Wong's Weblog

I’m on a boat

Previously on 24:

7:30pm: I was playing footy with my mates in Kennedy Town. My new British friend Damian told me that he was going to play an extra in a film directed by Steven Soderbergh with Matt Damon, Gwyneth Paltrow, Kate Winslett, and Marion Cotillard.  He asked if I was interested in going with him, I said, “sure, why not.” He told me they were meeting at 3:30 am. I was contemplating it, although at that point, it was unlikely that I would be going because come on, 3:30 am… Then he got an email telling me it was changed to 6:15 am, at that point it was more feasible.  I told him to give me a call in the morning and we would see what happens…

The following are the detailed events, albeit vague at times, of my time as an extra on a major Hollywood film.  All times are approximate for this day (all the times are pretty accurate up until I get to the set).

12:15 am: get back to the flat exhausted after playing football the entire night, jump in the shower, send casting director a picture of me.

12:35 am: contemplating if I am realistically going to wake up in 4 hours to be an extra.  Set alarm for 5:00 am just in case.

5:00 am: Wake up time.  Aaaaaaaaahhhh so tired. Need more sleep. Snooze option available? No.. Screw you Hollywood, time for some more sleep.

5:30 am: Wake up call from Damian.

Damian: Hey, are you going to meet me in Causeway Bay?

Me: (pretending to be awake) uh ya sure. I’ll be there.

5:31 am: (inner thoughts) crap, I need to get my suit on, shave, brush my teeth, look somewhat presentable and awake, find a cab, get across the harbor, meet everyone by 6:15 or I’m not going to be in the movie.

5:45 am: miraculously get ready in time, almost forget my suit jacket inside the flat as I got into the elevator.

5:56 am: still have not managed to locate a taxi that will take me to my destination.  I am screwed. It starts to sprinkle a little bit of rain. Crap.

5:58 am: found a taxi, on my way

6:12 am: find my friend Damian, go to the meeting spot, looking forward to an interesting day.

6:30 am: meet with the casting agent, he sends Damian, myself, 2 French dudes and an Irish man named Darrin in a taxi to Aberdeen where Jumbo Restaurant (a floating restaurant in the harbor) the location of the movie shoot.

7:00 am: make it to Aberdeen, see a bunch of tents set up.  People are getting wardrobe and hair and make up done.

7:15 am: still sitting around waiting for instruction

7:30 am: lined up to get hair done

7:38 am: get some breakfast brought to me while standing in line waiting to get hair done, breakfast consists of dry noodles, shumai and sausage.

8:01 am: getting my hair done

8:10 am: waiting for my friend, Damian, to finish up with his hair and walk over to the ferry that will take us to Jumbo Restaurant where the movie is being filmed.

8:15 am: get on to the ferry with the other extras and begin the wait

9:00 am: still waiting, decide to sleep

10:30 am: wake up, still waiting…

10:50 am: By this time, my butt is seriously hurting from sitting on a hard seat for two and a half hours, they decide to split up the Hong Kong chinese and the non-chinese people to the upper and lower floors of the ferry, I ask them what I should do since they were asking for the chinese speakers to go up stairs, they say they don’t care so I just stay on the first floor with my friend.  By this time, my butt is seriously hurting from sitting on a hard

11:30 am: the ferry starts making its short journey to Jumbo

11:35 am: they start letting all the chinese off the top floor off and then they select 30 of the caucasians off the first floor to get off the boat and tell the rest to wait, at this time i’m seriously the only chinese person left on the boat, this sucks…

11:40 am: I’m stuck on the boat with literally only like 30 other people, the other 100+ are moved inside to the set. they decide to let the rest of us off the boat, my level of depression lessens

11:48 am: some of the producers tell us to clear the way so that the actors can walk through to the scene

11:50 am: Holy crap! Gwyneth Paltrow walks by followed by a small entourage!

