Not pretty enough
I gotta hand it to the Chinese - with their remarkable Olympic opening ceremony this last week, they showed just what a strong authoritarian regime directing a large population acculturated to obedience and uniformity can accomplish. And I truly don’t mean that in any negative sense. China’s amazing display was all the more amazing because we all knew that such a thing could never be replicated anywhere else in the world. I’m not sure what London has planned for 2012, but I think the planners for that event just started sleeping a lot more poorly.
News broke earlier this week about the fake firework “footprints” that were part of the opening ceremony. Most people were either not terribly surprised or not terribly concerned. Now today we have news that the cute pigtailed girl in the red dress singing “Ode to the Motherland” was, in fact, lip-synching. Why? Because the seven-year-old with the wonderful voice, Yang Peiyi, wasn’t as pretty as the nine-year-old Lin Miaoke that we all saw on TV. The solution to this non-dilemma was to dub Yang’s voice over Lin’s singing.
To me, this is much more upsetting than some computer-generated fireworks, not the least because you’re teaching a little girl that it’s not true talent that matters, but good looks. The corollary lesson is that you can cover up deficiencies with a pretty veneer. But why stop there? If you’re going to make a substitution with these two girls, why not have Chow Yun Fat at the piano dubbed with a Lang Lang recording? Or have Zhang Ziyi become president while Hu Jintao continues to pull the strings in the background. Why not? Because it’s ridiculous, that’s why. It’s ridiculous and it rails against the values we should be promoting in a society (crap - now I’m sounding like a Republican), not to mention in seven-year-old girls.
Much talk has been made of the pretty facade that China has worked so hard to place over the country in the workup to the Games. Every now and then we scratch or rub away the gold plating and are disappointed by the leaden core we glimpse beneath. This definitely wasn’t the first peek, and I’ll be shocked if it’s the last.
12 Aug 2008 ekchung
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I was pretty amazed by the opening ceremony too. It was stunningly beautiful and a testament to what many people with a common goal can accomplish with a little coordination and discipline.
But when I cited a NYT story about 30,000 Chinese people being trained to cheer for the visiting athletes to encourage everyone to break records, some of my friends were horrified. How ridiculous! And then lots of grumbling about the inhumanity of the one-child limit and poor air quality and general human rights violations. But it makes perfect sense to me. To put it quite cynically, all human cultures exploit whatever natural resources are available. When your greatest national resource is your people, that’s what you exploit. We Americans are just lucky to live in a place where there’s a lot more space and a lot fewer people.
A general East-West cultural divide comes to mind.
Think of classic Southeast Asian values, parents sacrificing for their children and generations living under the same roof and whatnot. And then there are Americans who ardently assert the importance of individual accomplishment and the universal right to ignore your children and live as destructively as you want. I think the imagery of the solo dancer on a platform supported by tons of other performers summed it up quite poignantly. In the States, that solo dancer would not be carried by her fellows but would rather be fighting her way through a giant crowd of them.