Archive for the ‘Life as a foreign reporter’ Category
A week in Hong Kong
We met in Thailand when I asked you “where are you from?” and you replied “I’m from Thailand”. We agreed to meet again in Hong Kong, an island in-between us. You work in Bangkok and I work in Beijing.
We walked along the promenade of Kowloon harbour, looking at the lights that light up the sky. It’s a sight I’ve seen many times but it was the first time for you. You took photos and I was glad that you were there. That first night in Hong Kong was slow and easy, the next day we’d ride the ferry and watch the clouds reflect in the water.
The escalator is the longest outside escalator in the world. It transports you up the hill while either side are cafes and shops, bars and restaurants. Buildings are called needle buildings, tall and slender, reaching up. I look at them and marvel at their vertical structure, holding occupants whose lives I don’t know, each window a room.
We took a taxi to The Peak, which offers wide angle views of the city stretched out before us. I laugh when I hear an English friend refer to it as “the bay area” when I return to Beijing.
We stay up there, on The Peak, until the evening. The night is beautiful. We take a bus back down. Trying to remember chronologically now is not easy. Events in the memory just pop into my head. There was a cafe we stumbled into just before it started to rain. I ordered a latte. Outside the water drummed onto the streets and the cars. Inside the air conditioning made it a little too cold. It was an afternoon, just a week ago, and it’s already receding. The coffee was damn good though.
I ate a lot and felt hungrier than usual. You noticed. You were also sad sometimes and I couldn’t figure out why exactly.
On one of the days we took the metro to the island where the big Buddha sits. He was wreathed in fog looking majestic. I also took you to the Wisdom Path. I first went there nine years ago as a youth embarking on my first year abroad. I was eighteen and carried with me a copy of On the Road.
We sat and chatted one evening at the hotel. You were lying against the headboard of the bed while I sat at the desk. The TV was on. I said I liked Thailand because everything is so cheap. And you ranted (in your soft, gentle way) about how you didn’t like how foreigners said that, and you really didn’t like how your Korean boss would go to an expensive restaurant and order a lot and you had to join in and pay. “She don’t care about me, about us”, you said. I listened and smiled. I really appreciated that conversation. It pays to just listen sometimes.
I left the hotel first while you had to spend a day alone. My flight was earlier. You hugged me close and kissed me. You said “see you” and “bye bye” while I said nothing as I looked at your eyes and your head softly laid on the end of the bed. And I was gone.
18th May — In Beijing
It’s 28 degrees outside and hazy. Beijing’s spring is the shortest season. Soon the sweltering heat will arrive. Blue skies have been fairly common and it’s always good to see the city suddenly green.
I finished two books recently: John Updike’s Rabbit Redux and Evan Osnos’ Age Of Ambition: Chasing Fortune, Truth, and Faith in the New China.
The latter is a nonfiction title that is the most comprehensive, evocative, and insightful book on contemporary China I have read. The author was China correspondent for the New Yorker. He is widely regarded as brilliant.
His book is a page-turner, written with narrative drive, and telling the China story with great human stories. He had incredible access to some of China’s most notable and influential figures. And the story he has carved out; of rising fortune, middle class excess, and, later on, spiritual searching, manages to capture China with something approaching the greatness of a novel.
Checking out the book’s Notes on Sources I was awed by Osnos’ depth of research and reading. This guy seemed to have read everything. Was he just reading and writing all the time?
I put this question to a friend of mine, someone who has met Osnos, and who knew his Chinese assistant. My friend told me that the assistant told him that Osnos just wrote all the time, from morning to night.
And it was such a basic realization: to be outstanding, you have to work extremely hard.
It’s obvious of course. But we kid ourselves by imagining secret elixirs, fabled shortcuts, magic ingredients. It’s baloney. Only through work can accomplishment be achieved.
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I haven’t been working so hard. I’ve been having a great time.
I’ve been socializing with friends, drinking and partying. We went to a music festival that was very enjoyable. I’ve been working out and tried out boxing and Muay Thai. This year so far has been a hoot.
I’ve had very little journalistic published this year.
