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

by Mitch Moxley

  It was at night when the loneliness of living abroad hit the hardest. Sometimes I would wake up in the middle of the night and stumble to the bathroom. I would remember that I was in Beijing and be suddenly disoriented. I’d look at myself in the bathroom mirror as I peed and be gnawed by fear. Fear that I would never make it as a writer. That I was wasting my life. I thought about all the decisions that had led me to China and wondered if every major choice I had made in my life was the wrong one.

  But then I would think about walking around Toronto the year before with my shoulder bag giving me back pain, the grueling existence of a failing freelance journalist, and all the things that drove me to China, and the panic would subside.

  What I needed, I decided, was a girlfriend. A companion. A fling would do. I found one, by accident, on Halloween.

  A group from China Daily had tickets to a Halloween party in a club in a mall downtown called the Place. That afternoon, Rob and I went to the Silk Market to pick out costumes. Options were limited so we decided to dress as gangsters. I bought a black tie, suspenders, a gray fedora, and a toy gun to go with a truly tragic pinstriped charcoal suit that I’d had made for my trip to Dalian. When I put my outfit on later that night, I looked more like a gay Swiss yodeler than a 1930s Chicago gangster. The pants were too baggy, the shirt too tight. The hat made my head look like a shrunken miniature.

  Jon, my American colleague from the Web division, had picked up tickets for Rob and me, and we were all supposed to meet at 8 p.m. at his apartment. Rob, however, had gone to the gym after dinner and was more than two hours late. I grew more furious with each passing minute.

  We arrived at the party around eleven. I quickly got over my costume when I realized that all the girls at the party had used the event as an excuse to wear pretty much nothing. We got drinks and made the rounds, introducing ourselves to whatever group of liberally clothed young women we could find.

  Not long after our arrival, Max said he and his girlfriend were leaving. “Take my drink tickets,” he said, handing me a reel of a dozen tickets.

  As soon as the tickets were in my hand, Rob swooped in and ripped off about eight of them. “I’ll take those,” he said, darting off.

  A few minutes later, Rob handed me four drink tickets and asked me to get him an orange juice. This was during one of Rob’s euphoric upswings when he was working out religiously and cutting down on drinking and smoking. (“My body is a temple,” he told me once, without a hint of irony.)

  “Why can’t you go yourself?” I said, still angry with him for making me wait two hours.

  “I’m dancing.”

  I went to the bar with a friend, an Australian photographer named Chris who was already drunk. I ordered a beer and an orange juice.

  “Get me a beer,” Chris said.

  “Two beers and an orange juice,” I told the bartender.

  When our drinks arrived, I asked Chris for his tickets.

  “What tickets?”

  “Shit,” I said, counting out eight tickets—four of mine, four of Rob’s. Enough for two drinks.

  I sent the orange juice back, figuring Rob could wait a minute for his vitamin C dose while I went and bought new tickets. I went back to the dance floor.

  “I didn’t have enough tickets,” I told Rob. “I’ll go buy more and get your juice in a minute.”

  Rob looked at me with crazy eyes. He snapped. I heard some mutterings through his clenched teeth—“fuck” this and “fuck” that—and the next thing I knew Rob had knocked the beer out of my hand and two-hand-shoved me over a table. I tried to get up, but he shoved me back down, standing over me, screaming something I couldn’t make out. I thought he was going to stomp on my face, when suddenly Chris hauled me to my feet.

  “Let’s get out of here,” he said.

  In the hallway outside the club, Chris and I smoked cigarettes while I fumed about Rob. My hands were shaking.

  And then, through a throng of partyers standing outside the club, I saw a girl. She was wearing a black bra under a see-through mesh top, her tanned brown stomach exposed, and skin-tight blue jeans. Around her neck was a collar that led to the hand of a young foreign man dressed in Goth. She wore heavy makeup, but underneath she was gorgeous. She posed for photos with a group of guys.

  Chris noticed me staring at her.

  “You want to talk to her?” He nodded toward the girl. “Give me your phone.”

