Meritocracy, social class and primary school teachers

Hi there guys, I have just watched a short video on the BBC news website of Michelle Yeoh's mother crying with joy when she had found out that her daughter had won the best actress award at this year's Oscars - congratulations to Michelle Yeoh and admittedly, I've yet to watch Everything Everywhere All At Once so I will talk about that film only after I have seen it, but there was something else which is I would like to talk about in this post. My regular readers will know that I have been acting for many years now, it is something I do on the side whilst holding down a regular job. I know I would never become successful enough to depend on it to make a living and I am just content doing a few projects a year on the side to step back into a world I've been fascinated with all my life. Recently I had auditioned for a part that I thought I had no chance for - it was a very well paid role in a high profile ad but basically the brief was so open in that they only specified that the actor had to be between 30 to 60 (okay that's me), non-white (yeah but you can be black, Asian, Arab etc) and they haven't quite decided the gender of the role yet so either a man or a woman could audition for the role. I saw the shortlist of people auditioning for the part and my friend Anna was on that list - she is a beautiful, tall black woman and I thought, yeah she's gorgeous, pick her. I've just returned from my holidays in Spain and I have this ridiculous ski tan on my face which made me look just comical on camera - a ski tan happens when you wear a hat and sunglasses when you're skiing under very bright conditions, so you end up with a very uneven tan only on the lower half of your forehead, the tip of your nose, your cheeks and your chin but the area around your eyes and the top half of your forehead are shielded from the sun and thus a completely different shade. Oh I thought my face looked so ridiculous in the audition tape and they will never ever pick me, but I did the audition anyway, as I didn't want to disappoint my agent. 

But what do you know, I then got an email from my agent informing me that I had made it through to the next round and that the odds looked good, given that they had eliminated 95% of the actors from the first round. I was shocked, I watched back my initial audition video and my face did look so ridiculous with that ski tan but somehow, I must have done something the casting director liked. But I also found out that my friend Anna - the tall, beautiful black woman I mentioned earlier - well, she didn't make it through to the next round and having read that script, I would have thought that her chances of progressing through to the next round were much higher than mine. But there is still no guarantee that I'll get the part at this stage but I met the casting directors in person in London for a screen test. This is also known as a 'recall' as it is the second round of auditions. Even if I don't get the part, I'm just flattered to get that far in the process. I have signed an NDA so I can't reveal what the concept of the ad is, but according to what I have had to do for the first audition, there is an element of physical comedy to it so it's not just about some model posing with the product for the shoot - this would be done to how we interpret the script and deliver that subtle comedy to make the ad a lot more memorable. So this would come down to our acting skills, at the screen test the director would meet a short list of a small handful of actors who have impressed with their acting skills from the first round, the director would then try a few different ways to do the sequence, improvising and maybe using different props and based on how well the actor performs at the recall. But the bottom line is that the role is usually given to the actor with the best acting skills and that might sound totally obvious, but that's concept that my parents never really understood despite me trying to explain it to them over the years to the point where I've plain given up on them; at first I thought, they're just too stupid to understand but then I realized, actually they are just too working class to understand. So, please allow me to explain the difference. 

Let's take a typical working class job of a bus driver - you get your time table, you know exactly which bus route you have to drive, you simply follow instructions and there's no real concept of doing your job exceptionally well because a bus driver who makes the effort to be very polite and friendly with the passengers or even cleans his bus during his breaks to give his passengers a more pleasant journey isn't going to be rewarded for that effort. There just isn't any kind of performance-related pay related to this kind of working class jobs. In a recent post, I talked about a Spanish woman I met in a café in the ski resort of Alto Campoo - she had a terrible attitude and almost looked angry when I ordered my coffee as I had made her put down her phone to do some work. But of course, she isn't on any kind of commission, she doesn't care how many cups of coffee or how many slices of cakes that café would sell that day; this woman has a typical working class job where she is paid a flat wage based on her turning up for work and she would get paid that wage whether she did her job well or badly. Thus for her, she was trying to do her job as badly as possible without getting fired to maximize her pay - after all, she had no incentive whatsoever to try to do her job better given the nature of her work contract. Thus parents fall into the same category as primary school teachers - hence whether their entire class performed really well at the exams or if they all failed miserably, they would be paid exactly the same. The possibility of the entire class failing is extremely slim because most Singaporean parents will step in and spend a lot of money on private tuition if their children were unlucky enough to be stuck with a terribly unmotivated teacher, but just like the very bored Spanish woman in the café, my parents were also stuck with that mentality of trying to do as little as possible at work which is a product of a system that has no mechanism to reward those who do go the extra mile to perform better. 