Last week I finally finished an essay I spent two months laboring over. It’s 2000 words long. I sent it to the editor but he has not deemed to reply yet, not even to acknowledge that he’s received it. I know editors are busy people. But for a freelance it can be demoralizing and frustrating to hear such silence. All I can do is patiently wait. And hope.
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Next week I am going to Hong Kong to meet up with someone. It’ll be a vacation. Someone asked not long ago how can I afford to travel so much. I didn’t know quite how to respond. Truth is I don’t really know. I do not receive parental handouts. And the money I make is not by any means a great amount. In fact it’s only around a little more than double what my rent is.
I think it may be psychological. It is true what many of those travel bloggers say, that travel actually is not as expensive as what people may imagine. And that as long as you account for accommodation and things like flight tickets travel is just like being home — you still have to eat and get around and the usual expenses but you’re just doing it somewhere else.
I think that mindset is good to have. You always have to buy things to eat and in Asia that’s usually cheap. Hostels and even hotels can also be similar to what you pay for a monthly apartment. So travel is only restricted by time and busyness, your conceptual perception of how much time you have. For a freelance, who thinks in freelance ways, it comes easily. I don’t burden myself too much though, on the frugality, while traveling. Because, what’s the point?
February 20th — in Thailand
I’ve been to Thailand before. It’s a fun place.
It’s 5.17am and I’m in my hotel room, just off the road, in some seedy town on the island of Phuket.
I’ve been here a few days and I’m still jetlagged, operating English hours under the hot, Thai sun.
I’m here for a week, making the most of cheap flights and southeast Asian weather, before returning to the grim cold of Beijing.
Today I woke up, went to buy a ticket to go to Krabi (I need to catch the boat in a couple of hours), had some food and then went back to my hotel.
I then slept until early evening, whereupon I took myself to the beach and swam, bobbing up and down until the sun sank into the ocean. I jumped up at that moment, the moment it disappeared, as if I could jump higher than the horizon.
I went back to the hotel and showered, and had dinner and then walked the length of the beach and back. (I did the drinking and the partying yesterday). Then I binge watched the show Californication. I took a break to write the rest of chapter one of a novel I’ve started writing. And continued my binge until I felt the urge to write again, which is where the past meets the present in this blog post.
I’m here alone, traveling solo. Several people have asked me about how it’s been, traveling alone — from the guy at the check-in at Heathrow airport, to the travel operator I bought my ticket to Krabi from, it seems like it’s almost a predicament rather than a position of possibility.
But I like traveling alone. You can do whatever you want. And right now, it’s unalloyed freedom. Balance is important and this week in the sun and the sea and the palm trees and the delicious pad thai and the sense of feeling you get from detaching from “reality” (which is often a reality spent staring at a screen and endless, pointless updates) is a week worth its weight in gold.
It’s a week that will sunny up the weeks to come, and help the creativity flow. I’m a writer and so I chose a week of sun. It seemed like a good idea.
VIDEO: Travel + Journalism in Burma
This video is the story of the time I spent in Burma. I went there in February 2015. I went there to travel and to do journalism. I wanted to see if I could combine the experience of traveling with the challenge of trying to find stories. As a freelancer, trying to travel and hunt down stories while you do so is a fun challenge. This was my first experiment trying to do that.
The benefits of traveling in this way are many. One of these is that you travel in a different way, as you try to get beneath the surface and look deeper than you might normally do. You also meet people, from locals to intrepid expats. The other big benefit of course is financial, as stories you find and sell helps to offset the money you spent traveling.
The video was shot using a Canon S120 and edited in Windows Movie Maker.
Related:
- Burmese Days — this is the written companion to the video above
- How I learned to love life and reporting again while in Burma
- After Burma, now I’m broke
The CNN article mentioned in the video is here.
The previous video I made is: A Year In The Life of a Freelance Journalist Abroad
Choices: how to make them in an age of anxiety
When I made the decision to go to Beijing, after graduating university, it was an instinctive decision. I knew that it was a choice that would have deep and long-lasting effects. And it has. It’s been a blast.
