by Mitch Moxley
“But they just moved me here.”
“Yes, there’s some concern you walked out of an interview. But the editor in chief said you have to stay in business.”
For the next week, I was moved between the business and features sections a total of thirteen times. One editor would tell me I was in the business section; fifteen minutes later another editor would say otherwise, and so on.
Nobody bothered to tell me what was really going on, so I sat at my desk and did nothing. By now word had spread around China Daily that I had “walked out” of an interview, and both the Chinese reporters and foreign staff were asking me what was going on. I had no clue.
“I heard you walked out of an interview,” Jenny, who took me to my medical exam on my first day, wrote to me one day on instant messenger.
I explained the situation and insisted I wasn’t at fault.
“Hee-hee. You’ll never understand China,” she said.
It wasn’t until a few weeks later, once I had been resettled into the business section, that I found out what really happened. Over drinks at a bar one night, Ram, an Indian editor who had the most influence of any foreigner at China Daily, pulled me aside. Ram had been at the paper for years and had built up significant guanxi—“relations” or “connections,” hugely important in Chinese culture and business—with the bosses. He told me that most of the editors and reporters at China Daily were angry that there were so many foreigners at the paper and that we were being paid starting salaries triple that of Chinese reporters. They were especially livid that there were now foreign writers at China Daily, something entirely new at the paper. The business editors, who viewed their section as superior to the others, were especially displeased. When the opportunity arose, Ram said, certain editors deliberately tried to make me look lazy and unprofessional, in an attempt to demonstrate to the higher-ups that there shouldn’t be foreign writers in the business section and at the paper in general.
“So,” I said, smoking one of Ram’s cigarettes, “I was . . . set up?”
“Yes. But don’t worry. The editor in chief knows about it and he’s very upset. He’s let them know there are going to be foreign writers here and there’s nothing they can do about it.”
By the following week, things had changed. Ms. Feng, the business editor, asked if I wanted to write an opinion column and told me, “We need to do a better job of communicating with our foreign experts.” She cleared her throat. “I mean foreign friends.”
With so much time on my hands during the tumultuous few weeks, I tried to tackle Chinese. Because I was planning to stay only until the Olympics, I didn’t see the need to fully immerse myself in the language. “Just the basics,” I told Ms. Song during our first infamous lesson. “Enough to get around, order food, you know.”
I started by taking one two-hour lesson a week but soon realized that would get me nowhere. Chinese, a tonal language with some ten thousand characters, is a massive mountain to climb. I knew it wouldn’t be easy, but it didn’t take long before it simply felt futile. For a few weeks I arranged to meet Ms. Song for $7.50-per-hour lessons every day, but laziness soon overpowered what little determination I had. Ms. Song loved to gossip, and I latched on to her as an excuse to avoid studying. Ten minutes into our lessons, she would be gossiping about my colleagues at China Daily, in English, and I never tried to set her back on course. Before long, I was regularly canceling lessons, using myriad excuses, and I eventually scaled back to three times a week, then two, then one—right back where I started.
Our lessons would begin with a review of the previous class. Ms. Song would allow me to look over a chapter in our textbook, and then she would take it away from me, hiding it against her chest so I couldn’t see.
“What’s huanjing?”
“Hmm. No idea.”
“But you just looked at the book.”
“But I don’t remember.”
“But we study this word every week for last three weeks.”
“Sorry.”
“Sometimes I think you only speak Chinese with me.”
“Maybe.”
And then on to the next word I didn’t remember. Soon I would bring up the latest China Daily gossip, knowing Ms. Song would take the bait, or I might complain about whatever recent injustice I perceived I had suffered at the hands of China Daily. Two hours later, I was one hundred yuan (fifteen dollars) poorer and no closer to knowing any Chinese.
China Daily began offering group classes twice a week with Ms. Song. About eight foreign experts initially attended the classes. Seven of us were beginners, while one colleague, an American in his mid-twenties named Jon, who worked in the Web division, was upper-intermediate. Classes were a mix of Jon and Ms. Song speaking in Chinese, and the rest of us chatting in English.
I decided that regular testing was the only way I would scratch the surface of Chinese, so I paid Ms. Song extra to prepare weekly tests based on what we had studied in our private classes. A few days after the first test I was waiting for the China Daily group class to begin when Ms. Song arrived carrying a stack of papers.
“We are having a test today,” she said.
She handed out a sheet of paper to everybody in the class, and when she got to me, I noticed it was the same test I had paid her to make for my private classes. I should have let it slide, since I was paying her a total of eight dollars a week to make the tests.
Let it slide I did not.
“Ms. Song, I have a bone to pick with you,” I said as my classmates scribbled on the sheets of paper.
“A bone to chew?”
“A bone to pick.”
“What’s a bone to pick?”