12:02 pm: they move us from the area right off the boat nearer to the set

12:04 pm: we are sitting and waiting once again, contemplating at this point if I’m actually going to be in this movie, depressing thoughts start settling in

1:00 pm: one of the casting agents takes in around 10 people, at this point I give up hope on being in the movie and thinking about how much better it would have been if I hadn’t been sitting around all day in my suit doing nothing, thanking God that the weather was nice out that day

1:10 pm: they decide to take the rest of us up to the set

1:20 pm: they pair me up with this older gentleman, our job is to walk back and forth in the background talking to a waitress and watching people play craps

1:40 pm: They change camera angles and I spot director Steven Soderbergh for the first time, I walk up closer to see them filming the scene

1:53 pm: They pair me up with a young girl to start walking back and forth in the background past the actors, I start chatting her up in cantonese and my chinese is holding up better than expected

2:07 pm: new scene, paired up with another girl, chinese director gives me instructions to walk with her and look around in awe at the amazing interior, starting to feel pretty good about being in a couple of scenes,

2:29 pm: get placed in the background in another scene, this time I get to chat up another girl and grab a drink from the waitress, standing a few feet away from Gwyneth Paltrow

2:54 pm: get paired up with yet another girl, start walking back and forth in the background again, at this point every girl I talk to is apparently a model

3:15 pm: start getting pretty hungry for lunch, it has felt like a full day already, quitting time should be pretty soon

3:36 pm: break for lunch, everyone back on the boat, we get our lunch and start heading back to the dock, word is some will get picked to go back to film additional scenes

3:53 pm: some old dude starts throwing up all over the place in front of me, time for me to exit stage right

4:00 pm: exit the boat, walk back towards tent area

4:10 pm: everyone is lined up again, assistant director is picking the cast to return to film additional scenes, feeling beyond exhausted at this point

4:18 pm: get picked by the assistant director to return, am a bit surprised

5:04 pm: return to boat to head back to the restaurant to film more

5:32 pm: sitting around waiting with the other extras to get hair and make up done again

5:45 pm: get hair touched up

6:00 pm: sitting down exhausted

6:02 pm: make up artist tells me I don’t need make up since I’m wearing glasses, can’t see the circles or wrinkles around my eyes

6:10 pm: get picked along with 3 other guys and 4 girls to film small scene, get moved to other side of the set,

6:23 pm: make up artist comes by again, tells me I need to shave

6:24 pm: shaving…

6:25 pm: done shaving

6:26 pm: they decide I need make up done, and I need to remove my glasses since I had them on in earlier scenes,

6:28 pm: producer is waiting on me to get make up finished, rush me down to get me into the small boat scene

6:32 pm: on the boat, Ms. Paltrow walks in, holy crap this is crazy, she seems very nice

6:35 pm: start driving around in the boat around the harbor taking pics (I wasn’t allowed to take pics of this sadly)

6:58 pm: return to the restaurant, it is looking really cool at night

7:02 pm: walk up stairs to film another scene, wait around for a bit

7:14 pm: get placed with 2 girls at a table, one is a model from hk, the other is from Holland

7:30 pm: holding my own speaking in canto, pleasantly surprised at how well I can carry a conversation, girl is complements my canto

7:38 pm: told to take girl as my date, get up from the table and walk out of the restaurant for the scene

7:50 pm: still filming, well into OT by now, everyone is tired and falling asleep

9:00 pm: filming is done for the day, wait for boat to take us back to the dock and to get paid

9:30 pm: getting paid, feel screwed because my caucasian friends are literally making twice as much money as me but whatever, I did it for the experience

10:30 pm: get home, sleep

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Me no speak Chinese??

Soooo you know how I said I was going to try to tutor for work while I was out in HK…well I finally did last week.  It took a couple of months after I applied because most kids were still in school so the tutoring center didn’t need extra teachers but summer session just began so it is pandemonium inside the center with kids everywhere.  The owner of the tutoring center called me the day before and asked me to show up and discuss and teach the next day so I thought hey, it doesn’t hurt to earn some extra cash.  Well I showed up at 11:00 AM the next morning to start helping as an assistant to one of the other teachers who was a young Eurasian college student that lives in HK.  First session went great.  We tag-teamed teaching 3 kids a lesson on words that end with the letters “an.”  It was a joyous time of teaching phonics and saying sentences such as “Emily cooked with a pan“, “Emily stayed out in the sun far too long and got a tan“, “Emily drank from a soda can” and so on and so forth.  Good times. Good times.

