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

by Mitch Moxley

  After the discussion wrapped up, I went to the media center and told Xiao Zhang about the session. He suggested I write a story about it. I told him I would but only if I could write it honestly, including the criticisms made about China.

  “That’s okay. Write about the different opinions,” he said.

  So I did. The story I filed focused on the debate about China’s use of “soft power” and included a back-and-forth between Friedman and Sha about China’s role in the world. Friedman said China should take a hard-line stance against Iran and Sudan; Sha argued that China should lead by example, not by shows of dominance.

  Back in Beijing, the hatchets came out. During dinner that night in Dalian, a colleague told me the editors were removing any mention of Iran or Sudan from the story.

  “But that defeats the purpose of the story,” I protested.

  I text messaged Max in Beijing, who I knew was editing the Dalian stories. I asked him what changes were being made. He called back a few minutes later and said someone had cut the story from 750 words to about 250 words. All mentions of Iran and Sudan had been axed, as had Thomas Friedman and all of his quotes.

  “So what’s left?” I asked.

  “The China stuff.”

  “Please take my name off it.”

  The next day’s story, which didn’t include a byline, was titled, “China, Leading by Example.” “A panel of experts and officials was in hot debate about how soft power could work better, particularly about how China could use its soft power to attract and persuade others,” the opening paragraph, not written by me, went.

  I wasn’t angry about the changes. I would have been surprised if the story was published as I wrote it. China Daily was changing, but change happens slowly.

  Still, my colleagues could tell I was a bit annoyed. In the news center the next day, Xiao Zhang apologized for the changes and offered a rationale for the edits: “It didn’t go along with China’s views.”

  That was the last battle I fought with China Daily. I realized that any skirmish was going to be a lopsided affair. It was China’s century now. The rest of us were just living in it. I had come to China Daily determined to change the paper for the better, to instill in it my Western journalistic sensibilities. Now, I figured, I’d best learn how to enjoy the ride.

  “I wonder what it’s like . . . ,” I said, a few weeks later, running my finger over a map of China hanging on an office wall, looking for the most remote place I could find. “Here. U-RUM-QI.”

  We were sitting around Rob’s office at China Daily one afternoon, marveling at the scale of the country we were living in. I had never really taken the time to appreciate the vastness of China. I’d been in China four months and only visited Shanghai, Qingdao, Dalian, and an unimpressive beach resort near Beijing called Beidaihe, popular with Siberian tourists. I glanced over the map and wondered what, exactly, was going on in all these strange places—Gansu, Qinghai, Shanxi, Shaanxi. I had never even heard of most of China.

  I stood up and analyzed the country laid out before me. With my finger placed on the map, I sounded out the name of the capital of Xinjiang province, a sprawling, desert-covered region in China’s far west.

  “Urumqi,” I said, looking at the map even more closely. “Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region. I can’t believe people even live out there.” Xinjiang was bordered by a bunch of “Stan” countries. I read them off. “Kazakhstan. Kyrgyzstan. Tajikistan . . .”

  Summer had turned to fall, and the National Day holiday, a weeklong celebration of the founding of the People’s Republic of China in 1949, was approaching. It would be my first week off since I started at China Daily six months earlier, and I wanted to get out of town. I tossed around different ideas with friends and was leaning toward Southeast Asia for a week on a beach, when a friend of mine, Gemma, a British woman who worked in the carbon trading industry, whom I’d met through mutual friends that summer, asked if I was interested in something more adventurous: Xinjiang.

  “I don’t know,” I wrote her in an e-mail, my mind focused on beaches and palm trees. “Couldn’t we go somewhere more . . . exotic? Like Cambodia?”

  “Xinjiang’s as exotic as it gets,” Gemma replied.

  She e-mailed me pictures she had found on the Internet—photos of sand dunes, snowy mountain ranges, camels, and locals with colorful outfits. My arm was twisted.

