English magazines. I pitched North American newspapers and magazines regularly but without much luck. Many e-mails were ignored completely—so frequently, in fact, that I sometimes e-mailed myself just to confirm my messages were actually going through.
I often met foreign journalists who worked for well-known publications—the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, Time, Newsweek, and others. Beijing was stocked with foreign correspondents, and I felt grossly inadequate whenever I socialized with them, imagining them laughing at my career misfortune whenever I went to the bar to order a drink.
At night, lying in bed on hot summer nights—one year away from the Olympics—I would ruminate about my station in life. I wanted to be writing for marquee magazines, to some day walk into a bookstore and see a book I’d written. But I had no idea how to get there. And when I looked around the office at some of my colleagues—beat-down, dreary-eyed, wearing the same outfit they’d worn all week—it was clear that China Daily was not a path to great success.
One day in late August, Ms. Feng approached my desk and told me I would be sent with a team of Chinese reporters to cover the first World Economic Forum held in China, called “Summer Davos,” in the booming coastal city of Dalian. I would be the token laowai on our reporting squad. (Laowai is the colloquial term for “foreigner” in Chinese, literally meaning “old outsider.”)
I was at once flattered at being sent and slightly concerned that it would lead to actual responsibility at the paper, something I wanted to avoid so I could use office hours to covertly concentrate on finding freelance stories.
“You’ll be staying at a four-star hotel,” Ms. Feng said, with a nod that suggested, How about that?
Until the day of our departure a great deal of enthusiasm was generated among the business reporters about the “four-star” hotel in which we were booked. From the Beijing airport all the way to Dalian the talk was all about the four-star hotel. I got swept up in it as well, imagining the trip as more vacation than business trip: watching HBO in my four-star room and lounging in a sauna at the four-star spa downstairs.
After arriving in Dalian we drove in a cab through the city, passed the Shangri-La, the Kempinsky, the Sheraton, and a luxury Japanese hotel, before pulling into the Dalian Delight Hotel. It wasn’t horrible, but four stars it was not. (At least not by international standards; behind the receptionist desk was a plaque from the China Tourism Bureau with four stars prominently displayed.) My room was small, with dim yellow lights, faded carpets, and cigarette burns in the sheets, despite a no-smoking sign on the wall.
The Chinese staff was two or more to a room. I was given my own room, which made me feel uneasy. The Chinese reporters worked hard and carried the burden of actually putting out a paper, while I knew that very little would be expected from me on this trip.
After check-in, Xiao Zhang, a handsome young editor who worked on the international desk, gave me my first assignment.
“Please write a story about your impressions of Dalian,” he said.
“My impressions of Dalian?”
“Yes. What do you think of Dalian?”
“I don’t know. We just got here.”
“Maybe you should go and walk around, and then write about your impressions of Dalian.”
“Like, related to business? Or travel, or what?”
“Just impressions.”
“Okay . . .”
So I set out to discover Dalian. The city was by far the prettiest I had seen in China—clean, with wide, tree-lined streets and green spaces, and a decent beach close to downtown. Big squares defined the city center, paid for by growing software, tourism, and shipping industries. The city looked more like it belonged in Japan or Korea than China.
I strolled down by the shore, which was dominated by massive apartment buildings that looked like castles from Disneyland. A friendly young Chinese couple approached me. They were curious to know what I was doing in the city.
“China is changing very fast,” the husband said via his wife, who translated.
“This was all once seaside,” the wife told me. “Twenty years ago there was nothing here.” She spoke not with regret—the apartments were colossal eyesores—but with tremendous pride. “We hope you enjoy our beautiful Dalian.”
The city was emblematic of China’s economic miracle and a fitting home for the Economic Forum, which was held at a new conference center across town from our hotel. The meeting, dubbed “the Inaugural Annual Meeting of the New Champions,” was to celebrate the emergence of multinational companies from developing countries. Business and government leaders from around the world were in attendance. Chinese premier Wen Jiabao gave a speech on the opening night. Three-time Pulitzer Prize–winner and New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman was there, as were many prominent CEOs from global companies.
Journalists from Time, the Wall Street Journal, the Economist, and every other major news organization that had a presence in China were covering the forum. This brought back my feelings of inadequacy. During the days of the forum, China Daily gave me free rein to attend
whichever talks I wanted to. Whereas other China Daily reporters were tied down to the media center, I was free to wander around all day with no obligation to even check in with the team. I should have been out making contacts, developing sources, and setting up the exclusive interviews with bigwig business types that China Daily so lusted after. Instead, I wandered around aimlessly, my ID badge shamelessly flipped around so no one would know where I worked.
The forum was very much a China lovefest, and if anything of significance was accomplished there, I didn’t see it. The majority of sessions were behind closed doors, and the discussions open to the media were mostly contrived and bland. Each panel invariably had one Chinese member who would rattle off facts and figures and boast about China’s economic might, its commitment to the environment, and the development of a “harmonious society”—Chinese president Hu Jintao’s catchphrase. The foreigners on the panel would smile and nod, never questioning anything that was said.
After two days and after only contributing a few blurbs alongside my “Dalian impressions” story, I was feeling guilty about my insignificant contribution. I flipped through the forum’s schedule and noticed a session called “Soft Power: Influencing the World with a Chinese Touch.” The discussion would be moderated by Fortune magazine Asia editor Clay Chandler, featuring panelists such as Thomas Friedman; Sha Zukang, the United Nations undersecretary-general for the Department of Economic and Social Affairs; and prominent businesspeople from China and abroad. It sounded interesting and I decided to attend.
At the session, Chandler started things off by criticizing Premier Wen’s speech from the night before. Wen had given a boilerplate speech, listing off GDP figures, economic and environmental promises, etc.
“It was an opportunity for him to say something new,” Chandler told the audience. “But he didn’t.”
What ensued was a lively and candid debate that, for the first time I’d seen, contained both praise for and criticisms of China.