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

by Mitch Moxley

  There were two different worlds for me now: this world (Beijing, youth, adventure, recklessness) and that world (Canada, movies four nights a week, cooking at home, fatherhood, security). Whenever I thought about moving home, I reminded myself that I could still have all of those things, but this life—in Beijing, twenty-nine years old, a young writer abroad—I would never have again.

  The day Tom and I moved into our new apartment in Sun City, I had no doubts. I looked out of our big window toward the second ring road below, at the traffic, at the buildings—the Poly Theater, the Swissotel—at the hustle and bustle on the streets and alleys below. It was a hot summer night and the entire city seemed to be out. The sun had just gone down; the sky was purple-navy, and at street level the pollution mixed with the streetlights to give off a surreal orange glow that I will always associate with Beijing.

  I felt a surge of pride. This was my place. This was my city. I was, and forever would be, at least in part, a Beijinger.

  14

  Rent a White Guy

  In the fall of 2009, I was offered work as a quality-control expert with an American company in China I’d never heard of. No experience necessary—which was good because I had none. I would be paid $1,000 for a week, put up in a fancy hotel, and wined and dined in Dongying, an industrial city in Shandong province I’d also never heard of. The only requirements were a fair complexion and a suit.

  The job offer came via my friend Ernie, a Californian and longtime Beijinger I’d met the summer before through Julia. He told me to call his friend Kevin for details.

  “I call these things ‘White Guy in a Tie’ events,’ ” Kevin told me over the phone. “Basically, you put on a suit, shake some hands, and make some money. We’ll be in ‘quality control,’ but nobody’s going to be doing any quality control. You in?”

  I was.

  The opportunity couldn’t have come at a better time. I desperately wanted to cut down on my hours at Uncle Wang’s, but even with consistent freelance work I was finding it nearly impossible to earn a living as a writer. Since I was then (and am still now) incapable of budgeting, without voice recording I would have been drowning in a heaping pile of debt big enough to fill the Bird’s Nest.

  Fueled by the success of the Mongolia trip, within a matter of months I traveled to the Philippines and Burma for stories, and I was making inroads in the U.S. market. If someone had told me when I was nineteen years old that a decade later I would be living in China working as a writer, contributing to influential newspapers and magazines and reporting from across Asia, I would have said something to the tune of, “Fuck yes!”

  While the reporting trips made for excellent fodder on my Facebook newsfeed, my day-to-day work life in Beijing was mostly uneventful. I spent most days sitting at Café Zarah wondering why editors weren’t e-mailing me back, getting excited about a new story idea only to discover it had been done twenty times before. I would often wake up late, go for a coffee, check e-mails, and drink more coffee. Once or twice a month a story of mine would go to print, but I wasn’t making anywhere close to a decent living, despite Uncle Wang’s generous wages. All told, I was earning about $20,000 a year.

  The big 3-0 loomed heavily. In some ways, I had achieved what I’d always wanted: Adventures abroad. Writing for a living. Doing interesting things in interesting places with interesting people. And although I was aware I’d look back on this period as one of the best times of my life, the same questions kept resurfacing: What should I be doing? Where should I be? When will I become a real adult?

  How long, I wondered, could I keep this up?

  These were hard questions to answer. But one thing was clear: If I was to keep my life as a writer afloat, I needed a break. A big one.

  The fake-businessman trip seemed like an opportunity for another random China adventure, a good story to tell friends over beers. But it was an adventure that, months later, would change my life in unexpected ways. The trip would turn out to be exactly the big break I was looking for, although I had no idea at the time.

