Sad Peninsula by Mark Sampson Page B

editor from a fictitious interviewee.
    I consider it a scathing indictment on modern journalism that my dalliances could go on for four years before I got busted. Like a serial killer or corporate criminal, I grew arrogant and reckless. The “story” that did me in involved a book club comprised of immigrant housewives from the Palestinian territories who read novels exclusively by Jewish writers as an act of cultural understanding. It wasn’t the story’s questionable premise that sent the red flags unfurling. It wasn’t even a single sentence within the story. It was a passing clause within a sentence, sandwiched between em-dashes and mentioning an organization that did not and could not exist — The Jewish Consortium for the Annihilation of Arab History — that finally raised the eyebrow of my managing editor and sent her digging. And digging. And digging.
    The unearthing of (most of) my ruses took no time at all. Needless to say, the Daily News ’s competition had a field day when they became public. The Herald ran several days’ worth of articles about my misdeeds and subsequent termination, column inches that went on and on, needlessly. (They even mentioned my father, his noble reputation and work with the province, a tsk-tsk sort of reference.) The Canadian Press picked up the story and ran it nationwide. I know the girl who wrote it — we had a one-night stand my first year at J-school before I started dating Cora.
    I was, of course, done for. Let me remind you that this was the spring of 2002 and Google was just achieving critical mass. Plug “Michael Barrett” in a search engine and you’ll need to click through several pages of results before you find a link that doesn’t include the words “disgraced journalist.” So I took some time off to recalibrate. But before I knew it, “some” turned to “a lot”: spring became summer and summer became fall. Meanwhile I had student loans I was still paying off from ten years earlier; the banks would not give me relief. I was now taking cash out on my MasterCard to pay for essentials like rent and vodka. It was almost fun to be in this kind of free fall into hopelessness. Nobody would give me a job. The few friends I had weren’t speaking to me. I was drinking all day long. And watching month after month as I spiralled toward personal and financial Armageddon.
    Cut to a foggy afternoon: I was on the waterfront drinking alone in the Nautical Pub when I ran into an acquaintance from my university days. Over dinner, he told me how he had gone on to do an expensive MFA and then paid off the student debt he incurred by teaching in South Korea. Had arrived in Seoul $35,000 in the red, but after three years of teaching returned to Canada $15,000 in the black. Said I could do the same. “But I don’t have a teaching degree,” I told him.
    â€œNeither do I,” he replied. “You don’t need one. I wouldn’t even call what you do over there teaching. You just stand up in front of a bunch of Asian kids for eight hours a day and Be White, Be Western.” We parted company with him giving me the address for an online job board.
    So I checked it out. And I applied for something. And I got a job offer right away. During the brief, perfunctory phone interview, Ms. Kim didn’t even question why my seven-year tenure at The Daily News had come to an abrupt end. Nor did she ask what I’d been doing with myself in the eight months since. All she needed was for me to Fed-Ex a package containing my valid passport, notarized confirmation of my university degree, and a photograph, a headshot of myself — which, I later learned, was to confirm that I was in fact white. It would take her a couple of weeks to process my E-1 visa. After she did, she confirmed my salary — 1.9 million won a month, virtually tax-free — and that upon my arrival I would move into a free