CHEAP LABOR, SLAVES…AND CHINESE COOLIES FOR HOLLYWOOD AND FAKE HOLLYWOOD

…AND A UNIVERSITY WHICH CHURNS OUT HONORARY DOCTORATES TO VISITING DIGNITARIES.

By Mansor Puteh

There is an academy in Malaysia which is might proud to show to everybody how some of their graduates had landed jobs with film companies in America.

But alas, there are just a handful of them. They did not say what the other graduates of the academy are doing.

A few graduates who had worked on some films produced in America cannot make the academy exceptional.

I am sure there are other similar academies elsewhere in the world which have also produced graduates that had served the cause of the American film industry, but they may not hit the gong to tell everybody about it.

And least of all when all of them are nothing but cheap labor serving those companies; worse, they can also be seen to be modern day slaves, who are willing to get jobs which are too expensive for the Americans to do.

Yes, the graduates are all Chinese-Malaysians and they can also be described as CHINESE COOLIES, much like their brethren who had come from China in the old days to mind gold and to do other medial jobs in America.

Many of their descendants are still in the country mostly living in the Chinatowns, a place which can also be described as an internment center, much like the camps that were constructed by the Americans during the Second World War, to place the Chinese and also Japanese so that they could feel more at home so that they are not targeted and charged for being collaborators fighting against American White interests.

The truth is that the academy is only good at creating graduates who are only proud to serve the others and not themselves.

They can never find employment where they can call the shots, being at the top, to allow them to create their own characters and also stories.

This is the email I wrote to the academy just to let them know what they have been doing and been trying to do.

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I have been watching and studying the full-page advertisements your academy puts out regularly, and I find something which is strange.

You seem to be very happy and proud to tell everybody in Malaysia that your academy is serving the cause of the American film studios allowing them to get cheap labor from amongst your graduates, so that the film studios in America or Hollywood can save a lot of money.

This slave mentality is what's probably your academy is instilling in the minds of its students and graduates, all of whom can never be proud to have done anything substantial on their own, using stories of their own race and those of the others in the country, so Americans can in time follow suit.

I studied film directing at a more prestigious university in America, and I know how tough it is to be able to break into Hollywood if you do not allow yourself to be a slave to the Hollywood system.

It would be a lot easier if I were to churn out films or screenplays that help in their cause and not that of my own.

Please study what you advertisements have been telling people like me.

I also have a degree in advertising.

Your advertisements should be to highlight the cheap labor that your academy produces who are willing to serve American film studios' interests and no more. This is how I see it.

Where are the top directors and screenwriters that your academy has produced for Hollywood?

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If this academy is so good and that it can produce graduates who could find employment working in American films, then surely there would be many young Americans who would to join the academy so that they can also save a lot of money studying in Malaysia than in America, where everything is so very expensive.

But this has not happened.

Yet, there is another university which also likes not to say where their graduates had gone to but from where the students had come from, all over the world, it seems, so much so that it has the most foreign student ratio in any university in the country.

The public or state universities in Malaysia have a policy of allowing only a small percentage of students from abroad, with the exception of the International Islamic University of Malaysia (IIAM) in Gombak which has a high foreign student ratio compared to the other public universities.

But the private ones do not have such a policy so they can get as many foreign students they want.

Yet, none of the foreign students who had graduated can be said to be holding strategic roles in the development of their own countries.

If this has happened, and if one of them had become a minister or prime minister, this university would highlight it.

In fact, this university not only churns degrees but also honorary degrees as well. So any interesting foreign dignitary who visits the country would be given a honorary doctorate degree.

The idea is for this university to get as much publicity mileage from it. They do not have a senate whose members can decide if such and such a person is qualified to be given a honorary doctorate or not.

The public universities, however, are too happy to give their honorary doctorates to retired civil servants and cabinet members and sometimes other individuals.

So in the end, the universities in Malaysia can be said to be the universities that give the most number of honorary doctorates in the world.

And not enough with that, there are some of the universities which also offer honorary master’s degrees to some people who they think are deserving, especially those with no formal academic backgrounds, so much so that they thought they had been given a honorary doctorate degree and start to call themselves ‘Doctor’ so and so…