  It was one of my voice-recording partners who first told me about fake-businessman jobs, where Chinese companies hired foreigners to sit in meetings and pretend to be part of the company. It was an often lucrative gig for underworked expatriates in China like myself. She knew people who had been paid $1,000 for a day of meetings. I asked around, and it turned out this kind of work was quite common. In fact, companies sometimes posted ads online for white people to sit in business meetings. One friend of mine, an American who worked in film, was paid to represent a Canadian company and give a speech espousing a low-carbon future. Another was flown to Shanghai to act as a seasonal-gifts buyer. At one point, there was even a fake-businessman recruitment agency in Beijing. I thought it would make for a great story, and earning $1,000 for doing nothing sounded like Christmas come early.

  The obvious question was why Chinese companies would want to hire foreigners to pretend to be part of a company. No one seemed to know for sure, but the best guess was that it had something to do with face. Hiring fake businessmen was one way to create the image—particularly, the image of connections—that Chinese companies craved. Guo Li, my Chinese teacher and invaluable source of insight on all things Chinese, was at first aghast about how much we were getting paid, but she then put it this way: “Having foreigners in nice suits gives the company face.”

  It wasn’t so different from my time at China Daily. There the foreign experts were 50 percent copyediting drones, 50 percent window dressing. We were there, in part, for show. Same with fake businessmen. I was essentially stepping back into a job as a professional wallflower.

  After dusting off my ill-fitting market suit and investing in a new pair of shoes and a haircut (image is important to the fake businessman—in fact, it’s everything), I woke one Thursday morning to catch a 7:45 flight to Dongying. There were six of us in all—three Americans, two Canadians, and an Aussie.

  Ernie, in his late thirties, was a high-intensity conspiracy theorist and one of the funniest people I’d ever met. We had met on the trip I took to Inner Mongolia with Julia and some of her friends, and we hit it off right away. He’d made me laugh until I cried more than once in the time I’d known him, and he had also forced me to sit through hours of documentaries about the Bilderberg Group and its plot for world domination.

  Ernie showed up at the airport wearing a black suit and carrying nothing but a small shoulder bag, big enough for a laptop but not much more.

  “Is that all you’re bringing?” I asked.

  He looked himself up and down. “What else would I need?”

  Chris, a young computer nerd, was carrying with him two suitcases and a shoulder bag. I asked him why he needed so much stuff for just a week.

  “Oh, I’m staying for a few months,” he said.

  “To do what?”

  “I have no idea. Quality control?”

  “Do you have any experience in quality control?”

  “Ha-ha. No.”

  Kevin, a tall Canadian with a goatee, briefed us on the details. We were supposedly representing a California-based company that was building a high-tech facility in Dongying. Our responsibilities would include making daily trips to the construction site, attending a ribbon-cutting ceremony, and hobnobbing with people of varying degrees of importance. The rest of the time would be ours to spend as we wished. During the ceremony, one of us would have to give a speech as the company’s director. That duty fell to Ernie, the oldest of our group. His business cards had already been made.

  Dongying was home to Sun Tzu, the author of The Art of War, and that’s about its only claim to fame. The landscape was dry and bleak, with factories in all directions. We were met at the airport by Kim, a young Taiwanese with a brush cut and leather jacket, whose company, we were told, had been subcontracted to manage the project. Driving into town, the excitement we felt about posing as fake busi
nessmen for a company we knew barely anything about was almost overwhelming. We were giddy as schoolgirls.

  The lobby at our hotel was dimly lit and smelled like bad seafood. “At least we have a nice view,” Ernie deadpanned as he opened the drapes in our room to reveal a scrap yard. A truck had been stripped for parts, and old tires were heaped into a pile. A dog yelped.

  After a quick rest, we suited up and Kim drove us to the company’s temporary offices. These were small rooms with cement floors and metal walls arranged around a courtyard. The six of us had our own office space. On each desk were a hard hat with a company decal and an orange safety vest with an oversized zipper that read “D&G—DOLOE & GOB8ANA.”

  We took a quick tour of the factory—an army of migrant workers was about six months away from finishing—and then returned to the office and sat for hours. No instructions were given about what we should be doing, so mostly we tried to sleep at our desks. Flies buzzed around the room and boredom set in. We could hear Ernie rehearsing his speech in a room across the courtyard.