  A few weeks later, Gemma and I were driving the Karakoram Highway, the highest paved international road in the world, connecting China and Pakistan, in a rickety Volkswagen Santana with a small and bespectacled Chinese man named Xiao Xu at the helm. Xiao Xu, who ran a café in the nearby city of Kashgar and also organized excursions, was testy that morning. He’d expected two people, but the night before, Gemma and I had met an Australian couple in the hotel bar and invited them to join us.

  I asked him how long the trip would take.

  “Three hours with two people,” he huffed, nodding toward the couple, Tom and Kelly. “But four hours with four people. Because it’s uphill.”

  Gemma and I had been in Xinjiang for a week, and the trip had been eye-opening. Xinjiang was different from what I’d seen in China so far in almost every way. It was hard to believe it was even the same country. The region spanned 640,000 square miles and had been home to Uighurs, a Turkic ethnic group, for centuries. It had massive oil and gas reserves, which China was eager to develop, but also suffered from a drug epidemic, fueled by opium smuggled from Afghanistan.

  The drive to Karakul Lake was harrowing, not so much because of the terrain, which was rugged, but because of Xiao Xu’s driving. He rode the Santana from one side of the highway to the other, as if practicing downhill ski turns. Whenever his eyes caught a mountain or lake, or whatever else was on the side of the road, the car would drift to whichever side he was looking toward until he eventually noticed and heaved the car back toward the middle of the road. Our anxiety was compounded by the fact that the Santana’s backseats had no seat belts.

  It was a remarkable drive, the terrain like nothing I’d seen before. The mountains were massive and snow covered. Glacial lakes gave way to sand dunes, and the landscape was stripped of vegetation. We drove past men bundled in winter clothing, herding sheep on rocky cliffs. We stopped for photos, and locals would try to sell us trinkets and watches and whatever else they had. The women wore bright colors and the men dark. Their faces were uniformly reddened, with deep creases around their eyes and dry, chapped lips.

  Sometime after noon we arrived at Karakul Lake, 11,000 feet above sea level in the Pamir Mountains. Muztagh Ata Mountain, at 24,000 feet high, stood in the background, not far from the Tajikistan border. Xiao Xu had arranged for us to stay in a yurt belonging to a local family of Kyrgyz farmers.

  Along the way Gemma became sick; food poisoning, she thought, or maybe altitude sickness. The mother of the Kyrgyz family quickly adopted her into their brick home next door, covering Gemma with blankets and brewing up a thermos of hot tea.

  While Gemma slept, Tom, Kelly, and I set out for a hike around the lake. The terrain was rocky, with small tufts of grass. I dipped my fingers in the cold lake. We walked by camels with thick brown coats, grazing on the sparse grass. Camel shit was everywhere and I kicked clumps of it as I walked, noting that they were as hard as hockey pucks. Not long after setting off, I began feeling the altitude and had shortness of breath. I wondered if we would be able to make it all the way around the lake.

  An hour into the hike, Tom convinced me to try to climb a hill on the far side of the lake. Dressed in jeans, Nike Air Max, and a fake Arc’teryx jacket I had picked up in a Beijing market, I started to climb. The first section almost finished me off. I was hungry, thirsty, and faint. On a steep and rocky section I looked out toward the lake and felt completely disoriented. For a second, I forgot where I was. Tom kept going and I stopped to get my bearings. I thought about turning back, but watching Tom climb
I became more determined to reach the top, and about an hour after we started, I did.

  The view was incredible. The mountains seemed endless and the lake below was turquoise. I wondered if I was looking out at Pakistan or Tajikistan. I sat down, sucked in what little oxygen the air offered, and did my best to appreciate where I was. It was by far the most beautiful place I’d seen in China.

  Near sunset we made it back to our Kyrgyz family. They spoke no English so Xiao Xu translated. They fed us a dinner of yak meat with rice, cabbage, onion, and tomato, with bottomless cups of black tea. The yak was tough with a strong, overpowering taste, a taste that contaminates your mouth for hours. I forced it down because I knew I needed the nutrition, and I washed it down with tea. We ate and chatted, and I thought about how different the family’s life was from my own.

