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

by Mitch Moxley

  As we traveled through Beijing’s outlying regions, I lay in my bunk and read Theroux. I was the only foreigner in the car, and periodically a Chinese passenger stopped by to say hello.

  “Ni hao,” they’d say.

  “Ni hao,” I’d reply.

  “Ah! Your Chinese is very good!”

  Chinese have very low expectations of foreigners.

  A gritty city in Hebei province rolled by. I picked over a supply of ham, cheese, crackers, and fruit that I had brought with me in order to put off consuming the gruel served in the dining cars of Chinese trains.

  Rule number two: bring snacks.

  Until the late 1980s, China relied on steam-powered relics to transport citizens and goods around its vast territory. Iron Roosters. By 2010, it was home to the largest high-speed rail network in the world, with 4,300 miles of track. The year before, China spent more than $80 billion on rail construction, and it had plans of adding 10,000 miles of capacity by 2020. The country already had more than 1,200 miles of routes that could run at top speeds of 220 miles per hour, with much more to come. China had grand ambitions of connecting coastal cities to the remote west, and it envisioned lines beginning in China and stretching across Asia, the Middle East, and Europe.

  There were a few things about train travel the Chinese hadn’t yet perfected, however. Food, namely. For dinner, having exhausted my ham, cheese, and crackers, I went to the dining car. I ordered a meal of stewed cabbage and rice with a bowl of chicken soup, and washed it down with a watery can of Snow Beer. It didn’t work. Not even alcohol could make the food palatable.

  I was back in my berth for lights out at 10 p.m. Some passengers had been asleep for hours. The old lady across from me was still snoring. She hadn’t moved in more than twelve hours. I would have thought she was dead were it not for the snoring. The men below me smoked in their beds, thick clouds of smoke wafting up to my bunk and into my nostrils.

  I read to the light of my cell phone. It was fascinating to read of Theroux’s train journey and then look around to my own. In 1988, the Cultural Revolution was still fresh in the collective memory and people were still dealing with its repercussions. In 2010, the Cultural Revolution existed in theme restaurants in Beijing. The China I knew had nothing to do with communism. Back then, Deng Xiaoping’s reforms were just taking hold. Now China was a fast, materialistic, frantic juggernaut. Construction, money, epic change. The world Theroux described in Iron Rooster seemed so familiar (travelers in pajamas drinking tea, spitting sunflower seeds on the floor), yet so different. When he traveled China by train, the changes were just beginning. As I sat in my berth en route to Guilin, they had come to fruition. The future was here, and the Chinese seemed as comfortable in it as they were riding the train.

  After midnight I prepared for sleep by removing from my bag earplugs, an eye mask, and sleeping pills (rules three, four, and five). The snoring and smoking continued throughout the night. The pills were useless.

  On long train rides there’s a lot of time for thinking, and that’s what I did that mostly sleepless night. It was the first real thinking I’d done since the summer, when the “Rent a White Guy” article was taking off and dominating my every waking minute.

  In early August, I’d gone back to North America for a few weeks. I went with fifteen friends from high school and university to San Diego for a long weekend to celebrate our collective thirtieth birthdays. We rented a house near the beach and spent four days catching up and partying like maniacs.

  One afternoon we were walking from our house to the beach and I was telling my friends about my life in China. “It’s weird,” I said. “It’s like it’s not reality over there. I mean, I have no responsibilities, no mortgage or anything, no job to go to. It’s like living this, sort of, fantasy life.”

  “Yeah, yeah, we get it. It’s awesome in China,” one of my friends said.

  I could tell he was annoyed, but I wasn’t trying to brag. The opposite, in fact. I tried to explain that living in China felt like fiction. It was a choice to opt out of being an adult, to escape the realities and responsibilities of adulthood, and I was starting to wonder if that was really such a good thing. In some ways, I was beginning to envy my friends at home—who had girlfriends, well-paying jobs, comfort, and security. They had a place to call home.

