Heads up on bike safety

By Patrick Whiteley (China Daily)
Updated: 2009-01-05 12:57

To promote the campaign, Scott has run helmet design competitions, and one of the most popular designs featured a tiara attached to helmet. "Now I'm looking for a chance to buy some more tiaras. I'm waiting to get my hands on a clown fright wig, so I can add that to a helmet and one of my Chinese student friends is named Panda, so I'm making her a panda head helmet."

Before moving to China, Scott spent 30 years in the film industry in Canada, directing and producing television and movies under the professional name of Zale Dalen.

"It was a great career and I had a lot of fun, but I burned out on the stress and tension of freelancing and making things I was embarrassed to have anybody watch, feeding the in-satiable television mediocrity machine," he says.

"I wanted a change, and, as they say in the movie business, 'go big or go home'."

Going to China was about the biggest change Scott could find.

Scott's background is as interesting as any one of his TV dramas.

He was born in the Philippine Islands and his father was a Saskatchewan oil-company worker and his mother was a Manila debutante, born in Kowloon, Hong Kong, the daughter of a British Navy officer.

Scott's parents met in Santo Thomas prison camp where they were prisoners of the Japanese for three years. He grew up in Canada, mostly in Vancouver, but also spent quite a bit of time in Toronto, and always had an eye on China.

But in recent years the attraction became stronger and he made a decision to relocate to the "most exciting country on the planet".

"Between the opening up policy, the WTO, the Olympics, the space program, Yao Ming on the NBA, and the booming economy, China has just been buzzing with optimism," he says.

"I also wanted to learn another language, and starting the language with the greatest number of speakers seemed like a good idea.

"I admit I didn't expect to like China anywhere near as much as I do. In fact I came here with great trepidation and low expectations. But there's another saying in the film industry: 'Why would I do it if I wasn't afraid of doing it?'

"I think if we want to live to the max we have to face our fears and what a surprise. Coming to China was the best decision I ever made, for all kinds of reasons."

Scott is a keen musician and has been practicing the violin for 30 years. He fell in love with the erhu, which has similar tuning to the violin. He also likes to play traditional Chinese games.

"I've become a xiangqi (Chinese chess) enthusiast and now play everyday over the Internet with a guy in England who was one of the founders of the British Chinese Chess society," he says. "I won the first game, but I guess that woke him up. Haven't won a game since."

Scott has also found romantic love and after only a month after arriving met Ruth Anderson, from Winnipeg, Canada, and the couple have been together ever since.

"We now share an apartment on campus and consider ourselves to be a teaching team," she says. "She's very smart, and we are amazingly "sympatico", Scott says. A friend of hers in Winnipeg observed: "I've never seen one person in two bodies before."

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