But after three years of Beijing there will come a time when I will want to make another decision. Whether to continue doing the same thing, or to branch out and pick another fig, and experience something completely new.
But how will I know, when I come to make that decision, that the choice I make, will be the right one?
The first couple of months I spent in Beijing were miserable. Lonely. Hard. This was autumn 2012. You won’t find any posts about those months on this blog because I wasn’t blogging back then. But I do remember looking at the ceiling, in my little rented bedroom, at night, feeling quite alone, and wondering whether what I was doing made any sense.
I didn’t know back then whether the decision to go to Beijing would pay off. I had no idea. I couldn’t predict the future.
The second year was better. There was more momentum, more serendipity. By the third year though, things waned. Got a bit stale. Some of that initial motivation had worn off. And I wondered why that was.
The clue was that I finally understood what the phrase “the struggle is the reward” meant.
Those initial months in Beijing were hard, but I was struggling towards something. That struggle gave a firmer narrative to life and a meaning to the misery. The struggle itself made everything rewarding, even the hardship — especially the hardship.
There was purpose in it.
A person I admire is Casey Neistat, a filmmaker. He recalled his first years in New York City, after moving there from small-town New England:
The hardest part was the loneliness, like I didn’t really know anyone in the city when I moved here. I remember going home after work to my tiny apartment and it was like, I had no-one to hang out with, I had no-one to call, I had nothing to do. And that lasted for like, I feel like years, of that kind of loneliness.
I spent a lot of time in my head, dreaming and fantasizing about the life in this city I aspired towards.
Elsewhere, on his YouTube channel, he talks about how he lived in closets, in tiny apartments, in his early years in NYC, sharing with illegal immigrants and ex-convicts. All in the pursuit of his dream, of making it in the city.
He’s now wildly successful, with two million subscribers to his YouTube channel, a tech company he founded, and what he calls a golden age, of his present situation.
But there is a sense I feel, from him, that there is a part of him that maybe misses the young, crazy, suffering, part of his life, when he was starving, and all ahead of him was wild potential and possibility.
I am not successful, not to any degree to how Casey Neistat is successful anyway, in my own field. But I’m no longer that young kid scrapping in Beijing, hungry and desperate for bylines.
So there needs to be a re-framing, a different narrative, as I transition toward a different period in my life.
Is there a conclusion to any of this?
Not really. I’ll let you know in a year or two.
I can’t predict the future.
While you were gone
Some might think going abroad and living somewhere strange is full of fear.
And they wouldn’t be wrong.
I spent my early to mid twenties in a polluted, giant city. And I would be lying if I said there weren’t some hard, lonely and depressing times.
But I learned things.
I grew.
I became more of myself.
I got to know people — from China obviously, and from Italy, France, Germany, Japan, Australia, Korea, Canada, and other places. I got to know Americans. Quite a number.
Some of them became friends. Some of them became friends and then became not.
Some were just people you knew, had a great time with, got drunk with — pushed together by fate and circumstance. We didn’t know what was in front of us, in the future, or the significance of what we had just left behind.
We might have had plans. We might have had ambitions. We might have had more beers.
We didn’t know what was in store, whether it was ruin or reward.
We didn’t know if it was the best decision. Or the worst mistake of our lives. We didn’t know if we were forming memories, to be remembered long afterward, or just passing through, the next day obliterating the one just gone. But there was one thing we could be sure of at least.
We really did know how to party.
To all souls about to embark on 2016, good luck and have a happy new year
2015: A Year In The Life of a Freelance Journalist Abroad
2015 was strange. For me at least. It was the quickest feeling year I’ve ever experienced, when months announced their arrival with the thought: “It’s April already?!”
I arrived back in Beijing in mid-January. And I went to Burma in mid-February for 18 days. I then reentered Beijing and into March, after travel, like leaping over stepping stones instead of passing time step by step.
Burma was a delight: charming, hot, earthy, and quite magnificent. It reconfirmed for me that travel, when done, is rarely regretted. In Burma I was fortunate to meet and hang out with a fellow freelance correspondent and his crew. It was wild and reminded me of stories expats tell of Beijing twenty years ago, when parties were mostly of the house kind and simply living there was pioneering.