  Seeing my parents in Canada also hit me hard, as it did every time. My dad had just turned sixty-eight and my mom sixty. I saw them about every six months, and every time they looked just a little bit older. I could see it in their faces, and living away from them amplified that awareness.

  When I flew back to China, I lacked the same energy I normally had whenever I returned from North America. I was exhausted and unmotivated. It took me weeks to get around to unpacking my things in the new apartment, and a month before I scheduled a Chinese lesson with Guo Li. Work seemed excruciating. I had no fresh ideas and no will to dig any up.

  Part of it was the anticlimax after the “Rent a White Guy” craze. Although there was still a chance of selling the article rights for a movie, I had to confront the hard truth that the movie might not happen. In July, when the hysteria was at its climax, it seemed all but certain. But I should have been heeding my friend Paul’s advice—“I wouldn’t get my hopes up.” My hopes were way up. So many people seemed interested and momentum was building. But over the summer, the number of producers willing to create a package—a fleshed-out story idea with possible stars, etc.—had dwindled. Calls and e-mails from my agent were growing less frequent, and even with this new potential offer, of which I knew very little, my gut was telling me it wasn’t going to happen, and that even if it did, I didn’t really deserve it.

  The train pulled into Guilin station in the early afternoon. I immediately rushed to the ticket office to buy a ticket for my next destination, Guangzhou, two days later. This was a massive flaw in China’s ticket purchasing system: train tickets could only be bought from the departure city, an annoyance that often resulted in a mad scramble to buy return tickets as soon as a train pulled into the station.

  After buying a soft sleeper ticket for Guangzhou, I took a bus to Yangshuo, just over an hour out of town, with a twenty-five-year-old Swede named Olaf, whom I’d met on the train.

  “There is a Chinese conundrum,” Theroux writes in Iron Rooster. “If a place has a reputation for being beautiful, the Chinese flock to it, and its beauty is disfigured by the crowd.”

  Prime example: Yangshuo Valley. The area is known for its rocky, mist-blanketed peaks, depicted for centuries in Chinese landscape paintings. But it’s not the chill backpacker hangout it once was. Mid-Autumn Festival was just kicking off, and the once-quaint town was wall-to-wall with tourists, dressed in baggy plastic ponchos to keep out the rain.

  On the advice of friends, I’d booked a room at a small guesthouse in a village a few miles outside of town. It was raining, but I went for a stroll around the village anyway, taking photographs of the rocky hills and the Yulong River. At night, I met Olaf in Yangshuo town and had a dinner of spicy boiled fish and fried vegetables at an outdoor restaurant. We drank beers at an expat hangout called Reggae Bar, chatting with a chain-smoking Irish musician and a group of girls from Guilin who wanted to practice their English.

  The next morning, despite the rain, Olaf and I rented bicycles and rode up and down the valley, perusing the villages and stopping to take photos. The hills were shrouded in mist, and the sky was a dark gray. Rice paddies surrounded us. As we continued up the river, locals offered us rides across on bamboo rafts, which, apart from harvesting rice, seemed to be the only business going.

  We stopped for a swim at a part of the river where a couple of old ladies were defeathering chickens, preparing for a Mid-Autumn Festival feast. They tossed the feathers into the water. Up close, the river was polluted. Plastic bags. A Coke bottle. A dead fish. The water felt like a tepid bath. We got out soon after getting in, and I
felt itchy for the rest of the day.

  Despite the itch, it felt good cycling around that afternoon, in the outdoors, in the rain. It was a beautiful place and my head was clear. This was my job, and for a few hours I appreciated how lucky I was.

  Not that lucky, evidently. I woke up sick the next morning and couldn’t even get out of bed. My train for Guangzhou would be leaving in the early evening, and I spent the day sleeping, sweating, and running in and out of the bathroom.

  In late afternoon, I hauled myself out of bed and took the bus into Guilin. I was miserable. My stomach was in ruins, and I was sweaty with fever. On the bus, it took all the will I had to keep from throwing up on the floor beneath my feet. I put headphones on, but my seat partner kept tapping me on the shoulder to ask me questions in Chinese: “Where are you from? What do you do? Do you like China?” My head felt like it was going to explode.

  My ticket was soft sleeper, on the bottom berth of a cabin I shared with a thirty-something businessman from Guangzhou. He was a car salesman and offered me glossy pamphlets of the models he sold. He was single and had a sad quality to him. “I travel all the time,” he told me. “Very tired. Too tired.”

  A fat young man in a pink golf shirt with a dimpled bald head that resembled a honeydew melon opened the door and asked if I would move to another cabin and sleep on the top berth. I told him I wouldn’t. He grunted and scurried away. Later, another man peeked his head through our door, looked at me, and said, “Be careful of your things. There are thieves on board.”

  I forced down a dining car meal of mushy fish, vegetables, and rice, and went back to my cabin to read. I was exhausted and weak, but when it came time for bed, I couldn’t sleep. My body and head ached. The fat man in the pink shirt kept opening and closing our door, and I was convinced he was the thief in question. I had a camera and computer with me and wrapped the straps of my bags around my legs while I tried to get some rest.

  I skipped Guangzhou and continued on to the nearby metropolis of Shenzhen. Thirty years ago, Shenzhen was a fishing village. In 2010, thanks to its status as a Special Economic Zone, it was one of the fastest-growing cities in the world, home to almost nine million people. The average age in Shenzhen was less than thirty years old. The city was dazzling in its newness.

  I decided to make the most of my only full day in Shenzhen by doing absolutely nothing. I went to a lavish spa for an indulgent five hours of saunas, hot tubs, and massages, preparing for another long day on the train.

  At the spa, I experienced my first Chinese body scrub. For this, I lay naked on a massage bed while a scrubber, a man, vigorously scrubbed my entire body with an exfoliating cream and a wet towel. When I say my entire body, I mean everywhere.

  The eighteen-hour train from Shenzhen to Shanghai was newer and cleaner than the other trains I’d taken, featuring sit-down toilets (a rarity) and crisp, white sheets. I met a traveler named Nathan, from England but living in Amsterdam, who was in the cabin next to mine. We smoked between cars and drank tea in the dining car, glancing out at the green hills and crumbling villages outside.

  Nathan asked about my life in China. I initially gave my standard answers. “It’s awesome. I love it. There’s so much going on. So much opportunity.”

  But Nathan also lived abroad, and he asked good questions. So I eventually answered him honestly. I told him that living in China was always up and down, that I always had mixed emotions about it.

  I told him about Julia. The previous month, in Vancouver, we had seen each other for the first time in a year and a half. She was traveling across Canada with her parents, who were thinking about immigrating there.

  Seeing her was harder than I’d expected. Not because I still missed her and regretted breaking up with her, but because it was clear there was nothing left. We still got along well, but we had changed too much in the time we’d been apart. Our conversation lacked the fluidity it once had; our interaction felt awkward. I went back to China with a void in my gut. I had always thought that maybe, somehow, we might end up together. Not anymore. It was a hard realization, but I had come to terms with it in the past few weeks. This was a lonely path I’d chosen in life, and I knew it probably would be for some time.

  “It’s hard to date people here,” I told Nathan. “Everybody’s always coming and going. I don’t know, sometimes it just doesn’t feel like real life in China. It’s great, don’t get me wrong. But sometimes it just feels like a cop-out.”

  “How long do you think you’ll stay?” he asked.

  “I’m always here on a rolling basis,” I said. “I’ll stay for maybe another year . . . or so.”

  After a few more cigarettes, I returned to my cabin and flipped through magazines. I shared the soft sleeper with a young family who lived in Shenzhen and was heading home for the National Day Holiday. Their incredibly adorable little boy played with a brand-new iPad until ten o’clock, when they flipped off the lights and went to sleep.

  I woke from a dream. The cabin was black. The train had slowed to a crawl.

  The dream started off the same as all the other going-home dreams I’d had over the years, when I would find myself at the airport about to board a flight to Canada and be struck with sadness about leaving China. I would sometimes wake up, realize I was still in Beijing, and be washed over with relief. But in this one, I was at the airport and couldn’t find my ticket home. Someone was telling me I had to stay in China, that I couldn’t fly. In the dream I was nearly in tears. I saw flashes of family, of friends. They were moving on with their lives, getting married, getting older. But me, I was still in China.

  I opened my eyes to the darkness of the cabin. I could feel the rhythm of the metal wheels rolling on the tracks below me.

  I’d been running from real life for almost four years. But someday soon this would all end—the adventures. China, for me, would end someday. Not tomorrow. Maybe not this year or next, but someday. It had to.

  Real life would beckon.

  We pulled into Shanghai at 7 a.m. I rushed to the ticket counter, where a long line had already formed. After a half-hour wait, I reached the booth.

  “Do you have any tickets for Beijing tomorrow morning?”

  “Probably not,” the young man said. He scrolled through a list on his computer screen. “Actually, there’s a ticket for tomorrow morning at seven a.m.”

  It wasn’t ideal, but I was sick of trains. I wanted to sleep in a bed that didn’t stop and start all night long. “I’ll take it.”

  The next morning at 6:45, after a night of drinking pints and smoking cigarettes with Nathan, I arrived at the Shanghai train station exhausted and hungover.

  I handed my ticket to the attendant on the platform. She handed it back.

  “Where’s my seat?” I said.

  She took the ticket out of my hands, examined it again, and handed it over.

  “Mei you.”

  I looked at my ticket and noticed there was no seat number. My mind flashed back to buying it the previous morning. Had I asked for a seat? I couldn’t remember.

  “No seat,” the attendant said. “Standing room only.”

  Rule number six of Chinese train travel: double-check your ticket.

  I steadied myself for a long journey, twelve hours of standing on a Chinese train. I stood outside on the platform, massaged my temples, and took a deep breath of cool morning air before boarding.

  For the first few hours, before we reached Nanjing, I claimed an open seat. But then a businessman politely kicked me out. I walked down to the snack car. There were no seats, only standing tables. I made an instant coffee and studied Chinese characters for the next few hours. A middle-aged man from Shanghai interrupted my studying to practice English. His English was atrocious, and I felt a pang of sympathy for any Chinese person on whom I’d ever tried to rehearse my Chinese over the years, and for my trusty tutor Guo Li and her infinite patien
ce.

  I not-so-subtly hinted to the man that I didn’t want to talk, holding up my flash cards to indicate that I was deep in study. He didn’t buy it.

  “You like better Shanghai or Beijing?” the man said.

  “Um, they’re both good. Very different.”

  He continued to ask me questions while I flipped through the flash cards, until finally I’d had enough and told him I was going back to my nonexistent seat to sleep.

  “Very tired,” I said, mock rubbing my eyes.

  I returned to my car and claimed a spot on the floor in between cars. A woman, traveling with her daughter, handed me a newspaper to put on the ground. I thanked her.

  “What’s your name?” the daughter asked.

  “Mi Gao.”

  “Ha-ha. That’s a funny name.”

  The mother nodded. “Very funny name.”

  They were from Anhui province, traveling to Beijing to visit relatives. I helped the daughter study for an English exam, while the mother tried to doze with her head on her knees.

  New passengers boarded at every stop, and soon there were about twenty people crammed between the cars, towering over the mother and daughter and me. A solidarity developed among the seatless passengers, and as the only foreigner without a seat—the only foreigner dumb enough not to have asked for a seat—I was soon a minor celebrity on the train.

  There was much talk of my name.

  “You know, Mi isn’t a Chinese surname,” a young man in a boxy suit said.

  “Yes, I know,” I said.

  “Gao is a surname, but not Mi,” he added.

  “Mi Gao is something you eat,” an older woman said. “It’s a cake.”

  “Your name is very delicious!” someone wisecracked to much laughter.

  Everyone agreed I had a very funny name.