Apologies to My Censor (15 page)

O
n several afternoons we found ourselves on the grounds of the large cathedral in central Guangzhou. Some days we spoke with the Africans gathered there; other times we took seats on the benches outside and relaxed in the warm air, reading our books or testing ourselves with my Chinese flashcards. By midweek I had developed a stomach bug, so I often ended up lying in the shade, rubbing my belly and running in and out of a bathroom in an annex building beside the church.

One day we met an African man named Austin Jack. He was sitting on a step inside the church gate, reading a Bible. He was tall and broad-shouldered, well dressed, and wore reading glasses. Tom approached him while he read and asked if he'd be willing to talk, and Austin opened up immediately.

He said the church was the only place in Guangzhou where he felt completely safe. “The moment you leave the church grounds, anything can happen,” he said. Like so many others, Austin was growing frustrated with the way the Chinese treated Africans, while the Chinese who went to Africa for work were welcomed.

“The Chinese make money from Africa,” Austin said, “but they want to stop us from doing the same here. To me, it doesn't make sense.”

Austin invited us to attend church with him on Sunday and said we should interview Father Paul, who conducted Mass. He took us to Father Paul's office next door to the cathedral, and we arranged an interview the following day.

Father Paul's upstairs office was large and sparsely furnished, with afternoon light flooding the room from behind his desk. Father Paul was a small Cantonese man with thick glasses and hair parted to the side. Tom and I sat across from him as he served us biscuits and tea and went into a lengthy introduction of himself. His English was terrible, and I often lost the thread of what he was saying. I gathered that he had studied in the Philippines and worked in Guangzhou for three months. There were half a million Catholics in Guangzhou, he said, but his congregation was mostly African. They used the church as a meeting place for community groups, gathering in the crumbling annex next door to play music, sing, and hold prayer groups.

Tom and I asked him specific questions about the troubles his African congregation was having—visa woes, altercations with police, struggles with their businesses. Father Paul soon became evasive, replying to several questions with answers like “I don't know about that.”

After less than half an hour Father Paul had had enough of our questions. “If you want to know about them, ask them,” he said, leading us out of his office.

That Sunday we attended Mass with Austin. Father Paul delivered the sermon in unintelligible English to an audience of seven hundred African traders. They listened under the cathedral's high ceiling, chandeliers, and closed-circuit television cameras. We sat toward the back, and as I looked around at the rows of black heads, I had one of those moments that occurred every so often in China: when the reality of the situation I was in became needle-point clear—
here I am, in a church in Guangzhou, China, with seven hundred African men
—and I could barely believe it, thankful for whatever it was that led me there. It was for moments like this that I lived in China.

After Mass, the congregation spilled out to the cathedral grounds and into the annex, where they danced to the rhythm of guitar and African drums for much of the afternoon.

O
ne evening, while strolling one of the markets, we met Hugo. Hugo was twenty-nine years old, tall and lanky and dressed in baggy clothing. He was from Aba City, Nigeria, and had a broken leg. He leaned on a cane as he told us the story of how it happened.

“The knock on the door came very early in the morning and I knew straightaway it was the police,” he said. “They'd been raiding homes and taking people away since August, so I knew they'd found me. My visa was expired. I jammed the door shut and jumped out of the apartment window.”

He landed hard on the concrete below, shattering his right leg. He was in agony.

“The police left me there for ten hours before taking me to the hospital.” He had a twelve-inch scar on his leg and what he figured was a permanent limp. But he insisted he wanted to stay in China.

“It's still easier to make a living here than in Nigeria.” He sighed. “But it's a frightening place to be.”

T
hroughout our week in Guangzhou, everybody told us we needed to speak to Pastor James. If you were an African in Guangzhou and you had a problem, you called Pastor James. After several phone calls and much convincing by us, Pastor James invited Tom and me to meet him at his apartment in a prosperous suburb a half-hour drive from the city center. No photos.

His wife greeted us when we arrived. She was short and stocky with her hair pulled back into a ponytail, tight against her scalp. She seemed nervous and avoided our eyes as she spoke.

“Pastor James is eating,” she whispered. She nodded toward her husband, who was sitting at a table in the kitchen, about five feet away. He didn't look up, didn't say hello, didn't so much as acknowledge our presence. “He'll be with you in a moment.”

