VICE: My Time in China's Cancer Villages

VICE NEWS — We went into the heart of China’s Cancer Villages and shoved cameras into the pained faces of villages of people living out slow deaths, and we even brought Shoenice along to eat some of the tainted street food outside the lead foundry. But that was just the twenty minutes we showed you in our insipid exploitative voyeuristic documentary, an unjust fraction of the pestilence we saw. I spent one night in the Cancer Village and have since developed an acute brain tumor that will kill me. I am incredibly ashamed I didn’t identify the people I interacted with there as true human beings, actual living entities with as many layered meanings to their lives as my own. I can’t stop thinking of the bum I filmed, sleeping in the streets of Chernobyl. Now I am him.

I burned the documentary of my own story and the camera that I filmed it on because I don’t want people to see me like that, as if peering in at me through a keyhole. I felt even worse for those I’d exploited for the sake of profits and yuks, and I thought of following Ayn Rand’s philosophy and burning down Vice News. Instead, I’ve decided to write for Chronicle.SU, and have leveraged a good plan through Obamacare to pay for LSD and Heroin as I document my death.

Cancer’s a bummer, but a whole village of people with cancer is as quiet as death. I felt like I’d stepped into purgatory or hell, a kind of slow hell that God had forgotten, and I was an Atheist. Now I know better, thanks to my friends at Chronicle.su. I know soul and matter to be fused. Nothing’s just a feeling, or everything is, but none of that last gasp of metaphysical nonsense can transfer to you the change The Cancer Village gave to me. I thought of Vice as some kind of activism or beneficent reportage operation, but now I think it’s worse than celebrity tabloids because it goes after people who don’t want attention.