Look-alike is creepy

BY RON CORBETT ,OTTAWA SUN

 NOVEMBER 14, 2010

Frank Kuiack was flipping through a newspaper earlier this month when he saw it - a news story about someone trying to sneak into Canada disguised as him.

He looked at the photo, looked at it again, looked at it one more time and then in a voice loud enough to bring his daughter running from a nearby kitchen he screamed - "Holy Jeepers. That guy is me!"

Now, maybe you would scream something else, if you had seen a similar photo. You might have screamed "OMG, that guy is me!" Or you might have screamed "Holy s**t, that guy is me!"

But Frank Kuiack is 75, raised in a different time, and so when he saw the photo and read the accompanying news story, he said, "Holy jeepers. That guy is me."

He was still saying it when I contacted him last week.

"Did you see that photo?" he asked, as soon as he came on the phone. "Where do you think he got a mask like that? It's spooky, I tell ya, it's just downright spooky."

Kuiack goes on to say he does not know the young Chinese man who illegally boarded an Air Canada flight in Hong Kong by wearing a mask resembling "an elderly Caucasian man," as most news reports have described it, although there are certainly better ways to describe Frank Kuiack's face.

Kuiack insists he has never been to China. Never been to Hong Kong. Knows very few Chinese asylum seekers and is pretty sure he doesn't know this guy. (Although he admits it's hard to say for certain, what with the black bar newspapers have been running across the asylum seeker's eyes, like he was in some 1950s girlie magazine.)

"How do you think this happened?" he asks me. "My lord, I've been getting people asking me about it. They've been calling me up, saying: "Frank, have you seen the story about the Chinese asylum seeker?"

"I tell them I have and they say 'Holy jeepers, that's you.'"

Well, it is a mystery. In a story that already has quite a few mysteries - is it common for people to board Air Canada flights while wearing masks? Do elderly Caucasian men have a young Chinese man's hands? Was anyone drunk? - this is one more.

Perhaps what we are witnessing is the future of human trafficking - smuggling people into various countries by disguising them as Frank Kuiacks. Perhaps one day our airports will be crowded with Frank Kuiacks, all waiting to board a plane. Perhaps in the future the only conversation you will hear in an airport will be one Frank Kuiack saying to another Frank Kuiack:

"Gidday."

"Well, gidday to you."

Hey, don't laugh. It worked once. Maybe Canada was the test run. After all, everyone loves a fishing guide, especially one with a face as gnarled as a century-old maple. (See, there's a better description.)

Now, before you dismiss this idea outright (all right, a couple of seconds before you dismiss this idea outright) keep in mind it is indeed possible the Chinese asylum seeker saw a photo of Kuiack before he fashioned that mask and boarded that Air Canada flight.

You see, Kuiack has had a book written about him. The book was called The Last Guide. I actually wrote the book.

And if you search around on the Internet you can indeed find photos of Kuiack, photos that look exactly like that mask. Maybe in Honk Kong those photos are the ones that pop up when you search for "elderly Caucasian man."

I don't know. You tell me. I'm just looking for some sort of answers here.

So is Kuiack, who is a little freaked by the sudden attention he is getting these days. People up and down the Ottawa Valley have been phoning him ever since the story broke.

"Hey Frank," they say, "Have you seen the photo in the ..."

"Yes, I've seen the photo," he'll say, not even bothering to hear the whole question.

"Holy jeepers Frank, that guy looks exactly like ..."

"Me, I know."

A strange twist of fate. Try to imagine, for a moment, if it happened to you.

Holy jeepers.

ron.corbett@sunmedia.ca