She sat us down on a couch in the living room next to the kitchen, where Pastor James continued to eat. She put on a DVD of an African minister delivering a sermon on Revelation 1:5. Tom and I watched in an awkward silence and Pastor James's wife gave us apples while we waited. Occasionally, Tom and I exchanged glances—glances that said, “What the fuck is going on?”

Pastor James—dressed in a red Adidas hoodie, black corduroy pants, and black leather shoes—joined us after another fifteen minutes. He placed a chair across from us as we sat on the couch, apple cores in our hands. He was cross-eyed, and when he began talking, it was difficult to discern to whom he was speaking.

Pastor James was from Nigeria and had preached the Gospel in Guangzhou since 2004. He used to have a good space he used for a church, but the authorities closed it down in 2007. Now the church moved around, sometimes cramming into hotel rooms.

“It's not easy. This is a communist country. Religion is still underground.” He described his role as part pastor, part social worker. “Every day I receive calls for help from people in trouble,” he told us, adding that some Africans bring it on themselves by “engaging in dubious things,” like selling drugs. He said that most Chinese were friendly and that he had many Chinese friends. “They just don't want us to spoil their country.”

When the interview was finished, Tom and I caught a cab downtown. Pastor James was the last of the interviews we needed. We had spoken with dozens of traders during the week and listened to and recorded their stories. Jim had incredible pictures and we had all the angles covered. We had a great story. Now we just needed to sell it—easier said than done.

W
e took the train back to Beijing. In our sleeper cabin that night, I watched
The Sopranos
on my laptop and chatted with Tom about our stories. We were both happy to be going back to Beijing, back to our expat fantasy lives. The trips had made me more excited than ever to be living in China, and they helped take my mind off Julia, who was living several time zones away and whom I wouldn't see again for months.

Throughout the trip we marveled at how liberating our freelance lives were. As relatively well-off foreigners in China, we had so much freedom while so many others around us did not. Living in China at times felt like being a spoiled child who was allowed to run rampant. At the same time we had the freedom to escape to the comfort and safety of our lives in Beijing, or to our lives back in Canada, or America, or England.

The day we arrived back in Beijing, I went to a friend's apartment for Thanksgiving dinner, as far away from the miseries of Chocolate City and the Eighteen Sauna in Macau as could be imagined. It occurred to me that this was the nature of expat life as I knew it. Living in a bubble. I could take a peek outside of it, but before long it sucked me right back in.

A
s fall became winter, Tom and I met every day at Café Zarah, a small coffee shop near the Drum and Bell Towers that served as our de facto freelance office, to work on our pitches. We started at the top, e-mailing
Time
, the
New York Times
, the
Wall Street Journal
, the
Guardian
, the
Times
of London. Every editor we contacted told us we had great stories, really moving, but just not for them. Good luck elsewhere. We worked down the list of publications, but nobody seemed to want the stories. Sex, it turned out, did not necessarily sell, and neither did the woes of Africans in China. Whatever the case, for several weeks we couldn't find a home for the stories.

These were supposed to be our
big
stories. I had been so convinced they would sell that I became increasingly disillusioned with every rejection. “I just don't know what we're doing wrong,” I told my parents over the phone one night.

But, in fact, we had done everything right. We had good stories, we did the research, we believed in our subjects, and we reported them well. And we did eventually sell the stories. The trafficking piece was published in the weekend magazine of the
South China Morning Post
, an English-language newspaper in Hong Kong, and the Chocolate City feature appeared in
GlobalPost
, a start-up Web magazine. Both were solid publications, just not one of the marquee brands we'd been aiming for. I was proud of the pieces, if a bit disheartened, and the trips confirmed for me that China was filled with fascinating and heartbreaking people and places. Even though the stories weren't the monster successes we were hoping for, the trips gave us confidence that we were good reporters and that if we kept looking hard enough, we would find the stories we wanted.

A
few weeks later, one of the Africans I'd interviewed in Guangzhou called me. I was riding my bike on the way to meet friends for dinner. At first I couldn't place who he was, but then it clicked. It was the man I'd met in Canaan market—Chris, the cool Nigerian who told me about his fondness for Chinese women as we drank Sprites with his Cantonese business partner.

“He's dead,” he told me, his voice distant on the phone. Chris said that a friend of his, the friend he'd told me about that day in the market, the one who had been forced into hiding, had died.

