by Mitch Moxley
The trip was a journey into the bizarre, and I knew I was on to a good story. I had no idea it would be a life-changing story. When the article I wrote about the trip to Dongying was published in the Atlantic eight months later, I thought the story would come and go. Instead, the reaction was shocking: I had blown the whistle on the fake-businessman scheme, and the whole world, it seemed, wanted to know more.
Within a few days I was getting phone calls from international news outlets wanting to interview me about my experience. I received dozens of e-mails from people around the world—unemployed graduates, teachers, pilots—asking if I could find them pretend businessman jobs. My career seemed to be finally taking off. Kevin was livid. And I had become something of a celebrity among Beijing’s expat community.
I was the “Rent a White Guy” guy.
15
The “Rent a White Guy” Guy
I didn’t see any of it coming.
After I came back from Dongying, I sat in Café Zarah with my notes and wrote the story of my experience as a fake businessman. And then I waited. For one, I didn’t know where I could sell it. It was a great story, but few of the publications I knew accepted humorous, personal narrative pieces, and I didn’t know if the angle was strong enough for a top-tier publication. After all, most foreigners living in China had heard of the fake-businessman gigs, and many had done it themselves. It was a funny story, but it didn’t seem like anything new.
I also didn’t want to get the organizers of the trip, Kevin and Kim, in trouble. Although I had openly taken notes throughout the weekend, I didn’t tell them I was going to write anything. The story was supposed to be more of a quirky China anecdote, not an indictment of the company, but I still thought I would give it some time before trying to sell the story so that it would be more difficult to track down the company that had hired us.
I set the story aside and resumed my normal life. Work was going reasonably well: I accepted a part-time assignment as a stringer for an international newswire based in Rome, and I continued to freelance for international publications, sometimes traveling elsewhere in China and Asia for assignments. Traveling kept me content; it kept Beijing fresh. Making the transition back to North America was always in the back of my mind, but as long as I was content and my parents were happy and healthy, I was going to stay. I felt like I was on the right track: I had published in American magazines, had steady freelance work, and had cut down on voice recording. I perhaps hadn’t accomplished as much as I’d hoped for, but I was doing all right.
In April 2010, I turned thirty. Celebrating my thirtieth birthday in the capital of China was not something I had foreseen in life, but I was thankful for the way things had turned out. Life was easy, satisfying, and constantly amusing. The anxieties I’d had about turning thirty—about career, money, the future—had started to fade. I was in the right place at the right time, and I knew it.
A few friends threw a party for me in their courtyard home, not far from Dongzhimen subway station. Their apartment was packed with people—old friends and new friends and friends of friends I didn’t know. We drank a vodka punch outside in the courtyard on the cool April night, and I gave a speech for my friends that left me nearly teary-eyed.
I was presented with a birthday gift: a headless and limbless mannequin outfitted in black lingerie. I was still single, after all. We drank for hours in the courtyard and at midnight went to a large club near Workers Stadium and danced—yes, even me—until dawn. I woke up the next morning a thirty-year-old with a killer hangover and a real sense of optimism I hadn’t had in years.
Around the time of my birthday, I pitched the Rent a White Guy article to the Atlantic. I had been looking for buyers for the previous few months, trying publications in the United States and Canada, with no luck. I had almost given up selling the story when one day I flipped through an issue of the Atlantic and saw a story similar in tone to what I was envisioning for the piece. I figured I had nothing to lose, and lo and behold, the magazine accepted my story.
During the fact-checking phase, the Atlantic contacted Kevin and the others to confirm the details of my account. Kevin was furious. He called me one morning while I was brushing my teeth.
“What the fuck have you done, man?” he asked over the phone. “Is this some kind of hatchet job?”
I assured him it wasn’t: I had withheld everybody’s last names, the company name, what the company did, and when we went. I told him the story was meant to be a funny anecdote about the business culture in China and not an exposé of the company. Kevin calmed down and said that as long as I didn’t publish any of the crucial details, he would be okay with the article, although I suspected otherwise.
The article was published on the same day as the start of the 2010 soccer World Cup. My friends and I watched games on outdoor screens in Sanlitun, drinking beers and returning home at 5 a.m.
The next morning, I opened my inbox to find an e-mail from a producer in Los Angeles who said she worked with a major studio. She wanted to know if the rights to my article were available for a feature film. I read over the e-mail several times. The published article was short and, I thought, insignificant: a comic tale about something relatively common in China. Sure, it was a good story to tell friends over beers—“You made a thousand bucks to pretend to be a businessman? For real?”—but I had never, not for a minute, thought it could be a movie.
I went running that afternoon with my friend Paul Morris, a twenty-seven-year-old Brit who had worked as an assistant director on major movies in England. I told him about the producer’s e-mail. He tried to temper my expectations.
“Producers have interns scouring the Internet for ideas all day,” he told me as we jogged around Ritan Park. “They’re contacting people all the time. I wouldn’t get my hopes up.”
Paul’s advice would later prove prescient, but the e-mails kept coming. More than a dozen producers contacted me with inquiries about film and TV rights. Most e-mailed me; some called out of the blue.
