It is Tuesday afternoon and I receive a friend request on WeChat that reads: ‘Hi, I am Diana’. The photo to this message doesn’t show a person, but a landscape. It shows blue skies with white fluffy clouds over a wet surface that mirrors the sky with the clouds and a person walking on the surface.
I accept out of curiosity. I receive the same message again: ‘Hi, I am Diana!’
Hello Diana, how are you?
Hey Theo, r u free on Thursday?
What for? Excuse my question, but who are you?
My director friend still need one more temporary actor. Act as a scientist in the lab for a drug company.
Ah, OK! Sure, I’m in!
I am Diana. It won’t last 2 hours, xx Yuan.
Cool!
Then she asks some questions about age, height, etc. and asks for some photos. We do lengthy small talk and she gives me more details and she says that she’d come pick me up and drive me to the pharmaceutical company. It will be a promotional video for the company to show on the screens across their premises and show it to their customers and business partners.
She texts me again on Wednesday with more details about the time and on Thursday afternoon a car stops in front of the school’s gate. Inside it are the driver, Diana, a Welsh and a Greek guy who will also participate in the shoot. We get to know each other while we’re taken across town to the premises of the pharmaceutical company.
We arrive after a half an hour drive and have to check in at the gate. We get some passes to hang around our necks while on the premisses, and are escorted to one of the buildings. A make up artist is already waiting for us, and another person has lab coats and name tags. Once we’re done with that, we are escorted to one of the upper floors where the director and his team is. There are some Chinese actors shooting some scenes and the boss (a woman!!!) of the company is watching their work.
We have to sit around for a while, before we are asked to move to another room for our scenes. While the team sets up the room, we go downstairs to the cafeteria and have free dinner. I can’t say that I’m happy about the quality. It’s like most company cafeterias or restaurants, really low.
After dinner we are seated along a long table. On one side the three Laowai, to my left the Chinese colleagues. We have to pretend that us, the scientists are promoting and selling our products to the businessmen. Since no sound is recorded, we can say whatever we want. We don’t speak each other’s language, so it’s the body language that counts.
Things get funny when it is the turn of the second Chinese to speak. He says probably the only sentence he knows in English: ‘You are beautiful!’ and everybody bursts out laughing. We have to do this scene several times because he repeats this line again and again.
When we’re done with those scenes, the Chinese colleagues leave us and we move downstairs to the labs. The boss is always with us and you can see the pride in her eyes. To our surprise she speaks English and that allows us to have a chat with her.
We fool around quite a bit as you can see in the photos and it takes way longer than the two hours Diana mentioned two days ago. But it was worth it.
Fooling around
Make up artist with Laowai
Received my payment in this envelope. Red is a lucky colour in China.
If you would like to read more by me, here are my novel and my diary from Ar'ar, in the northern Saudi desert. Both available on Amazon as soft and hard copy.
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