by Mitch Moxley
“It’s historical, about, I don’t know how you say in English . . . Gong Chan Dang.”
I didn’t know the word so I checked my phone dictionary. Gong Chan Dang = Communist Party of China. The foreign doctor, I guessed, was Norman Bethune, one of the best-known foreigners in Chinese history, a Canadian who helped Mao’s Communists until his death of blood poisoning in 1939. In China, Bethune is considered a martyr, and I wondered if my citizenship would give me a leg up on the role.
Sylvia led us upstairs to meet the producer. On the way, she told us, “Don’t say you don’t have much experience. Say you’ve done movies, TV shows, commercials, okay? That will be better.”
A young producer waited for us in the hotel room. He was working on his laptop as we walked through the door; a cigarette was dangling from his lips. Beside him was an ashtray with a couple of dozen butts. Smoke filled the room. As we walked in, he looked at the Ukrainian and Kurt, the Hawaiian.
“Oh, tai gao le!” the producer said. Too tall.
My heart sank. Kurt and I were the exact same height, and the Ukrainian was a couple of inches shorter.
Next the producer looked at the Syrian, who was tanned, with dark stubble on his face.
“Oh, tai hei le!” he said. Too dark.
I sat down before he noticed my height. The producer stopped on me for a moment and turned to the agent.
“He’s the best. Take him to the other room.”
Sylvia walked me to a nearby room. She was thrilled. “This is great. He likes you. Make sure to tell him you’ve acted.”
“Actually, I was in a movie. And a music video.”
“Great! We’ll put that on your résumé.”
“My résumé?”
In the hotel room Sylvia asked me to upload my head shots onto a memory stick while she crafted a fake résumé for me in Chinese. A few minutes later, the producer entered and asked me to stand.
“How tall are you?”
“I’m 190 centimeters”—six foot three.
“Hmm. That’s okay, we’ll tell the director you’re 180.”
“But won’t he notice—”
The producer darted out of the room, a cloud of cigarette smoke trailing behind him. Sylvia grabbed my shoulders and pulled my face close like she was going to kiss me. “It’s looking good,” she said. “Really good.”
Sylvia treated us to lunch as we waited for the director’s word. I was feeling optimistic. “This could be good for you,” Kurt said, slightly forlorn, as we ate at a Korean restaurant next to the hotel. “Apparently, it’s a recurring role.”
Half an hour later, back in the hotel lobby, the first producer came down to deliver the news.
He spoke in Chinese. “Did you eat enough? Good. So here’s the thing. You guys didn’t fit.” He looked at me. “The director said you’re not quite right. You’re too tall. Sorry, really sorry.”
We were all slightly annoyed with Sylvia on the ride home. A simple question—how tall are you?—could have saved us all four hours of our time. I asked Sylvia once more what, exactly, the producers were looking for in the role of doctor, other than someone shorter than me.
“They want a forty-five-year-old man,” she replied.
I had just turned thirty-one.
An agent called me one Saturday night as I sipped champagne at a friend’s wedding. A movie was being shot, he said, and the producers wanted to meet me the next afternoon. I asked if I needed to wear anything special or if I would be auditioning.
“No, nothing special,” the agent said. “They just want to meet you.”
The next afternoon, hungover from a long night of drinking champagne, I showed up at a studio near Beijing’s Central Business District to find that it was, in fact, an audition, but not for a movie. The job was for a promotional advertisement for a Chinese television company called Blue Ocean Network. BON broadcasted English-language programing to the United States. My old roommate Tom had worked at BON before moving back to the United Kingdom the previous year, and I still had several friends at the station. I really didn’t want any of them to see whatever end result would come of this, and I considered backing out and going home to nurse my hangover.
