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

by Mitch Moxley

  This was a humbling realization. It wasn’t as if I hadn’t tried. True, I didn’t do much homework—ever, really—and I used most of my class time with Guo Li and other teachers to relay my problems to them and solicit advice. The Chinese language, ancient and profound, seems to have an idiom to address every dilemma, and over the years I probably heard (and promptly forgot) all of them. But the fact that I could even have those conversations, I figured, was evidence I could speak Chinese. Maybe not fluently, but good enough to chat with friends. Good enough to appear on a Chinese dating show (although to be fair, the show’s editors did a brilliant job of hiding my many lapses during the program).

  On my first day of intensive class, I woke at 6 a.m., made coffee, slipped on a backpack, and hopped in a cab to Tsinghua University, one of China’s most prestigious institutions of higher learning. Orientation was in a building near the center of campus. There were some seventy students in the course, many of them fresh out of American colleges, and I felt like a grizzled China veteran when I heard some of them discuss their first days in Beijing. During the program director’s introduction, she described life in the city. “In Beijing you should know nobody pays attention to rules of the road. So make sure you look in all directions when crossing the street,” she said. A young man beside me, an American wearing New Balance sneakers, wrote in his notebook: “Look in ALL directions.” He penciled a dark line under the word all.

  The program required the equivalent of second-year university Chinese, and I was lucky that when the administrators interviewed applicants for admission, they didn’t consider our knowledge of Chinese characters. My reading and writing ability was abysmal, and these shortcomings became abundantly clear when, on orientation day, we took a written test that would determine our classes for the semester. I was at a total loss; the questions might as well have been written in . . . well, Chinese.

  As soon as the director finished her speech, we signed a language pledge. From then on, we were forbidden to speak English at the school or at any school activity. After signing the pledge, we stood around the classroom chatting awkwardly in Chinese, unaccustomed to the charade of speaking a second language to someone who speaks your native tongue. I exchanged short bios with several students. When I told one young woman with strong Chinese how long I’d lived in China, she looked confused. “You’ve been here how long?” she asked.

  Why are you studying Chinese after five years in China when you’re planning to leave?” more than one friend asked me after I enrolled at Tsinghua. It was an excellent question, and I offered two reasons. First, I simply couldn’t bear the loss of face of leaving China after so many years with poor Chinese. I had moved over one last notch on the Foreigner/Chinese Identity Spectrum. The second reason was, in the months after appearing on Bai Li Tiao Yi, I needed to make a change in my life. But I still hadn’t figured out what that change would be.

  Through the winter and into the spring of 2012, my life continued as it had the previous fall. I knew I wanted to leave China, I knew I wanted to set down roots somewhere other than Beijing, but I still didn’t know where or how. Meanwhile, more friends were leaving, and I felt more trapped in China than ever. I couldn’t concentrate on work and I was sleeping so poorly that I was eventually prescribed sleeping pills. Sitting in a movie theater one afternoon, avoiding work and hoping to take my mind off things, my heart started pounding, my palms were sweating, and I thought: I have to leave.

  Then, something happened: I calmed down. I realized there was no way I wanted to leave Beijing without some form of closure: the city meant too much to me and I felt I owed it something. So I made a concerted effort to reconnect with Beijing. I started going out more, I reached out to old friends and made new ones, and I agreed to do things I would normally turn down without thinking. Finally, I enrolled at Tsinghua.

  Over the months, I fell in love with the city again. Beijing is a city that grows on you. It’s not like Shanghai or Hong Kong in my experience, places that grab you immediately and command your attention. During the Olympics, a foreign woman who had been working in the Chinese capital for a month told me why she hated the city: “It’s dirty. It smells. The air is terrible. I think the people are rude. Do you want me to go on?” Her outburst was crass but not entirely unfounded. Beijing is sprawling and inconvenient, with horrible traffic. There are very few pedestrian-friendly areas, the air is toxic, and it’s too hot in the summer, too cold in the winter.

  Despite its flaws, I adore the place. It’s gritty, idiosyncratic, and overflowing with character. I cherish interactions with the residents of my hutong neighborhood: the old folks in my building, the couple who own the laundry shop, the fruit stand ladies, the granny sitting on a stool wearing a red “Security Volunteer” armband. These are the moments I cherish and will miss most when I finally leave Tall Rice behind.

  Often, late in the afternoon after hours of reading and writing Chinese characters, my brain begins to hurt, so I take my bike and cycle around the city. Sometimes I go around the Drum and Bell Tower and Houhai Lake and then wind my way south through the hutongs until I hit the Forbidden City. I’ll stop on Chang’An Dajie at the Gate of Heavenly Peace and watch the crowds, just as intense and curious as they were when I first ventured there my first week in Beijing. Chairman Mao’s portrait hangs above the gate beside the words “Long Live the People’s Republic of China.” The only difference is that now I can read them.