I envy my Burma counterpart because that southeast Asian experience seems more reminiscent of the kind of old-school correspondence conjured by the likes of Graham Greene novels. Burma is like a country wrapped in amber, suffused with a golden light, and I do hope I make it back there sooner rather than later.
The year was also one of hardship. In March, I left a job that had been my main source of income for over a year. From March onward I depended entirely on my freelancing income and the transition was not a smooth one. Financially it was difficult, but the transition was the more harder simply because the routine of commuting and office hours that my former job had given me was suddenly stripped away. I was alone.
April through to July was difficult. That’s four months. Four months where I felt, at times, a great weight of loneliness and isolation. I would go so far as to say despair, especially when there seemed to be long hours which I spent just lain on my couch, dressed in nothing save denim shorts, sweating and thinking. That’s an image for which I am thankful as I now have a mental picture of myself that I hope never to reproduce.
Four months equates to a season, in a year, and so 2015 was irrevocably marked by this season of difficulty.
But, there have been bright spots. Most notable among these was the money I earned from freelancing. This year’s haul is almost four times as much as what I earned the previous year from freelancing. However, the freelance income from the previous year was supplementary to the income earned from my other job (the one I quit in March), which meant that, overall, this year I still earned less than what I earned the previous year.
There have been other milestones. But I do not wish to bore you, patient reader, with a list of achievements. Rather I wish to convey what being a freelance journalist abroad has meant to me.
And 2015 has felt like a transitional year. And educational, for reasons that are not so clear to me now but that I think, in retrospect, will probably guide me in the future.
Certainly, there needs to be a helluva lot more planning for 2016 if I am to make the most of my time, to make the most of what I can experience and to make the most of what I can do.
I have only realized, in the past week, that I had mislaid a small but significant resource. And that is the simple to-do list. For much of the time I have been in China, I have relied on to-do lists, dutifully scribed in my small Moleskine notebooks either in the morning or before I went to sleep. Never underestimate the power of a to-do list. It provides structure to your day and a sense of purpose.
This blog continues to be a source of solace and power. By making a timeline of 2015 for myself (a previous blog entry), I could see the year all the more clearly, laid out in front of me. It’s a great tool as I can objectively examine the time I used, to see what could be learned, what themes and patterns might be picked out, and what could be improved.
And writing in this blog is always a great way to work things out for myself.
Finally, theluhai.com (I pay annually for the URL) has paid for itself many, many, times over in freelance commissions from editors, and others, who have found me via this website. If that doesn’t sway you, if you’re a freelancer, to start your own website — the lure of work and money — then I don’t know what will.
Seminal posts of 2015:
The weekend of February 13th: getting ready for Myanmar
How I learned to love reporting (and life) again while in Burma
Trying to cobble together a sustainable freelance writing career
There is much to look forward to and next year I hope to be more footloose. Being trapped in Beijing, to where I will probably return in the spring, is not good for the soul. And traveling is a great way to slow down time as it focuses you on the present. However, I will still need to base myself somewhere, and will probably need my own place to call “home”, so reconciling wanderlust and home comforts will be a defining tension, as is common for wandering writers.
Beijing itself has been the great uncaring mass it has always been. The spring was lovely, with uncommonly blue skies, summer was hot and sweaty as usual, autumn was very mild, and winter was very cold and very polluted, although this offered journalistic opportunity.
I have been traveling and basing myself in Beijing for three years now and I am tired of the place. I’d quite like to base myself somewhere else now to be honest. But what I want, as is common for all people, does not accord with what others may want. This is a reference to the nature of foreign correspondence. Editors want journalists who have a native expertise and that means Beijing, and China, and the knowledge and contacts I have accrued from being there are what makes me valuable to them.
There is a meeting I have in London in early January that is important for me and I don’t want to say too much for fear of unnerving myself. But I’ll reveal more once we get to it.
For now, happy new year. And thank you for reading.
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The previous year’s summary
A video showing a year in my life, compressed into five minutes
A brief timeline of 2015
01 January
Arrived back in Beijing, after festive break in England with the family, in mid-January.
