Dancing the White Monkey Waltz

There are places where there’s real work in being an outsider — but is it for me?

In 2009, my girlfriend — an interior designer — called me to her office on a caper. I was to be present at a meeting with one of her superiors and some potential clients. Here, she planned to introduce me as a foreign design expert.

For the record, I am not a design expert. Just so you know.

I went along with this little scheme even as I wondered how this could possibly work. She was really expecting to pass off a badly dressed 23 year-old who was about three months overdue for a haircut as some manner of globe-trotting elite designer? Forget that I knew nothing about the field — odds are that I wouldn’t be able to meaningfully communicate with anyone in that room in any way. Was she going to translate, or pretend to translate, or what?

All of this drifted in and out of my head as I sat in that little conference room, braving the shy glances of the other office workers who couldn’t hide their curiosity about their friend’s Western boyfriend. I was still far too new to the country to realize that my actual purpose was to sit there and look pretty — or, more precisely, to look foreign. After two decades of not fitting in anywhere, I’d found myself in a place where not fitting in was a marketable skill.

And I didn’t yet know just how much easy money that skill could make me.

There’s been a lot written about the phenomenon of the “white monkey,” the foreigner-for-hire in China, but it’s often presented in a very abstract manner, as though it were some poorly understood phenomenon of nature. It is not hard at all to find people who’ve done this work. In fact, I’m not sure that I know of a single expatriate here who hasn’t played the white monkey at some point, if only as a favor.

That’s in large part because we’re such a rare breed, and that’s critical to understanding this practice. Last year’s census revealed that there are fewer than a million foreigners living in the People’s Republic of China — less than 0.1% of the population, one of the lowest proportions on Earth. That’s far less than affluent Western states such as the United States (15.4%), the United Kingdom (14.1%) or France (12.8%), but it’s even lower than Japan (2%), a historically isolationist country which even today is notoriously difficult to immigrate to.

Compounding this is the nature and distribution of those rare foreigners. At least half of China’s foreigners hail from Sinosphere countries in East and Southeast Asia, and thus only a minority of this already tiny group are “visibly” foreign. What’s more, these expatriates tend to crowd into the urbanized coastal areas — such as Shanghai, which had a comparatively cosmopolitan 0.6% foreign born population in 2019 — and become increasingly rare as one heads into the country’s interior.

Therein lies the value and spectacle of the outsider. If you’ve never encountered a foreigner in person in your life, then meeting one is a special event — and if you’re running a business, then those rare white monkeys are one hell of a promotional tool.

One rainy afternoon, I found myself in a cab headed to a gig — a paying one this time — in parts unknown. The radio was tuned to a news broadcast, and though my ear was hardly tuned to the language, I could pick out just enough to know that they were discussing the then-recent inauguration of President Barack Obama. It was as big a story in China as it was back home, but I’d been far too busy to appreciate it myself.

My employer had set up this side job, as they did on occasion, and I was expecting a typical teaching assignment — a few hours of doing my dance for children too young too appreciate it and then back to my apartment. Instead, the cab pulled up in front of a two-story KFC. I sensed an error until I saw one of the office workers waiting for me. This was the place — I was doing a children’s class in a fast food joint. At least they had us on the second floor.

This was probably the strangest gig I ever had, but it’s far from the weirdest I’ve ever heard about. White monkey work can go to some extremely unexpected places.

Articles on the white monkey phenomenon often describe such jobs as “acting” or “modeling” work. Technically this is true, but both of those terms can be interesting euphemisms, as anyone who’s worked in those fields in West might tell you. Such jobs can be very favorable to the performer — they pay quickly and often very well, and they’re never especially hard. However, while this work may not be technically challenging or physically taxing, it is often humiliating. Indeed, the less dignified the job, the higher the paycheck.

What does white monkey work look like? It may entail going to a business and pretending to work there in order to impress a visitor — the same kind of work I did for my girlfriend and a few others. It may entail handing out flyers in some kind of costume. For female white monkeys, it may entail hanging out in a bar or club and enduring a lot of flirting in faltering English. Increasingly, it may entail a role in the growing “influencer marketing” space, basically allowing a blogger to follow you around and record you making a fool of yourself.

This work exists in abundance, despite the government’s efforts to shut it down — there’s simply too much demand for it to go away. Once upon a time, one could support himself fully on such work. Though these days are largely gone, it remains a popular hustle for students, workers with light schedules, and anyone between missions.

So is it really worth it to debase yourself like this for a few bucks? It never really was for me. I hustled the freelance market for a while — judging contests, recording podcasts, and posing for the odd promotional photograph with some would-be entrepreneur — but I never had a taste for it and got back into regular work as quickly as I could.

For one with a hustler mindset, though, the benefits go far beyond the initial payment. A lot of this ties into guanxi, a quirk of the Chinese business world that can make it a challenge for an outsider to make inroads.

The concept of guanxi is misunderstood by foreigners. Many Western news sources and opinion journalists will just translate this as “corruption” and talk about it as such, but the truth is much more nuanced. In China, social and business ties are not easily disentangled. This is a world in which men take up smoking just so that they have an excuse to step outside with a potential business partner, where clients and suppliers may meet for drinks many times before money even comes up. Chinese people prefer to do business with friends, to the point where the friendship becomes critical to the business.

For foreigners, white monkey jobs can actually be a viable path into the otherwise impenetrable world of guanxi. Pretend to work in an office, for example, and you’ll meet people in that business as well as their clients. Appear in an advertisement or on someone’s blog, and now people know your face. With time and a little finesse, this can turn into everything from invitations to lavish banquets to offers for legitimate full-time work not available to those who refuse to play the game. One can easily buy a seat at the table for the price of a little dignity.

Does that still sound wrong to you? Perhaps that’s because you’ve never had a demeaning job yourself — and I have, not just here in the United States. Back home, I begged for work and got only the scraps. I worked in call centers in the middle of the night, crawled around a vineyard picking up bits of paper so that the owner wouldn’t have to see them, and got pink slips for working too hard and making myself redundant. The difference is that, with a little brain power and a sense for Chinese culture, the monkey dance can lead to a whole new future.

I had no concept of any of this as I sat in that conference room back in 2009. I was just doing someone a favor, acting as a prop in a little stage play I didn’t fully understand.

The man I was to meet never turned up — not an uncommon occurrence in Chinese business culture, I would come to learn. I went for tea with my girlfriend and then made my way back home, praying for a cab that would stop for me over one of the locals. It was just another odd little anecdote, one of many I collected in those early years.

Now, with the benefit of hindsight, I have to wonder what opportunities I missed by not meeting those people. Odds are that it would have been another awkward interlude, with me sitting in silence as the insiders conducted their business. Yet there’s this other possibility — remote, but real — that I could have been pulled further into this world for as long as I’d care to stay.

Perhaps in some other reality, I am a foreign design expert, just waiting for someone to see through the charade.