Apologies to My Censor Read Online Free PDF Page A

It was rapid-fire, machine-gun diarrhea. It sprayed all over the toilet, the floor, the walls. Not to mention all my clothes.
    Once all was said and done, I took one of my new IKEA towels and wiped up what I could. I sprayed down the bathroom with the shower head, threw my underwear and socks in the garbage, and put my jeans back over my still-filthy legs. There was a knock on the bathroom door, and some chattering in Chinese. I opened it a crack to find a small Chinese woman I’d never seen before looking back at me with curious eyes, standing in front of the crew of IKEA deliverymen.
    â€œMs. Song?” I asked, my forehead damp with sweat.
    She nodded.
    â€œNice to meet you,” I said. “I’ll just be a minute, okay?”
    â€œThey want to know if they can go,” she said, nodding toward the workers.
    â€œUh, yeah, tell them they can go.”
    I shut the door and washed myself off as quickly as I could. I wiped up whatever was left on the floor with a second brand-new IKEA towel, dried the sweat from my face, and reluctantly made my way out of the bathroom, praying that Ms. Song didn’t have to use it.
    â€œOkay,” I said nervously. “Maybe we should go to a café for the lesson? It’s not very good light in here. I just need to change into shorts first. It’s very warm today.”
    We walked to a nearby coffee shop, and for the duration of our two-hour class, my first Chinese lesson ever, I couldn’t stop wondering if Ms. Song was noticing the pungent smell of shit wafting off my legs.
    O ne of my frustrations at work was that many of the stories I was assigned to edit at China Daily didn’t make sense. Talking to the Chinese reporters often left me even more confused, so I would often clean up the copy or rewrite it entirely without actually understanding the point of the story, and then send it along to the Chinese sub-editor. If I didn’t understand what was going on in the story, they certainly didn’t.
    China Daily features, a colleague told me, were to be positive and “happy.” News involving the Three T’s—Taiwan, Tibet, and the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre, all highly combustible issues—was tightly controlled, and anything remotely sensitive was so biased it became laughable. On one occasion, at a meeting with the business editors, I was told China Daily would not write stories about Germany for the time being because Chancellor Angela Merkel had recently met with the Dalai Lama. Thus the world’s fourth-largest economy, according to China Daily , had simply vanished.
    This type of “journalism” went on in spite of the China Daily Code of Journalism Ethics, which had been included in a booklet I had received upon arrival: “Factual, Honest, Fair, Complete.”
    Before I came to China, I wondered if working at a state-owned newspaper was a step in the wrong direction. Now I wondered if it wasn’t a giant leap. Among foreigners in Beijing, China Daily was a laughingstock. And although I’d had hopes of serving in a mentor role to the Chinese reporters, imbuing them with all the vast wisdom I’d gained in journalism school and in my brief career as a reporter, nobody at China Daily seemed especially interested in what I had to say. Foreign experts’ editorial suggestions were routinely ignored; we had next to no input about what went into the paper. That applied especially to me, one of the youngest foreigners on staff.
    Meanwhile, my freelance ambitions were dead upon arrival. The city and country were so enormous and confusing, I had no idea what to write about. Every time I came up with an idea I thought would sell, I discovered within the span of a five-minute Internet search that the story had been done—about five years earlier. After two months in Beijing, I hadn’t sold a single freelance article. When I told some of my foreign colleagues about my book idea, they laughed.