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

by Mitch Moxley

  We pulled into Beijing in the early evening. The sun was low in the horizon, and the air felt warm as the doors opened. I gathered my things and took a photo with the mom and daughter on the platform. My back was in knots and I was exhausted. I had in mind the great Chinese cure-all: a cheap massage.

  During the cab ride home I thought about the trip, and then I thought about my next reporting trip, to Sichuan, just a few days later, then another after that, to write a story about surfing in the south of China. It was exciting—the life I always wanted—but I also felt drained.

  I wondered: How many more twisted paths were there left to explore in China?

  Plenty, it turned out.

  17

  Dancing Idiot

  On a warm day in Beijing shortly thereafter, a young man approached me on a street in Sanlitun with a request. He was in his early twenties, short, with bushy black hair, a shiny face, and a tribal tattoo on his left arm. He introduced himself as Eric.

  “Are you busy next week?” he said in nervous, slightly American-accented English.

  “Why?”

  “My company’s filming this, sort of, music video. Can you be in it?”

  I looked over to my friend, Annie, with whom I had just finished eating pitas. She shrugged.

  “Do I have to pretend to sing or anything?” I asked.

  “No singing.”

  “What about dancing? I hate dancing.”

  “He does hate dancing,” Annie confirmed.

  “No dancing,” Eric said. “You just have to pretend to be, like, in love with some girl.”

  “Will you pay me?”

  “No,” he said, raising his eyebrows, “but this video will be seen everywhere.”

  Everywhere. The word lingered for a moment as I pondered the opportunity. On the one hand, I was terrified. Terrified of having to dance. Despite Eric’s no-dancing pledge, I was sure he was lying, and, as already established, I have no greater fear than sober dancing. On the other hand, it might make for a good story to write, another strange laowai-in-China anecdote, like “Rent a White Guy.”

  Annie told me to go for it.

  “Why not?” I said.

  If living in China was like a drug, Eric was offering the chemical substance that provided the high. But as with every drug, there are ups and there are downs. For me, the highs were the moments of bewildering hilarity and adventure; the point of boozy weekend nights when things got interesting; the travels; the randomness and the unusual.

  The lows, by the fall of 2010, were pretty much everything in between.

  In a lot of ways, I was growing weary of my China experience. In Beijing, life sometimes felt routine: sit in cafés, go to the gym, Chinese class with Guo Li. DVDs, basketball, pub quiz. It was a good life, but not as exciting as it once was. Days flew by. Here’s a thing about most foreigner experiences: despite living in one of the most chaotic, baffling, and fascinating countries on earth, eventually you settle into a routine and realize that it all seems so normal. You stop noticing the unusual things around you—in fact, the unusual things are simply not unusual anymore. And then you’re left wondering: Why am I still here?

  After almost four years in China, I was growing numb to it all, and in the wake of the excitement sparked by the “Rent a White Guy” article and the possible movie deal, which, in the end, never happened, I felt drained. Whenever I wasn’t traveling or living out some strange story I could later tell friends over drinks, I didn’t know what to make of myself.

  These thoughts intensified after I traveled to Sichuan with Jim, a few days after the train trip, and experienced one of the great scares of my life. We were in the mountainous western region of the province reporting a story. On our last day, the two of us climbed to the top of a mountain ridge, looked out at the beautiful landscape around us, filmed one of those giddy “Look where we are, Mom!” videos they find after people have been eaten by grizzly bears, and then promptly got lost in a dense mountain forest with no food, no water, and no protection. We wandered for hours as the temperature steadily dropped. After much struggle and a few shed tears (on my part), we made it out minutes before sunset with only bruised egos and a nice collection of thorn lashes, but it was the first time in my thirty years that I had ever genuinely feared for my life.

  The old internal debate between staying or leaving resurfaced with a vengeance in the weeks that followed, and I came close to calling it quits in China.