“It’s an expression . . . never mind. Anyway, the thing is, I paid for you to make these tests for me, not to make them for everybody in the class. If I knew you were going to hand out tests in the class, I wouldn’t be paying you to make them for me.”
Ms. Song’s eyes widened. For a second I thought she was going to cry. She said nothing.
“Uh . . . I’m sorry,” I said, instantly regretting being a baby. “It’s really not a big deal. I just thought I’d, you know, I thought I’d let you know how I felt.”
After class, Jon approached me at the elevator.
“Hey Mitch, I think Ms. Song was really embarrassed.”
“I wasn’t really angry. I just thought she shouldn’t use tests for the class that I’m paying her to write for me.”
“Yeah, I know, but in China there’s a certain way of dealing with things like that. It’s a face thing.”
A face thing. Face is an enigma central to Chinese culture. It would take me years to figure out how to navigate the labyrinth of face, but I figure it essentially works like a currency. Face can be given and taken away, in small, medium, or large increments. The giving and taking of face can be deliberate or accidental. By confronting Ms. Song in class, I had taken away her face. Or at least that’s what I understood.
Later that day an e-mail arrived in my inbox with the subject “paper case.”
hi mitch:
i am ms. song. i want to explain the paper giving to you. i think i should say sorry to you, because i havent tell you i gave the paper to other class. But i don’t think i am wrong.
i am very happy you love to study chinese very much, so i want to help you. i hope all of my student can speak chinese very well, actually, i dont care about you money, i just want
you can get improve and feel more fun with studing chinese, yesterday i spent 2 hours to make you paper, comperad you payment i think i spent more time maybe i shouldnt tell you this but i just want you to understand me, i hope you kown you are my student also friend. . . .
i think you shoud not talk to this thing in my class, you made me so embarrassing, except you and me nobody know this, and i can not explain in the class using everbodys time. so mayby because of you words somebody will misunderstand me, thinking about me is a cheater. anyway, that’s why i give the paper to basic class, i hope you, friend of mine, can understand me.
I might have been lost in Chinese class, but being an asshole, it turned out, translated into any language.
Unmotivated to work or learn the language, I needed a break—from the city, the heat, from China Daily. A friend from Canada was coming to town, and we decided to make a weekend trip to a former German colonial town on the coast called Qingdao, where an annual beer festival was about to begin.
On the flight from Beijing, I was reading a book and sitting beside my friend George, a former colleague from Canada, when the plane shook violently. It felt as if we had collided with another plane. A few seconds later we hit turbulence so bad it made the cabin lights flicker. The flight crew hit the deck and the toddler behind me started to wail. Beside him, an old man laughed hysterically, as if to say, I knew man couldn’t fly!
The trip went all downhill from there.
I was excited about Qingdao. The Rough Guide described the city as some kind of Bavarian wonderland. Chinese colleagues had sung its praises, too: beach city, boomtown, beer festival. “The port city of Qingdao in the east of Shandong province makes a remarkable first impression,” the Rough Guide said. “Emerging from the train station and walking north with your eyes fixed on the skyline, you could almost believe you had got off at a nineteenth-century Bavarian village, nestling on the Yellow Sea.”
As far as I could tell, the only thing Bavarian left in Qingdao was the rain and the German guy who stole our cab during a torrential downpour our second night in town. Every number listed in the Rough Guide was incorrect (seven digits instead of eight) and the hotel it recommended, and where we stayed, smelled of bad seafood, as did much of Qingdao itself. Our room, at one hundred dollars a night, overlooked the city’s busiest intersection, which meant that as of 7 a.m. we were greeted with the whistles, honks, and hollering of a thousand umbrella-wielding Chinese tourists marching up and down the boardwalk.
Our first night in Qingdao, after a day spent walking around town in the rain, we went to Tsingtao Beer Street. (Qingdao is known for its beer and is famous for the popular brand Tsingtao.) The beer festival was kicking off the next day, so visiting a street of beer seemed appropriate. Beer Street was packed, lined with indistinguishable seafood restaurants. There were some suspicious smells, but the food was good: tiny clams, garlic shrimp, grilled fish, all washed down with fresh beer brewed across the street.
The atmosphere, however, was not as appetizing. When I went to the washroom, the floor was covered with urine, and though it was a one-man bathroom, two drunken men invited themselves in and peed in the drain while I used the Western-style toilet. One of them gave me a thumbs-up. Later, as we ate dinner, a man beside us placed his index finger on his left nostril and blew a wad of snot on the ground, his nose inches from our bowl of shellfish. Meanwhile, an old lady in an apron emerged from the kitchen, sat in a chair, and picked her nose as we ate our shrimp.
At this point, we were still giving Qingdao the benefit of the doubt, assuming there was more to the city than met the eye. After a good night’s rest, George and I figured, we would discover the city’s true charm. But Qingdao had other ideas. As soon as we decided to leave Beer Street, the rains came. It poured from 10 p.m. until past 2 a.m., flooding the streets. It was clear we were in for a long weekend.