“What happened?” I asked.

“The cops, they came to his home, they chased him, he jumped from the balcony. He was still alive, but nobody helped. The police wouldn't take him to the hospital for twenty-four hours. He died. He fucking died, man. You have to tell people, man. You have to write about this. Can you help? Can you?”

I couldn't. There was nothing I could do, really, except write the story we'd gone to report, a story that would likely have no real impact whatsoever. And suddenly it all felt so futile. We had gone to Erlian and Macau and Guangzhou to tell the stories of people who couldn't tell their own, to expose injustices. But the only thing we had exposed, I felt, was the vast divide between the lives they led, and the ones we did.

12

The Bachelor

“Y
ou look like a vampire,” Tom said.

“Did you bring that suit? Or was it theirs?” our friend Alex chimed in with a laugh as the three of us drank pints one Saturday afternoon in the winter of 2009. “It's pretty hideous.”

I rubbed my temples. A vampire in an ugly suit was not the image I wanted to project as one of
Cosmopolitan
magazine's 100 Hottest Bachelors in China. Unfortunately, Tom was correct; I looked like a character from
True Blood
. The magazine's art department had gone a little heavy with the makeup; my face looked powder-white, my eyes dark, as if I was suffering from a terrible hangover. My hair was jet black and styled to look a little like Charlie Sheen circa
Men at Work
. I wore a navy and white striped shirt under a double-breasted, tan-gray checkered suit. I looked gaunt and smug.

I flipped back to Tom's picture, a page before mine.

“Yours isn't much better, Tom,” I said.

Tom's photo, like mine, took up half a glossy magazine page. He looked slightly drunk, with a wide smile and his hands out in front of him, palms down, as if he was performing some kind of mating dance or trying to regain his balance.

“At least I don't look like a corpse,” he said.

“I was going for a brooding look.”

It was nearing Valentine's Day and the issue—an annual supplement to the Chinese edition of
Cosmo
—had arrived on newsstands across the country. More than one million copies, the editor told us. Beside our portraits were brief bios, including hobbies (mine: watching movies, playing basketball, reading, playing guitar); what we like in a woman (funny, confident, not too tall, not too short); the words we live by (“treasure every day”—which the editors had made up on my behalf); as well as our e-mail addresses.

Before the shoot, Tom and I had made a bet about who would get the most e-mails, which we figured would be somewhere in the dozens. We agreed that the first to reach one hundred e-mails would have to buy the other dinner. We fantasized about receiving e-mails with photos attached of gorgeous, scantily clad women.

The timing was good, too. I was single again.

E
arlier that month, Julia and I broke up. For real.

She had visited Beijing for a few weeks that January. It was strange, the first week, to resume a relationship after not having seen each other for four months, but by the second week we were back where we left off.

Before she arrived, I'd imagined us breaking up when she left, but toward the end of her stay, that seemed impossible. On her second-to-last night, however, after we returned from a bar drunk and slightly stoned, she broached the subject.

“Sladki, we need to talk,” she said as we lay on the couch in Comrade Wu's apartment. She said that she was nearing thirty and needed to be in a relationship that was going somewhere. With her in Moscow and me in Beijing, that didn't seem likely between us.

I got angry with her for bringing it up at all, even though it was obvious we needed to address our relationship. I had been thinking the exact same thing but, for the last few days, had been trying to push the thoughts aside. “Why would you ruin our time together by saying that?” I said. We went to bed that night with no resolution, and the next day we were too drained to make any decisions other than to wait and see.

We had another teary goodbye at the airport. We hugged for longer, and this time, when I let go, I didn't say I would see her later because the truth was, I didn't believe it. I walked away, and when I got to the bottom of the escalator, I turned back and ran up to see if she was still there, but she was gone.

I took a taxi to a Café Zarah, but I couldn't get any work done. I didn't want this to be it. I didn't want to get married or have kids, but I wanted to be with her. I knew that. I didn't know if I was in love with her, but I felt something like it.

I tried to chase out the thought that we might never see each other again, and then I thought it a cruel cosmic joke that I'd found a girlfriend from Moscow—why Moscow? There were so many places I'd like to live, but not Moscow.

