Ed’s note: Our friend Justin Mitchell, who quietly left China last year after a decade here, grew nostalgic upon watching the latest Donnie video and got in touch. He should be in touch more often.

I am not the first or last expat to leave China after a long stretch. Mine lasted about 10 years and while I can claim no special linguistic or unique experience beyond doing PR for the PRC — as I often describe my time working at the likes of China Daily, Global Times, China Radio International and Shenzhen Daily, as well as the best times of my journalistic Asia experience at The Standard in Hong Kong — I find myself homesick and occasionally heartsick.

I can’t bring myself to write the same sort of sensational “working in the belly of the beast” as so many Brits seem to easily slag about, though I often readily identify with what they say. I had my issues with censors and sometimes almost came to blows, though we were often the same creaky age and could have done nothing more than fake a few punches like a couple of bad kung fu stunt doubles.

The best was when it came to a meaningless short story at Global Times about some joyous male college students celebrating graduation by streaking. The censor, who was almost exactly my age at the time, about 55, told me it could not run because the students’ behavior was “disgraceful.”

“You and I were almost the same age in 1971,” I replied. “I streaked and it was nothing but a good time. What did you do? It was your Cultural Revolution. You were probably sent down to a countryside to feed pigs while I smoked marijuana, protested, and listened to rock and roll music for another revolution to end the war in Vietnam. And now you and I are working at the same place. How ironic is that? Let the story run, it’s harmless, just like we were.”

To his credit, he bent and the story ran.

But it leads me to another truth. One thing that drove me outta China besides my declining health was a declining sense of joy and discovery that led me there to begin with.

Now I realize that so much time has passed and the old stories are now new again.

(Image via)

“Is it a sin to work for Global Times?” asks the headline to a recent SCMP blog by Amy Li that launches into an account of a recent, unpleasant and viral Weibo exchange between a reporter from the English version of GT, Zhang Zhilong, and a scribe for a more liberal paper, China Business News, Wang Wai. Zhang had contacted Wang under the unspoken “we’re all journalists together” pact in hopes of getting more police information about a taxi accident involving his parents and doing a story about it.

Wang asked what paper Zhang worked for and the response was harsh. Wrote Li: “Upon hearing the name Global Times, Wang said: ‘Then I don’t care’ and hung up.”

Ugly Weibo exchanges followed, with many onlookers cheering Wang and calling Zhang a “50-center.”

But is it a sin? Ms. Li should have asked at least two of her Chinese SCMP coworkers. Before “defecting” to the SCMP, and despite their “sin,” they both toiled through self-censoring managers under the Red Thumb and the imagined whims of the egomaniac and decidedly marmot-banged Global Times editor-in-chief Hu Xijin, who, Li wrote, also courts controversy. As Hu wrote on his Weibo following the Zhang-Wang spat:

“It’s nothing. Global Times has such a large circulation. [Note: without a specific number -- it’s always been a mystery.] Its website is the largest besides [state tit] the People’s Daily. Confidence helps people maintain their manners.”

Hu thrives on attention, good or bad, as long as they spell his name right. To his small credit, he did “liberalize” the English language version from the rabid Chinese version, albeit with very mixed results. The opinion page continues to suck dead rats and draws the most negative attention, but if one sifts through the news pages there are still some gems.

GT has run stories that China Daily (where as a PR for the PRC hack I also worked) would never touch. Maybe my proudest two moments at GT were finally getting the foreigners paid on time and killing a story headlined, “Incest Around the World,” based on an old Austrian-based story about the animal who imprisoned and fucked his daughters for years. It was neatly summarized according to countries and incest relationships. Guess which country was omitted? “It’s a Small World After All (Except China)” kept ringing through my head as I read it.

As the first foreigner hired at GT-English, I recruited both of those two previously alluded to SCMP reporters after working with them separately in Hong Kong and Shenzhen. I admit, I felt a bit guilty as I couldn’t exactly figure out why they wanted to be a part of what would become the ultimate clusterfuck, but felt they could make a difference. But in their time they did a helluva job, inspired younger reporters and ultimately went on to the SCMP, which has had its own managerial and self-censored sins to consider.