  Other times I’ll head north, up to the third ring road and past the McDonald’s where Rob and I ate Big Macs after a long night in Sanlitun my first weekend in Beijing. I’ll ride along the China Daily buildings, which have new white tiles on the exterior and seem to belong to an entirely different newspaper from a new era. Across the street, the noodle shop, where two China Daily foreign experts once came to blows, has been turned into a 7-Eleven. I’ll bike north to the Olympic Green, past the Bird’s Nest, where I watched Usain Bold break the world record, and Ling Long Pagoda, which is still lit up at night like a Christmas tree.

  Then I’ll cycle back to my sprawling apartment in the hutongs, which I’ll only call home for a few more months.

  I’m leaving Beijing in mid-April, exactly six years after I arrived in China. Sometime between now and then, I’ll open my laptop and buy a plane ticket. One way. To New York.

  In the meantime, I’m happily riding out my last days in China. It turns out that neither I nor Tall Rice was made for minor Chinese stardom. My line from Qian Xue Sen was left on the editing room floor; I appear in the film for a few seconds as a blurry figure with a bad haircut hidden in the background. My potential future wife rejected me on national Chinese television, and I still have nightmares about sober dancing in a low-budget music video, although they’re slowly abating.

  “Can’t do it, I’m afraid,” I told a friend who called with an acting gig not long ago. As I talked to him, it seemed as if for the first time since I came to China, I had no doubts whatsoever. A plan was in motion. I was ready to leave my China identity behind and start looking for a new one. “I’m retired.”

  Acknowledgments

  To everybody below, drinks on me. I owe you that and much, much more.

  To Stephanie Sun, my agent emeritus, thank you for seeing potential in an eight-hundred-word article and believing I could do this even when I wasn’t so sure. This book simply wouldn’t exist without you. To Maya Ziv, my editor at Harper Perennial, thank you for your hard work and thoughtful comments throughout, and for seeing the bigger story that made sense of all the little ones. Thanks as well to Katie Salisbury for taking a chance on an unknown writer hiding out in Beijing, and to James Gibney and the people at the Atlantic for publishing the story that started all this.

  To my brother, Sean Moxley, my first reader at every step of the way, I’m grateful for your ideas and advice from proposal to final draft.

  Thank you to the following people for your insight and opinions at var
ious stages of this project: David Herbert, David Fu, Clarissa Sebag-Montefiore, Kit Gillet, Allan Pulga, Kathleen Boyce, Kevin Keane, Richard Wiltshire, Julian Wilson, Claire Pennington, and Nestor Santana. Thanks to Jim Wasserman, Tom Mackenzie, Annie Ly, Paul Morris, Julia K., Nick Houshower, and Jeff Lulewicz for being such a big part of my Beijing life and the stories included in this book. Thank you to Wei Xiao Ming for all your help over the years; you are a much better journalist than I’ll ever be. And I’m forever indebted to the wonderful Guo Li—my teacher, life coach, therapist, and, above all, friend.

  Thank you to the folks at Café Zarah for letting me occupy their lovely coffee shop for the better part of six years, and many thanks—and apologies—to the good people at China Daily for giving me the chance to come to Beijing in the first place.

  Lastly, I owe everything to my parents, Joan Skingle and Ross Moxley, whose unwavering support and belief in me over the years has helped me through the many highs and lows of living abroad. Thank you for a lifetime of love and encouragement.

  Mitch Moxley

  January 2013

  About the Author

  MITCH MOXLEY spent six years as a freelance writer in Beijing. He writes about culture, travel, and current affairs for publications including The Atlantic, the New York Times, the Globe and Mail, and others. Mitch went to China in 2007 to work at the state-owned China Daily.

  www.mitchmoxley.com

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  Copyright

  Cover design by Jarrod Taylor

  Cover photographs, clockwise from top left: © Thomas Hoepker/Magnum Photos, © Alex Majoli/Magnum Photos, © Stuart Franklin/Magnum Photos, © Thomas Hoepker/Magnum Photos, © Patrick Zachmann/Magnum Photos, © Rene Burri/Magnum Photos, © Hiroji Kubota/Magnum Photos

  Some names and identifying details have been changed. In a few instances the chronology of events has been adjusted for the sake of the narrative.

  APOLOGIES TO MY CENSOR. Copyright © 2013 by Mitch Moxley. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

  First Edition

  ISBN 978-0-06-212443-2

  EPub Edition July 2013 ISBN: 9780062124449

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