Mentor: Tricia Barg, 27, controller at Natayo Manufacturing Inc.
Mentee: Daisy Wong, 31, worked doing quality assurance in a laboratory in China
Tricia Barg’s windowless office is small, about 12 feet by 14 feet, and cluttered with dozens of multi-coloured binders, folders and bundles of stapled paper. The three of us squeeze in, with me sitting on the floor, next to several tins and boxes of soup – Barg’s quick-fix lunches, destined for the microwave.
On this Friday morning in August, Barg is spending several hours showing Daisy Wong the nuts and bolts of her job as a controller at Natayo Manufacturing in industrial southeast Calgary. Looking at a binder stuffed with invoices, the women discuss accounts payable and receivable, financial statements, debits, credits, margins, as well as hedging the diminished U.S. greenback.
“If not finished goods and not a raw material, but in the middle of being produced, what is the name for this?” asks Wong.
“They are called sub-assemblies,” says Barg.
Wong, who is working towards an accounting certificate at SAIT, asks a lot of questions. That’s a good thing. According to Barg, when they first met through New Horizons, Wong was very shy. “In China, women do what they are told and don’t question,” Barg realized. “I told her, ‘That’s where you need to grow.’”
Barg, on the other hand, is proud of being aggressive (her word, not mine). It’s one of the reasons she figured she’d be a successful mentor, leading by example. After becoming a certified general accountant, she decided it was time to give back. “When I graduated last year,” she says, “I wanted to help other people any way I could.” And for the past few months, that’s meant trying to help Wong get an entry-level accounting job. “We do mock interviews, talk about how the process of looking for work is going,” Barg tells me. “We spend a lot of time on her resume and talk about jobs that are posted. I explain what they are.”
When Wong moved to Calgary with her husband in 2005, she started working towards a master’s degree in chemistry. She has a bachelor of science from a Chinese university. But during her second semester at the University of Calgary, she became pregnant; her son, Neil, is now her priority.
I’m surprised when Wong tells me that she doesn’t really like science, nor endlessly toiling in chemistry labs, but that’s the field her parents chose for their sole child. “I like working with numbers,” she says, her dark eyes lighting up.
Wong immigrated to Canada because she wants to have more than China’s state-imposed limit of one child. She lives in Calgary’s Chinatown, crammed into a bachelor apartment with her husband, baby and mother-in-law, who came to Canada to help out with her grandson. With skyrocketing rental prices, a bachelor apartment is all they can afford. This past summer, Wong got a job handing out the free Metro newspaper on LRT platforms. She also spent hours and hours searching for a daycare centre because her mother-in-law wants to go back to China. “It is very hard,” she says. “All of the daycares have waiting times of more than one year. I look everywhere.”
Barg, who was born and raised on an acreage north of Brooks, didn’t have much contact with immigrants until now. “Being a mentor, I think it’s really opened my eyes to how much people go through when they come to Canada,” she says. “We are so quick to dismiss them, not thinking about what they go through when they get here. It’s tough. It’s almost incomprehensible.” U
Category: Work
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