One morning, my phone rang when I was half asleep, a long-distance number I didn’t recognize.
“Hey,” I said groggily, assuming it was my parents calling my cell phone over Skype.
The voice on the other end introduced himself as Dan so-and-so, from such-and-such a production company in Hollywood.
“Oh, hi,” I said, sitting up in my bed and rubbing my eyes.
He went on. “I loved the story you wrote in the Atlantic. Great stuff. We think it has excellent potential for a feature film.” He listed a number of movies his company had done with various stars. “We’d love to talk more about this.”
“Uh . . . okay,” I mumbled. “Yeah, great.”
Meanwhile, a major management company in Hollywood arranged an early morning conference call with its CEO and manager. They said they were interested in taking a crack at the project and asked me to take a look at their standard rights agreement. I told them I needed to seek out advice and was exploring my options.
“Of course,” the CEO said. “You should. And if you find somebody who you think might be a good fit, please have them get in touch. The last movie we did, we got Brad Pitt on board.”
Yeah, I thought, let’s call up Brad and see what he thinks . . .
Meanwhile, strangers were contacting me from all over the world asking me to find them fake-businessman jobs. Some sent me full rundowns of their CVs:
I am a highly motivated business minded individual who desires a challenge in everything I do. As soon as I graduated I went straight into a high pressure sales job to increase my sales ability and rapport building skills. . . . I am naturally good at meeting people face to face without coming off as the dreaded “solicitor.”. . .
I have mastered the art of the international language with a smile and positive attitude along with the determination to jump into any situation. . . . If you can remember when you first s
tarted and through hard work and perseverance, and maybe knowing the right people at the right time, achieved your dream . . . then maybe you can help me get that start.
Others sent me modeling shots. Some had unique experience to offer as a fake businessman:
I am from the US and was hired as a pilot for———airlines . . . I have always wanted to go to China and would love to be involved in one of these opportunities. An advantage that I have is that I can fly into several cities in China as many times as I would like for free.
Or:
I am a Caucasian male with excellent etiquette, style, and verbal skills.
Or:
[I’m] an old white guy with a bespoke suit or two.
At first I found it entertaining that anybody would contact me looking for a fake job, as if I was the world’s liaison to employers of pretend businessmen everywhere. Then I found it sad, because the people who contacted me were mostly unemployed and had run out of options. As several of the people who contacted me said, they had nothing to lose.
One day during the “Rent a White Guy” craze, my mom called me in Beijing.
“Are you having an affair with a married woman?” she asked.
“Excuse me?”
“Look in the Atlantic’s comments section. Someone wrote that you’re having an ongoing affair with a married woman.”
I opened up the article and scrolled down through a couple hundred comments until I found it. “International Journalist Mitch Moxley . . . has recently been forced from Beijing after his affair with the wife of ——— was recently discovered,” the message said. It went on to claim that I had been carrying on the affair for four months and offered as evidence an “intimate” photo of my alleged lover and me in an expat listings magazine. The woman’s husband was apparently “full of murderous rage and vows to hunt Moxley to the edge of the earth. Moxley has since left Beijing but has been quoted several times saying how he targeted married women for sex as they required less care and maintenance.”
I fought through my bewilderment and contacted the woman with whom I was allegedly having an affair. (We were not; the magazine photo in question was simply me, her, and another friend standing beside one another at a concert.) I gave her a heads-up in case her husband saw the comment.
“Wow,” she messaged me back. “Somebody really doesn’t like you.”
The whole thing had taken on a life of its own. Over the course of a few weeks I was interviewed by the BBC, CNN, National Public Radio, and news outlets from Canada to New Zealand to the Netherlands. Journalists from around the world contacted me to help do their own fake-businessman stories. CNN did a story that generated more than fifty-three thousand “likes” on Facebook. The Colbert Report did a skit on the Rent a White Guy phenomenon.
The requests for movie rights continued to pile up. At its peak, there were some twenty production companies considering buying the rights. I needed advice. A friend in Beijing put me in touch with an agent in the city who contacted his colleague in Los Angeles on my behalf. That night, at 3 a.m., I received a call as I stumbled home slightly wobbly from a club opening in Sanlitun. The agent made his pitch. I was on board.
In July, while my agent worked with producers in Los Angeles to pitch “Rent a White Guy” to studios, I moved apartments again. Tom was going back to England, and I wouldn’t be able to afford my place in Sun City alone. Paul and I and his cousin Kit Gillet, another freelance journalist, spent a month looking for the perfect apartment. We had almost given up when we finally found it: a two-thousand-square-foot space on the top floor of an old building near Lama Temple. It was the city’s best neighborhood, in the hutongs, with cool bars, cafés, and restaurants nearby, but with a Chinese feel. On the wall of our building were characters that read: “This building has old people. Please keep quiet.”
