Apologies to My Censor by Mitch Moxley

postcard. This, more or less, was China Daily . Asia attracts the latter kind of man. Many are in or beyond middle age, reliving their youth through copious amounts of alcohol and regular (sometimes paid) intercourse with women young enough to be their daughters. I had seen them before, in cities like Bangkok and Manila and other stops in Southeast Asia. These were men who refused to grow up: the Lost Boys of Neverland. And China Daily offered what they craved most—escape.
    At China Daily , we lived cushioned existences outside the realities and pressures of our lives back at home. Everything was provided for us. We could spend weeks at a time without ever having to leave the China Daily compound, a life revolving around a piece-of-cake job, heavy drinking, bootleg DVDs, and not much else. We could eat breakfast, lunch, and dinner for almost nothing at China Daily ’s canteen, a two-minute walk from our apartments (although it’s debatable whether to describe what the canteen offered as “food”). We each hired cleaning ladies to come in on weekends to tidy up our apartments and do our laundry. Reality and responsibility were things that existed outside the gates.
    Potter had spent years working copy desks in Hong Kong and Bangkok. He was now late in his career doing the same thing, at the same pay, as people thirty years his junior. His life, or what I knew of it, consisted of work, betting on Hong Kong horse races over the Internet, and drinking with his buddies until dawn.
    There were others, too. There was Wooden Tooth Dan, a boozer from Alaska I met my first day in China. His hair was disheveled, dandruff-ridden, and cut at different lengths, in some places down to the scalp, as if it had been cut with a Flowbee. His teeth were large and brown and looked like they had been carved out of driftwood. I would often see him after work walking back from the convenience store on the corner with a plastic bag filled with a dozen or more cans of beer. In the evenings, I could hear him and his young local wife screaming at each other in their apartment. The next day he would show up at work reeking of liquor so badly you could smell it from down the hallway.
    There was the white-haired man who worked upstairs at one of China Daily ’s sister publications and whose name I never learned, who told stories of ’Nam even though it seemed to me he was at least a decade too young to have served there. There was one editor, a recovering gambling addict, who once won a dubious award as his country’s worst journalist after he was found fabricating stories.
    There was Rob, Yi Bai Wu—One Hundred and Fifty. Rob, my first friend in China, was half Potter’s age but on the same path to reality and morality warping and eventually dissipating like a fog. Rob was on his way there; Potter had long passed.
    Rob was at once one of the most fascinating and frightening people I had ever met. He was one of those people who would require a team of scientists monitoring him 24/7 to figure out what was going on in his brain, and even then I don’t think they’d get it right. There were times when Rob was genuinely insightful and thoughtful. You could give him a book and he would tear through it in a weekend and come in on Monday with a full report. One day he bought me a book of short stories from an English-language bookstore just because he thought I would enjoy it. Rob was a good writer and often talked about chronicling his seven years of debauchery (a book I would read). He could be philosophical, and he tried harder to learn Chinese than any other foreigner I knew at China Daily , myself included.
    At other times, his moods turned dark, often vicious. He could be combative and withdrawn, stumble home drunk at 7 a.m. with a strange girl on his arm, and otherwise tear through life like a tornado, leaving a trail of destruction in his wake. After a few months of knowing him, I became convinced he was