This is why my parents don't understand the concept of how actors have to audition for a role and how they get selected for the part - for them, the concept of getting a job is limited to those like the bus driver and that Spanish lady at the café. You agree to work there, you show up for work, you do the hours and you get paid for it whilst doing the same as everyone else who is doing that job. If you are totally stupid, devoid of any talent or skill, then you'll want to be in that kind of role where you get to do as little as possible knowing that you will still get paid at the end of the day. I still have this memory from my primary school days when this teacher came to the class one day completely ill-prepared, she told the class something like, "class, open your textbook to page 42, chapter 7" and we were like. huh? But we have already done this chapter, why are we doing it again? Not only had the teacher forgotten, she had clearly turned up at the class having not done any preparation whatsoever. But instead of admitting to the class what her mistake was, she made some excuse like, "oh this is a very important chapter that we need to revise for the exam, so that's why I have decided to take a closer look at chapter 7 today." I was not convinced by her lie at all but she was probably thinking, "oh you're just a bunch of young kids, I'm the only adult in the room so I can get away with anything!" In this example, the primary school teacher did her job badly but managed to get away with doing her job badly as there really wasn't any mechanism to punish anyone in her position for making a mistake like that and this is probably one aspect of teaching that attracted my parents to the profession in the first place - hence they've often used the term '铁饭碗" (iron rice bowl) to describe teaching, so even if you're a really terrible, useless teacher, you are unlikely to be fired and so you will have a job for life. 

Let's contrast that to the way I make money today: in corporate finance, there is no guarantee that I can earn money when I try to put a deal together. Here's a case study of a deal that fell apart, there was this company that needed a cash injection of US$2.5 million for their expansion plans and I had a client who said, I like what you guys are doing,  I am willing to give you half of that, US$1.25 million and so we began the process of putting the deal together. The investor commissioned an independent third party to do a due diligence report on the company seeking the funding - the report wasn't favourable and accused that company of being way too optimistic with their sales projections and overvaluing their company. Thus upon receiving that report, the investor pulled out of the deal, despite the fact that I had put in so much hard work but I had no control over the way the due diligence report was written. Likewise, I could attend an audition, go through the entire process but still fail to get picked in the end, then I am still not going to earn anything. Let's take that audition I did recently for example, so the actor who finally gets picked for the starring role in this ad will be paid about £30,000 for 3 or 4 days of work as it is a really high profile product. There is a second choice called a 'Covid-back up', so there is still Covid-19 testing with all shoots like this and if the first choice happens to test positive within 48 hours before the shoot, then the second choice will be called in under those exceptional circumstances but the second choice would be paid probably no more than a few hundred pounds just to be on 'standby' during that 48 hour period. Thus there isn't even a role for the third choice in this process and the person who is the third choice gets absolutely nothing, apart from being able to take pride in the fact that they got quite far in a very tough selection process. So in order to ensure success in either corporate finance or acting, I will have to make sure I perform at my very best with absolutely no room for error. 

Thus if you look at my income stream, I will be paid a lot of money a few times a year but I also have my passive income from my property and investments. It is this element of unpredictability and uncertainty that a lot of people may find quite scary, not knowing exactly how much they will earn say in the next six months. I don't even have that much control in this process: with the deal that fell apart, I had no say over what was written in the due diligence report. With any casting process, I can try my best to prove to the casting director that I'm the best actor for the part but it is still someone else making that decision and not me. But of course, this means that when I do succeed, the victory is even sweeter and the reward is much bigger than a primary school teacher, who gets paid a regular salary regardless of their job performance. Thus it takes a lot of confidence to go down the riskier route that brings more reward and unless you know you have the skills to pull it off, you're unlikely to want to take that risk. It is up to each individual to decide which path to take to maximize their job satisfaction and happiness, a person like me would get frustrated in a position where there's no performance related pay and there is no way I can earn more money by working harder; but on the other hand, a person lacking confidence would find the kind of uncertainty that I face extremely stressful and would prefer to know that their salary would simply appear in their bank account at the end of the month, even if that isn't a particularly big pay cheque. To each his own but it is clear that my parents and I are very different in this aspect and thus have chosen very different paths; they have no idea why I have chosen this path and have made very little effort to try to understand what it is like in my world, this has led to them saying some really shockingly ignorant, even hurtful things to me about the work that I do. 

