Apologies to My Censor (2 page)

2

The Chinese Propagandist

L
ife in Beijing got off to a fittingly inauspicious start. On my first morning, Jenny, the Chinese staff member assigned to handle foreign editors at
China Daily
, took me to my state-required physical examination at a nearby hospital. On the way, we passed a commotion at a busy intersection. A crowd had gathered around a police car, and as we drove by, several men were yelling at one another.

In the middle of the crowd, I noticed a man lying twisted, motionless, and bloody. Nobody was helping him.

“Holy shit,” I said, my face pressed against the taxi window. “I think he's dead.”

Jenny giggled. She was a jittery woman in her mid-twenties with a ponytail and thick glasses. I told her that a story about a subway tunnel collapse that killed six workers in Beijing had recently made news in Canada.

She looked at me and said, “How many dead people do you think makes the news in China?”

“I don't know. One?”

She laughed again. “At least ten.”

I offered an uncomfortable chuckle before realizing she wasn't joking but pointing out my naïveté. In a country of 1.3 billion people, one dead pedestrian wasn't news at all.

The examination, required for all foreign workers in China, included a blood test for HIV/AIDS and heart monitoring. I caused some confusion when I stated my height and weight in inches and pounds, and a question about narcotics prompted a flashback to a long and regrettable cocaine-fueled night a few months earlier at a friend's wedding in Cancún. I worried for a moment that my time in China might be over before it began.

After the examination, I had a lunch of pork and fish with my new boss, Mr. Wang, a nervous little fellow with glasses, a bowl cut, and an oversize University of Tennessee sweater-vest. Mr. Wang, who was in charge of all foreign staff, hunched over his plate and studied the fish we were eating. He determined that it was a lake fish—“some kind of carp,” he said. He went on to talk at length about Norman Bethune, the Canadian doctor who joined Mao Zedong's communists during the Revolution and who is a legend in China but barely known outside of it. I asked him about his vest and he told me that he had once been a visiting scholar at the school, studying mass media. “It is very polite,” he said of Tennessee, “but conservative.”

Mr. Wang told me I'd be working the night shift, at least to start, editing the business pages. My heart immediately sank. Editing the
China Daily
business section's “torrid prose,” as the
Rough Guide
put it, was one thing, but doing so at night, while I wanted to be out diving headlong into Beijing's boom, was a whole different ball game. I made a mental note: this will need to be remedied.

After lunch, Jenny whisked me away for a tour of the office.
China Daily
's headquarters were in a four-story, faded yellow building near the fourth ring road in north Beijing, far from the Forbidden City and Tiananmen Square, located in the center of the city. Guards who looked no more than twenty, wearing poorly fitting green uniforms and armed with walkie-talkies, stood at lazy attention at the front door. Everything about the place looked drab and dated, from the water stains on the outside tiles to the bizarre cubic architecture throughout. The interior was as bleak as outside, with humming fluorescent lights, gray cubicle walls, and the constant waft of onion drifting in from the canteen down the hall. Jenny sat me down at my cubicle. The chair squeaked and there were enough crumbs in my ancient keyboard to feed one of the young guards working out front.

I wandered the streets around the
China Daily
compound that night. I could hardly believe I was there. The setting sun had turned the sky purple, and the streets were busy with locals walking in and out of brightly lit restaurants. The air smelled of garlic and burning meat. Potbellied middle-aged men with their pants pulled high smoked cigarettes on the sidewalk while mothers fussed over small children. I was energized. I felt more optimistic about life than I had in a year.

The next day, my second in China, I started work. I was told to shadow a balding, nervous Scotsman, a
China Daily
veteran who introduced me to some of the foreigners around the office. There seemed to be a clear divide in the expat staff. Some were young and international, here for an adventure and to experience the Olympic buildup. A few were wandering professionals who had spent a career bouncing from one developing world English-language paper to another. Others were lifted directly from a Hemingway novel—heavy drinkers, bar fighters, frequenters of prostitutes. Many were career expatriates, some having been in Asia for a decade or two.