  Then a young man with bushy hair and a tribal tattoo came along and offered yet another hit of the China drug, which reminded me exactly why I was still living in Beijing. Don’t get me wrong—it’s not as if starring in a music video was in and of itself enough to keep me in China. I didn’t even really want to do it. But it represented everything that made life in China so addictive: experiences so beguiling and bizarre that they stay with you forever; rare moments when you are fully aware, fully present. Those moments—raw, challenging, uncomfortable, and often humiliating—make you feel alive.

  It later occurred to me that Eric’s offer presented an opportunity for an aspect of the foreigner experience in China that had intrigued and eluded me since I first arrived in Beijing: random stardom. Every so often I would meet a foreigner in Beijing who was marginally famous for this or that reason, generally because they had become a television personality on account of speaking good Chinese.

  By far the most prominent of this group, the man every foreigner in China loved to hate, was Mark Rowswell, better know as Da Shan, or “Big Mountain.” Da Shan was a middle-aged Canadian who had been a presence in China for more than twenty years. He was usually the first thing mentioned whenever I told a Chinese person I was from Canada. Chinese were fond of comparing a foreigner’s level of Mandarin to Da Shan’s, as in, “Your Chinese is okay. But not as good as Da Shan’s.”

  Da Shan’s Chinese was indeed very good, and he had become enormously successful because of it. Before he became Da Shan, Rowswell was a young exchange student in Beijing, learning Mandarin at Peking University in 1988. That year, he made his first appearance on Chinese television, hosting an international singing competition. Later he was invited to perform a comedy skit on CCTV’s New Year’s gala, which was broadcast to an audience of 550 million viewers—approximately 520 million more people than exist in Rowswell’s native Canada. For more than two decades, Da Shan had been a ubiquitous presence in the Chinese entertainment industry and a thorn in the side of every foreigner who had ever set foot in the country.

  I met Da Shan during the Olympics. He was Canada’s “Commissioner General” for the Games and had come to the CBC studio at Ling Long Pagoda for an interview. Our meeting was brief; we shook hands and said hello. He waited in the studio before going on air, chatting with a couple of ladies who worked with the network. They wanted directions to a market in the center of the city. Rowswell jotted down the Chinese characters for the address, as well as the thorough directions to get there from the Bird’s Nest.

  “You can’t just say the address in Chinese. The taxi drivers probably won’t know it,” he explained. “You have to be very specific—go down this alley, turn down this street, it’s across from this building.”

  He seemed genuinely interested in helping these women, exhibiting the kind of joy I still got whenever friends came to town and I could show off my local know-how. Even after twenty years, countless TV and movie appearances, a fan base that numbered in the hundreds of millions, and I assume plenty of money, Mark Rowswell, aka Big Mountain, seemed like a completely normal dude. He wore Canadian Olympic team gear and unfashionable eyeglasses. His thin blond hair was parted to the side and he had a gap between his two front teeth. He looked like an accountant.

  The second-most-famous foreigner in China was an American named Jonathan Kos-Read, also known as Cao Cao. I met him for the first time at a writers’ workshop in a Beijing café called the Bookworm. He wa
s handsome, in his mid-thirties, with what I remember as being very nice hair: brown and thick and wavy. The writing group took turns reading our stories and discussing ideas, and during his turn we brainstormed a movie idea he had involving the sexual chi of an ancient Chinese emperor.

  A few years later, I interviewed Kos-Read for a story. We met at a Starbucks in Beijing’s Central Business District, where he was waiting with his Chinese wife. He wore Thai fisherman pants and a loose-necked shirt. His hair was still great.

  I pulled out my tape recorder and placed it on the table.

  “So. What do you want to know?” he said.

  Kos-Read had arrived in China a decade earlier, after graduating from college in New York, where he studied acting and took Chinese classes to fulfill a language requirement and “impress chicks.” In Beijing, he worked odd jobs until he stumbled across an ad on a local listings magazine’s website looking for foreign extras. The rest, he explained, was history. Since then, he had made a very healthy living appearing in more than sixty Chinese movies and television series, often playing the white villain. He displayed no vanity whatsoever about his fame and still seemed to marvel at his luck. (Once, he told a friend of mine in an interview that he “should probably be waiting tables somewhere,” and his Twitter bio read, “professional token white guy.”)

  “What are the perks of being famous in China?” I asked.

  “I suspect the perks of being famous in China are the same as perks of being famous anywhere. People are nice to me. I get hired for stuff because I’m famous. I get into places free. But nobody runs around and doesn’t let me live my normal life. I’m like the Goldilocks of famous—just right.”

  “Any drawbacks?”

  “Nope. None. It’s just awesome.”

  A few days after our initial meeting, Eric sent me a string of text messages, all of which addressed me as “Dude.” I was told to meet on Tuesday at 7:45 a.m., and to “produce a business suit, two shirts, and jeans. Can you produce it?”

  I told Eric I had a suit, but it didn’t fit. He told me to bring it anyway. I reminded him again that I wasn’t an actor and that under no circumstances would I dance. “I don’t think it’s a problem,” he said. “You just have to pretend to be in love with some girl.”

  We met with the cast and crew at an outdoor mall called Solana. At a fountain outside a Starbucks, one of my costars, a good-looking Chinese model/actor with big hair, pursed lips, and a thin nose, was busy staring into a personal mirror and trimming his goatee. He complimented me on my beard and immediately applied makeup to darken his. I was the only foreigner there. The girl I was supposed to be in love with was a pop star from Shandong province who went by the English name Marry. We waited while she was made up in a rented van parked nearby.

  The director arrived, a chain-smoking twenty-five-year-old waif from Guangzhou who called himself Viko. He called me “Mitch-ee.” He seemed nice, although he was visibly displeased with the wardrobe I’d brought. I was wearing skinny blue jeans, a slim black short-sleeve shirt, and brown leather boots. I had dropped and stepped on my second shirt while exiting a cab earlier, marking it with two boot prints. The suit was boxy and terrible, the one I’d had made for my trip to Dalian years earlier. Viko winced when I showed it to him.

  Marry came bouncing out of the van half an hour later. She wore a flowing white dress, her hair in carefully manipulated twirls and her eyes in heavy black makeup. She was tall, with a nice smile and wide face. She looked like Winnie from The Wonder Years and she was clearly excited about the shoot.

  We drove around to the back of the mall. Permits to film at Solana were expensive, so this was a guerrilla operation. Under umbrellas at an outdoor seating area, a team of makeup artists applied makeup and hair products on me and the other model, whom I’ll call Derek (as in Zoolander). One woman kept trying to poof up my hair like Derek’s, and I kept trying to pat it down whenever she looked away.

  Meanwhile, the crew was shooting Marry up on a veranda overlooking the park behind the mall. She smiled, she spun, she swooned. It all looked very much like a Chinese music video, and I was getting nervous.

  The premise of the video, as it was hastily explained to me, was this: Marry and Derek were lovers on a trip to Europe, where they meet me, a random European. Some sort of love triangle ensues. Marry is confused, Derek oblivious, and I’m eventually heartbroken when she chooses him over me.

  About half an hour later, Eric handed me several sheets of paper stapled together, one of which featured movie stills, mostly of Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy in Before Sunrise.

  “Okay,” he said, “the first shot is of you and the girl and the other guy running. Like this.” He tapped on a small image of three actors running hand in hand in a European city.

  “That seems weird,” I said.

  “Yes.”

  “Holding hands?”

  “Yeah. It should be no problem.”

  It was a problem. During the first take, Derek darted out quickly, while I went for a light jog, leaving Marry awkwardly in the middle being tugged in both directions. When the director yelled “cut,” everybody watching started laughing. Eric was literally keeled over.

  “Mitch. Mitch!” he said, trying to contain his laughter. “You have to go faster! And don’t stare at her the whole time. It looks funny.”

  I watched the video playback. My arms and legs were so stiff it looked as if I was wearing clothing made of metal. “Jesus,” I said. My mouth was parched. “Eric, can you get me some water?”