I told one of the Chinese producers that I had expected to be meeting about a movie and he waved his hand. “No, no movie. No movie.” The director asked me to stand in front of a green screen and walk from left to right, front to back, pretending to look at things off in the distance. Then he asked me to walk in place, facing the camera, and act as if I was looking at the Forbidden City just beyond. There was some grumbling about the fact that I’d worn shorts and a T-shirt, and about my beard, and after a couple of minutes of walking in place, the director thanked me and said he would get in touch.
I got the part on the condition that I shave my beard. After much complaining, I relented. The shoot took up a Sunday, and I was paid $200 for my troubles. All I had to do was walk around in front of a green screen pretending to look at things that weren’t really there.
It was my first and only starring role.
My friend David Fu, a Chinese-American who worked in the film industry, hooked me up with a spot on Beijing Television. They wanted a foreigner to more or less humiliate himself by performing Chinese opera in front of a television audience of millions.
I was instructed to meet at 4:30 p.m. at the Beijing TV studios downtown. Paul, Kit, and Annie came along with me, interested as they were in watching me embarrass myself. We met Ms. Li, a producer on the special National Day holiday show on which I was to appear. She escorted us into the building and brought us onto the set. The show was called Guang Rong Zhang Pang, which translated roughly into “Glorious Burst into Bloom.” The studio was dark, with a black and purple backdrop, and purple, pink, and white star-shaped strobe lights illuminated the stage.
A few dozen people had gathered in the audience, but more than half the seats were left empty. They were old ladies mostly, and several of them were growing impatient. “When does filming start?” one belted out. “It’s almost rush hour!”
We sat. We waited. My palms were sweaty. Ms. Li told me I would be called onstage and instructed to do various poses and movements common in Peking Opera.
“Will I have to sing?” I asked.
“Maybe. Maybe not. I’m not too sure.”
“You don’t know?”
“No. It’s up to the host.” She scurried off.
Eventually the host arrived. And then the three guests: female Peking opera performers. As filming began and they started the interview, I still didn’t know what I would be encountering upon being called onstage. After twenty minutes, the host asked the audience if anybody wanted to come up and learn some Peking opera. This was my cue. Ms. Li nodded and I stood to go onstage.
There I introduced myself to the audience, and one of the performers handed me a baton and tried to teach me how to twirl it. Easy enough. A few minutes later I went back onstage and learned a little dance, which went considerably better than my music video routine. In the end, I was not required to sing.
I sat down, satisfied with my performance. An old lady tapped me on the shoulder and whispered in my ear.
“Hen lihai!” she said. Very formidable.
She presented me with a little notebook and asked for my autograph. I signed it, in Chinese characters: Mi Gao.
During the National Day holiday week, in October 2011, I gave a speech at my former assistant’s wedding. Her name was Wei Xiao Ming, and she and her new husband, who went by the Anglicized name Mex, were married in a village of two hundred families not far from the North Korean border. (“Most of the villagers have never seen a foreigner before,” the groom told me when I arrived.)
I read the speech, in Chinese, in front of a curious audience of locals in Mex’s family’s backyard as sappy music played in the background. Despite my grow
ing show business CV, I was so nervous my hands were shaking and I lost my place a few times. The host, a man in his thirties wearing a sparkling jacket that looked like fish scales, helped me find my spot each time.
“Wei Xiao Ming and I started as colleagues,” I said, “but now we’ve become very good friends. I’m happy she’s found such an amazing husband. He’s very handsome, isn’t he?” The crowd cheered. “The bride’s very beautiful, isn’t she?” They cried even louder. “I wish them one hundred years of good luck and a long life together. Thank you.”
When the speech was over, I looked at Xiao Ming in her white wedding dress, standing on a stage in a tiny corner of northeast China, and she was crying. It was by far the most satisfying moment I would have in front of an audience in China.
Throughout those months I felt like I was living two separate lives. One was my Facebook life; the other my real life. Facebook life consisted of all the random adventures I was having in the name of writing—chasing acting gigs, starring in music videos, mumbling a line in a Chinese movie. People left comments congratulating me on living such an interesting life and wishing me luck in my next pursuit. But Facebook life wasn’t really my life. It was Tall Rice’s.