My cubicle neighbor at
China Daily
was a well-dressed young Chinese reporter who went by the English name Harry. He had a firm handshake and a flattop brush cut, and he spoke in robotic English. On one of my first days of work, Harry showed me a Flash presentation he'd made for his former employer, a political magazine.

“This is for propagating at the beginning of a campaign,” he told me.

I had no idea what he meant. The video was slick, with pictures of Chinese leaders throughout history mixed with images of battles and slogans. Chinese characters and English words—totally out of context—flashed on the screen. victory. history. I would have thought it was a joke if Harry's facial expression didn't betray such pride. He was beaming.

“I love this Flash,” he told me. “It is one way in China we have of propagating. Here at
China Daily
, we use careful chosen words for propagating. It's a different way.” Harry nodded. “It's good.”

A few days later, over lunch at a local noodle shop, Harry told me with a straight face, “There are too many foreigners in China.” Again, I would have thought he was joking had he not looked so serious. Harry had been by far the most accommodating Beijinger I'd met since arriving; he had even paid for the noodles I was eating. He shook his head. “Far too many.”

It turned out, foreigners weren't the only group of people Harry frowned upon. His countrymen from Shanghai were “the most disgusting people in the country, other than Taiwanese. Taiwanese want their own country,” he scoffed, moving his hand in a sweeping motion, “so forget about them. Shanghainese, they think the rest of Chinese are all
peasants
! They think they are the only ones who are sophisticated, that they are
soooo
well educated. They are disgusting.”

The next time Harry asked me for lunch, I politely said no.

M
y first friend at
China Daily
was a thirty-year-old Englishman named Rob. He had been at the paper for three months when I arrived and introduced himself on one of my first days on the job.

“I heard there was another young guy here. That's good,” he said, nodding. He told me he liked Beijing well enough but was eager to find a wingman for the weekends. “We should party sometime.”

“Definitely,” I said.

Rob reminded me of a balding James Bond, only in boot cut jeans instead of a tux. He had broad shoulders, blue eyes, and a wide smile of fake-looking front teeth. Rob had lived in Asia for seven years—in Japan and the Philippines before coming to China—and had slept with more women than anybody I'd ever met. His nickname at the paper, I soon discovered, was Yi Bai Wu, the Chinese word for one hundred and fifty. That was supposedly the number of women he'd bedded, although after hearing him talk I figured it was a conservative estimate.

On my first weekend in Beijing, Rob and another coworker, an Australian in his mid-thirties named Max, took me out to a few bars in Sanlitun, Beijing's rowdy nightlife area near the Workers Stadium. We visited a half-dozen bars, packed with foreigners and Chinese. There were dive bars, expensive bars, music bars, hooker bars, and massive, booming nightclubs that stayed open until the last customer left. We drank until four in the morning and finished the night off eating Big Macs at a McDonald's down the road from
China Daily
.

The next morning, hungover, Rob regaled me with stories of his many conquests in Asia as we strolled around town. We bought lattes in the Starbucks in the Forbidden City, and as we walked through the old imperial palace talking about women and drinking American coffee, I felt like we were pissing on two thousand years of Chinese history.

I was a stranger in a strange place, and even though I was hardly alone, I felt unique simply for being there. The city's global prominence was growing. The Olympics were on everybody's mind, and I was there to see it.

When I came home that night, after spending the evening walking around the city with Rob, I sat at my computer and wrote for hours, recording the details of the beginning of my new life.

A
lthough I was hired as a writer, my initial duties were editing, or “polishing,” as it was known around the office. I started work at two-thirty in the afternoon and ended around eleven or eleven-thirty. During the empty hours before work I would take long walks around the
China Daily
building (almost all of the foreign editors lived in an apartment complex next door), or go to a nearby gym, which, like everything else in Beijing, smelled of onions. My apartment, the office, people's breath. It all smelled like onions.

