Apologies to My Censor by Mitch Moxley Page B

snack, followed by well-groomed poodles that did nothing but sniff each other.
    Exit poodles, enter two lions and a tiger. One male tiger tried, unsuccessfully, to mate with the lion, which was also male. The lion was swapped for a second tiger, and the two were led around the ring by the trainer, jumping through flaming hoops. Toward the end one tiger swiped at another and a skirmish ensued.
    While there was no wrestling in the finale, there was a bear. And it wasn’t wearing a cape. Instead, this poor creature in this freezing northern Chinese city was wearing women’s lingerie. Extra-extra-large women’s underwear and a bra.
    It’s true—I have witnesses.
    The lingerie-wearing bear was led out by the trainer and presented with a two-wheel bicycle, which it proceeded to pedal with its short legs, doing circles around the ring. The bear followed that by skipping a rope swung by the trainer and his assistant and dunking a basketball on a miniature hoop.
    Inside the Nescafé/Harbin beer tent, the crowd went wild. Kids hopped up and down on plastic chairs, clambering for more. Satisfied dads lit up cigarettes and clapped.
    Our jaws were on the floor. “Well, that was fucked-up,” Jeremy said, summing up the entire episode nicely.
    One member of our group, a friend of a friend from North Carolina, looked stunned. He sat hunched over his beer, shaking his head slowly from side to side. “That was just . . . wrong.”
    None of us knew what to make of what we’d seen. I was somewhat ashamed to have even witnessed it. We sat in the smoky Nescafé tent drinking beer and shared a few minutes of contemplative silence.
    A lcohol, we figured, would wash away what had just taken place, and so we went out in search of Harbin’s nightlife. Friends from Beijing had recommended a popular expat hangout called Blues Bar. When we arrived, there were only a few tables of young Chinese, drinking beer and playing a dice game. We ordered drinks and soon more people started arriving.
    We met a group of teachers from Australia and Canada. They ordered bottles of a Chinese-made vodka that tasted like acid. I flipped over a bottle and noticed on the label that the vodka was made by Anhui Ante Biological Chemistry Co. Ltd.
    â€œYo, you know this is made by a chemical company,” I said, presenting the bottle to a spiky-haired Australian.
    He shrugged. “I like to party,” he said, downing a glass of vodka and Coke.
    The teachers took us to a club called the Box, which was packed with both Chinese and foreigners. The foreigners came from all over—the United States, Mexico, Russia, parts of Africa. Some were teaching in Harbin, some studying at the university. Whenever I traveled to places like Harbin, I always marveled that anyone would actually choose to live somewhere like that. For some reason, imagining their lives in this lonely, frozen outpost made me a little sad. I didn’t even want to imagine how the search for deodorant would go down in a city as remote as Harbin.
    T he next afternoon we headed for our second animal-related adventure, at the Harbin Siberian Tiger Park, where visitors could feed live animals—including chickens, goats, and cows—to tigers and lions. The park was lively when we arrived in midafternoon, the parking lot abuzz with tour groups and families. A sign at the ticket booth said, in English, “No. 1 Adventure Bus: You’r welcome to take No.1 Adventure Bus to experience the tense feeling of looking at the tigers in close distance, viewing the thrilling scene of tigers’ preying on other animals.” We pooled our money together and bought a goat for about five hundred yuan—seventy dollars.
    On our bus were children as young as five, their curious eyes pressed against the window. We toured the park, where tigers dozed in the cold surrounded by chicken feathers, until we reached a feeding ground. We watched as a park worker in