Apologies to My Censor Read Free

end was an American who said he worked as an editor at China Daily in Beijing. It had been months since
I’d submitted my résumé and weeks since I wrote the editing test. I assumed
they’d forgotten about me.
    â€œThe bosses were impressed with your editing test,”
the man said. “I can’t say for sure, but it looks good.”
    I could feel my heart hammering inside my chest but
tried to sound composed on the phone. “That’s, that’s . . . great
news,” I said. He asked me a few questions about my experience, told me a little
about the job, and said to expect an e-mail shortly.
    Over the next few days, I checked my e-mail
constantly, and when the offer finally came, three weeks later, I was ecstatic.
One-year contract, accommodation, plane ticket each way. I was in a coffee shop
and it was blizzarding outside. I wanted to laugh at the swirling snow and its
attempt to keep me rooted and miserable in Toronto. I bit my fist, barely able
to wrap my head around the idea of moving to Beijing. I was going to do it right
this time, I told myself. Not like Japan. I was going to make this trip
count.
    After the initial euphoria faded, doubts crept in.
Despite the terrible year I’d had, I couldn’t help but wonder if China Daily was a step in the wrong direction. Based
on the warnings that soon began landing in my inbox from foreign editors, it
didn’t seem like what they were doing over there was journalism exactly, and being a journalist was the only thing I had
ever wanted to be.
    As a kid, I would sit in my basement penning tales
of sporting glory and intergalactic adventure, a long-haired and ear-pierced
version of my young self in the role of protagonist. In high school, I interned
at a local weekly paper, writing for the sports section, and during my
undergraduate studies I worked at my university’s student newspaper. I loved it.
Journalism, and writing in general, gave me an identity. I went on to do a
master’s degree in journalism, and during my course I interned at a newspaper in
Toronto called the National Post , where I continued
to work after graduation.
    My dream was to live abroad and write long-form
magazine articles and books, but I was realistic enough to know that those
things wouldn’t come right away. At the National Post , I was placed in the business section, and
although I gave it my best (at least at first), it became clear that a career as
a business reporter was not my calling. I wrote stories about investing although
I had no investments and no interest in investing. I reported on dividends and
bonds and EBITDA and interest rates, without truly understanding what any of
those terms meant. I was perhaps the world’s most inadequate business reporter,
and toward the end of my contract it began to show. I made small mistakes,
rarely pitched stories to my editors, and whined incessantly about my job to
anyone who would listen.
    I grew anxious to get out into the world and do the
writing I wanted to do. When I eventually left the paper and traveled to Asia in
the fall of 2005, I wrote a few magazine articles that stirred my passions,
including a dozen-page magazine feature about the legacy of Agent Orange in
Vietnam. This, I thought, is what I want to do. I wanted big stories, stories I could live and feel, stories that would make
a difference, stories that would take me out of an office and into places I
never knew existed.
    But despite a few successes, I never figured out
how to make freelance writing sustainable on that first trip to Asia, and by the
time I was back in Toronto I was writing business articles again, only now I was
doing it for half of what I earned at the Post . I
had envisioned that at this stage of my career I would be writing for GQ or Esquire from jungle
war zones and sinful foreign metropolises. Instead, I was writing weekend
features about how to get a better deal on your cell phone plan.
    China was a chance