  I handed him my phone and he led me by my suspenders across the hall. He tapped the girl on the shoulder. She turned around with a big smile.

  “Yes?” she said.

  “Hey, there. Can we take your picture?” Chris said.

  “Sure.”

  “Okay, you two together,” he said, motioning for the two of us to squeeze together.

  I wrapped my arm around her cool, bare shoulder and Chris snapped a photo on my phone. Then he handed her the phone.

  “Great. Now can we have your number?”

  “Ha-ha. Nice try, guys,” she said.

  I couldn’t place her ethnicity. I thought she was Chinese, but she was speaking with a Russian accent.

  “Are you Chinese?”

  “No, I’m Russian.”

  “You don’t look Russian.”

  “Well, I’m Korean. But born in Russia.”

  I was mesmerized. She was beautiful. She was sexy. She was perfect. She was . . .

  “A slut!”

  “Excuse me?”

  “My costume. I’m dressed as a slut, ha-ha. I didn’t have anything else to wear.”

  “Interesting. You probably shouldn’t tell people that.”

  “Yeah, I know. Actually I don’t know what I am. I just wore whatever clothes I had like this.”

  Her name was Julia. I asked her a few questions about what she was doing in China (studying) and for how long (two years), and then I ran out of things to say. I wanted to ask for her number, but I froze.

  As we left the club, I turned back, waved goodbye, and walked out.

  That week at China Daily, Rob and I played the silent game. We passed each other a few times in the corridor without speaking. We each told colleagues our versions of the story, and we each thought the other was in the wrong.

  Midweek, at lunchtime, Rob and I passed each other on the sidewalk outside China Daily. We stopped and Rob smiled.

  “I just wanted to say . . . sorry,” he said.

  I was shocked. I didn’t think he was capable of apologizing. “Thanks,” I said. “I’m sorry, too.”

  “Give me a hug, mate.”

  We hugged it out right there on the sidewalk. Rob said he would make it up to me on the weekend . . . by buying a gram of coke.

  On Saturday night, we went out to Suzy Wong’s, dipping in and out of the bathroom to snort Rob’s peace offering. As Rob hit on a Chinese model at our table, I looked around the bar and spotted Julia, the Korean-Russian. I stood up immediately. I approached her at the bar and reminded her that we’d met the weekend before. Her smile was wide and beautiful. It lit up the room, and I was intimidated. I took a deep breath, hoped that Rob’s makeup present was masking my nerves, and asked her if she wanted to go for a drink sometime.

  “Sure,” she said.

  “Sure?”

  “Yeah, let’s go for a drink. Let me give you my number.”

  We exchanged phone numbers, my coke-strained heart beating furiously. I thanked her and returned to the table with Rob and his model.

  “Who was that?” Rob asked as I sat down.

  “This girl I met last weekend.”

  “Where’s she from?”

  “She’s Korean but from Russia.”

  “Hmm,” he said. “Krussian.”

  I went out for dinner with Julia, who would forever be known among my friends at China Daily as the Krussian, the following week
at an Indian restaurant near her apartment in Wudaokou, a university neighborhood in northwest Beijing. It was awkward at first; she looked lovely, and I was nervous. At first we had little to talk about and I thought she wasn’t interested in me. She ordered Sprite—a bad sign. Good first dates should always include alcohol, I reasoned. The dinner was slow, and as I paid for the bill, I thought that perhaps this was a dead end.

  On the walk home, I asked her what she usually did on weekends.

  “Go dancing,” she said.

  “You like dancing?”

  “I love dancing.”

  “That’s too bad. I hate dancing.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I’m usually the tallest guy in the bar. When I dance, I feel like everybody’s staring at me. Plus, I’m a terrible dancer. I move like this.”

  I started doing an awkward robotic dance, pumping my fists up and down. She laughed.

  “You are a bad dancer,” she said. Her cheeks were dimpled and rosy when she laughed, and I thought she was adorable.

  We had dinner the next week, and the following Friday I went out with her and her friends. She wore a slim black and white dress, and I barely let her out of my sight. We went to a Latin club, and she even got me dancing a little. Before long, we were kissing in the corner of the club.

