Song #37: Workin For a Commie Mouthpiece, More Stuff Other People Said (2005). I begrudgingly left Beijing in spring 2003, after SARS hit, and slunk back to Indiana. My goal was to work until I could afford a plane ticket back, hopefully by the fall. At first, I worked, coincidentally, at a struggling Chinese restaurant near my mom’s house, where I stayed. I did that for a couple months, reading, watching day-time talk shows with my sister Jessica and hanging out at my old cafe haunts, like Toast and Jam, in Fort Wayne, where they had a popular weekly open mic. There was a bluegrass house band that was usually there. I played stuff from Elegant Pond. Then, fortune struck. My friend Nate got me a job as working the deep fryer in a mobile cheese truck. Charlie from Wisconsin ran the food car. The idea was simple. Cut the cheese (curds, in the parlance). Toss it in batter. Deep fry it. Sell it at summer fairs. Lines could stretch a ways. The carny life fit me well. I only worked two gigs over the span of a month: the Indiana State Fair, in Indianapolis, and the Elko County Fair, in the southeast corner of Wisconsin. But it seemed longer, in a good way. Every day, the five of us would get up, start work at 10am and run the cheese truck until the fairgrounds closed, around midnight. One cashier. One batter-maker. One fryer (two at peak times). Charlie pitched in when needed. One guy on break, for about an hour. Next day, we’d do it again. (There was one girl in the crew). We’d rotate stations. At the end of the 10-12 hour days, we smoked pot and drank beers and hung out in our living quarters, either a mobile trailer or a disused train boxcar. It was hard work and good money. We’d barter with the neighboring pizza truck for food: swiss curds dipped in rye-batter on a stick for a large pepperoni. We didn’t have time to ride the rides. I did check out the cow show at in Elko, though. At the state fair in Indianapolis, my girlfriend Helen came to visit from Chicago, to which she fled SARS. We had a whole boxcar to ourselves, situated on the edge of the fairgrounds. A guitar, a journal, a book, a candle (no electricity), some cans of soup, and a firepit is all I needed. By August, I had money for a plane ticket, around $1,200 at the time: Fort Wayne to Beijing. Helen and I eventually found an apartment. We took odd jobs that required nothing much except being a native English speaker (though it helped if you “looked American” (i.e., were white): tutoring, freelance proofing for magazines, transcribing TV shows and other videos. After a few months, my American friend Katie told me that an English-language news weekly, Beijing Review, was hiring a foreign “specialist editor,” what turned out to a proof-reader. A degree from some kind of Western university was required, though not necessarily in journalism. The magazine has national distribution in China. The readership, judging from readers’ letters, are mostly Chinese students zealous to practice English, some Western expatriates looking for a “Chinese perspective” (this phrase is common) on politics and culture, and the odd podunk Asian politician or diplomat. I got the job and signed a year-long contract, including a generous month’s vacation time. The office was housed in two floors of a drab ~1970s-era mid-rise building, tucked in a residential area of western Beijing, about an hour bus-ride from my apartment on the eastside. The staff was all Chinese, except for me and two other foreign editors, divided into two rooms of cubicles. One room had senior journalists and editors. Since all content was first written in Chinese, the other office had the translators, who also did some independent reporting. My desk was in among the younger staff, who would send me electronic documents of their translated articles. Katie, a jaded expat veteran from Vermont, knew the drill: polish the English articles in your inbox, and the other five to six hours of the day was left to read or meander online. I gleefully did, too, for the first few months. After awhile, though, the routine got tiresome and, eventually, very frustrating. Spring 2004 was around the time I discovered Wikipedia, which I would pillage as a reference to look up some Asian prime minister or political party. For instance, I received an article on the Korean legislative election, and duly added some info to give the reader some background. No problem there. To challenge myself, I got permission to translate a couple articles myself, including one on the “snakehead” gangs that smuggle people out of China. General social problems could be reported. The magazine published a piece on tainted blood transfusions in a central province that was contributing to a rural AIDS epidemic. The quality of writing varied drastically, though. Some of it was actually decent first-hand journalism. One young reporter in his mid-20s, who we called Xiao Ni, went out into Beijing, and occasionally beyond, to report. Some of the articles, on the other hand, were a mash of talking points that the governments Information Office would hand down to the editor (and to editors across the country). After several months on the job, a couple of my coworkers pointed out the name of the writer who ostensibly wrote one of these propaganda pieces, which translates roughly as “No Name,” the romanization of which looks like an innocent Chinese name. I call it propaganda because the pattern of the language was consistent. And when I directly asked my boss, the managing editor, Madame Wang as she liked to be called, she tactfully told me as much. Talking in her office once, I asked her frankly about covering the 15 year anniversary of the 1989 Tiananmen Square killings. She recalled journalists who were fired specifically for refusing to censor coverage of the government ordering the military to open fire on student protestors encamped on the sprawling cement plaza after a peaceful stand off. To this day, there is blanket news blackout on this subject. Other taboo subjects include: questioning the central political role of the Communist Party, criticizing specific Communist Party leaders, (the president or prime minister), the de facto independence of Taiwan, and political autonomy in Tibet. Around the anniversary of Tiananmen in June that year, I was reading coverage of the New York Times online. My colleague in the next cubicle, who became a good friend, teared up when she saw me reading the front page story. She told me she was upset that she, as a journalist, had to rely on foreign news of the events and was ashamed that her government forbid even discussing it publicly. It sounds almost quaint, but the government, over which the Communists have a monopolistic control, has an information ministry. And it is very serious about media censorship. It has a two-pronged approach to censorship and propaganda: domestic and foreign. Xiao Ni told me, privately, that he was obliged to attend regular meetings to go over what subjects were not allowed to be reported or opined on. I got my hands on a (Chinese) book in the office library, nestled among major English language publications (Time, The New Yorker, The Economist and Newsweek - before it when to shit). It lays the Party’s strategy to “making China better know to the outside world,” which is code for repeating rosy platitudes about Chinese society and politics in English-language newspapers, like Beijing Review, for example. And I’ll never forget watching one of the Bush-Kerry presidential debates that fall with Xiao Ni. He was genuinely shocked that John Kerry, a mere federal senator, could tell the incumbent US president to his face that his policies were wrong. Senator Kerry wasn’t throw into an unmarked white van and detained indefinitely, as would-be protestors today are. Meanwhile, the nationalism that bordered on chauvinism in the office started to grate on me. Most of the staff were fairly patriotic Chinese who wanted to make an honest living, despite the professional constraints. Two of the (youngish) senior staff were the main source of the jingoism in the office. Political relations between China and Japan have been tortured since the second world war for many reasons, not least because of unresolved emotional scars from Japanese imperialism across much of East Asia. Almost a year into the job, I got kind of loopy. One of the nationalist journalists in the office sent me a article of Japanese military reform. It was paranoid right-wing boilerplate, painting the Japanese government as neo-imperalists who wanted to dominate a poor, well-meaning, benevolent China, ready to assume its natural role as the center of the world. So, I played along. Thoroughly jaded at this point, I poured scorn on the Japanese running dogs, even turning up the rhetorical temperature of the article. He said it was the best work I had done for the magazine. Admittedly, it was kind of fun. Harmless, I thought. Ultimately, felt sorry for the whole sorry futile endeavor. This journalist was the same person who, trumpeting “5,000 years” of Chinese history, chuckled out loud when I mentioned in a staff meeting that I had studied US history. History? What history does the US have? Good question. Unfortunately, I never got the chance to actually discuss it with him, let alone cover it in our newspaper.
Posted on: Sat, 03 May 2014 21:23:52 +0000
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