  Since nobody ever told us why we were there, we spent much time speculating. Our best guess was that the company hired us to make the project look more important than it was. A ceremony was scheduled for the next morning, and we were told local dignitaries and the media would be there. When a Chinese company builds a factory, it’s not news. It’s another story when a big American company builds one, not to mention sends over its representatives—fictitious as we were—to check up on things.

  I carried a notebook in my pocket and jotted notes throughout, increasingly aware that I had stumbled upon a great story: “Can’t believe this is actually happening . . . We chat about sports, NFL mostly . . . Workers walk past, peeking through the door, we sit at our desks, suit jackets hung on chairs, hard hats in front of us. Smile and wave . . . Company has printed off an itinerary for tomorrow . . . breakfast @ 7:45, ceremony @ 9, speech by Director Ernie . . .”

  Nobody, not even Kevin, was sure what we were supposed to be doing while we sat in our office. According to the itinerary, our duties were finished at the end of the next day. But we were scheduled to stay for a week. Kevin told us to sit tight and await further instructions.

  “I wish I brought a magazine,” Brad, a quiet American lawyer, lamented.

  “What will we do this weekend?” I asked Kevin as I flipped through the sheets of paper on my desk. “There’s nothing on the itinerary.”

  “We’ll see. There might be some important people to meet.”

  Ernie leaned toward me and whispered, “It’s becoming clear they’re just making this up as they go along.”

  The next morning was the ceremony—the main event, the central reason for our trip.

  I’m still not clear what the ceremony was for—the factory was still just a shell—but it was obviously a big deal. On a side road next to the construction site, they’d set up a red carpet. Pretty girls in red, dragon-patterned dresses greeted visitors, and Chinese pop blasted from the loudspeakers. Down the street, police in shiny yellow vests directed traffic. The mayor was there with other local dignitaries, and so were the TV cameras and reporters.

  We stood in the front row wearing our suits, orange safety vests, and hard hats. As we waited for the ceremony to begin, a foreman standing beside me barked to workers on the construction site to stop what they were doing and get out of view. They scurried behind the scaffolding, and the cranes stopped.

  “Are you the boss?” I asked the foreman in Chinese.

  He looked at me quizzically. “You’re the boss,” he said.

  Actually, Ernie was the boss. After a brief introduction, “Director” Ernie delivered his speech in English before the hundred or so in attendance. He boasted of the company’s long list of international clients and emphasized how happy we were to be working on such an important project in Dongying. When the speech was over, confetti blasted over the stage and fireworks popped on the dusty field beside us. Absorbing it all, I felt like we’d pulled off a clever ruse. Almost like a teenager who’d successfully lied to his parents about smoking.

  On the walk back to the office, Kim told us what we’d all started to suspect: that for the next five days we’d have to sit in the office for eight hours a day, doing nothing. Or we could choose to go back to Beijing a few days early—for half the pay.

  Ernie was livid. I think the director role had given him a sense of entitlement. “You’re kidding, right? We have to sit in that box all day?”

  “No,” said Kim. “You can walk around the courtyard, too.”

  Back at the office, Ernie, still fuming, asked Kevin, “You didn’t know about this, right? That we’d have to sit in this shitbox all day?”

  “I knew we’d be doing nothing.”

  “Nothing is one thing. Sitting in a fly-infested metal shitbox is another.”

  Later, Kim again presented the option of going back to Beijing a couple of days early. Contemplating sitting for days in the fly-infested metal shitbox, I accepted the redundancy package.

  That night Kim and a couple of the Chinese guys took us out on the town. We started in a rip-off Western-style bar, with Beatles posters on the wall and a young man onstage singing incomprehensible English lyrics.

  From there, we moved to another bar across town, where we’d heard all the foreigners hung out. Opening the door to a one-room pub with a pool table in the middle revealed a pasty-faced gang of English teachers with one lone Chinese woman, presumably the owner. They eyed us suspiciously.