  We talked about Chinese politics with Xiao Xu. He had been born in Kashgar and spent his life there, married a Uighur woman, and seemed more sympathetic to his Muslim neighbors than to his fellow Han.

  “In China, rich government, poor people,” he said.

  “Do you think China will ever change?” Tom asked.

  “It would take thousand years,” Xiao Xu replied.

  An hour later we went to our yurt, a tentlike dwelling common on the Central Asian steppes. It was freezing and none of us could sleep. I’d forgotten my sleeping bag and struggled to keep warm despite several layers of woolen blankets. Drinking so much tea also proved to have been a terrible idea. In the middle of the night I had to get up to go to the bathroom. Struggling to navigate my way out of the pitch-black yurt, I slammed into the fireplace.

  Outside, the sky was full of stars, from horizon to horizon, big ones, brighter even than those I grew up with in northern Canada. Looking up at the sky, I could barely believe that this was China. In Beijing, I’d seen maybe . . . three, four stars in six months. This place, these people, were was all so foreign, and it occurred to me that I knew nothing about China, that there remained this massive, curious country to explore, and I knew that a year would not be nearly enough time.

  I stayed outside in the cold for a few minutes and promised myself that I would do a better job of appreciating the opportunity I was being afforded. I had yet to fall in love with China—that would come later. But there were incredible places outside the walls of China Daily, and it was slowly dawning on me as I stood outside of our yurt looking up at a sky full of Xinjiang stars.

  I took a deep breath and went back into the yurt. As I struggled to find my bed, I accidentally stepped on Xiao Xu, who woke in a panic. I crawled under the blankets and lay awake, staring into the dark.

  “How did you all sleep?” I asked.

  “Poorly,” Tom said. “Somebody kept banging into things.”

  “Hmm.”

  We were exhausted. We ate cold bread and drank more black tea, even though the only thing I wanted was a coffee. We said goodbye to the family, paid them about ten dollars each for accommodating us for the night, and boarded the shaky Santana, which barely started in the cold. We were quiet on the ride home. It was cloudy outside and cold in the car. At one point, our car began to slow and I noticed that the engine wasn’t running. Xiao Xu drifted to the side of the road, stopped the car, and sighed. There were no cars in sight and no help for miles. He waited a moment and turned the key. The engine started on the first go.

  We flew from Kashgar to Urumqi, Xinjiang’s capital, two days later. With eight hours to kill before our flight to Beijing, Gemma and I headed downtown. It was cold and gray in Urumqi, and I was feeling depressed that the trip was over.

  We walked in silence to a public park in the middle of the city, where we rode the most terrifying Ferris wheel on earth—old, rusted, and lethal—and as we did, I imagined it collapsing and crushing us, two foreigners in this frozen, forgotten city. I wondered if China Daily, where I’d be back at work again the following morning, would even report the story.

  6

  Bad China Days

  As fall turned to winter, the cold came suddenly and with force. The city government wouldn’t turn on public heating until mid-November, and as the temperature dropped, there seemed to be no escaping the cold. I wore sweaters and a hat while watching movies at home, and I used an extra blanket at night. At work, the cold was numbing. My fingers felt arthritic as I typed.

  And then the heat came on. Immediately, on November 15, my apartment became a sauna. I opened my windows to let in the cool fall air and used sheets to cover the radiators. I complained to Jenny and other officials at China Daily and was always met with the same response: “There’s only one setting.” The heaters also sapped out what little moisture was in the air, and soon after the heating went on, I developed a chronic, hacking cough that lasted for two months.

  Meanwhile, the high-pollution days added up. There were days when the sky was a gray-brown postapocalyptic haze. Pollution so thick a building a hundred feet away would be a blur; so dense you could taste it on your tongue. There are days in Beijing when you would wake up feeling hungover even though you didn’t drink the night before.