Last Sunday night was Lantern Festival. As such, C and I had holiday dinner next door with a friend of hers whose parents, sister, and the sister’s spunky 6-year-old daughter were in Shenzhen for the holiday. The dinner was fine, lots of salty spicy fish, chicken and pork dishes, and some vinegary cucumbers.

I toasted with a vodka and tonic while the others raised modest glasses of cheap Chinese red wine mixed with 7-Up. For reasons I’ve never been able to pinpoint, red wine with Sprite or 7-Up (or scotch mixed with green tea) is considered the height of sophisticated drinking by many middle-class Chinese, though I’ve long since disabused C of that notion and she now admits it tastes lousy. She only bent her Absolut on the rocks rule in order to “not be the bird that flies away from the flock.” As a foreigner, the flock rule doesn’t apply to me.

We returned to our place and before we slept she told me she was leaving the balcony light on for the night.

“Why?” I asked.

“It’s so our ancestors can find their way to where we live tonight.” She cleared her throat and laughed self-consciously. “But I don’t know how mine are going to know where I am in Shenzhen…” (Her hometown, Dandong, is more than 1,000 kilometers north).

“I don’t know how mine are going to find me either,” I said. “Most of them probably never thought of coming to China — except maybe my mother’s father, Knox. He was Irish. Before she died my mother told me he loved reading stories about Asia, particularly by a British writer named Kipling. Something about a ‘Burmese girl,’ I think, too.

“Though I don’t know that story or poem. Maybe if he had a thing for a fantasy Asian girl from Burma or China, he’d have enjoyed knowing about us.”

“Maybe.”

We slept as the balcony light glowed through a night punctuated by staccato New Year’s fireworks and omnipresent smoke. And I dreamed.

I dreamed that my grandfather Knox who died when I was two and my mother Mila who died 12 years ago were told I could be found in China. If they desired, they could leave whatever realm the dead inhabit and join others who were visiting their descendants here for one night.

I’ve no real memory of my grandfather, though I’m told he was fond of me and that he died peacefully napping on his couch after lunch as my mother, dad and I were visiting him and my grandmother.

“You played on his body until the ambulance came,” my mother told me. “You didn’t know he was dead and thought he was pretending to sleep. It was a game you’d played with him before.”

Now I am sleeping and my dead grandfather and mother are flying through the air to see me in China. He calls it “Cathay” in my dream because that’s what Shenzhen’s province, Guangdong, was called by foreign barbarians when he was alive. Cathay.

“C’mon now, Mila. We’re flying to Cathay to see Justin,” he tells my mother. He’s wearing a tweed suit, white shirt, thin tartan tie and perhaps set off with a tweed newsboy cap, attire I either imagine or think I’ve seen in old photos of him.

He hasn’t lost his Irish accent in my dream. He came to the US as a young man who’d taught at a deaf school in Belfast and had dabbled in boxing only to visit a brother in Oregon who had immigrated to the US. But Knox never returned to Ireland until many years later.

While in America he’d caught polio shortly after coming and the Illinois woman he eventually married was one of his nurses. She was my grandmother but she’s not visiting tonight. It was also complicated between her and my mother and probably still is in the hereafter.

“Hullo mum,” my grandfather had greeted his mother with an American accent upon returning for a visit to his ancestral home in Northern Ireland’s County Down. According to family lore, he was limping due to the polio. His mother stood silently on the porch of their whitewashed home called The Spa.

“Ah, Knox. You’ve got the Yankee twang,” she finally said of his greeting. Until this exchange, they not spoken to or seen each other in the 25-plus years since he’d left for a “short” tour of America.

There is no Yankee twang in my dream. He’s soaring through the air to Cathay — a place he’s only perhaps read and maybe dreamed of — arms outstretched like Peter Pan, one hand clasping my mother’s who looks as she did in her high school and college photos.

In those black and white pictures she isn’t tethered to an oxygen tank or embittered and numbed by the booze and pain pills that momentarily pacified her arthritis pain but inflamed her demons.

