David Mills
“For the second pageant, in October,” writes Meredith Hattam in The Atlantic,
I was hired to cruise around Dalian in a fake gold Mercedes golf cart with five other girls for three days, in an effort to lure potential buyers into investing in a miniature replica of Versailles. A printed guide to the event offered fictitious backstories in Chinese about each contestant, and her purpose there. We wore dresses whose colors the organizers must have thought somehow corresponded to our countries of origin. As Miss America, I strangely, and perhaps unpatriotically, wore a teal-tinged baby blue.
She is not Miss America but in China she can make money pretending to be and perhaps in a day earn twice the monthly salary of an average Chinese family. Because:
These pageants echo China’s larger affair with Western knockoffs. In the city of Wuxi, an entire street is lined with stores like H&N, Sffcccks Coffee, and Zare, while fake Apple stores have been shut down in the city of Kunming. Attractive Caucasian men are paid generously (sometimes up to $1,000 a week) to lend validity to new businesses by posing for store openings and ribbon-cutting ceremonies. Nor is architecture immune: A replica of Paris lies empty in Tianducheng, while in Beijing, there’s an Amsterdam-like area where roommates of mine traipsed merrily down a cobblestone alley to shoot a Chinese beer commercial.
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