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

by Mitch Moxley

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

  “Whoa, what’s wrong? Why are you crying?”

  She took a few deep breaths.

  “What?”

  “I . . . I . . . love . . .”

  I knew it was coming, but I tried to stop it anyway.

  “Please don’t say—”

  “ . . . you.”

  She started wailing. “I have to tell you this. I love you.”

  “But . . . but we’ve only known each other for two weeks. And we’re not even dating. We’re just friends. Remember? We talked about it.”

  “I know,” she said between flustered breaths, “but I feel like . . . we’re more than . . . just friends.”

  “Even if we were more than just friends—which we’re not—you’re moving to Shanghai in a couple of days.”

  “I thought . . . we could do . . . long distance.”

  “Long distance? No, that’s not an option.”

  The floodgates were opening. I didn’t know how to handle the situation so I stiffened up and leaned against a railing, waiting for her to stop. After a few minutes, she calmed down and dried the tears from her eyes.

  “Can I ask you a question?” she said.

  “Uh, I’m not su—”

  “Did you ever like me?”

  “Yes, I like you. But just as friends.”

  “Okay,” she said, sniffling. “Friends.”

  We shook hands, as friends, and never saw each other again.

  Nearly two years later, the first date I went on as a newly single man in Beijing—not to mention one of China’s 100 Hottest Bachelors—was with a girl named Mei Mei (which means “Beautiful Beautiful” in Chinese). It was a disaster.

  Mei Mei was a Beijing socialite and had a reputation of dating guys with money, something I decidedly did not have. We had met through friends the previous year but had barely spoken the few times we’d bumped into each other. She was the type of girl who when she walked into a bar all eyes turned to her, and not always in a good way. The kind of girl whom guys fantasized about and women loathed. She wore laughable outfits, a ton of makeup, and carried herself with an air of condescension. She was intimidating, and maybe because of that she was surprised when I asked her out for dinner out of the blue one night. (I was slightly inebriated.) She said yes and a few days later, I texted her to arrange a time.

  We met outside Workers Stadium. As she stepped out of her car, my heart started pounding. She was wearing jean shorts that were the size of panties. Six inches of her tiny belly were exposed. A belly-button ring glittered. Her heels were four inches high, and she had fake eyelashes extending off her eyelids like hair combs. She looked absolutely, totally, 110 percent absurd.

  I panicked for a second at the idea of one of my friends spotting us together. Thinking on my feet, I suggested we go to a Chinese-owned Italian restaurant across the street, where, after two years in Beijing and many times passing by the establishment, I had never seen more than one or two patrons dining at a time.

  She agreed. I exhaled.

  I ordered spaghetti; she ordered a lasagna she didn’t eat and coffee she didn’t drink. She spoke virtually no English, and I ran out of things to talk about in Chinese after fifteen minutes. I was still taking lessons with Guo Li almost every day, but my conversational abilities remained limited. For the next forty-five minutes Mei Mei smoked cigarettes and texted her friends on her iPhone, while I twiddled my thumbs and prayed for it to all be over.

  A few weeks later, I went out with a former Miss China contestant who called herself Angel. She hosted a show on Chinese television and we met at a magazine party. The following week, we went on our one and only date, in the same bar where we’d met. I was feeling melancholic that night and didn’t really want to go on a date. I was tired and wanted nothing more than a massage and a movie, but I pushed through anyway, for the story of going out with a Miss China contestant, if nothing else. I arrived early and ordered a glass of wine. She arrived an hour late; I was on my third glass. As soon as she walked in and sat down on the stool beside me, I knocked over my wineglass and it smashed on the bar, sending small pellets of red wine onto her dress. We parted company after an awkward hour. That was the last I saw of Angel.