  The weather influenced Beijing’s usually vibrant social scene. Whereas summer was a nonstop stream of dinners, parties, and other events, the fall-winter schedule revolved almost solely around bootleg DVDs. Chinese television was all low-budget historical epics, variety shows, and dating shows. The only English channel on regular cable was the news station CCTV 9—essentially China Daily put to camera. The televisions in our apartments had CNN, but the satellite was frequently down. Going to the movies wasn’t much of an option, either. Cinemas in China played just twenty foreign movies a year, most of which were big Hollywood blockbusters. There was no such thing as independent cinema. There were no legal movie rental shops, and the Internet was too slow for downloading.

  But bootleg DVDs were everywhere. Vendors varied from the haggard-looking migrant woman—selling filmed-in-the-theater copies of The Bourne Ultimatum, Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End, Transformers, and more from a shoe box outside the Noodle Shop—to fully stocked, seemingly legitimate stores, selling illegitimate copies of movies from around the world.

  I bought most of my DVDs from a shop called Tom’s in the expat neighborhood of Lido, which was on the way from China Daily to the airport. Tom’s was located in a basement under an antiques shop, and it was remarkable, stocked with thousands of DVDs, old and new, Hollywood and foreign. New releases often made it to Tom’s before they premiered on movie screens in the States. On Sunday afternoons, especially during the cooler months, Tom’s was shoulder-to-shoulder packed with expats filling carts with DVD boxes, stocking up for the week ahead.

  A good friend of mine at China Daily, Ben, a thirty-year-old Australian who worked in the features section, reviewed movies for an Australian website to supplement his income. He watched five films a week from Sunday through Thursday, and with his fiancée, Helena, often hosted dinner and a movie at their place, two floors above mine in the China Daily apartments. I often attended along with our friend Jeremy, a tattooed copy editor and Columbia journalism grad from Michigan in his early thirties. The movies ran the gamut from black-and-white classics, like The Maltese Falcon, to modern Academy Award winners, to 1990s sexual thrillers and action movies. The latter categories were my favorite. Sometimes we would drink whiskey and end up laughing on the floor while watching movies like China Moon, an incredibly awful yet unintentionally hilarious film noir starring Ed Harris.

  I loved movie nights, but life in Beijing was becoming routine. The gray weather often mixed with isolation to create boredom—a potent combo for me—and it was during this time that I became familiar with Bad China Days. These days are known to all foreigners who make China their home. They are the days when the country makes you want to explode, when you feel at the brink of a murderous rage, when even the simplest task becomes an Olympian feat. Life in a foreign country can be difficult; in Ch
ina it can sometimes seem impossible.

  It’s the little things that get to you. The big things—the traffic, the smog, the masses of people—you expect. But the little things, the simple problems of day-to-day life—trying to buy batteries, for example, or the Odyssean quest to find decent deodorant—those are the things that drive you crazy. When I first arrived, a simple chore might be a half-day gauntlet of frustration.

  I had reached the point in my China life where not everything seemed exciting anymore, where every day didn’t feel like a small adventure, as it had when I first arrived. Xinjiang had opened my eyes to China’s possibilities, and I felt trapped at China Daily. I was unfulfilled at work, and even though I had sold a few freelance pieces, I was frustrated that I hadn’t done more writing for Western publications, despite my increased efforts.

  I also grew increasingly irritated with myself that my Chinese was so dismal. Despite several hours of class a week, it felt like I was making no progress at all. Chinese words were learned and forgotten as if I was reading names from a phone book. My Chinese colleagues all spoke English, and I had Chinese friends outside the paper as well, but our relationships depended entirely on their English ability. It was obvious that without better Chinese I would never really connect with the city.

  The up-and-down waves of life in China, which initially arrived in hourly and daily increments, were becoming much more profound. The swings expanded into weeks, and the pivot could happen suddenly. I would love Beijing one minute and pat myself on the back for being smart enough to come, and then the next moment I might find myself in a state of near panic that would last for weeks. As I sat at my desk, staring at my computer screen, homesickness would set in and I would forget all the reasons I left and focus on the good things back home: reading the newspaper at my favorite café, having drinks with friends in a nice cocktail bar, watching indie movies at the cinema near my apartment, cycling by the lakeshore during Toronto summers.