Read Online Apologies to My Censor by Mitch Moxley - Free Book Online Page A

from a late night of boozing the night before, I grew annoyed with myself. I surely felt a hundred times better than I did in Toronto, but was this why I’d come to China? To hang out in seedy bars and coast through life either drunk or hungover? Partly, yes. But still, I thought, there must be more to Beijing life than this. The summer had been fun, but I hadn’t fulfilled my promise to make more strides with my freelance career, even though I spent large chunks of my day surfing the Internet for story ideas. My Chinese was virtually nonexistent. I could barely motivate myself to pick up the phone for the articles I was supposed to be writing for China Daily . I was partying too hard and needed things to calm down in the fall.
    I eventually found more friends my age and grew less intrigued with the darker side of Beijing, avoiding the Den or Maggie’s whenever possible. But the more I got to know Potter and his friends, the more I felt I understood them and I realized they could also be decent people. A friendship like David and Potter’s struck me as truly rare. They would die for each other; they just lived by a different set of rules, lived in a different reality. They lived in Chinese Neverland—they had permanent residency, in fact.
    Later, Rob and I grew apart, too, and as time went on he became increasingly isolated, spiraling into a deep depression. He stopped hanging out with many of the China Daily staff, myself included. The only people he seemed to trust were Potter, David, and a few of their friends, and he refused to attend any event that included the majority of China Daily ’s expat staff.
    Rob seemed to know what he was becoming and he mostly embraced it. But he had doubts. A friend relayed to me a story about one afternoon when Rob and Potter sat in the China Daily lobby, smoking cigarettes and talking. Rob needed advice. He was single, lonely, drinking too much. He was lost.
    â€œBut this is the life, right? Freedom. Doing whatever I want,” Rob said. “I mean, look at you; you’re happy, right?”
    â€œWhat do you think, mate?” Potter replied. “I’m fucking miserable.”
    T wo years later, Potter died of a heart attack. After being laid off from China Daily , he moved to another state-owned paper that had launched an English version. He was found alone in his apartment after several days, when colleagues wondered why he hadn’t shown up for work.
    After Potter’s death, his friends created something of a shrine to him in one of his favorite Beijing bars. On the wall at the back of the bar were photos of Potter and his buddies drinking Carlsberg and Johnnie Walker, smoking cigarettes, laughing it up. Living a life I would later worry might suck me in, too.

5
    On Assignment
    M s. Feng’s instructions for most of the stories I wrote for China Daily were straightforward: “Find out what Westerners think.”
    It was clear early on that Pulitzer Prize–winning journalism would not be expected of me as a writer for China Daily , and before long, I owned the “What Westerners Think About Stuff” beat. Property prices, Chinese products, websites about China—I was tasked to find out what foreigners thought about it all. It seemed the editors simply wanted me out of sight, out of mind, and that was fine with me.
    The stories I was assigned were mostly puff pieces that would be tucked into the business section’s back pages or in a weekend supplement called Business Weekly . One of the first stories I wrote for China Daily , with a Chinese cowriter, was about an Israeli products fair downtown. We sampled olives and hummus and wine. It was a lovely afternoon, but it wasn’t a story. It shouldn’t even have garnered a brief, but we wrote a feature about it anyway, reporting—despite a total lack of substantiating evidence—that Israeli goods were taking the Chinese market by storm.
    For another story, the