NPR: Job Ad In China: White Man. No Experience Needed

That's interesting.

Assuming you watch TV, do you get the feeling their hiring practices require a British accent?

 

A while ago I heard a radio piece of a similar story that Westerners were hired to pretend to be company officials and to give PowerPoint presentations in English. This one seems even easier: no PowerPoint presentations, just walk around in a nice suit.

 

I'd say about 35% of the white collar workforce in the US already has this job, and at much better pay

 

Is it OK if you purchase the suit in Hong Kong?

 

I take offence at your racist slur




(not really, no moderators required )

 

Assuming you fit the requirements, how could you not have experience being white?

Granted, it's probably less of a 'racial experience' than most 'non-whites' get.

 

...and why not a woman? Huh? :huh:

Sexist, as well as racist...

[Not you, Hyo.. I was just using your post as a sounding board...]

 

One time a few years ago I was in a medium sized town in China with my wife at a meeting and lunch with the Mayor and other officials. My wife gave a short speech in Chinese and then turned to me, a western man, and said to the group I would be glad to give a brief overview of China/US relations. So I had to make an impromptu speech of about 5 minutes. Luckily, it was in English, and most people didn't have a clue what I was saying. Sadly, no remuneration except for a good lunch.

 

Renting a woman to pose as a girlfriend... um, there's a word for that. It's on the tip of my tongue... can't quite come up with it...

 

Does it prove that Chinese are racist?

 

In my youth, I was occasionally used as the token honky. I remember once being the "foreign investor's representative" at the opening of what was supposed to be a Sino-foreign joint venture door factory. It was a Sino-foreign JV on paper only: one Chinese company had invested directly in the door factory, and the same company had invested in the same factory via a Singaporean special-purpose vehicle. At the time, a Sino-foreign JV got tax breaks and other benefits that a Chinese company wouldn't get.

So they asked me to go along and look white. No-one seemed to question what a 20-year-old British guy who knew nothing about door manufacturing was doing investing in a door factory in Tianjin.

When I lived in Shanghai, I saw a job advert in SH, the local listings magazine. It said "Black man required to be club DJ. No DJing experience necessary, but you must look cool." So it's not just Caucasians who should be looking for jobs.

On the plus side, the severe lack of white people in China at the time (this was 20 years ago) meant that we also got lots of film and TV work. I was an American gangster selling machine guns in 1920s Shanghai. One of my friends was a female boxer in an advert for haw juice. And another was the lead romantic interest in a terribly serious historical romance.

 

Yeah, at university I had a couple of BBC friends with the same problem.

It was particularly frustrating for one of them because her Chinese wasn't as good as mine (I'd had a bit of a head-start on her, and she was adopted by white people so she didn't come from a Chinese-speaking background). So people would ask her if she was my translator, and she'd have to ask me to translate their question, and then I'd have to translate her explanation that she wasn't my translator. It all got a bit confusing.