Everything was new and strange and exciting. The streets, the sounds, the unique Beijing energy—it was invigorating. One morning, I stopped at a narrow, polluted river near my office. Old people walked up and down the banks, slapping their backs and doing strange exercises. One elderly woman massaged another with her fists. A city worker raked the ground around a small tree while debris floated in the toxic-looking green river behind him.

Each day was a small adventure. I had arrived in Beijing armed with an arsenal of Chinese words that topped out at one:
ni hao
—hello. To communicate, I relied on colleagues, maps, and body language, which I discovered did not work very well in China. Ordering food was a crapshoot, especially if restaurant menus lacked pictures. During my first week in the city, I stopped for lunch at a restaurant across the street from
China Daily
, where the waitress presented me with a menu featuring columns of Chinese characters. I was hungry and too proud to walk out without ordering, so I simply pointed at random to an item I felt fell in an appropriate price range for a lunchtime meal for one. What arrived was a massive metal bowl filled with spicy red broth, bony chicken, and vegetables. It was delicious, and it could have served five.

Despite the language barrier, I did my best to explore. Rob and I bought cheap bicycles, and on a Saturday morning we rode south to Chang'An Dajie (Avenue of Eternal Peace), Beijing's main artery, a wide boulevard lined with government buildings. We cycled west past Wangfujing, a popular pedestrian street, down to Tiananmen Square and the Forbidden City, where tourists in from the countryside took photos of a portrait of Chairman Mao. We headed south through the winding
hutong
alleyways, many of which faced demolition as the Olympics approached. In late afternoon we arrived in Dashilan'r, a former slum that was being renovated into a tourist attraction. We had a late lunch of pork with green pepper, ground beef and green beans, spicy tofu, and dumplings dipped in vinegar, and we drank throat-numbing rice wine and Yanjing beer with a gregarious restaurant owner.

One morning, I cycled along the north fourth ring road, not far from the
China Daily
compound, to the Olympic Green. Finishing touches were being put on the National Stadium, better known as the Bird's Nest, and the National Aquatics Center, aka the Water Cube—self-congratulatory national backslaps that stood honor to China's rise. The Olympic Green was surrounded by a blue metal wall. Workers in yellow construction hats squatted on the surrounding pavement, slurping noodles from metal bowls. Around them were the temporary barracks in which they slept, and the trucks and diggers and bulldozers they worked in by day. Visitors peered through cracks in the blue wall and hoisted digital cameras over the top, snapping pictures of the nearby future.

At night, during those early days, I would stand on my balcony smoking cigarettes and looking out at the glowing city, and my heart would thump. Beijing—home to emperors and tyrants and thousands of years of history—was my new home. It was an incredible feeling.

W
alking back to my apartment one afternoon, I ran into an Australian editor named Martin, who was in his forties with a friendly smile of smoke-stained teeth and wiry gray hair. Martin had been in Beijing for more than a year. “Things are changing here,” he told me, pointing to the influx of foreign staff. “Sure, it's a drab government paper.
China Daily
doesn't break news because the government doesn't break itself. But it's changing.” He mentioned a few recent stories that had been critical of the government, before noticing the skepticism creeping on my face. “You'll have a ball here,” he said.

But I had my doubts. It only took a few weeks for my initial high to wear off and I started to dread going to work. When I arrived in Beijing, I wanted life at
China Daily
to be crazy, movie-premise crazy, communist spies leaning over my shoulder, filtered e-mails, phone taps, and threatening late-night altercations with men in Mao suits. In my imagination, I would be a fly on the wall and expose the massive state propaganda apparatus from within. The book would be huge—maybe I'd be kicked out of China and return to Toronto, triumphantly, just in time for my book launch. China—and
China Daily
—promised so much for me, and more than anything it promised escape from the boring, depressing, and uninspiring life I had been leading in Canada.

So it was a massive disappointment to discover that my job was, above all else, boring, depressing, and uninspiring. The office wasn't crazy at all. A little nutty, maybe, but more in a funny ha-ha sort of way than a Stalinist Russia way.