Apologies to My Censor Read Online Free PDF Page B

inches taller than anyone
else on the court. My shooting and driving abilities played well in the Chinese
game, in which absolutely zero defense is played.
The hoops were about nine and a half feet high, which meant I could dunk. This
caused quite the stir.
    Within a few weeks I was the basketball sensation
of the three-square-block area around China Daily . I
wish it was because I’m a naturally gifted athlete, but basketball in China is
simply different from the Western game. For one, in North America players don’t
often wear jeans. On the indoor courts where we sometimes played, a layer of
dust covered everything, so you didn’t so much run down the court as you did
skate or ski. Players often refreshed themselves between games with a cigarette,
which they smoked inside the building at the edge of the court.
    Soon after my debut, China
Daily organized a game with a team from the Ministry of Health. Our
captains had recruited another basketball talent, an Australian in the features
section named Ben. He would be our point guard. The excitement around the office
was palpable, and the paper’s Chinese-language monthly newsletter ran a Q&A
with me—or rather my new alter ego, Mi Gao.
    China Daily: Please give some comments on our basketball
club.
    Mi Gao: I think more games need to be arranged against teams outside China Daily . A couple of times I was told we had a
game only to show up at the gym to find it was a scrimmage against other
players from China Daily . Real games will help
us play better as a team.
    CD: What did you learn or benefit from our basketball
club?
    MG: I learned I am the tallest person at China Daily .
    A few days before our game against the Ministry of
Health, the foreign editor came to my desk and told me with great disappointment
that the game had been postponed.
    â€œWhat happened?” I asked.
    â€œThey found out you could dunk,” he said
solemnly.
    â€œBut I can’t actually dunk on a regulation net.”
    He shrugged. “They want a month to prepare.”
    The extra preparation proved futile: we played the
game a month later and pummeled them. I didn’t dunk.
    T he
interview with the foreign businessman that Ms. Feng had assigned was scheduled
to last three hours on a Friday morning, the one day of the week I worked the
day shift, editing the opinion pages. I mentioned this to the reporter, a husky
man with a bowl cut who was surnamed Lu, the week before the interview, and he
said it was no problem; we’d cover my questions first and then I could step out
and return to the office to work my shift.
    The interview came and went, and I awaited word
from editors about my hoped-for switch to the day shift as a writer. The night
shift did not suit me; it made me feel comatose and envious of anybody who
worked normal hours. I was still struggling with freelance story ideas, and I
hoped that moving to a reporting position would propel me into action. There was
an exciting world to explore beyond the China Daily gates, and I felt like I was being robbed of the opportunity to get out
into it. I focused all my resentment on China
Daily .
    â€œAnybody who believes China
Daily is a real newspaper is fooling themselves,” I told Rob on one
of my bad days. “It’s a fucking joke.”
    A few weeks after my interview with the foreign
business executive, the time came for my two-month evaluation. Mr. Wang, of the
Tennessee sweater vest, sent the evaluation in an e-mail and asked me into his
office for a meeting. “This is an overall reevaluation of your work, which was
done among copy editors and editors who have been working with you in the past
months,” the e-mail read. “On the basis of the assessment sheets collected, we
got the following results. Your average score is 10.25 out of 20 points, which
is 51.25 out of 100 points.”
    Fifty percent ? What had
I done wrong? It would be a lie to say I was enjoying the work, but I arrived