Second session started at 12:00 pm.  There were 8 kids so we split into 2 classrooms of 4.  I had 2 little girls and 2 little boys that were around 8-9 years old.  Their names were Gigi, Serina, Edison and Kevin.  Cute little kids I would have to say but would they stay that way…

Our lesson that day for them was based on reading comprehension and the topic was “The first day of school.”  Oh, the wonderful memories of the first day of school.  Heck I can remember my 1st day of school pretty vividly.  My mom dropping me off at school and me not wanting to get out of the car so I would pull on her hair so I could stay with her.  Ya, that first day of Senior year high school was rough, uhhh I meant kindergarten… Anyways, we read a story about these twin girls that were experiencing their first day of school and we talked about what they ate for breakfast and how they were late to school because of an accident and then finally the twist in the whole story was they switched backpacks accidentally when they got to school!! I love these crazy children’s stories with twists.

So, as I was teaching them they had confused looks on their face, then I thought oh yeah there was vocabulary on the front page and I skipped right over it.  Stupid me. So we went back to the 1st page and went over the vocabulary.  I explained words like accident by using 2 pencils and making them collide.  I said to them “this is an accident (took 2 pencils and smashed them into each other), Boom!!” It seemed like a great example at the time but unfortunately I was wrong, yet again… They started taking everything on the desk and made things go “Boom!!” Fantastic, I should get a star for my teaching capabilities.

We got to the word “term” and for the life of me, the most simple word in the world (not really) and I just was not getting through to them.  I tried to explain, “a term is a period of time, like right now boys and girls, you are on summer term, and when you go to school in September, that is your 1st term of school.” Right, that makes sense doesn’t it? Made sense to me! So as I kept on trying to explain it to them, I overheard one of the girls, Serina, speaking to Gigi in Cantonese saying “what is he talking about” and Gigi would reply “I have no idea.” Also, by this point, Edison was quite restless and put his head on the ground and then the girls kept on yelling at me to speak Chinese.  They kept saying in English, “we know you can speak, just talk to us in Chinese.”  Of course I was carefully instructed to say “What are you talking about, I’m from America, I can’t speak Chinese.” But of course we all know that’s a lie haha, oh how devious and tricky us adults are…

So my kids kept on getting restless and did not want to do any of the activities and Edison putting his head down did not help the situation because then Gigi started putting her head down on the table.  You may ask where Kevin was during this whole time, well he was the quiet one so we don’t talk about him.  The girls kept on talking in Cantonese and of course I understood so I would interrupt their conversations with what they were talking about in English but kids, they are the cutest things, they didn’t even pick up on me understanding their chinese, I was just so sneaky.

We got to the part where they were supposed to write about their 1st day of school.  Let’s just say they were not happy to have to write a paragraph now on their 1st day of school after answering questions about the twins from the story before.  They kept on raising their voices and I kept on trying to reason with them. I went as far as to tell them what to write exactly and still, barely a budge on their efforts.  I would then go on to explain with threats like, “Now Gigi, your parents are paying a lot of money for you to learn here.  You need to do the work or they won’t be very happy.”   So a tip to you future tutors, the threat of parents usually works on little kids.  Class ended, I graded each of them for the day (I was a bit too gracious on their scores, I’m way too nice) and we said our good-byes.

After class, I discussed the schedule of when I would work with the tutor center’s owner (I forgot to mention that at the time I was and currently still am full time volunteering on Mondays thru Thursdays at my church).   She said, “I’m going to need you on Tuesday and Thursday from Noon to 1:00 PM.”  So I quickly thought to myself, “hmm, 2 hours a week right in the middle of my day” and I responded with a “No, thank you very much.” And that my friends, concludes my illustrious career as a childern’s english teacher.

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