Beauty Pageant and Banquet
We were given free tickets to a student-association dinner in a nice hotel, so we went. Interesting experience.
The crowd was mostly students, of course, and that’s great. They’d worked hard to find sponsors for a high-end social experience they could share, in the ballroom of a downtown hotel, and they provided the entertainment as well. The participants were distributed in traditional Chinese fashion, at circular tables of ten surrounding with lazy susans. There were lots of people on the waiting/serving staff, and at least four hotel event managers with walkie-talkies running the food service. Unlimited drinks, but no alcohol. An MC and two guys running the audio-visual show from a computer next to the central dais.
A traditional Chinese banquet, I think, has zillions of courses, which this one also had – took HOURS to get through them all, and they were all very tasty and fairly expensive. Well, to me, with my largely vegetarian diet, a meal that includes duck, chicken, fish, shark-fin and abalone soup, scallops and veggies, and a few other courses is quite high-end, but you may have other ideas. The key here is that it takes hours for the food to be cooked, plated, served, and consumed, course by course, so you need entertainment.
What would traditional entertainment be, at a banquet where you had to keep your guests happy and at table for 3 hours? Maybe some Chinese opera, some martial arts displays, poetry-writing contests? Dancing girls? Drinking games? No alcohol or girlie stuff was allowed here, and apparently modern engineering students don’t go in for poetry or kung-fu displays, so what we got was a beauty pageant.
From an organizational point of view this works well. Young smart people modelled clothes, makeup and hairstyles provided by sponsors – a win-win. And the sheer amount of hair gel on display was truly impressive – shows what a variety of effects you can achieve within the limited palette of straight black hair.
This was interesting for its departure from U.S. beauty contests. One reason was that the participants were all students from the engineering school, so their friends were the audience, and there was some slightly raucous interraction between tables of banqueters and the people going across the dais. It was also relatively non-sexist: there were as many male as female participants. They had to do four things: do a choreographed dance all together; do a formal wear demo; a beach wear demo; and a casual wear demo. And a couple of professors had to judge the winners – nobody wanted that job!
They showed off the formal wear in couples, not just sashaying down the catwalk, but doing some acting in little scenarios; the offended girl, the dancing night out, the boy sweeping girl off feet for the big exit – interspersed with attitudes struck to show off the clothes (supplied by the sponsors). It looked to me like auditioning to be in a soap opera, and maybe that’s what it really is. Plus it looked like fun, and a chance for these particular students to do some acting and escape the prosaic reality of student life.
The beach wear was very modest, I was happy to see – at an academic gathering, you don’t really want to see a parade of flesh. The girls modeled sun dresses, and the boys had tank tops and board shorts. The one risque moment occurred when three boys pulled off their tank tops just before exiting the stage, and the hoots and howls of their classmates were highly appreciative.
All this was interspersed with food service for those of us not in the pageant, and by the time the casual wear demo started I had had enough and needed to come home. I’d had enough food and noise, along with the other profs in attendance had lent age and respectability to what was after all a youth function. And because neither my husband nor I had to judge the pageant, thank god, and had been seated at a table with other professorial types (and a toddler, who was loved by students and faculty alike), we could leave.
So what to make of this? Constrained by tradition (the long banquet format) and the interesting cultural mix of Singapore (no red meat or alcohol, so you can accomodate Muslims and Hindus), along with the modern ideal of non-sexist entertainment that involved amplified music and could be offered in spurts, between courses, I have come to the conclusion that a fashion pageant was in fact a great idea. It highlighted a lot of what I like about Asian student culture: good cheer; inclusion of elders and babies as a matter of course; hard work and organization; and supportive teamwork.