HomeMy WebLinkAboutThe Citizen, 2010-07-29, Page 5THE CITIZEN, THURSDAY, JULY 29, 2010. PAGE 5.
You looking for work? Have I got a job
for you. The starting pay is fairly
decent – a thousand bucks a week, tax
free – and there’s a ton of travel involved.
You’ll fly business class to foreign
destinations, get put up in first-class hotels and
chow down in five-star restaurants. Best
of all, there’s no experience necessary. All
you need to qualify is a presentable pair of
shoes, a white shirt, tie and a half-decent
business suit.
It would probably be better if you’re not
sporting nose rings, a Mohawk hairdo or a
BORN TO RAISE HELL tattoo on your
forehead but other than that, you’re good to go.
Providing you’re also a white guy.
Rent A White Guy – it’s the latest craze in
China where industrial towns and cities are
exploding like cancer cells. Factories and
office buildings take root and blossom
overnight. For some inscrutable reason
Chinese entrepreneurs have concluded that
having white guys – pretty much any white
guys – hanging around, adds prestige to their
operations. Such employees do not have to
have any industrial expertise or training. All
they have to do is show up and…look pale. A
young Canadian traveller writing on the
internet described his recent experience as a
Rent-A-White-Guy:
“Six of us met at the Beijing airport, where
our contact briefed us on the details. We were
supposedly representing a California-based
company that was building a facility in (the
city of) Dongying. Our responsibilities would
include making daily trips to the construction
site, attending a ribbon-cutting ceremony, and
hobnobbing.”
And that’s it! Don’t speak Mandarin? No
problem. Haven’t got a clue about the
company you’re theoretically representing?
Fuggeddaboudit. Just show up and…be a
white guy. They’ll even have personalized
business cards (in Chinese, of course) printed
up and waiting for you.
I’d be inclined to dismiss the story as an
Oriental urban legend if it wasn’t for the
experiences of my nephew in Japan. Said
nephew – let’s call him Paddy to protect the
guilty – spent a few years in Japan as a young
student. Paddy could hardly have chosen a
culture he was less likely to blend into
physically. He looks like a Viking hero action
figure, tall, broad-shouldered, blonde and
blue-eyed.
Whereas your average Japanese male is…
not.
But far from being a disadvantage, Paddy’s
whiteguyishness conveyed a kind of instant
celebrity. Strangers gaped and smiled
spontaneously. Japanese families asked to
have their pictures taken with him. He grew
accustomed to being treated as something
between a freak of nature and a Hollywood
star (if, in fact, there’s any difference). The
more adventurous Japanese girls were thrilled
to help him, um, practice his Japanese. For a
single guy, life was good.
And then it got better. Paddy was
approached by a Japanese firm and asked if he
would like to become a marriage priest.
Religious affiliation? Not important.
Command of the Japanese language? No
problem – there would be a script. Besides,
his less than perfect white-guy accent was…
Exactly what they wanted.
Turns out there are considerable cultural
brownie points to be gained among certain
Japanese by having a certified white guy
oversee their marriage vows. For the better
part of three years, Paddy would receive a
phone call once or twice a week instructing
him to be at such and such a pagoda at such
and such a time. Sometimes the calls would
come at almost the last minute, resulting in
Paddy haring across Tokyo on his motor
scooter, his priestly robes billowing out behind
him.
The sight caused a few Japanese ‘salarymen’
to swear off the sake forever.
It was a sweet gig. Excellent pay, minimum
hours and no heavy lifting. Then there was the
time it didn’t work so well. Paddy was halfway
through the ceremony, the about-to-be
newlyweds kneeling blissfully before him. He
was intoning the vows from the script before
him when, unaccountably, the pages stuck to
each other.
“I skipped over two or three pages of the
ceremony altogether,” Paddy recalls. He didn’t
yet comprehend Japanese well enough to catch
his error and the bride and groom were either
too in love or too nervous to notice the boo-
boo, but folks in the bridal party sensed
something was out of whack. Complaints were
lodged with Paddy’s employer.
Paddy’s not sure what the upshot was – he’s
not even sure the couple is technically married.
“I think maybe they got a discount or
something,” he says.
Good lesson for Paddy. He boned up on his
Japanese to make sure such a mistake
wouldn’t happen again.
Good lesson for the bride and groom too:
don’t expect the course of true love to run
smooth just because some white guy is in
charge.
Arthur
Black
Other Views Rent a white guy, now in China
My chiropractor always tells me that
sitting down is the back’s main
enemy. He says the body is designed
to walk. After last weekend, however, Doug, I
have to question your thinking on this.
I was in the west end of Toronto over the
weekend at St. George’s Golf and Country
Club watching the PGA’s best (hardly – there’s
something about Canada in recent years that
has kept the big guns away) duke it out for the
title of Canadian Open champion and while at
this event I learned a little bit about why golf
was recently renamed an Olympic sport and I
learned a lot about pacing myself at a spectator
event where movement is involved.
I had never been to a golf tournament before,
so when I arrived at 8 a.m. on Saturday
(typically moving day on the PGA Tour – tees
and greens are often modified to be a shade
easier to incite low scores and a lot of
movement on the leaderboard) with lofty
ambitions and a million things I wanted to see
and do.
First I wanted to see golf’s original bad boy,
John Daly, then up-and-coming star Camilo
Villegas, followed by former number one
player in the world David Duvall. So we
followed Daly for about 12 holes, then Villegas
and Duvall for about another dozen holes and
then it was time to watch the leaders, but there
was something holding us back. It was a
mythical ball and chain strapped to each leg as
all of this movement caught right up with us.