She’s not even Mila. Tonight she’s “Johnnie,” a high school/college nickname due to her maiden name, Johnston. She sometimes smokes a pipe and is already a talented artist. She wears bobby socks and is a babe. And though it was also very complicated between her and her father, tonight they’re feckless and free together. She’s thrilled to be on her father’s arm flying and free-falling to Cathay to see her son, and her father is quietly proud to take her. And though it’s a country of 1.3 billion, with a gazillion more dead Chinese ancestors crowding the airspace tonight, they’ll have no problems.

You see, because beautiful C has left the light on so they’ll know where to find me.

Recently I received an email and link from a Chinese friend who wanted to share her love of what she called “traditional Chinese whistling music.” This is indeed melodic whistling music. But if you’re old and foreign enough, you may recall “Are You Going to Scarborough Fair?,” popularized in the late ’60s by the US folk duo Simon and Garfunkel, used as one of the songs for Dustin Hoffman’s breakout in The Graduate.

I wrote her back gently saying it wasn’t traditional Chinese music, but based on an ancient bittersweet UK folk song  from perhaps as long ago as the 17th century, and asked her to check out the Simon and Garfunkel version also. Enough said about Chinese copying — and Simon and Garfunkel getting publishing rights to a song they didn’t write. Both guilty. Let’s just be happy that a 17th century Brit folk tune recycled through an American band can find appeal in 21st century China.

It’s still Christmas in some parts of the world. BJC’s “An Expat Christmas” series continues, in which foreigners in China write about the holiday experience from their respective cities. Here, Justin Mitchell recalls one fretful Christmas in Shenzhen, and the people who made it all better.

By Justin Mitchell

I have spent enough Christmases in China that hearing “Mamacita, Donde Esta Santa Claus?” and the barking Jingle Bells dogs pumped at 110 amps in late October in a Shenzhen wet market no longer phases or even makes me wonder WTF?

Few have been especially memorable except one that I’ll call the Gift of the Magi.

It was a classic deep and dark December in Shenzhen – wuss weather compared to anything Beijing dishes out so coldly and cruelly, yet enough chill and attendant “fog” in the air that it felt like you could spoon chucks outta the muck and spit them out.

I was having a classic foreigner vs. local-downstairs-neighbor-and-property-agent clash as my circa 1993 “Flying Swallow” washing machine was leaking water directly into my aggrieved neighbor’s apartment. She spoke fluent English, which I initially thought was an advantage as my eight- or 10-word Chinese vocabulary doesn’t cut it even when it comes to reliable cab rides. But nooo… it backfired big time on me.

Attempts at negotiations led nowhere as I was “obviously” at fault because I flushed toilet paper instead of tossing it into a waste basket where it would become a cockroach and sanitation-free amusement park that the Atlanta Center for Disease Control would’ve killed to study.

Though it was obvious to me that bad plumbing in the kitchen where the washing machine churning out its aqua evil was the culprit, all Chinese eyes were on the toilet paper disposal. Nearly 2,000 kuai in compensation to the neighbor became as useless as the used TP, and the situation escalated to the point that she began calling me at 5:30 am to complain about a load of wash I’d done at 8 pm the previous night.

My fuse blew and I responded with what I thought were witty, culturally cutting text messages. “I curse you for eight generations!” She threatened to sue. My pithy response was “Chinese law is bullshit. Like your tofu apartments. I am doing a load of laundry now so I won’t smell like a zhu tou (pig face) like you. Deal with it.”

She threatened more legal action and took steps to have me fired from my state-owned media group where I toiled as a “foreign expert polisher.” Not a small threat, actually, as there was precedent when former naughty laowais had suddenly had their contracts and visas cut loose for “disturbing the social order” following a bar fight that had nothing to do with their otherwise professional duties.

She informed me that she had saved all my rude messages that had hurt the feelings of Chinese people, most especially herself, and said she’d begun trying to contact my employer.

Enter the classic deus ex machina.

Through random circumstances I’d become friends with a notable Chinese female composer, pianist and conductor whose father was a well known, distinguished multilingual professor and editor of a respected Guangzhou university literary publication. I’d never met him, and my relationship with his daughter – who calls composers such as Tan Dun “little brother” due to being close classmates back in the day – was entirely chaste.

But we enjoyed one another’s company and a few days before Christmas I spilled out my house rent blues to her over dinner.

