Six days a week for the past two years, LiWen Tan has been dancing in front of the Church’s Chicken on the north side of Lougheed Highway, just west of Willingdon in Burnaby.
Watch the Chicken Dancer for a few minutes and you’ll see that among several moves, a one-armed stylized ping-pong slap preponderates. When LiWen sees you approaching, he makes a gun out of his thumb and forefinger and slings it around sideways at you in acknowledgement, like Ice Cube in Boyz n the Hood.
In LiWen’s hand is a sign – “Spicy or Classic?” – with a list of prices. His stock in trade is “shakerboarding”: Church's pays him to swing his sign and attract attention to the shop. “I got my start 2½ years ago, when my foster parents had a garage sale,” says LiWen. He’s tall for a Chinese, and speaks English with mathematical precision. “It was a humongous success.”
That success followed LiWen to Church’s. After he started in the summer of 2007, his managers tell him, the Lougheed store was the top-grossing Church’s in all of Canada. The night manager, Elmer Pasana, estimates that six in 10 customers come in because of LiWen – about 100 a day. Sitting at a window booth in the restaurant, Pasana looks out to the street and sighs. “No newspaper, no TV,” he says. “He’s our advertising budget.”
A person starting out in shakerboarding can expect to make minimum wage, $8 an hour. LiWen has had a couple of raises since starting at Lougheed, and, although other Church’s outlets have attempted to hire him away, he’s happy where he is, close to home. Of course, if someone offered him quite a bit more money – “$15 to $20 an hour,” he says, “cash” – he’d consider a move.
Not everyone could shakerboard, says LiWen: they’d get too bored. His prodigious energy, he says, comes from the dance music pulsing in his earphones: “I just couldn’t do this job listening to country.”
For LiWen, the job's biggest payoff is seeing people smile as they drive past on their errands. “You know, it rains two-thirds of the time in Vancouver – it’s depressing,” he says. “But there’s a bright dome of energy surrounding me.”
