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Yang Peiyi, I feel your pain. So does everyone who has a grade school picture hidden away, the one you wish your parents had not pasted in the photo album.
Your bangs are crooked. Your forehead is shiny. You may be missing a tooth or two. And where did your eyebrows go? Maybe you look a little like me, age 6, not bad but – yes, I'll say it – not exactly a vision from Central Casting.
There's a reason why the Beijing Olympics lip-synching scandal made the front page of newspapers all over the world, including here at the Observer, why – if only for a day – little girls grabbed the spotlight from the great Michael Phelps.
It happened in China but the story is universal.
Your mother tells you it's what's on the inside that counts – character and concern for your fellow man. Your father tells you that, to him, you're the most beautiful girl in the world.
But very early in life, you know that's baloney. In society, cute counts.
Most of us don't figure it out on the world stage, with billions watching and listening.
At the Olympics opening ceremony, 9-year-old Lin Miaoke, dressed in a sparkly red dress, soared above the crowd at Bird Nest's Stadium, singing “Ode to the Motherland,” and became an instant star.
It was all a deception, a whistle-blower revealed. Seven-year-old Peiyi, who was judged too flawed, was the voice behind the state-sponsored face. After the ceremony's musical director called Peiyi “a magnificent singer” who “doesn't deserve to be hidden,” everyone who saw photos of the sweetie with front-teeth growing in agreed.
China was ridiculed for its clumsy and cruel stage-managing.
Even those of us who exchanged thick glasses for contacts and got rid of flyaway bangs long ago remember how it feels to be rejected because, as a Chinese Politburo member said of Peiyi, she did not look right.
Hearts ached in every language for her. We also felt for Miaoke, who found out that it was her smile, not talent, that won her the spotlight. Even the designated perfect ones are hurt in the hoax, taught that they don't have to try as hard or achieve as much because they can get by on looks.
That may work for a while, but who hasn't heard sad stories of the football hero and homecoming queen unable to move beyond past triumphs. (Cue Bruce Springsteen's “Glory Days.”)
The parents of Yang Peiyi and Lin Miaoke say both girls were honored to participate. They got their pictures in the paper and on TV and will get record deals. They should be fine.
What have the rest of us learned, class? That every TV show will allot one “very special” episode where the shy, homely girl wins the cute guy. And just as surely, the shy and “homely” one will be transformed into a knockout – the picture of air-brushed perfection – by prom night.
Mary C. Curtis: mcurtis@charlotteobserver.com