  Eventually I got the hang of being single in Beijing again, and I enjoyed it, mostly. But more often than not I just never felt on the same page with the Chinese women I went out with. That’s not to say I didn’t meet a lot of intelligent and charming Chinese girls. I did; I just found it difficult to bridge the cultural, not to mention linguistic, gap. And I shudder to think what many of them thought of me. When I went on dates and had to use my Chinese, I became Tall Rice, and I found Tall Rice’s charms to be limited with the opposite sex. Whereas Tall Rice was quick to make people laugh with his poor Chinese and could break the ice like no other, being slow and stupid only went so far with women.

  So I mostly went out with other foreigners, but I didn’t find anything serious after Julia. I enjoyed the freedom of living in China, and because I was always in Beijing on a rolling basis—maybe another six months, maybe a year—it never seemed to make sense to enter into a long-term relationship. At least that’s what I kept telling myself.

  My extended bachelorhood was good news for my friend Ola, who was looking for single men to put in a bachelor auction that summer. Ola was from Poland and ran an event planning company that focused on things like speed dating. We had met through a mutual acquaintance the year before and became quick friends. She had invited me to her singles events on many occasions, and I always declined. I initially turned down her request to do the bachelor auction, too, but eventually capitulated.

  Ola was thrilled. I was skeptical.

  “Oh, come on. It’ll be fun,” Ola said. “Plus, it’s for charity.”

  I tried to back out more than once, but Ola kept playing the fun/charity card. A few days before the event, I met with her and her business partner, Allison, at Café Zarah, and they peppered me with questions that would be used for my onstage Q&A. Questions like “What’s the most romantic thing you’ve ever done?” and “What’s a secret nobody knows about you?”

  My answers were weak, and Ola and Allison exchanged worried glances.

  “Come on, Mitch, just answer truthfully,” Ola said.

  “These questions are crap,” I said. “If you had better questions, I’d give you better answers.”

  “Look, if you really don’t want to do this, we won’t force you,” Allison said, her brow furrowed.

  I sighed. “No, it’s fine. I’ll do it. It’s for charity, right? Okay, a secret nobody knows about me . . . I like to watch romantic comedies on airplanes.”

  “That’s good,” Ola said, scribbling my answer.

  The idea of a bachelor auction terrified me. Standing in front of a crowd of women like a circus monkey while they bid on what would surely be the most awkward date ever did not seem appealing, despite Ola’s assertions that it would be “fun.”

  On the night of the bachelor auction, I guzzled pints of Stella as the crowd started to form. Ola instructed me to “go mingle,” but, instead, I just chatted with a fellow bachelor who was as nervous as I was. I’d brought a few friends to watch: Kathleen and Michelle, two women I had met through friends in the first few months I was in Beijing. They came more or less to watch me squirm, and they seemed to relish the fact that I was so nervous. When they saw that I wasn’t only nervous, I was terrified, they tried to comfort me. “Oh, you’ll do fine, don’t worry,” Michelle said.

  It didn’t help.

  The first bachelor went for 800 yuan, about $125. The next went for a disappointing 300 yuan. Only two women bid on him, and I could tell from offstage that he was embarrassed and angry, which is exactly how I would feel—and might feel in a few minu
tes, since I was up next.

  The whole Q&A portion was a blur, and it seemed to me that nobody was paying attention. After my answer about rom-coms on airplanes, the bidding began.

  There was a brief pause.

  “Two hundred yuan!” someone yelled.

  I couldn’t make out who it was under the spotlights. Another pause.

  “Three hundred!” another woman yelled.

  I recognized that voice.

  “Three hundred yuan? Come on, ladies, we can do better than that!” the host, Allison, said into the mic.

  A long pause.

  “Four hundred!”

  A looooong pause.

  “Five hundred!”

  There was a bidding war between two women. Two women I knew. Two women who were at the auction entirely on my behalf.

  The bidders were my two friends, who, it struck me all at once, were saving me from the humiliating fact that no one else was bidding. Thank you, Kathleen and Michelle.

  Kathleen won out at seven hundred yuan. I hopped off the stage and hugged her.