  She came to my house that night, and my winter doldrums began to lift.

  All of a sudden life at China Daily didn’t seem so bad. I tackled new feature assignments, pitched a few more freelance stories, and began to focus as best I could on learning Chinese. I met Ms. Song twice a week at my apartment and attended the two free classes she taught at China Daily. I even started learning Chinese characters. It was slow and painful, but at least I was making an effort.

  But for every China high, there’s a China low. After a few weeks, I was back to the Bad China Days. Beijing was cold in late December, and after seeing each other at least once a week for close to two months, Julia went away for vacation. I would have to work throughout the holidays.

  On Christmas morning I sat at my desk, staring blankly at my computer screen and thinking about all the things I was missing in Canada. It was the first time in my twenty-seven years I hadn’t been with my family on Christmas.

  It was a white Christmas in Beijing, but not in the Bing Crosby sense. Outside the office windows, the sky was a toxic white haze of suffocating pollution. The hours passed by glacially. My colleagues and I took a long lunch and exchanged gifts. We tried to put on happy faces, but it didn’t work.

  For the first time, I was truly homesick.

  Every year during the Chinese Lunar New Year, otherwise known as Spring Festival, occurs the largest human migration on earth. In the span of forty days, almost three billion passenger trips are made around the country. Train stations become desperate seas of humanity, where anxious travelers camp for days and weeks to purchase tickets that sell out in minutes. For many of China’s 200 million–plus migrant workers, the Lunar New Year is the one chance they have each year to return home, the one chance to see family and friends.

  For me, escape from Beijing was imperative as well. During Spring Festival, the entire city goes on a massive fireworks binge at all hours of the day and night. For three consecutive days that February, I had been going about my routine amid constant explosions, waking up at dawn to deafening pop-pop-pops, car alarms, and children squealing. For a day, the fireworks are pretty cool, an entire city of eighteen million alight with dangerous explosives that can be purchased on any street corner. After two days, it’s annoying. By day three or four, thoughts creep to murder.

  I was anxious to begin exploring the country again. My life felt lazy and routine: work, DVDs, dinner/drinks, rinse, repeat. I wanted some excitement, and Harbin, a city in northeast China, seemed to offer it. A colleague had visited Harbin a few weeks earlier and stumbled upon a rare attraction: bears wrestling while wearing capes. The strange event occurred at the site of Harbin’s annual ice festival, which featured ice replicas of the Acropolis, the Egyptian pyramids, the Eiffel Tower, and other famous landmarks. My colleague spoke highly of the city’s vodka-fueled nightlife, and taken together it seemed crazy enough to warrant a look.

  I had a few days off and many of my friends, including Julia, were out of town. Through China Daily’s travel agency, Jeremy, Ben, and I managed to buy tickets to Harbin, capital of Heilongjiang province, nine hours to the north, near Siberia.

  We took a morning train and arrived in late afternoon. The temperature was minus twenty degrees Celsius. We promptly took a taxi to an ice bar on the main street and downed shots of vodka under a pair of reindeer horns harnessed to the ice wall.

  Fortified for the cold, we walked toward the yellowish glow of Harbin’s ice city, not far from downtown. Hundreds of families, bundled up in layers of winter clothing, snapped photos in front of ice sculptures and buildings lit up in red, yellow, green, and blue. I followed my colleague’s instructions to the back of the ice city, where she had spotted the wrestling bears a few weeks earlier. We climbed to the top of the Acropolis and spotted the venue we sought: a rest area with Nescafé and Harbin beer signs surrounding a circuslike ring.

  We pulled up to a table next to a foggy window and ordered a round of beers. Families with young children sat at tables around us, anxiously awaiting what was to follow.

  The show began with a Chinese trainer leading a dozen or so mangy wolves around a ring, their gray hair a patchy mix of thick tufts and bald spots. The wolves jumped through hoops and did an assortment of other unimpressive tricks. One particularly haggard wolf was whipped by his master and took a frightened dump in the middle of the ring.