My mother once described what I did to a cousin as, "when they need to film something with a Chinese person, they will call him." I was so angry I totally lost my temper with my mother then - I'm not just a token ethnic character who gets work on the basis of my skin colour. I have to audition to prove what a fucking amazing actor I am, during my auditions I have to act, sing, dance, do gymnastics, be witty, funny, engaging and give the performance of my life to impress, rather than just say, "I'm Chinese" to get the job. Allow me to explain the difference between a skilled job and an unskilled job in the acting industry: imagine we have a scene in a Chinese restaurant in Chinatown so everyone in this scene is Chinese. The scene involves an assassin looking for the protagonist who is dining at the restaurant, the restaurant manager recognizes the assassin approaching and tells the protagonist to hide in the kitchen. There is a nervous confrontation where the restaurant manager welcomes the protagonists in and offers him food, but pretends that he hasn't seen the protagonist at all. Meanwhile, the protagonist is hiding in the kitchen and wondering, wait a minute, why does the restaurant manager know the assassin sent to kill me? Have I just walked into a trap? In the meantime, an old Chinese lady who has been making pork dumplings gestures to the protagonist to follow her through the backdoor - she hands him a big bag of used plastic containers to make it look like they are both just taking out the recycling. When they enter the back alley behind the restaurants, she tells him in Mandarin to run to the other end of the alley and turn left, there is an entrance to the train station there. "It'll be crowded at this hour, you will blend into the crowd. Get the hell out of here, go!" However, just as the protagonist gets to the end of the alley, we hear the old lady scream loudly as the assassin strikes her across the face and she falls to the ground, covered with blood. Our protagonist hesitates for a brief moment, then he runs for the train station. The assassin decides to leave the old lady on the ground and runs after our protagonist.

So in this scene, we have three main characters and two supporting members of the cast: clearly, the protagonist and the assassin are playing leads in the film. The restaurant manager and the old lady are both very important to this scene, but they only appear in this one scene and are not seen again for the rest of the film. So the top tier, most highly paid actors would be the two leads, followed by the two supporting characters and then the bottom tier would be the extras who are merely customers in the Chinese restaurant or some of the staff working in the restaurant. They are not acting, they are usually given very simple instructions like, "sit at this table, you're looking at the menu trying to decide what to order, don't make eye contact with anyone, your eyes are focused on the menu. Even when the assassin comes into the restaurant, you don't even look up, and don't draw any attention to yourself." When the protagonist is hiding in the kitchen, there could be a young man washing a pot at the sink. So he would be given instructions like, "you're washing the pot, I know it is clean but all you do is the same action over and over, wiping in the inside of the pot with that sponge. Don't turn around, your back is to the camera, we don't want to see your face. Don't wipe the pot too vigorously, don't draw attention to yourself. When the protagonist comes into the kitchen, you do not turn around to look at what is happening, you got that?" Essentially with extras, since they are not trained actors, they are merely there to populate the scene - whether it is a crowded restaurant or a busy kitchen. In this scene, an extra would be chosen for simply being Chinese but not be required to act whereas the actors who were cast in the leading roles and the important supporting roles would have had to go through an gruelling casting process in order to be chosen for those roles - huge difference. Thus I got angry with my mother when she tried to describe what I did as an 'extra' rather one of those leading actors: when I act, I do a highly skilled job, I am not an unskilled extra and I always get paid a lot more than one of those extras. 

