I showed back up at work after ten days of vacation to discover nothing was accomplished. It was like the entire tv station had spent the previous week in a time vacuum. The International still hadn’t moved to the new building after a month of delays, none of the articles or news items for the week had been translated despite a quickly impending deadline, and my boss seemed to feel it was all somehow my fault as she felt compelled to chew me out for a story I had been given a half hour to write despite a dearth of English language sources on the “Dalian Classic Car Museum.” Then she said I needed to “show my passion for my job by coming to work every day despite having nothing to do and despite a paycheck that was two months overdue.
When I was finally paid, they tried to cut my salary down by a quarter. And that was the tv station’s version of being nice. I was able to argue my way into full pay, whereas both the cameraman and the English translator, tired of being professionally abused, decided to quit. They were the last original remnants of this show.
Then the tv station, knowing full well that I’m on a spousal visa and not a working permit (and thus technically not allowed to work for money) sent me down to the headquarters of the Exit-Entry Bureau (the guys in charge of visas and who gets to stay and who has to go) to interview some vey important and very friendly PSB officer who was all too happy to point out that what I’m doing is illegal and needs to be remedied, leading to the admittedly minor possibility that I could get kicked out of China. Then he cheerfully rewrote our entire news story just to add insult to injury and suck out what little life it had left.
That was a bad month.