Tom Scocca, Beijing Welcomes You: Unveiling the Capital City of the Future (2011)

Long before publishing a celebrated piece on his health and professional crises this year, Tom Scocca was writing about China in the thick of the 2008 Olympics

Tom Scocca has known difficult times of late. Earlier this year, he published an essay in New York magazine detailing his struggle with a fierce and mysterious — and, as of the piece's writing, still unexplained — autoimmune disorder. This health crisis struck amid "some normal midlife stuff, some normal parent stuff, some abnormal and menacing stuff that I truly can’t even get into," but also as the effects of the professional apocalypse in the journalism industry reached his own career. "I gambled on a job I wanted, as the editor-in-chief of a small magazine, and it ran out of funding." (This seems to have been a short-lived, garishly designed, murkily blockchain-driven venture called Popula.) Another position was not forthcoming: "abruptly, all that my connections could offer were gigs."

Despite only ever having had gigs, I've felt some of this myself; over the past six months or so, for reasons I still don't understand, it's become awfully hard to get a reply out of any editor. Being a dozen or so years younger than Scocca, without a family to support or a body suddenly bent on dissolving itself, this hasn't put me into a much worse position than usual. Regardless, I can't help but pay more attention to what I do have in common with him, especially when I consider where he was back in the mid-two-thousands. I mean that not in the sense of where he was in his career, exactly, but where he was in the world: Asia, and more specifically China, gathering the experiences that would go into his first (and, to date, only) book, Beijing Welcomes You: Unveiling the Capital City of the Future.

"I had never planned or expected to become involved with China," Scocca declares in chapter one. But he did become involved, at Harvard, with the American-born daughter of Chinese immigrants. After they married, they both received job offers, he to write a column for the New York Observer — that publication having still been in print in 2004, and "columnist" having still been a plausible job title — and she to set up the Clinton Foundation's office in Beijing. Individually irresistible, despite the transoceanic shuttling they would entail, these situations together afforded Scocca the chance to write about the Chinese capital in the run-up to the 2008 Olympic Games. "New York would be there in 2009 or 2010, mostly the same," he reasoned, but "I would have only one chance to see Beijing before it became something else."