Real life was something different. During the summer and fall of 2011, I was growing increasingly anxious about my future, about when and how I would leave China, and what I would do once I was gone. As Tall Rice, I was experiencing more adventures than I had ever thought possible. But in my real life, I kept asking myself, was I still happy in China? I struggled to find an answer.
Things were changing in Beijing. I had been in the city for four and a half years, and many of the core friends I’d made over the previous few years had left or were thinking about leaving. We had lived a life of prolonged adolescence, and now people were growing up. Social engagements were growing fewer and farther between, and people were pairing up and settling down. Some of my best friends were seeking jobs back home or applying for graduate school. On bad days it seemed like my Beijing life, which I had loved so much, which had given me an identity, was crumbling before my eyes.
My dating life was practically nonexistent except for the odd drunken one-night stand, sometimes spaced months apart. Why date when you know that someday you won’t be here anymore? Partying, so key to life in China, was losing its shine. The wasted journalist abroad was getting boring and cliché.
When I first arrived in Beijing, I would walk into a bar and not know a soul. It was exhilarating. Who are these people, I wanted to know, and why are they here? A few years later, I did know. I’d walk into a bar and recognize dozens of people. Now that was starting to change. The wave of foreigners who had come to witness the buildup and aftermath of the Olympics—my wave—was being replaced by a new one of people coming from all over the world for the opportunities China afforded. They were excited to be here and they were young. Sometimes in bars and nightclubs I was starting to feel like Matthew McConaughey in Dazed and Confused—“I get older, they stay the same age.” I would look around and notice that I was the oldest person in my group—by about five years. And I wasn’t even that old.
I had lived in Beijing longer than in any other city since high school, and the fast-approaching five-year milestone weighed heavily on me. I felt increasingly guilty about living abroad, about being so far from my family, about avoiding responsibility. I was jealous of friends who were leaving and of those who had a plan for the future. But it’s hard to leave the city that’s the closest thing you have to a home, even if you’ll never really belong there.
My head was a clouded mess. Days were spent killing time, filling it up in chunks—reading a magazine, cycling to the gym, Chinese class, followed by sitting in Café Zarah surfing the Internet and looking for things to tweet, and then getting a tiny burst of energy to write. At night: dinner, basketball, drinks, a movie.
It was all a blur. I wasn’t really there. Not totally. In a lot of ways, I was starting to feel like I had when I left Toronto.
It was time to enlist my therapist: Guo Li.
Guo Li and I had been having classes together for more than three years. I use the word classes loosely. Mostly, I would pay her fifty yuan an hour just to sit and talk. She knew everything about me—more, in fact, than most of my Western friends in Beijing—and I knew everything about her. She was more than just my best Chinese friend; she was one of my best friends, period.
One afternoon in the fall of 2011, at a coffee shop in a mall near Dongzhimen subway station, Guo Li noticed that I wasn’t my usual self.
“Mi Gao,” she said, “what’s wrong? You’re not normal today.”
I sighed and explained that I was feeling nervous about the future. I told her that many of my friends were leaving and that, although I still loved Beijing, I also felt stuck. I didn’t know if I wanted to stay or go.
She nodded. “That’s because you’re bei piao.”
Bei piao. I was one of Beijing’s floating generation.
“I’m bei piao, too,” she said.
We sat in silence for a few moments, both of us lost and confused in the booming capital of China.
Guo Li tried to put me at ease. “You live a good life here, Mi Gao. You travel all the time, you have so many friends, and you’re not poor. You should enjoy it. You can go back to Canada whenever you want.”
