Getting the Hell Out of Dodge

Changing a Tampon in Total Darkness...

(“Newsweek” Cover on a Beijing News Stand, with Protest Sign Censored)

They say you can spot foreign correspondents because they are the ones frantically trying to get into a place that everyone else is trying to leave. This is pretty accurate. Correspondents, much like “Great Gatsby” characters, “beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”

A recent one of my “5 a.m. Stories,” “Long Route to Beirut,” described how difficult it can be for a journalist to get where the action is. Today’s story is about how hard it can be to get out.

Journalists need to know how to disengage from a story and get the hell out of Dodge when the right time comes. It’s an art. I guess today they would talk about an “exit strategy.” Back then, we just called it “going home.”

 Big news stories develop relative to whatever else is happening. They never exist in a vacuum. A story can be the biggest one on earth, until it isn’t. For example, in 1989, I was in Beijing helping with the Reuters coverage of the events surrounding the bloody June 4^th Tiananmen Square massacre. Government troops rolled through an encampment in the Square, killing hundreds, possibly thousands, of protesters in and around the Square. The world watched, aghast.

The massacre was a huge story. So huge, that when America’s one-time arch-enemy, Iran’s Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, died in the midst of our Tiananmen reporting, we in the Beijing bureau glanced briefly at the news bulletin, shrugged, and went right back to work on Tiananmen Square.

We were smugly certain that we were reporting on what would be the top news story of 1989. Then, a month later, the Berlin Wall came tumbling down. You win some, you lose some.

The protests in the Square had been growing for several weeks, despite efforts by the authorities to quell them. Veteran China watchers knew somebody was going to have to pay for this, especially when the demonstrators erected a Statue of Liberty replica squarely facing Zhongnanhai, the compound where senior Chinese leaders lived.

It was a huge loss of face. Lady Liberty might as well have been flipping the bird right at the officials. From the instant that provocative statue went up, there could be no pulling back.

(Me, With Statue of Liberty Replica in the Square)

Seeing this ragtag and somewhat naïve army of angry protesters in the Square boggled my mind. On another Beijing assignment only two months earlier, I had written a light feature on Beijing’s first-ever wig shop, catering to the newly fashion-conscious. Suddenly, for the first time since I came to Asia, it had seemed okay to write somewhat cute China stories.

My lead on that piece was, “Vanity, thy name is Wang.” The Miami Herald used my feature under the headline, “Chinese Flip Their Wigs Over Stores Selling Western Hairpieces.” I still have the clipping.

China always maintained a firm grip on the number of foreign correspondents each news organization could have officially reporting from Beijing. Reuters was allowed only four print journalists to cover a billion people, so by my math, each Reuters reporter had about 250 million people on their beat. It’s hard to get to know that many folks on a first-name basis.

If you’re wondering why our other bureaus in China didn’t help pick up some of the slack, Beijing was the only one we were allowed to have. Our second bureau, in Shanghai, would be negotiated a few years later, and even then only a single additional reporter would be authorized.

In spite of the Draconian rules, we were able to temporarily expand the Beijing bureau that fateful spring, because our extra reporters and photographers came in as tourists.

Over the brief period of just a few days the bureau grew exponentially, until it resembled a high school study hall. Our working capacity mushroomed, but we weren’t giving ourselves individual bylines, so it would have been hard to prove we were anything but casual sightseers taking happy snaps and sending postcards home.

Indeed, when I arrived in Beijing late that May, I stopped at a street kiosk to buy a goofy straw hat that fairly screamed “Just a tourist!” and I wore it the entire time I was there. It also helped that my go-to hotel in the city had a miniature replica of the Great Wall, and tourists took turns posing in front of it so they wouldn’t need to travel three hours to get to the real thing. I was as touristy as I could be.

I was sent in from my Hong Kong office in late May, about a week before the June 4 massacre. The travel arranger told me she couldn’t find me a seat in business class, so I was going to have to be upgraded to first class. Darn the luck.

It should be pointed out that she couldn’t get me any seat at all on the official Hong Kong carrier, Cathay Pacific, which was quite possibly the best airline that ever existed. So, I was booked on Air China, whose dilapidated planes made flying only slightly better than walking. Sure, I was in first class, but trust me, it hardly mattered.

The Reuters bureau grew day by day. The influx was made up mostly of veteran reporters, many of them fluent Chinese-speakers. But there were also some people like me, who were not there to report, but only to edit our outgoing stories for distribution to the world over the vast global Reuters network.

The reason I make this distinction between reporters and editors is that I knew many journalists who put their lives at risk in the Square during the assault, but I was not one of them. Understanding this will help you appreciate my single favorite journalistic story about myself. It is coming up here in just a few paragraphs, so please watch for it.