  “That was awful,” I said. “I need a drink.”

  “You owe me,” she said.

  It turned out I wasn’t one of the hottest bachelors in China, after all.

  13

  The Beijinger

  “Hello. My name is John,” I said—slowly, painfully, enunciating every . . . single . . . syllable. “I like tig-ers.”

  My voice-recording partner, Kristin, wasn’t paying attention. I cleared my throat. She poked her head up and leaned toward the mic. “My name is Jane. I like pandas.”

  “Question,” I said, reading from the text in front of me. “What animal does John like?”

  By the spring of 2009, this is how I was making much of my money. I was writing the odd article, but without a consistent gig I needed extra income, and voice recording provided it. It was a common part-time job for native English speakers in Beijing, and it was remarkably easy. Tom recorded once in a while and had referred me to his boss, who went by either Mr. Wang or Wang Shushu (Uncle Wang), an affable fifty-something with a head of dyed-black hair.

  It turned out I was quite good at voice recording—“You have strong voice,” Uncle Wang told me after my tryout shift. Basically, the job entailed sitting in a studio reading English texts that would be put on CDs and used in schools and universities throughout the country. Millions of Chinese were learning English, and voice recorders were in high demand. I recorded three or four times a week, four hours at a time, and was paid about fifty dollars an hour for my efforts.

  Uncle Wang was a great boss. He used to be a medic in the army but now made his living working sometimes sixteen hours a day in the recording studio. He had a wife and son, but he told me he didn’t like going home. “Come to work is very interesting,” he said, in broken English. “Money, money, money.”

  The problem was, voice recording was boring to a degree I never imagined possible. The studio was a stuffy little room built into an apartment Uncle Wang rented. Occasionally, when my partner was reading a monologue, I could take a minute break and read a page of a book, but the rest of the time we recited mind-numbing dialogues and stared at a computer screen Uncle Wang had placed in front of us so we could check our voice levels and recording time. More than once, I suggested to Kristin that physicists should study the space-time continuum in that room: four hours felt like a geological epoch.

  As dull as I found voice recording, it kept me in the lifestyle to which I had become accustomed. Mine was an easy life that included sleeping until I felt like getting up; long, slow days reading and writing in cafés; an hour here and there at the gym; Chinese lessons; evenings having dinner and drinks with friends or going for indulgent, two-hour, ten-dollar massages (no happy endings). Weekends were a boozy haze; Fridays and Saturdays, without question, were nights out, either at bars or clubs or house parties or all three. There were birthday parties and going-away parties and coming-back parties and (insert excuse for party here) parties. Once in a while, I would head down to Shanghai or Hong Kong for out-of-town parties. Sometimes it felt like life in China was one big party, and it was thanks to voice recording that I was able to keep it all going. Just barely.

  Expat life was a never-ending adventure, and for the most part, I loved it. My circle of friends was growing. My freelance assignments, although not enough to pay the bills alone, kept me motivated, and my Chinese continued to improve. One day I remarked to Tom that I was the happiest I’d ever been in Beijing. China was addictive, and as I celebrated my twenty-ninth birthday that April, I wondered if I was too hooked now to break that attachment.

  But in the midst of it all I would still get sharp pangs of reality. Once, around my birthday, I woke in the middle of the night in a state of panic and realized that I had only a year left in my twenties, that I was nowhere near where I wanted to be in my career—I had published only a handful of stories so far that year—and that I was still living a life with little responsibility, with no money, no job, no girlfriend, and no semblance of what I had once perceived as a normal life, before I got to China.

  My heart was racing—it felt like there was a man inside my chest beating a bass drum. I thought: What am I doing here? Where is this all going? What should I be doing? I lay in bed in Comrade Wu’s rental apartment, with mattress springs digging into my back, and stared at the ceiling for what felt like hours. There was no clear path ahead of me. I had one year to figure it all out, I told myself. The end of the party.