My father said this horrible thing to me when I once told him that I got cast in a lead role. He said, "so they finally got sick of seeing white people in the programme and decided to give a Chinese actor a chance then?" He made it sound as if I was given the lead role as an act of charity, as if some white person decided to make a grand gesture in the name of diversity to cast a non-white actor - he completely ignored the fact that I had performed so well in the audition that I had impressed the casting directors, convinced them that I was the best person for the job. But as teachers, they have absolutely no idea how competitive the adult world is beyond the gates of primary school. So I remember when I was in primary school, there was a school play and the teacher responsible for choosing the students for the play deliberately picked a particular shy student for a role and that casting choice puzzled me: they picked a very shy boy for one of the roles and I thought, he doesn't wanna do this and he's not even going to do a good job - why didn't the teacher pick one of the more outgoing and confident students in the class for that role, that would have been the most obvious thing to do. But the teacher had a completely different agenda, he simply wasn't that bothered about how good or bad the play turned out, he was more interested in giving the extremely shy student a chance to develop a different skill set and perhaps help him grow through the experience. Sure there were students who would have performed a lot better, but the teacher probably looked at them and thought, they already have great social skills and thrive at public speaking. Instead I really need to use this opportunity to help the students who need the most help in this aspect. Anyway this shy boy picked for the play hated every moment of it; on the day of the performance, he got on stage, took one look into the audience and just froze in total shock - talk about stage fright. After a lot of prompting by the teacher, he began to slowly deliver his lines but in a whisper so soft that even the other actors on stage (never mind the audience) couldn't hear what he was trying to say. That school play was nothing short of a dumpster fire of course, it was a car crash, it was a catastrophe but the teacher didn't seem to mind or care, as he had achieved his objective of forcing that shy boy out of his comfort zone. 

So that is how a primary school teacher would treat the challenge of casting, they would pick the people who need the experience the most to develop their social skills, rather than choose the most talented actor for the role. Thus in the case of the school play that went so horrible wrong, it would be expected that the other teachers would not only understand but support the decision of that teacher to put that very shy boy in that play, regardless of how awful the results were. In fact, some people may even applaud this teacher for going through with a potential controversial decision as it would be so much easier simply to put a more confident boy in that role to guarantee a much better outcome. But of course, in the commercial world, casting directors are not like that and they have the responsibility to pick the best actors for the parts as they are committed to producing a high quality product so picking the wrong person for the role would be an expensive mistake that will also damage their reputations as a casting director. That is why so much money is spent on the casting process to ensure that any production, be it a film, a TV programme, an advertisement or a music video will always get the best actors cast in those roles. After all, the whole point of creating a film, TV programme or an ad is to make money and a poor casting decision could severely affect the profitability of the project. Would Everything Everywhere All At Once be as successful if a lesser known, less talented actor had been cast in the lead role instead of Michelle Yeoh? But my father didn't understand that, he could only see the situation through the filter of what a primary school teacher would do and he made no effort at all to try to understand my world, which is so different from theirs in the safe, sanitized environment of the primary school. Of course, I don't expect my parents to understand the very complex world of showbiz and how it works, however it is both frustrating and irritating when they make such assumptions as if I get a big part due to charity or a statement of diversity, rather than because I had proven that I am such a talented actor. 

Thus this is why I get so incredibly frustrated with my parents to the point where I don't even want to talk to them anymore - what I am doing is a highly skilled job where only the best of the best, the most talented actors get chosen to do the most important roles; yet they have reduced it to an unskilled job which requires no talent, no brains, no efforts, which I only get due to some kind of charity. I roll my eyes and think, you know most parents would be jumping for joy if they realized that their child has some kind of talent and can excel in something, anything - yet you have so much talent in front of you in your own son but you somehow chose to pretend it is not there at all and ignore it? Well, the two explanations for this bizarre situation is that they hate me and they want to find ways to hurt me. So by refusing to acknowledge how talented I am, they have found a way to really upset me. My sister says it isn't true and the real reason is their extreme stupidity, like they take stupidity to a whole new level and we should just consider our parents mentally retarded so we have absolutely zero expectations of them to be able to understand anything. My sister once held a very senior job as a director at one of Singapore's hospitals - she is not a doctor but part of the senior management team there. Once a family friend asked my parents if my sister was a doctor (since she works at the hospital) and if not, what job did she have there? My mother said something ridiculous like, "she's a clerk who deals with complaints there." How did my mother miss the mark by so far? How could she reduce my sister's job to some very lowly admin clerical position despite the fact that my sister has tried so many times to explain to my parents what her job was? Hence my sister uses that example to explain to me how my mother is completely clueless when it comes to what the hell goes on in the adult world and not to take it personal because my mother is completely wrong about most things.  I think my sister and I share one thing in common in that we are both just extremely grateful that somehow we didn't end up as stupid as our parents. 

So I would like to end with the question, what do I expect from my parents then? I never expected my parents to understand how things work in my industry, but at the same time, I don't want them to assume the very worst of what I do - that it is something so simple that it is the equivalent of a totally unskilled job or that I can only get work as an actor when it comes as an act of charity. Both of these assumptions are completely untrue of course. I just don't want them to say hurtful, nasty things to me to insult me. Let me use an analogy, if I took an important exam and I am about to get my results, you have absolutely no idea how I scored. I have not given you any information about whether I thought I had done well for the exam or not, or even described to you whether I had studied for it or what kind of results I was expecting and so, you have no information at all. Therefore, what would you say to me under such circumstances then? 

A) I am sure you will score very well because you are so smart, so you're bound to ace this exam.

B) Good luck! If you have worked hard for this exam, I'm sure your hard work would've paid off. 

C) You are going to fail the exam as you're such a loser. You're always failing at everything in life. 

Now statement A might be quite optimistic but hey, some people are conditioned to go for option A as they are simply socially conditioned to say something nice whether or not they have any hard evidence to justify that level of optimism. There is usually very little or no harm done when someone chooses option A. Option B is a far more common middle ground whereby you are trying to say something polite and encouraging without being overly optimistic - note that it is conditional, "if you have worked hard, then your hard work would've paid off". However the same side of that coin is "if you have not worked hard, don't expect miracles when you collect your results, you would be lucky to even pass." But option C is just a toxic mix of being cruel and pessimistic - it would be uncalled for to say something which would be the worst case scenario, you would have to assume the very worst of me to come up with option C. Thus in the case of my parents, I am not even expecting them to go for option A which would be to say something nice about how talented and successful I am, but I would have expected them to at least go for option B, which would be to remain neutral - that's good enough by me. But given the way they had talked about my work as an actor - reducing it to an unskilled job or something I can only get if someone offers it to me as a gesture of charity, they had gone for option C. Not only is this a total misrepresentation of the kind of work that I do, it is just baffling that in the absence of information, they would default to option C when option B is always on the table. Thus I find it hard to understand why my parents would reach for option C - if I am put in a position where I simply don't have any useful information to make any kind of judgment at all, I would either say nothing or opt for option B and say something relatively neutral. You could say that this is merely a function of their very poor social skills but really, how hard is it avoid saying something utterly cruel and nasty to your own children? 

Despite setting my expectations quite low (all I want is option B, I am not asking for option A), I know I am not going to get what I want and they're always going to go for option C so I've just stopped talking to my parents. Yeah, it was pretty easy - I was going through a stressful difficult time in January and February with so many issues I had to deal with all at once - I felt so totally out of control and stressed then that I just couldn't deal with the fact that if I got on the phone to speak to my parents, I was going to have to deal with option C. I just said no, sorry but I can't talk to them now, no - I can't cope with it, I simply refused to - on normal days, I can cope with a small amount of their bullshit but not when I am already so stressed. But one week passed, then another and so I've not spoken to them since the third week of January. In fact I didn't even feel bad about not talking to my mother on her 80th birthday given that my sister took her out shopping for her birthday to buy my mother something nice, but instead of being grateful, my mother said some very hurtful and awful things to my sister during that shopping trip - it's almost like she just has to default to being nasty and cruel to people, even those trying their very best to be nice to her. When my sister told me about that incident, I just rolled my eyes and thought, that's why I don't feel bad about not talking to them. Thus it has been more than two months of not talking to my parents and yeah, that's just the way it is going to be from now on. I did wonder if we were going to make an effort to talk on birthdays or Christmas, but no, I don't even think I am going to do that. I look back at all the posts I have written about how utterly frustrated I had been with my parents and now I realize, why didn't I just stop talking to them years ago and free myself of all of this angst? What's the point of moving eight time zones away and still allowing them to wind me up and upset me like that? Look, I'm not saying that I'll never ever speak to them again, but at least I no longer feel the need to speak to them regularly just to keep in touch; we are not fighting, we are just not talking anymore. 

Remember that part I told you about at the beginning of this post? Well, I didn't get that part but I was just happy to have gotten that far in the process whilst still holding down a full time job in finance and for that, I'm already very grateful. I'm learning to give myself a lot more credit than waiting for others in my life to give me that validation. But what do you think? Is this my parents simply misunderstanding an industry that is so foreign to them or is there an element of them being unnecessarily pessimistic? Am I judging them too harshly given that other Asian children probably face the same crap from their parents as well? How often should grown up adults speak to their parents - should it be a few times a month or a few times a year then? Do you feel obliged to speak to your parents? Do your parents make the effort to try to take any interest in your adult life? So let me know your thoughts and leave a comment below - many thanks for reading.