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

successfully fought off the happy ending,
but my masseuse was loath to give up. She keyed 300 into her phone. “Okay?”
    â€œNo, I don’t want that!” I said.
    She threw up her hands in exasperation. The rest of
the massage was terrible. She spent most of the time unenthusiastically kneading
my back with one hand, and text messaging with the other.
    A fter
waking the next morning to more rain, George and I went across town to drink
coffee at a Starbucks. We basically just wanted to kill the day before boarding
the flight back to Beijing. By midafternoon the clouds broke for the first time,
revealing a lovely blue sky. Of course, we were wearing jeans and shoes, and too
far from our hotel to change into shorts and enjoy the weather.
    A few hours later, we were sitting on the plane,
having never set foot on the beach during our weekend beach getaway, and looking
paler than ever.
    D uring
the weeks that followed I did very little work at China
Daily . The editors would assign me a story, I would take two weeks to
write it, and then the story had a 50 percent shot at going to print. Throughout
the summer and into the fall, I wrote maybe three or four stories. The rest of
the time I did whatever I wanted.
    It became clear to me during that time that the
influx of “foreign friends” to China Daily was
little more than window dressing, not much different from the coats of paint
they were throwing up on apartment buildings around the ring roads to beautify
the city before the Games. We were a small part of the biggest public relations
campaign in history—Beijing’s Olympic makeover.
    To that end, China
Daily brought in people with real journalism experience. In the past, the foreigners at the paper were travelers,
university students on summer break, or outright nut jobs. One foreign expert,
whose career at China Daily lasted two weeks,
frequently and firmly made known his belief in aliens and claimed to have
fourteen doctoral degrees, one of which was being suppressed by the Vatican. Now
the foreign experts appeared legally sane, or at bare minimum did not talk
openly about their belief in aliens. We were told we would have real influence
at the paper and that we could help decide its direction. But in the end, what China Daily really wanted was for us to sit
down, shut up, and edit. There were changes, but they were glacial and
superficial. It was a sugarcoating, and we were the sugar.
    Periodically the foreign staff would discuss the
ethics of working at China Daily . Some felt we had a
responsibility to make the paper better. Others disagreed. “There’s nothing
wrong with what we do,” my friend Max, the Australian, said one night as we
strolled around the China Daily compound. “You have
to realize what this is. We’re not a newspaper, mate. We’re PR. You have to give
the bosses what they want.”
    He was right, and once I accepted that fact I could
tolerate working at China Daily . I was no longer a
journalist, but I could be one in my off-hours. By midsummer I had sold a few
freelance articles, and I became determined to do better. I would be like a
media Batman: propagandist by day, journalist by night.
    Although I would always have my issues with China Daily , I eventually began to appreciate the
unique experience for what it was and to enjoy myself. And I still hoped that I
could, in some small way, change the paper for the better, to make it somehow
more palatable, to blur the line between propaganda and journalism until a
reader might barely know the difference.
    â€œHow does it feel to be a government propagandist?”
a woman asked me once at a bar in Beijing, barely masking her contempt. It was a
question I received often, and I answered her honestly: “Great!” It had become a
reason to be in China during an incredible time, a chance to be a part of
history.
    Since my editors asked very little of me, that’s
what I gave them, and in the