  The idea of turning thirty tormented me. I still felt inadequate whenever I met another journalist who had achieved more than I had. And I felt ashamed when, before voice recording came along and gave me the finances I so desperately needed, I had to ask my parents, who always remained supportive, to bail me out again, the day I looked at my bank statement and realized I was $10,000 in debt and had four dollars in my checking account.

  Beijing, meanwhile, had become so familiar that it startled me when—while walking around town, or sitting in a cab, or waking up in the morning—I would think, Holy shit, I’m in Beijing. I still live in Beijing. The Chinese capital was my home, but it also wasn’t. Canada was my home, but it also wasn’t. I wanted to be in two places at once, and I still didn’t know how to make that happen.

  I didn’t have any answers, so I made the easy choice: I stayed. If I didn’t make it as a journalist, I decided, my time in China would be for naught. I needed to work harder, pitch more, write more, focus on my goals, and be more responsible with money. I became dedicated to doing those things (except, if I’m honest, the last one).

  I felt an immediate weight lifted off my shoulders. I became focused on building on what I had achieved so far. I paid $1,500, borrowed from the Bank of Mom and Dad, to have a professional-looking website designed, and I got slick business cards made at Kinko’s, featuring my name in both English and Chinese. I set up an office in our spare room with a desk overlooking the hutong below. On the desk I placed a small potted tree and a ceramic frog used for tea ceremonies that is meant to bring good luck and money, which would be a very welcome development indeed.

  And then I started planning my next trip: Mongolia. Jim and I had been thinking about traveling to Mongolia since the previous fall, when we reported the human trafficking story. We wanted to look at the aftermath of trafficking and interview women who had returned home. We had a few other stories in mind, and a presidential election there was on the way, so we decided now was the time.

  It was a risk. We didn’t have any clients for the stories, and I would be paying for the trip on my credit card. I worried about a repeat of our previous trips: coming home with stories nobody wanted to buy.

  I’d had some success as a freelance journalist in China, with stories in the Guardian, Foreign Policy, CNN, and half a dozen Canadian publications, but I was still waiting, and hoping, to further break into the
American market, which I figured was key for me to move my career to the next level.

  Mongolia, I hoped, would be the ticket. The country, bordering China to the north, was underreported and increasingly relevant, sitting on resource riches that the government seemed intent on squandering. Foreign countries were clamoring to start digging, and Mongolia, once home to the greatest conquerors the world had ever seen, was worried about twenty-first-century economic colonization, namely at the hands of the growing superpower to the south: China.

  Our lineup of stories included the trafficking follow-up; a piece about the mining industry; coverage of the upcoming election; and, by far the most intriguing, a report about the emergence of a neo-Nazi movement in Mongolia. The latter story was directly linked to China, which had been conducting more and more business with Mongolia, much to the displeasure of many Mongolians, who, having suffered for decades under iron-fisted communist rule as a Soviet satellite state, feared Chinese encroachment in their country.

  The neo-Nazi movement was at the fringe of a very real current of nationalism in Mongolia. The young men who made up this movement were full of venom, targeted at Chinese living and working in Ulaanbaatar, the capital. They were mostly hooligans, but the threat of violence seemed real. There had been reports of Chinese business owners being assaulted in Ulaanbaatar, and one prominent Mongolian neo-Nazi was in prison for killing his daughter’s boyfriend, also a Mongolian, who had done nothing more than study in China.

  We arrived in Ulaanbaatar late at night, after a fifteen-hour delay in Beijing on account of high winds. We took a cab directly to a bar with our host, an English photographer named Peter. Around 2 a.m., we headed back to Peter’s apartment, where he almost got us beaten up after arguing with a taxi driver over the fare. There was some pushing and grabbing in Peter’s dark stairwell, and the driver left to go get backup while we hurried into Peter’s apartment and locked the door.

  It was a fitting introduction to life in Mongolia, one of the toughest countries—with the toughest people—on earth.