Continued working on a story about Buddhism for CNN, commissioned in December.
02 February
Celebrated Chinese New Year on the 19th, welcoming in the Year of the Sheep.
Two days later, I left for Myanmar. I spent a total of 18 days in Burma, hunting for stories and traveling. A mishap with flights meant I spent too much money on this trip.
The Telegraph published my article entitled The Good, Bad, and Ugly of Moving to Beijing.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/expat/expatlife/11386649/The-good-bad-and-ugly-of-moving-to-Beijing.html
03 March
Finally ended my association with BON, a TV company I’d worked for since November 2013.
I had no longer an office job and would now be living entirely on freelancing income.
At the end of the month, The Telegraph published another of my pieces, which was to be my final one for the expat section, due to budget cuts.
04 April
My debut for CNN, a piece from my Burma trip for the Travel section.
edition.cnn.com/2015/04/16/travel/myanmar-monks-lunch/index.html
Where I am right now
Published on Monday, December 7, in The Independent, p. 23.
After four weeks in Yunnan, I am back in Beijing. Before I fly back to England for Christmas I am staying on a friend’s couch in Beijing.
Recently, I was published for a piece analyzing international affairs. It was my first time writing such a piece for a national newspaper. I asked the editor for advice on tone, to which he replied: “It’s supposed to be written in an authoritative manner, by you, our correspondent, who knows about China’s approach to climate change”.
The pressure was on. Certainly I did not want to write an article with my name on it, and my picture, a first for me, that had holes in it — or a poorly researched piece that could make me look like a fool in the printed paper, and online, for an audience of millions.
But the piece was well received by the editor and appeared in Monday’s issue of the paper. As a foreign correspondent I have made progress since August, when I received a phone call from London, from the foreign editor of The Independent, asking me if I was available to write a story.
The call came around 6pm my time, which is about 9am in the UK, and of course I said “yes”. The editor knew me because I had, some months ago, Tweeted him on Twitter asking if I could contribute to his paper. We exchanged messages but nothing came of it. As no-else was available at that time, that day in August, he suddenly remembered me and gave me a call.
That evening, I rushed around Beijing, doing interviews, calling people, and wrote up my story in a Starbucks. The story I wrote impressed the editor and was printed the following day. From then on I got more work with The Independent.
A couple of things to note, especially for any budding freelancers out there. While I was on the phone to the foreign editor, even though it was my first ever time speaking to him proper, I still asked him if I could have a higher fee for the article I had not yet written. He said “yes”– he’d give me a bit of a higher rate (he didn’t have much of a choice) and so I established, from the beginning, a precedent for getting higher rates from them.
It’s important that freelancers do not price themselves out of their jobs, and importantly, price other freelancers out of their jobs.
It’s important that editors respect you, and that you respect yourself and your work. It is a question of confidence that you value yourself to a point where you feel you can ask for better payment. But it’s a good habit to have.
Capturing a scene in 200 words & getting paid for it
In the past, newspapers sold on the grimy streets of London or New York City often contained evocative accounts of far away lands. Telegrams would be sent from the Crimea, from Prussia, Indochina, Arabia, Austria-Hungary, and other exotic places.
Whether describing a war, some local ascendancy, or natural disaster, these early foreign correspondents would write in a style now rarely seen, exciting the imaginations of readers back home who could not see (there being no TV) nor travel to foreign countries.
A “vignette” is defined as “a brief evocative description, account, or episode”. They were a popular form in early American newspapers. Indeed, that sublime piece of “reporting” — The Red Badge of Courage, by Stephen Crane, written about the American Civil War, could be taken as a long, extended vignette.
I wrote the following vignettes for The ‘i’ newspaper, a British national newspaper, that still finds a place for them. I enjoy writing them. It’s a romantic form that allows the writer to claim some lineage with explorer writers like Wilfred Thesiger or Marco Polo. Well, that’s how I like to think of it anyway.
The ‘i’ newspaper, a sister title to The Independent, pays £50 for each 200-word entry.
Lu-Hai Liang 