Beijing’s bylaws stated that apartment buildings of more than six stories must have an elevator, and our apartment was on the seventh floor of a building with no elevator. Nobody had ever lived in the space before, but for whatever reason the building’s management company had decided to rent it out anyway. It had cement floors splattered with white paint, big windows, two massive balconies, each the size of squash courts, and ten rooms in all. It felt like an art gallery. We furnished it ourselves, framed photos and hung them on the walls, built bookshelves, and bought a movie projector. It was an incredible apartment, and it cost only $1,400 for the three of us.
One day shortly after we’d moved, I sat in a nearby coffee shop and read over my journals from before I came to China. I was reminded of the dark place I was in that year in Toronto. Thinking about those days, I could hardly believe how much had changed. Over the course of three years, I’d gone from spending my days wandering around alone, bullying myself for being such a failure and writing business fluff pieces—to having Hollywood producers call me.
I shook my head. Unbelievable, I thought. What an unbelievable, incredible, mind-boggling . . .
Fluke.
The article was a mere eight hundred words, a story about a slice of expat life that is ridiculously common. One story in one magazine. But it had obviously struck a chord with a readership suffering from 10 percent unemployment, with an economy in the toilet and news of China booming in their faces every day. And my career was taking off because of it.
Still, I knew in my heart that, really, I didn’t deserve much credit. I couldn’t help but feel like a bit of a fraud—which, coincidentally, was also the main job requirement of a fake businessman.
Perhaps I’d found my calling.
16
Chasing the Iron Rooster
The old lady was asleep on the berth beside me, snoring. It was a guttural snore, a snore that came from the soul. It rose up from the gut, through the lungs and throat, with a brief layover in the nasal cavity and was then released with a thunder. It was an epic snore, one that might provoke thoughts of violence. Thoughts of violence within me. Toward her.
I lay in my bunk, consumed by the noise. Not just the snoring; sounds were everywhere. It was seven in the morning and the train was alive. Old men climbed down from their berths, stretching and yawning. Young women shuffled to the steel sinks at the end of each car to brush their teeth and hair. The televisions mounted to the walls of each cabin were soon turned on—at full volume—playing a low-budget Chinese historical epic. Before long, the grumpy attendants were out, pushing carts down the aisle, selling fruit, toothbrushes, and fried chicken in vacuum-sealed packages.
Sleep was futile. Outside my window was southern China’s Guangxi province. As staccato images of rocky outcroppings, rice paddies, and half-built brick homes flashed by, I rolled out of bed and mixed myself a cup of instant coffee I’d brought with me.
Rule number one of Chinese train travel: bring coffee.
I had been commissioned by the Globe and Mail to write a travel story about riding the rails in China. The paper gave me a budget for more than a week’s worth of travel. From Beijing, I’d take the twenty-eight-hour train to Guilin, in Guangxi, and spend a few days exploring the karst peaks of Yangshuo Valley. From there I would travel to Guangzhou and Shenzhen, the southern Chinese boomtown. After Shenzhen, I would take the night train to Shanghai for a day before returning to the capital.
It was a much-needed break from Beijing. For months, I had been consumed with just one thought. One word, really.
Movie.
My agent in Los Angeles had been pitching my Atlantic article to producers who were in turn pitching it to studios. They had been close more than once, and now there was a possible offer: a major producer was on board and a private financier was considering funding a script, which would be presented to studios once completed. I didn’t have the details yet but was told to expect them in a matter of days.
Throughout the process, I hadn’t been able to work on much else. I had images floating in my head of relocati
ng to Hollywood; of sipping martinis on a private jet flying to the New York premiere; of a steamy affair with the female lead. It was all so close, yet so far, far away. It was delusional, of course, but this is what happens when you’re plucked from obscurity to land a Hollywood agent. You get ahead of yourself.
Despite Beijing traffic’s best effort to stop me, I made the train to Guilin minutes before its 8:58 a.m. departure. I claimed my spot on the middle berth of a second-class compartment, called a “hard sleeper.” The beds were almost as comfortable as first class—“soft sleeper”—but had six berths to a cabin instead of four. The train was sold out, and my car was a hive of activity.
For reading material I’d brought Paul Theroux’s 1988 book about train travel in China, Riding the Iron Rooster. Much had changed in China in the last twenty-two years. Much hadn’t. “A train isn’t a vehicle,” Theroux writes. “A train is part of the country. It’s a place.”
I couldn’t have agreed more. Chinese, in particular, don’t just ride a train—they live in it. The minute a train pulls from the station, sunflower seeds are chewed, card games played, and tea endlessly gulped. Cigarettes are smoked; bodily gases passed. Passengers sleep away the hours as if on vacation, chat with strangers, or gaze out at the passing world. Riding the rails wasn’t just a way to travel China, neither during Theroux’s journey nor mine; it was a way to experience it.
There are two types of people on Chinese trains: sleeping people and restless people. The old lady beside me had already fallen asleep and begun her monumental snoring, which would continue unabated, except for a few meal breaks she took in bed, for the next day. I never saw her go to the bathroom, and I wondered if her bladder was the size of a wineskin. Meanwhile, a middle-aged man on the bunk below me was up and down, up and down, all morning, rustling through his belongings, chatting with his buddy, or smoking cigarettes in between cars. Technically, smoking was not allowed on the train, a rule ignored in totality.