  The director put his arm on my shoulder. “You have to be more natural. And move your arms when you run.”

  We did three more uncomfortable takes before the director yelled, “Good take!” To put a time frame on the shoot, I had told them I had to leave for work at 11:30 a.m.—a lie. The director checked his watch. We’d just started filming but only had a little over an hour left before my deadline.

  The next shot was a short scene of Derek and me sitting on a bench pretending to talk. Before cameras started rolling, Marry yelled to me, “Mitch, like Tom Hanks!” Somebody mentioned Tom Cruise. “Like Tom Cruise!” Marry said.

  After we wrapped that scene, a crew member brought over two cups of melting ice cream. For the next shot I had to walk through the mall holding the ice cream and trying to look “happy and excited,” and then, upon seeing the two young lovers enjoying themselves on a bench already eating ice cream, I was instructed to “look blue.”

  “With your eyes,” Eric translated. “Look blue with your eyes.”

  The directions were specific: hold the ice cream like so; walk like this; keep your head down; don’t use your hands or shake your head. We did four takes, and each time I thought I’d nailed it. The director thought otherwise. With each take, he looked increasingly worried until finally he glanced at his watch and said, “Good enough.”

  I was a star once. I was twelve years old, in seventh grade, and I had been cast as the lead of my elementary school’s Christmas musical, called Small One. The play was based on a children’s book about a young boy and his beloved donkey. I played the boy. I sang songs (Small one, small one, small one for sale . . . one piece of silver, small one for sale . . .) and acted my heart out. We did an afternoon and an evening performance, and both earned standing ovations as robust as strong coffee. I remember spotting my grandpa in the audience as he sprang up from his seat before anyone else, slapping his big hands together with a great force. It was the proudest moment of my young life.

  The next year I was cast as Tiny Tim in our school’s rendition of A Christmas Carol. But something had changed that year: the onset of puberty. As the boy in Small One, my voice was high and angelic. Not so as an adolescent. My voice cracked and couldn’t decide between high and low. My performance was a disaster, and as I stood onstage struggling through my numbers, within me was growing a lifelong fear of performing.

&n
bsp; A fear that would only be exacerbated by what was about to happen.

  Marry changed into a white wedding dress, and for the last of my scheduled scenes, the three of us were positioned atop a set of stairs in the middle of the mall. Eric explained that we were to simply walk behind her while she pretended to sing her song, which blasted from a pair of speakers. There was then a long conversation in Chinese between the director, his assistant, and Marry. I couldn’t understand all of it, but I did catch one fateful phrase:

  Tiaowu. Dancing.

  My ears perked up, and so did Eric’s. He hurried over, cigarette in hand, and told the director, “No—Mitch can’t dance.” The director spoke in Chinese, and Eric translated. “You don’t have to dance, just walk to the music. Like this.” He made dancing movements.

  “That’s dancing!” I protested.

  Eric laughed. “I know, I know. Just, you know, move to the music. Not dancing. Just moving.”

  My heart was racing now and sweat circles were forming in my armpits. During the first take, which seemed to span the length of a Chinese dynasty but was probably no more than thirty seconds, I was back in my metal clothes. I moved like RoboCop.

  When the director yelled cut, Eric said, “Mitch, you’re very nervous. You’re doing like this.” He imitated my RoboCop dance. “Try to act like you’re flirting with her. Like you’re having fun. More natural.”

  “But I’m not having fun and it’s not natural.”

  The second take was as bad as the first. The assistant director pointed out the obvious—that I was awful. The director asked for one more take.

  “Look,” I said, “it’s not going to get any better than this. This is really awkward for me. I said I didn’t want to dance; you want me to dance. That last take was as good as it’s going to get.”

  Marry told me that I needed to be “more manly—like cool man.” She grabbed my arms and said: “Do you like me?”

  “Sure, why not,” I said.

  “Well, then you have to act like you like me.”