She offered to call my rabid neighbor and property agent as a mediator. She did so and then I learned she’d played the cultural card, plus an inventive twist of high fiction.

After establishing her academic/musical credentials with the neighbor she mentioned her father, whom she described as a “good friend” of mine, so good, in fact, that I had once offered to donate blood to him for a serious operation.

This time the bitch caved. She knew the father’s reputation and was stunned to hear that an evil, foul-mouthed, ass-wiping and flushing foreigner would do such a thing.

Well, maybe I would, but it never happened.

Nonetheless it came to pass on Christmas Day that the Magi appeared: my composer pal, a property agent, and some schmuck in a bad suit and company lanyard hanging from his neck. The schmuck left quickly, but the two women held up more than half the sky that day. I possess the hardware and plumbing skills of a half-wit dingo, but they were diligent.

The composer — originally from Guangzhou — had grown up in Inner Mongolia during the Cultural Revolution where she was both able to still play violin and study music, but had also learned basic skills that the American tool guy takes for granted.

They spent nearly seven hours calling in plumbers and doing their own calculations, squatting in my kitchen muck til finally the washing machine ran like the Flying Swallow it was meant to be, no muss, no fuss, no drainage.

I imagined my composer on a podium or sitting at a piano in formalwear as she labored under my sink and felt both ashamed and grateful. It was like watching the likes of Leonard Bernstein fixing my garbage disposal.

But I can think of no better Christmas present or past, here, there or anywhere.

God bless them, everyone.

By Justin Mitchell

Here we are daily witnesses, viral voyeurs and readers to how cheap, meaningless and callous life can often be. Drivers willfully plowing over pedestrians, sometimes two or three times to ensure the dirty work is done; infants and children abandoned or even worse; beggars, protestors, petitioners and migrant workers treated like so much offal; and nasty foreigners own evil deeds — added up, it’s all far too easy to just numb oneself with the “this is China” mindset.

In contrast, I’d like to present a very small personal vignette about how merciful and kind China can be, and I’m not talking about a kind-hearted hooker waiving her fee because one was too drunk to fuck.

Tuesday morning, October 16, I was walking to work, normally a 10-minute casual jaunt to a large state-owned media group in extreme west Beijing, where I’m one of a hundred or more foreign “experts” employed to polish and/or present PR for the PRC. After walking only about five minutes, my nearly 60-year-old body suddenly betrayed me.

Classic heart attack pains up the left side of my chest, profuse sweating and then all control lost as I collapsed halfway into the wet street, limbs flopping like a speared flounder.

Still conscious and acutely embarrassed, I tried to right myself as if nothing was wrong when about four or five Chinese pedestrians, also apparently on their ways to work, immediately gathered around me and began taking charge.

My Chinese language skills are less than minimal, but I managed to show them my danwei ID, and through one kind man’s sketchy English skills said I was “okay,” though it was clear I wasn’t. He offered me two small bb-sized herbal pills from a tiny green ceramic bottle and someone else called the police for aid.

I live and work in a PLA military zone, and it’s the first time I’ve been grateful for that. Within five minutes a cop car arrived and I was gently hoisted into it and driven straight to where I work, then lifted on a makeshift stretcher into the first floor auditorium stage to lie down until an ambulance arrived while puzzled coworkers starting their shifts gawped and/or murmured gentle sounds of encouragement.

My employer’s HR staff and a couple others in my department rode with me to a nearby hospital where, despite my lack of proper ID, paperwork, etc., they were able to get me tested, treated and reassured to the point that one woman offered to hold my hand – my god, the offer of the human touch, simply magical at that moment — while another ran out and bought a phone card to reactivate my bankrupt cell phone so I could notify friends who might be able to help if needed.

Between EKGs, blood and other tests (which ultimately never pinpointed what caused my meltdown) I gasped out my gratitude to them and the anonymous, kind passersby who’d kick-started the aid chain. I’m a firm atheist, but like some grocked-out human Hallmark card or clichéd country singer, I found myself declaring “God bless China,” to which several replied in unison, “God bless America.”

God (or something like him, her or it) bless us all. Failing that, I’m just happy to report that the Lei Feng spirit is alive and well and so am I. Thank you, China.