Apologies to My Censor by Mitch Moxley

persuade others,” the opening paragraph, not written by me, went.
    I wasn’t angry about the changes. I would have been surprised if the story was published as I wrote it. China Daily was changing, but change happens slowly.
    Still, my colleagues could tell I was a bit annoyed. In the news center the next day, Xiao Zhang apologized for the changes and offered a rationale for the edits: “It didn’t go along with China’s views.”
    That was the last battle I fought with China Daily . I realized that any skirmish was going to be a lopsided affair. It was China’s century now. The rest of us were just living in it. I had come to China Daily determined to change the paper for the better, to instill in it my Western journalistic sensibilities. Now, I figured, I’d best learn how to enjoy the ride.
    â€œI wonder what it’s like . . . ,” I said, a few weeks later, running my finger over a map of China hanging on an office wall, looking for the most remote place I could find. “Here. U-RUM-QI. ”
    We were sitting around Rob’s office at China Daily one afternoon, marveling at the scale of the country we were living in. I had never really taken the time to appreciate the vastness of China. I’d been in China four months and only visited Shanghai, Qingdao, Dalian, and an unimpressive beach resort near Beijing called Beidaihe, popular with Siberian tourists. I glanced over the map and wondered what, exactly, was going on in all these strange places—Gansu, Qinghai, Shanxi, Shaanxi. I had never even heard of most of China.
    I stood up and analyzed the country laid out before me. With my finger placed on the map, I sounded out the name of the capital of Xinjiang province, a sprawling, desert-covered region in China’s far west.
    â€œUrumqi,” I said, looking at the map even more closely. “ Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region . I can’t believe people even live out there.” Xinjiang was bordered by a bunch of “Stan” countries. I read them off. “Kazakhstan. Kyrgyzstan. Tajikistan . . .”
    Summer had turned to fall, and the National Day holiday, a weeklong celebration of the founding of the People’s Republic of China in 1949, was approaching. It would be my first week off since I started at China Daily six months earlier, and I wanted to get out of town. I tossed around different ideas with friends and was leaning toward Southeast Asia for a week on a beach, when a friend of mine, Gemma, a British woman who worked in the carbon trading industry, whom I’d met through mutual friends that summer, asked if I was interested in something more adventurous: Xinjiang.
    â€œI don’t know,” I wrote her in an e-mail, my mind focused on beaches and palm trees. “Couldn’t we go somewhere more . . . exotic? Like Cambodia?”
    â€œXinjiang’s as exotic as it gets,” Gemma replied.
    She e-mailed me pictures she had found on the Internet—photos of sand dunes, snowy mountain ranges, camels, and locals with colorful outfits. My arm was twisted.
    A few weeks later, Gemma and I were driving the Karakoram Highway, the highest paved international road in the world, connecting China and Pakistan, in a rickety Volkswagen Santana with a small and bespectacled Chinese man named Xiao Xu at the helm. Xiao Xu, who ran a café in the nearby city of Kashgar and also organized excursions, was testy that morning. He’d expected two people, but the night before, Gemma and I had met an Australian couple in the hotel bar and invited them to join us.
    I asked him how long the trip would take.
    â€œThree hours with two people,” he huffed, nodding toward the couple, Tom and Kelly. “But four hours with four people. Because it’s uphill.”
    Gemma and I had been in Xinjiang for a week, and the trip had been eye-opening. Xinjiang was different from what I’d seen in China so far in almost