She was right, of course, but still I fretted. I saw two possible futures for myself. Scenario A: I stay in China, nine more years pass, and the clock strikes forty. Broke and alone, I reapply for a job copyediting at China Daily, spending my days trying to block out the hum of my ancient computer and the blinding fluorescent lights above my head, and my evenings in the Den, wallowing in middle-aged sorrow, following in the footsteps of Potter and his friends, drinking flat Carlsberg and smoking cigarettes bummed off young female interns I’m trying to sleep with. Scenario B: I return to North America, accept a job at a newspaper, and bore people to death with endless tales about the good life I used to live over in China.
Neither option appealed.
Not a day went by that I didn’t weigh leaving, weigh the choice between two vastly different worlds, between two vastly different lives. I worried that if I stayed, I’d miss out on having a family and building a life for myself in a place I could call home. I worried that I’d miss out on spending time with my parents as they grew older, and with my friends as they settled into families.
On the other hand, I worried that if I left, I would never really find my way back in North America, that I would miss China so much it would consume me.
But I began wanting a more normal life—I wanted a stable job, enough money to be comfortable, a nice apartment, old friends, and a neighborhood pub. A weekly softball game with colleagues. Maybe a wife and a daughter. All those things that once terrified me and prompted me to run—the things that, when you boiled it right down, had driven me to China—all seemed strangely appealing.
What was happening to me? I wondered. Could it be that I was, finally, growing up?
Despite all the friends I had made over the years, and all the time I had spent in the city, the expat life in Beijing could still be a lonely one. And it became clear how much it was affecting me after I met my Future Wife.
One summer night a few months earlier, at a hutong restaurant not far from my apartment, I spotted a girl who was, in my mind, perfect. She was uniquely gorgeous with a cool style, somehow both sexy and modest. But it wasn’t just the way she looked. I felt immediately as if I already knew her, as if I’d always known her, even though I’d never seen her before in my life.
I was infatuated. Nothing like this had ever happened to me before. She was sitting at another table across the restaurant, with some people I knew, and I stared at her the entire night. At one point I approached her table with the sole purpose of getting an introduction. I didn’t, but I did overhear her name—Maria.
The
next day I flew to Canada for a few weeks, and when I arrived, I did some Facebook stalking to see if I could find her, but to no avail. Who was this girl? What was she doing in Beijing? Was she single?
Although I had no answers to these questions, I told my mom I’d found my “future wife”—I actually used those words.
“Mom, I met my future wife the other day.”
“Oh really? Tell me about her,” my mom said.
“She’s only the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen.”
“What’s her name?”
“Maria.”
“What does she do?”
“Well, I haven’t actually met her per se.”
A few weeks later, I was back in Beijing, and after a month of wandering the city with my eyes open, thinking of the lines I would use on her if I ever found her, I gave up hope of finding my Future Wife again.
Then one night I saw her in a bar. As soon as I noticed her from the door, my heart started pounding. My mouth was dry. I explained to my friend Gil, who just happened to be the world’s best wingman, that I absolutely must talk to this girl. Gil agreed to approach her table with a concocted story about how we had all met on some previous occasion. After an awkward few minutes of listening to Gil’s fabricated story, she snuck outside, and I followed. I introduced myself and we chatted for a few minutes. She was British and worked at an NGO in Beijing. She was about to go home for the night, and I blurted out something about getting a drink sometime. She said sure. I was euphoric.
We arranged a time. She canceled. We arranged another time. She canceled again. We ended up having lunch, and during the lunch she casually mentioned that she had a boyfriend. I was, even though I’d known this girl for all of twenty minutes, devastated.
A few months later, we would end up dating, Maria and I, and I was crazy about her. It didn’t last long, though. Apparently I had seen too many romantic comedies on airplanes because I got very far ahead of myself. I was convinced she was going to be my ticket out of China. We rushed into things after she broke up with her boyfriend, and then she pulled away, drew in again, and a few months later, pulled away for the last time. I ignored all kinds of warning signs—she’s too young, just twenty-four years old, too soon out of a relationship—and I paid for it in the end. She hadn’t really been single since she was fifteen years old, she told me. Her last few relationships had been “really intense.” She needed to do “the whole single-Beijing thing.”