“E
ither you move to Moscow, or we have to break up,” she said, a few weeks later, over Skype. It wasn't exactly an ultimatum—it was the reality of our situation. It had been an agonizing few weeks, stuck in a limbo between knowing we had to break up and not wanting to do it. I couldn't take it anymore, so I'd called her that night to see if we could get some clarity.

“Move to Moscow? I don't even know what I'd do there.”

“You can live with me. Can't you freelance here?” she said. “You know I can't come back to Beijing. I need to finish my school.”

She told me to take some time to think about it, and I did. For a while, for a few days even, I decided that, yes, I would move to Moscow. Moscow would be my new home. I'd move there for her.

“
Moscow?
” my mom said one morning as we talked over the phone.

“Yes, Moscow. But only for a few years, until she finishes her degree. And then we'll move to Canada.”

“How are you going to get her into Canada? It's not easy to immigrate to Canada, you know.”

“I don't know. Maybe we'll get married.”

Married
. This was the first time in my life I had ever uttered that word in reference to myself and in a nonsarcastic way. It scared me to say it out loud. I knew there was something special between Julia and me, and I wish we'd had more time to see where it went. But I wasn't ready for marriage. I wasn't ready to live in Moscow. I barely knew if I loved her.

I was miserable for the next week. I missed her terribly, but I knew we had to end it. One evening, after steeling myself all day, I called her and said I couldn't do it.

T
he
Cosmo
shoot, like many China adventures, happened randomly. A few months earlier, as we walked out of a coffee shop near the Drum and Bell Towers, Tom received a phone call from a former colleague of his at a local English-language newspaper who was now an editor at
Cosmo
.

“You want me to be one of your bachelors?” Tom said into his phone. “Wow, you must be getting desperate.”

“We are,” the woman confessed.

Tom laughed into his mobile. She asked him to bring a friend. Tom covered the phone.

“Hey, Mitch, do you want to be in
Cosmo
for their Valentine's special?”

“Really? Don't they need to see my picture first?”

“Do you need to see his picture?” Tom asked the editor.

She did not.

A few weeks later, Tom and I arrived at the
Cosmopolitan
offices in downtown Beijing. A young woman met us in a coffee shop downstairs and escorted us to a studio on the building's top floor, where we were greeted by a photographer from Hong Kong named Leon; Tom's editor friend, Liu Jia; and a makeup artist and hairstylist. We were led over to the wardrobe section of the room, where a dozen men's suits were hanging on a rack behind a curtain.

I tried on a few jackets and held up pants over my jeans. I called over the editor, Liu Jia.

“I don't think these are going to fit me,” I said, holding up a pair of pants several sizes too small.

She hurriedly flipped through the rack and pulled out a checkered suit. “Try this,” she said, closing the curtain as she left.

The pants were snug and the cuffs of my shirt stuck out several inches from the jacket sleeves. The suit looked like something that might be worn by the pervert cokehead cousin in a mafia movie.

I exited through the curtain.

“Looks good!” the photographer hollered from the set.

“It's not really my style.”

“It will have to do,” Liu Jia said. “It's the biggest we have.”

In the makeup room, a young woman applied beige powder to my cheeks and forehead. The hairstylist, meanwhile, yanked at my unruly hair with a brush. She added water and pulled at it more, trying to slick it back.

“I don't think that's going to work,” I said. “My hair's pretty thick.”

The makeup artist offered some advice in Chinese. I didn't understand it all, but I got the idea. “Like
Mad Men
,” she said.

Once finished, I strolled back into the studio, where Tom was already in the middle of his shoot. I felt queasy watching it. The photographer had Tom doing all sorts of ridiculous poses. Laugh shots. Hysterical laugh shots. Dance shots. Lunging-at-the-camera shots.

Tom seemed to be enjoying it. More than that, he was making it look natural.

I sidled up to the photographer.

“I don't know if I can do this,” I muttered. “I mean, I can't do this dancing stuff.”

“Don't worry,” he said, still snapping shots of Tom. “We'll do what makes you feel comfortable.”

We soon discovered that there was only one pose that made me comfortable: serious face, no smile, sitting down, hands resting easily on my legs or in my pockets. The photographer had snapped about forty of these—“Good, good, yes, sexy look, nice”—when Liu Jia approached and demanded more variety.

“Let's try it with a smile,” Leon said.

“I look stupid when I smile on camera,” I protested.

“Let's just try it. If it's no good, we won't use it.”

I smiled.