The next day the rains continued and we were slow moving. After lunch we took a bus to the Beer Festival, where we sat at a table drinking bottles of German beer as a waitress tried to sell us chicken feet and duck liver. Around us were several hundred drunk Chinese huddled at picnic tables under a large circus tent. Onstage, a performer in a black tank top and ripped jeans, with a beer gut and Elvis hair, swung his hips and punched the air to the tune of horrendous pop music played at what was surely a dangerous decibel.
At around 7 p.m. we decided the Beer Festival was beyond salvaging and headed back downtown. After the aforementioned German stole our cab, we eventually made it to our destination and decided to unwind with a pizza and a massage. We headed to a four-star hotel near ours and ate a pizza with toppings that included sausage, lettuce, and corn.
Then we went downstairs to the “spa.” I should have known something was amiss when two young women took George and me to separate rooms, at which point my masseuse, whose thong was exposed at the back of her jeans, began to massage nothing but my lower abdomen and inner thigh, moving slowly inward.
“You want?” she said, eyebrows raised.
I shook my head. “Bu yao, xie xie.” No, thanks.
I covered my eyes with my hands and tried to will away what was happening in my pants.
She typed the number 1,200—about $150—on her phone and showed it to me. “Okay?”
“No, thanks.”
She pouted and typed 600. “Okay?”
“No, thank you. Just massage.”
George was having a similar problem. “Mitch, what’s happening over there?!” he cried from the other room.
“She’s trying to jerk me off!” I hollered.
“Me, too!”
George successfully fought off the happy ending, but my masseuse was loath to give up. She keyed 300 into her phone. “Okay?”
“No, I don’t want that!” I said.
She threw up her hands in exasperation. The rest of the massage was terrible. She spent most of the time unenthusiastically kneading my back with one hand, and text messaging with the other.
After waking the next morning to more rain, George and I went across town to drink coffee at a Starbucks. We basically just wanted to kill the day before boarding the flight back to Beijing. By midafternoon the clouds broke for the first time, revealing a lovely blue sky. Of course, we were wearing jeans and shoes, and too far from our hotel to change into shorts and enjoy the weather.
A few hours later, we were sitting on the plane, having never set foot on the beach during our weekend beach getaway, and looking paler than ever.
During the weeks that followed I did very little work at China Daily. The editors would assign me a story, I would take two weeks to write it, and then the story had a 50 percent shot at going to print. Throughout the summer and into the fall, I wrote maybe three or four stories. The rest of the time I did whatever I wanted.
It became clear to me during that time that the influx of “foreign friends” to China Daily was little more than window dressing, not much different from the coats of paint they were throwing up on apartment buildings around the ring roads to beautify the city before the Games. We were a small part of the biggest public relations campaign in history—Beijing’s Olympic makeover.
To that end, China Daily brought in people with real journalism experience. In the past, the foreigners at the paper were travelers, university students on summer break, or outright nut jobs. One foreign expert, whose career at China Daily lasted two weeks, frequently and firmly made known his belief in aliens and claim
ed to have fourteen doctoral degrees, one of which was being suppressed by the Vatican. Now the foreign experts appeared legally sane, or at bare minimum did not talk openly about their belief in aliens. We were told we would have real influence at the paper and that we could help decide its direction. But in the end, what China Daily really wanted was for us to sit down, shut up, and edit. There were changes, but they were glacial and superficial. It was a sugarcoating, and we were the sugar.
Periodically the foreign staff would discuss the ethics of working at China Daily. Some felt we had a responsibility to make the paper better. Others disagreed. “There’s nothing wrong with what we do,” my friend Max, the Australian, said one night as we strolled around the China Daily compound. “You have to realize what this is. We’re not a newspaper, mate. We’re PR. You have to give the bosses what they want.”
He was right, and once I accepted that fact I could tolerate working at China Daily. I was no longer a journalist, but I could be one in my off-hours. By midsummer I had sold a few freelance articles, and I became determined to do better. I would be like a media Batman: propagandist by day, journalist by night.
Although I would always have my issues with China Daily, I eventually began to appreciate the unique experience for what it was and to enjoy myself. And I still hoped that I could, in some small way, change the paper for the better, to make it somehow more palatable, to blur the line between propaganda and journalism until a reader might barely know the difference.
“How does it feel to be a government propagandist?” a woman asked me once at a bar in Beijing, barely masking her contempt. It was a question I received often, and I answered her honestly: “Great!” It had become a reason to be in China during an incredible time, a chance to be a part of history.
Since my editors asked very little of me, that’s what I gave them, and in the slow, sweltering weeks of summer I settled into a lovely routine in my new career as a wallflower. Sometimes, out of sheer boredom, I would offer to edit a story, but mostly my days looked like this:
