Would I run back at the next opportunity? Probably not, as I think a certain element of movie magic gets lost the further back I pull the curtain. But was I grateful for the experience? Without a doubt, and in unexpected ways.
From the moment I finished wardrobe, make-up and hair, at which point I looked like this:
I felt like a different person. Not that I felt more Chinese, even though I was dressed in Asian-style clothes and shoes that my grandpa used to wear around the house, nor did I feel more like a rickshaw driver, who I was supposed to portray. I just felt less like Austin, whom Jenn in make-up bured in layers of fake grime and dirt. I understood then how some could enjoy performing in drag so much. Flamboyance and exhibitionism aside, it was a chance to hide in plain sight.
On set, I stood shoulder-to-shoulder with Nicole Kidman, said hi to her as she walked by. During one take, as I wiped my brow after setting my rickshaw down, Clive Owen looked directly at me as he delivered his lines. I watched Joan Chen play ping pong in the rec room of the Chinatown YMCA, which served as base camp for the shoot. I caught up with her afterwards and told her that she was great in Mao's Last Dancer, which is one my parents' favorite movie of late. (Truthfully, I had never seen it and only knew that she starred in it thanks to IMDB. What a brown-noser.)
Sure, I was a little starstruck, but mostly in the sense that I felt an obligation to feel starstruck. These were some famous people, after all. Really, the people I enjoyed meeting the most were fellow extras who woke up at the same time I did that morning, who felt similarly tired from pacing up and down the same alley 30 or 40 times (literally), who stood with me in the cold in our threadbare peasant outfits as the fog rolled in.
The truth was, I got a little bored after a while. The excitement wore off soon after I realized that being an extra was essentially like being a robot: perform the same tasks, on command, as many times as necessary without calling attention to yourself. I mean, really, there was only so much fake-shopping, fake-interacting, fake-cleaning the rickshaw I could do before I wished I actually was a 1930s Chinese peasant, just so I could get on with my life and out of the endless loop I had trapped myself in. And the weather, which had bestowed some sun and warmth in the morning, grew bitter and unkind as the day wore on.
In all, it was a lot of "hurry up and wait," and I learned to hate the word "reset." Once the director calls "Cut!" which the production assistants would echo up and down the alley through megaphones, the next word we would most likely hear, the one we would learn to dread, was "Reset!" which meant for us to go back to our original starting positions for take 'x+1:' more fake cleaning, more fake shopping. I started wondering if the hourly minimum wage they paid us all was even worth the tedium, because the "fun" certainly wasn't.
During one painstaking hiatus in which the film crew broke down one set and erected another, all while the extras just stood around doing nothing besides shiver, I began talking to Li, an older woman and fellow fake marketplace shopper. Earlier, I had bashed my knee against my rickshaw as I fake-cleaned, and for every take thereafter, Li ensured that I would not again, reminding me with a maternal smile to avoid the random (and stealthy) rod jutting out from the wheels.
She had done several of these background gigs and wished there were more of them.
"Really?" I asked. "This is getting kinda boring."
She agreed that it can be tiresome and physically painful at the end of a marathon day, but since she had fallen victim to the recent economic bust, random jobs like this one, jobs that did not require a fluent command of the English language, were a godsend. Sure, it was only about $100, less after taxes, but spend it wisely, she said, and you can cook healthy meals for yourself for a whole week.
And there I was, completely nonchalant about the money because I was just there to have fun, not to mention using paid time off from my regular job to be there. I chose to be there, and I could just as easily have chosen otherwise without consequence. Li would have had to find another way to feed herself for a week.
All of a sudden, I didn't feel so cold, so tired, my corporate job didn't seem so bad. Today, I returned to my warm cubicle, sat in a comfortable corporate chair that gets ergonomically evaluated annually, and probably spent more money on snacks and lunch than what Li sometimes makes in a week. Mind-numbing meetings and busy work never seemed more like a blessing.
So yes, I had an amazing adventure yesterday; I learned something, took away a new appreciation for my life. While I was a little starstruck at seeing Nicole Kidman, I was just plain struck by Li.
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