The making of a pet reporter

Animal stories are a staple of China’s local newspapers, as any glance through the “China Scene” section of the China Daily will tell you.

Last week, for example, there was a revival of the “pet chastity belt” story that comes around every few months. A pet owner in Zhengzhou became so fed up with the “sexual harassment” her 10,000-yuan pedigreed poodle received whenever they went on walks that she now dresses her up in special pants. The story was picked up by other papers, its social implications were dissected in the op-ed pages, and other localities (such as Yantai, the source of the photo at left) discovered pet chastity belts of their own.

On the weirder side of things, the hilarious blog “News Sewer” (新闻下水道), which aggregates Netease discussions on largely irrelevant news items, has recently been featuring a series of stories about massive fish and the men who discovered them.

Zeng Ying, a Sichuan-based journalist and columnist, conducts interviews with people about their interaction with animals, which he then cleans up for publication in the Chengdu Evening News. They’re not all cute, sentimental stories, however—In one recent piece, a thirty-something Chengdu resident described how he swapped his dog’s tail with that of a neighbor’s cat when he was ten years old.

Zeng noted in a blog post last week that he mocked pet reporters in a humor column several years ago:

I recently became an animal reporter, and from that point I’ve been fighting at the front lines of Chengdu’s animal journalism. I remember when I wrote an article a few years ago, and I can’t help but sigh: as an essayist, what good fortune is it to live in this age and be mocked by it!

Here’s that column, which first appeared in the pages of Procuratorial Daily in 2003:

Li Xiaomao is a good friend of mine. He is a reporter at the highest-circulation paper in my city. Of all of the “chickens and ducks falling in love”-type reports published in that paper, eighty or ninety percent flow from his pen. Hence, he draws the highest income out of all my friends.

Li Xiaomao used to work for a company paper run by a certain factory. He was reporter and editor for all four pages, and he also served as proofreader and distributor as well. He spent his days writing “news” like how Workshop 3 was off to a good start, or how Workshop 5 had gone half a month without any tardy arrivals, or how the plant manager and secretary had personally toured the facility and had made important remarks, all of it infuriating to the guys who were with him in the factory. One said, “If you have any guts, write a negative story talking about our plant’s mistaken investments, or expose the scandal of how the guards conspired with coal sellers to sell rocks as good coal. Or report on whether there’s a relationship between those food service workers who are getting stockier by the day and the porridge that’s getting thinner.”

Li Xiaomao was young and impetuous back then, so after thinking it over for a while, he ultimately chose a story: exposing the fat cooks in the cafeteria. This affair brought out an additional use for the company paper aside from wiping your ass or using as a seat-cover: reading. The workers joyously read and discussed it. Within a few days the cafeteria was overhauled. With the exception of Li Xiaomao, all of the workers saw the quality of their increase.

If it was only retaliatory small portions on the part of a few fat cooks, Li Xiaomao would not have cared much. In the worst case he could cook his own meals, and then he’d be able to eat the things he wanted. But the problem was that the factory leaders had discovered that Li Xiaomao’s awareness of the supervising function of public opinion had grown. They felt that he was no longer well-suited to running a factory paper. Under the excuse of cutting expenditures, the factory leaders killed the factory paper. Li Xiaomao was sent to the front lines, which most needed his light and heat. Before the bright, hot machines, Li Xiaomao felt like a piece of iron, heating up, turning read, and changing shape. It was almost intolerable.

Later, the county television station was recruiting, and on the strength of a pile of printed factory papers, he became a reporter for the station. When he first joined the station he did two really stupid things. First, he captured the scene of a city administration officer beating a vegetable farmer. Second, he was at the scene of a fire in an entertainment complex before the firefighters arrived, and he recorded the hostesses escaping through the windows. But much, much worse was the fact that he really should not have neglected to film the county leadership hurrying to the scene to deal with the emergency once the fire had been extinguished.

Even though those two reports were never aired, the station boss felt that this young man didn’t have the makings of a television journalist.

Without the appreciation of the leadership, Li Xiaomao was canned in an optimizing reorganization three months later. When he left the factory, he felt proud and heroic, so there was obviously no chance of him going back there. Nothing left but to press on ahead; he set off for the provincial capital to seek his fortune. Carrying 1000 yuan and his favorite book, Journalism and Justice [subtitle: Pulitzer Prize Winning Articles in Journalism], he entered the capital full of ambition.

At the first paper he found, he interned for two months before being let go. The reason given was that he caused too much trouble.

At the second paper, a laudatory article about a business drew the displeasure of a former leader of the business and also attracted a lawsuit. Before long, he had to resign from the paper voluntarily.

When he arrived at a third newspaper, he had just twenty yuan left in his pocket and twenty days until his rent was due. A senior colleague who had been at the job for a while longer him saw how miserable he was and clued him in: “You’ve got to feed yourself. You can’t always think of saving the world.”

Although he didn’t really understand, he saw how serious the old guy was, and it seemed to him that a hazy light began to flickering in front of him.

That afternoon, he discovered a cat and a duckling lying in a filthy ditch on the outskirts of town, and he had an inspiration. He thought the duck looked like an awkward boy, the cat like a lovely girl, and that they were in love. A news article titled “Brother Duck Falls in Love with Sister Cat” quickly issued from his pen. Many years later he would reflect, “It was very likely that it was all a mirage caused by hunger.”

The article made the paper at once. The director and senior reporters clapped him on the shoulder and said, “The kid’s finally got it!” So he continued to write stories like “Clipping My Pet’s Vocal Cords,” “Birdie Dies in Cage While Pining for Its Mother,” “Cuckoo Battles Wood-Thrush,” and “The Love of a Stray Dog.” The boys in circulation said that his articles were very popular with the readers. It’s also worth mentioning that he recently wrote two highly affectionate pieces, one titled “Skilled Surgeon Removes Tumor from Old Dog’s Abdomen,” and another that told the story of how a doctor gave a transfusion to a chimpanzee with blood poisoning. That day, he blew off an interview with an anemic kid and a country teacher with blood poisoning to go to the zoo, where he arrived just as the chimp was about to die. He snapped a photo of the chimp’s expression, full of a longing to live. He won a prize from the agency for that photo, and the royalties and manuscript requests came in a flurry from all over.