  The wolves were followed by house cats that performed equally lame hoop jumps, followed by a boar that could identify Chinese characters in exchange for a snack, followed by well-groomed poodles that did nothing but sniff each other.

  Exit poodles, enter two lions and a tiger. One male tiger tried, unsuccessfully, to mate with the lion, which was also male. The lion was swapped for a second tiger, and the two were led around the ring by the trainer, jumping through flaming hoops. Toward the end one tiger swiped at another and a skirmish ensued.

  While there was no wrestling in the finale, there was a bear. And it wasn’t wearing a cape. Instead, this poor creature in this freezing northern Chinese city was wearing women’s lingerie. Extra-extra-large women’s underwear and a bra.

  It’s true—I have witnesses.

  The lingerie-wearing bear was led out by the trainer and presented with a two-wheel bicycle, which it proceeded to pedal with its short legs, doing circles around the ring. The bear followed that by skipping a rope swung by the trainer and his assistant and dunking a basketball on a miniature hoop.

  Inside the Nescafé/Harbin beer tent, the crowd went wild. Kids hopped up and down on plastic chairs, clambering for more. Satisfied dads lit up cigarettes and clapped.

  Our jaws were on the floor. “Well, that was fucked-up,” Jeremy said, summing up the entire episode nicely.

  One member of our group, a friend of a friend from North Carolina, looked stunned. He sat hunched over his beer, shaking his head slowly from side to side. “That was just . . . wrong.”

  None of us knew what to make of what we’d seen. I was somewhat ashamed to have even witnessed it. We sat in the smoky Nescafé tent drinking beer and shared a few minutes of contemplative silence.

  Alcohol, we figured, would wash away what had just taken place, and so we went out in search of Harbin’s nightlife. Friends from Beijing had recommended a popular expat hangout called Blues Bar. When we arrived, there were only a few tables of young Chinese, drinking beer and playing a dice game. We ordered drinks and soon more people started arriving.

  We met a group of teachers from Australia and Canada. They ordered bottles of a Chinese-made vodka that tasted like acid. I flipped over a bottle and noticed
on the label that the vodka was made by Anhui Ante Biological Chemistry Co. Ltd.

  “Yo, you know this is made by a chemical company,” I said, presenting the bottle to a spiky-haired Australian.

  He shrugged. “I like to party,” he said, downing a glass of vodka and Coke.

  The teachers took us to a club called the Box, which was packed with both Chinese and foreigners. The foreigners came from all over—the United States, Mexico, Russia, parts of Africa. Some were teaching in Harbin, some studying at the university. Whenever I traveled to places like Harbin, I always marveled that anyone would actually choose to live somewhere like that. For some reason, imagining their lives in this lonely, frozen outpost made me a little sad. I didn’t even want to imagine how the search for deodorant would go down in a city as remote as Harbin.

  The next afternoon we headed for our second animal-related adventure, at the Harbin Siberian Tiger Park, where visitors could feed live animals—including chickens, goats, and cows—to tigers and lions. The park was lively when we arrived in midafternoon, the parking lot abuzz with tour groups and families. A sign at the ticket booth said, in English, “No. 1 Adventure Bus: You’r welcome to take No.1 Adventure Bus to experience the tense feeling of looking at the tigers in close distance, viewing the thrilling scene of tigers’ preying on other animals.” We pooled our money together and bought a goat for about five hundred yuan—seventy dollars.

  On our bus were children as young as five, their curious eyes pressed against the window. We toured the park, where tigers dozed in the cold surrounded by chicken feathers, until we reached a feeding ground. We watched as a park worker in the Jeep in front of us threw a live chicken out of the passenger-side door. (Passengers couldn’t actually feed the animals themselves.) A tiger snatched the chicken in its teeth and ran off into the bushes.

  Our bus continued into the African lion’s den for the goat feed. As soon as we entered the gate, hungry female lions swarmed our minibus, jumping up and pawing at window. Kids wailed. Parents laughed nervously. At the front of the bus a park worker prepared our goat, which looked concerned.