Memoirs of a Barista

We went to see 'Memoirs of a Geisha' last night. Great movie. One of the actresses (Youki Kudoh) seemed very familiar.

I lived in Hong Kong for a few months after I graduated and my first job was with Pacific Coffee (a sort of far eastern clone of Starbucks). Now of course Youki Kudoh is Japanese not Chinese, and all through the film I was convinced she was this girl Youki who I worked with. I've not found any direct evidence to show that she was in Hong Kong at that time, but every actor does waiting jobs at some point in their life and the Hong Kong movie industry has been big for decades, and she's about the right age, so it seemed perfectly plausible that she was there. As a barista at the coffee shop she had a reputation for bossing people around without doing any actual work herself - typical thespian.

It was only this morning that I remembered that the girl I had worked with was called 'Sooki' and not 'Youki' at all.