Leon snapped a shot or two, and then he and Liu Jia conversed quietly in Chinese.

“Okay, let's try it without the smile again,” Leon said.

After a few shots he asked me to try standing up. I stood and he laughed.

“Those pants are really tight, ha-ha.”

“Yeah, I know,” I said, tugging at the material around my thigh. “They were the biggest ones.”

We tried a few more poses, some sitting, some standing, hands placed here or there, arms crossed, chin down, face tilted left or right.

“I think we're good,” Leon said after ten minutes.

“I'm sorry I couldn't do any better.”

“That's okay.” He flipped through photos on his camera's screen. “Some people are just naturals. Some people . . . aren't.”

I wasn't sure how to take that. “But you've got enough, right?”

“I think so.” He paused. “We'll see.”

“But you're definitely going to use us in the issue, right?” I asked Liu Jia. “I mean, you already took our bios. You already have our e-mail addresses.”

“We'll get in touch,” she said, shaking my hand. “Thank you for coming.”

Tom and I changed out of our suits and bade farewell to Leon and Liu Jia at the elevators.

I sighed as the elevator doors shut. “Damn it,” I said. “They're not going to use me for sure.”

S
o it was with some surprise when I bought the Valentine's issue of
Cosmo
from a Sanlitun newsstand on a chilly afternoon to find my picture on page thirty-six of the Valentine's special. I was thrilled. I might have looked like a vampire, but I was the Don Draper of vampires. I was among the top one hundred hottest bachelors in the most populous country on earth, a country of 1.3 billion people, including about 700 million men. Forget one in a million; I was one in
seven hundred
million. Never mind that I had been asked out of desperation.

After the issue was published, we waited for our flood of e-mails. But the electronic levees held. A day passed, a few days, nearly a week. Neither Tom nor I received a message. We scaled our bet down from first to reach one hundred to first to reach fifty. And then the first to get to twenty-five. First to ten? Whoever got the first e-mail received a pint of beer, we agreed.

Tom got the first e-mail. He rejoiced. I fumed. The next day I received a message from a Yahoo account with the subject line “from cosmo”:

Hi, Moxley;

I am ———, come from cosmo. could you make frined with me ?

with the best wishes.

from ----

As the days passed, more e-mails arrived in my inbox, never a flood but a steady stream. Over the next few weeks I received dozens of messages from women named Daisy, Sunny, Coral, Evan, Lucy, Cherish, Princess, and more. Some notes were short and to the point (“hi, I saw your picture”; or, “I am Chinese girl. Do you like China?”), some were complimentary (“I saw you there with mature and polite. I like that kind of guy.”), some confusing (“Your name sounds like my favorite Micky, but you looks more serious than him :)~”).

Several girls e-mailed both Tom and me the same message, and a couple sent group messages to the entire cohort of one hundred bachelors. Some asked if we could be friends. Some if we could be lovers. One asked me not to call the police on her:

HI

MY NAME IS ———, I AM A CHINESE GIRL. I AM A NURSE IN ———, FUJIAN. YOU KNOW FUJIAN. IT IS VERY BEAUTIFUL, AND I HOPE YOU CAN COME HERE.

OH YOU MAY FEEL SO STRENGE, WHY I KNOW YOUR E-MAIL. BEAUSE I SAW A BOOK AND IN IT THERE IS YOUR PICTURE, AND MY ENGLISH TEACHER COMES FROM THE SAME COUNTRY WITH YOU, AND DID THE SAME JOB BEFORE. SO I WANT TO TELL YOU IT, JUST IT. . . . PLEASE DON'T CALL POLICE, BECAUSE I AM NOT A BAD GIRL, THANK YOU

A few were from gay men. One sent photos of himself in military fatigues. Another wrote from the e-mail address [email protected]:

So are you gay or not?

A tiny minority included photos—including one voluptuous woman (who might have been a man) in a sexy nurse outfit. Each message was a tiny thrill, and my and Tom's competition intensified. Whenever we received a new note, we would announce it by yelling to each other across Comrade Wu's place, where Tom had recently taken a room, or by texting taunting messages.

In the end, neither Tom nor I cracked a hundred; I topped out at eighty, edging out Tom by a few messages. (He never bought me dinner.) But with all the online attention, I was gaining the confidence I needed to tackle the dating scene in the analog world.