In recent weeks, I have said that I’ve been
feeling old (beginning with last week’s cranky
column, commenting on those darn young
whippersnappers and their loose morals) but it
was on Saturday night that I really felt
physically old.
After starting early on the course (around 8
a.m.) we decided to pack it in at about 2 p.m.,
about four hours before the group of leaders
was set to finish, which turned out to be just in
time, as the skies opened up in a serious way
shortly after that.
Back at my friend’s place, we just couldn’t
move and it was clear that our ambition had
gotten the better of us.
So between walking a 7,100-yard golf
course several times over with more hills than
you could shake a pitching wedge at, in
addition to the crippling heat, we were
essentially down for the count. Walking was
out of the question for me, let alone swinging a
golf club and definitely let alone doing it
effectively.
So when we returned on Sunday, we realized
what many golf spectators learned a long time
ago. Pick a spot and stay there.
On Saturday, I thought how boring it must be
to sit and watch action at the same hole all day,
but on Saturday night, I realized how boring it
was to have to exert maximum effort into
standing up to get a drink or rolling over onto
my other side while trying to get some sleep
while minimizing pain.
And then there were the people walking
around with lawn chairs. How silly I thought
they were. Then on Sunday, whenever I saw a
lawn chair cradled in someone’s arm, I praised
them for their genius and foresight in this
endeavour called golf spectatorship.
So when I see someone like 60-year-old Tom
Watson playing and competing at major
tournaments, I truly tip my hat to him.
It takes a lot of guts, physicality and
sportsmanship to walk an 8,000-yard golf
course over and over again for a living, let
alone manoeuver your way through the course
in less strokes than a field full of twenty-
somethings.
Universities get more human
Long may you run
Ontario’s cash-starved universities are
competing fiercely for students and
one result is they are putting a little
more humanity in their messages.
The universities, while emphasizing more
they are ready to educate for a changing
economy, are stressing they are more
welcoming to students and accommodating to
those with families so they can cope with both
roles at the same time.
A review by this writer of the universities’
advertising shows shows some still stress the
merits of their teachers, but less their academic
credentials and more their personal, colorful
characteristics.
McMaster University boasts the director of
its new Centre for Medical Robotics,
Dr. Dave Williams, is a former astronaut who
holds the Canadian record for walking in
space, a rare opportunity to learn from those
who have been there.
Universities boast less they have heavy-
weight administrators, although the University
of Ottawa still tries to impress by pointing to
its governors, who include such as luminaries
as Peter Herrndorf of the National Arts Centre.
Only one university, McMaster, bragged of
its ability to raise money, in a full-page ad
saying 36,000 supporters had donated $473
million to it over four years, which is not
necessarily proof of merit.
Universities now are more likely to point to
their students as achievers. University of
Guelph focuses on one of its students who
won a Canadian National Brain Bee and
another who climbed Mount Kilimanjaro to
raise funds for an AIDS clinic in Africa and
says it is cultivating the next generation of
great thinkers and doers.
Brock University devoted a full-page to
Rohan Kothari, a biological sciences student,
who it says is doing groundbreaking research
aimed at reversing the human aging process
when he is not hitting the high notes on his
saxophone.
Universities now inject more personal
anecdotes about their students and commonly
feature those of Asian and African back-
grounds, suggesting they welcome students of
all races. One Ontario university was accused
of racism a few years ago.
More universities promise to train for
careers in new industries and involving other
countries, knowing technology is changing
and some of best jobs require understanding
China and India.
Durham College urges students get in the
growing field of renewable, sustainable and
alternative energy, including solar and wind
power, which will be useful particularly if
Ontario’s Liberal government ever has stable
policies in these areas.
Ryerson University promises to teach real
world challenges. The mammoth University of
Toronto claims since scientists associated with
it invented Pablum 80 years ago it still is
generating new ideas and high-impact
innovations, although it would have been more
relevant if it cited some more recent.
York University says it can help build
global careers with specialized knowledge
of China and the Asia Pacific region.
Among those offering more personal help to
students, the Richard Ivey School of Business
at University of Western Ontario allows
students to train for a master of business
degree four consecutive days once a month, so
they can continue their jobs and family
commitments.
Fleming College promises friendly faculty
who know students by name and hands-on
learning, a far cry from when one of my five
children studied at York and asked a professor
when she could see him outside classroom
hours to ask supplementary questions and he
told her “you can’t – I don’t provide it”.
Notwithstanding all these costly advertise-
ments, one university, Waterloo, has an
advantage that without even trying may attract
more students more than others.
Waterloo is a top-level university in its own
right and Stephen Hawking, the world’s most
famous mathematician and theoretical
physicist, is distinguished research chair at the
nearby Perimeter Institute for Theoretical
Physics.
The two institutions are independent of each
other, but newspapers constantly publish
headlines such as Hawking Spends Summer at
Waterloo, Hawking Trumpets Waterloo’s
Physics Credibility and Queen Visits
University of Waterloo when she went to the
research centre – other universities must yearn
for such helpful publicity.
Eric
Dowd
FFrroomm
QQuueeeenn’’ss PPaarrkk
Shawn
Loughlin
SShhaawwnn’’ss SSeennssee
No man is really wise until he is kind and
courteous.
– Charles Haas
Final Thought