My own knowledge of spoken Chinese was limited to the ability to give my home address to a taxi driver in Hong Kong, and even that would have been in Cantonese, leaving the Mandarin-speaking Beijing denizens hearing only unintelligible gibberish coming out of my mouth.

Emotions ran high on that June night. There was drama all around. I vividly remember a photographer staggering into our newsroom overcome by shock. He had just helped to ferry some injured protesters to a hospital, where he had seen the dead and dying.

“It’s lives for free out there!” he said to the room. “You can just take lives for free!”

Nor will I ever, ever forget a quote from a protester, reported by one of our reporters in the Square: “I have just smoked my last cigarette. Tonight, we are all going to die.”

When the sun rose over Tiananmen Square the morning after the massacre, the headcount tally in our own office was alarming. Two of our reporters and one photographer were unaccounted for, and their relatives had to be notified.

All three were eventually found – two had sought refuge in shops off the Square until they could find a circuitous way back to the bureau, and one was beaten up by police and dropped, bloodied but alive, at our doorstep.

I was in frequent telephone contact with our Hong Kong office. Our Asia deputy news editor, a plucky woman I will call Janie because that is her name, had the unenviable task of telling next of kin that we couldn’t find their relatives. With those calls made, she then needed to call other families, to tell them their loved ones were safe, at least for now.

Among her calls was one to my wife, who was a seasoned New York Times correspondent, and who knew Janie well.

“Hello?”

“Barbara, it’s Janie. I guess you’ve been up all night?”

“God, yes, it’s just horrible!”

“Well, I wanted to tell you I just spoke with Bob, and he’s not in danger. He’s safe.”

There was a prolonged guffaw from the other end of the line. “Well, he would be safe, Janie, wouldn’t he? He’s an editor!”

Both parties on that phone call tell that story to this very day, with no disagreement over the details. Should that make me feel good? Because it doesn’t.

(A Reporter Scores Fresh Fruit for a Hungry Beijing Bureau)

A couple of nights after the massacre I was doing the overnight shift in our bureau, and I called our room at a giant hotel overlooking the Square. We had posted a staffer there just in case there was anything to see, but the authorities had warned that if they saw a light in any of the windows, they would shoot at it.

I rang the staffer often, to ask how she was doing.

“How am I holding up? I’m guessing you’ve never had to change a Tampon in total darkness,” she replied. Well, she had me there.

Several days later, after working 36 hours at a stretch and using our wiles to get kumquats and jiaozi – Chinese dumplings - to feed the office, we saw indications that our visiting tourist ploy might have run its course. It was time for the visitors to turn the bureau back over to their fully accredited colleagues. The party’s over, it’s time to call it a day…

This was where things got a bit sticky. Many foreign countries had mobilized their airlines and were using them to shuttle their frightened citizens from Beijing  to safety.

Unfortunately, the U.S. was pretty slow off the mark in evacuating its people. Which meant I faced joining thousands of American students and tourists camped out at the airport, lining up for planes that were coming all too slowly.

“I guess I’m stranded,” I told a colleague.

“Wait,” he said. “Forget the U.S. What’s your legal status in Hong Kong?”

“I have a resident stamp in my passport.” That didn’t make me a citizen, but it meant I enjoyed many of the same rights as a Hong Kong citizen.

“There you go,” he said. “Cathay Pacific has to fly you out.”

Which was how I found myself handing my return ticket to a Cathay Pacific representative who was keeping a neat stack of them as they decided who would get on the last flight of the day.

An hour later they gathered stand-by passengers in a group and read a list of those who made the cut. I was on it. We all lined up with our boarding passes. At the gate, a stern-faced Cathay employee put his arm up to indicate that I should not follow the others shuffling onto the plane.

This is it, I thought. I’m done. I am being arrested and I will spend the rest of my life slurping congee from a cracked bowl in a secret prison in Wuhan.

The Cathay rep pointed to another gangway, marked First Class. Only then did I remember that amid all the tumult and chaos, the return ticket I had handed them was First Class. He was simply telling me I didn’t have to queue up with the masses.

And so, I left China in style, a champagne flute in my hand and warm cashews on my tray, trying to choose between the pepper steak and the shrimp étouffée for my dinner.

I was worried for my colleagues. There had been some serious bonding that week, and some new friendships I would keep forever. These warm cashews would go down pretty well at kumquat time in the bureau… So would this champagne, for that matter.

The lights of Beijing dimmed beneath us as we climbed to our cruising altitude. My Hong Kong home and my family were just a few hours away. I’m safe, I thought to myself.

But then, I would be, wouldn’t I? I’m an editor.