Free Apologies to My Censor by Mitch Moxley

polishing is okay, but we cannot fit it on the page.”
    After a few moments of stalemate, I agreed to redo the edits. As the editor walked away I opened the original story. Without making any changes, I sent it back to him, the word-for-word original—the same way it ran in the next day’s paper.
    Nobody said a thing.
    T he next week I showed up at work, and Harry, my anti-foreigner, anti-Shanghainese, anti-Taiwanese deskmate, was gone. My new neighbor introduced himself as Wang—“just Wang is okay,” he said. (For newcomers to China, keeping track of people surnamed Wang can be daunting.) Wang was the same age as me, thin and bespectacled, with immaculate hair parted to the side. He was a Communist Party member, he told me, not because he was necessarily interested in politics or the Party but because it was key for career success. Membership mostly entailed spending the odd weekend away at Party conferences, where officials would drone on about policy and ideology for hours. Wang covered natural resources for the paper, and he was good at his job. He worked the phones all day and filed clean copy.
    One Friday, a few weeks later, I noticed Wang was proofreading the opinion pages I had edited. Initially I took this as a slight to my work, and then I became nervous that my bosses had figured out that I didn’t actually read the proofs.
    â€œWhy do they need you to work as a proofreader anyway?” I asked. “You’re already working all day as a reporter.”
    â€œThey need me to look for political mistakes.”
    â€œPolitical mistakes? Like what?”
    â€œLike Taiwan and Hong Kong, for example. Or another example: the other day there was a reference to South Korea as ‘Korea.’ That is not acceptable. Because there are two Koreas, South Korea and North Korea, and one Korea cannot represent both Koreas. If we have that, North Korea will call China Daily and be very upset with us.”
    â€œI see.”
    I pulled out a proofreading sheet and found a story that mentioned Taiwan as a Chinese province.
    â€œHey, I found a political mistake here. Shouldn’t this say ‘China and Taiwan,’ which are two separate countries ? Like North and South Korea?”
    Silence. Wang grabbed the paper and held the sheet of paper inches from his glasses.
    â€œI’m joking,” I said.
    Wang just laughed nervously.
    I was much better suited to the day shift, and my mood perked up accordingly. Working from ten to six improved my social life, but I still wasn’t finding much in the way of freelance success. I wrote a piece about China’s stock market for a Canadian business magazine, and I was commissioned a few stories for local English magazines. I pitched North American newspapers and magazines regularly but without much luck. Many e-mails were ignored completely—so frequently, in fact, that I sometimes e-mailed myself just to confirm my messages were actually going through.
    I often met foreign journalists who worked for well-known publications—the New York Times , the Wall Street Journal , Time , Newsweek , and others. Beijing was stocked with foreign correspondents, and I felt grossly inadequate whenever I socialized with them, imagining them laughing at my career misfortune whenever I went to the bar to order a drink.
    At night, lying in bed on hot summer nights—one year away from the Olympics—I would ruminate about my station in life. I wanted to be writing for marquee magazines, to some day walk into a bookstore and see a book I’d written. But I had no idea how to get there. And when I looked around the office at some of my colleagues—beat-down, dreary-eyed, wearing the same outfit they’d worn all week—it was clear that China Daily was not a path to great success.
    O ne day in late August, Ms. Feng approached my desk and told me I would be sent with a team of Chinese reporters to cover the first World Economic