  I asked one of the teachers what other bars were good in town.

  “This is pretty much it,” he said.

  “You guys come here every weekend?”

  “Pretty much. Thursday, Friday, Saturday.” He shrugged. “It’s got a pool table.”

  After an uncomfortable few minutes with the teachers, we moved on to the city’s only nightclub, where Kim’s middle-aged Chinese coworkers bought us bottles of whiskey and ice tea. The club was at once welcoming and hostile. Young girls and their gangster-looking boyfriends eyed us, but for different reasons. It wouldn’t have shocked me if one of us had gotten laid, another stabbed. We were the only white people in the bar, and several club employees were dressed in oversized animal bodysuits.

  By midnight we were hammered. About an hour later, Kim, who had previously said we had the next day off, broke the bad news.

  “Well, we better get going. Gotta be back at the office by seven forty-five.”

  We protested.

  “If you’re not there by seven forty-five,” Kim said, “don’t bother coming for the rest of the week.”

  It wasn’t clear who we were fooling. For the next two days we sat in the office, swatting flies and dozing at our desks. Surely any passerby would realize we weren’t really working. And yet there we were, high-level employees of some American company that didn’t really exist. We were so important, in fact, that Chris and Sam were both asked to stay for eight months—eight months of waking up early, putting on a suit, and doing nothing—in exchange for a salary of $4,100 a month. (To be fair, they then received quality control training, although I’m skeptical that either of them ever performed a quality-control–related task.)

  It would be easy to write this off as a quirky “only in China” anecdote, but at the heart of it was the enigma central to Chinese business and life—face. By donning a suit, touring a factory, attending a ceremony, and sitting in an office for a few days doing absolutely nothing, we were apparently giving face to the company, the project, and the city.

  It would be a mistake to attribute the fake-businessman phenomenon to any type of racial inferiority complex with the Chinese. It’s true that Western people and Western products—the West in general—are admired in China. But it’s not a racial thing. China is an increasingly confident nation, and Chinese people are deservedly proud. They’re also proud that foreigners are inte
rested in their country. But they don’t think that people with white skin are better than themselves. We’re just exotic, and all we did in Dongying as Westerners in suits was add a little exotic prestige. We were just PR tools; we gave a little face to a small company in a small city in the middle of nowhere.

  Still, after a few days I felt guilty. I thought about how little the workers made; I figured it would take them four months to earn what we were making in one week. Everybody treated us with such great admiration and deference that I was tempted to grab one of the workers by his shoulders, shake his bony frame, confess that we were frauds, and thrust a bunch of crumpled bills into his calloused hands. The whole episode started to feel wrong.

  The trip was a perfect, albeit extreme, example of the artificial reality that is the expat universe. Did we deserve to be paid $1,000 for this? Absolutely not. One hundred percent not. We weren’t even that good at being fake businessmen with our unfashionable suits, our three-day beards, our perpetual hangovers. But most of the time we acted as if we were worth every penny, whining about getting up early in our crappy hotel and having to sit in our metal office all day, dozing at our desks or reading magazines.

  If you are a foreigner, China can give you fraudulent confidence, and it’s when you forget that you really aren’t that special that it can get dangerous. Most of us were in our late twenties through thirties, living out our very own Judd Apatow movie. Our only responsibilities were to put on cheap suits and get out of bed on time. How do you leave a life that presents you with scenarios like that?

  Kim picked me up in an SUV on my last morning. The others were staying a few days longer, while I was clocking out early. We drove to the airport, and he asked questions about my life in Beijing. I was starting to like the guy. I was happy to be going home early, but something (easy money?) still prompted me to say, “Let me know if you need me to come down again.”

  He seemed a bit surprised. “Yeah, come any time you can. Lots happening,” he said. “We need people for a week every month. It’ll be better next time, too. We’ll have new offices.”