The Trip Home

Thursday, July 14, 2011

As the bus pulls away from the Galaxy, the night is lit up by all of the casinos just like the Vegas strip.  In place of a lot neon are LEDs which provide a brighter, more defined glow to the night.  We cross the bridge into Macau proper.  I am amazed at how clean the streets are and excited that so many shops are still open at that hour of the night.  We get to Hotel L’Arc for the aforementioned after party.  The entourage is led up to a huge room with projection screen.  Several people start flipping through the electronic catalog of songs.  The rest of us sit and chat to make the last few moments with the stylists last as long as possible with the fondest of memories.  Champagne is provided to celebrate the end of a successful goodwill tour and toasts abound.  Food and brought in immediately after the drinks, and the songs begin to pour out.

Speeches and grand gestures are peppered throughout the night.  First, announcements and congratulations by the board members and founders.  Business in China is  done almost entirely outside of the office and entirely over cigarettes and alcohol.  Tonight is no exception.  Cigars and cigarettes abound, and the liquor flows freely among the senior members.  Everyone is a bit delirious from fatigue, but the singing and merriment continues.  The next gesture are medals awarded to the contestants and staff.  In their uniform velveteen track suits, the medals look like they have placed in some sort of sport at the Olympics.  Some of the girls play into the look by posing as if they just stuck it after dismounting the uneven bars.  Willis, whose role has been stylist assistant and body guard, begins to serenade Michael, the assistant videographer, with a birthday song.  The gesture is followed by sad goodbyes full of smiles and tears as we bid adieu to the stylists.  They will be spending the night at the hotel and the day touring Macau before they fly back to Guanzhou.

The bewitching hour is upon us, and we say our goodbyes to our hosts.  The bus leaves the twinkling lights of Macau behind as we roll up to the ferry terminal.  This begins our long trip home.  We manage to catch an earlier ferry to Hong Kong, but we have to go through immigration to leave Macau.  Tip: If taking a ferry in Asia, make sure you know what your seat number is and keep you ticket accessible to you.  We handed in our tickets altogether and ended up causing a lot of trouble with all of our luggage.  Eventually, it all works out, and we pass out during the hour long ride between the islands.  In Hong Kong, we end up having to fill out an additional form to enter the country.  Immigration starts asking a lot of questions, and eventually, a couple of the entourage get held back a bit for small issues.  We have plenty of time to get to the airport before the flight to Shanghai, so no one is worrying quite yet.

Nothing is open at the airport when we arrive,  None of the counters are staffed, and it is little more than a couple of hours before our flight.  We are a weary bunch of travelers already with two bouts with immigration already under our belts, and it’s not even 6AM, yet.  A few minutes after 6AM, the counter staff begins to trickle in.  I’m lucky to be in the beginning of the line and make my way through security and immigration with a few others.  Boarding time is 7:25AM.  There’s no telling if everyone is going to remember to look up from all of the great shopping in the Hong Kong airport.  We actually start boarding early.  Now, we start worrying that the rest of the group won’t make it in time.

After the last few stragglers make it through the cabin door, I shut my eyes.  When I open them, we’re just about to land in Shanghai.  Little did we know what the Chinese bureaucracy had in store for us as we deplaned.  I had asked the counter staff back in Hong Kong if we had to worry about going through immigration and picking up our luggage for customs in Shanghai to switch planes.  She was confident that we wouldn’t need to.  To my dismay, she was half wrong.  While we didn’t need to pick up the luggage, we had to go through another security screening (buh-bye nearly full bottle of water I just bought in Hong Kong) and immigration into China as well as immigration out of China.  Instead of letting us through the most direct route into security, we are made to circumnavigate the arrival hall to arrive at the start.  Immigration has but two employees and several planefuls of passengers waiting to make their connections.  Luckily, because of a gate change, our boarding is delayed a few minutes, and the girls run off to shop for gifts again.  The rest of the travel is uneventful, and I am thankful for that.  We will say our last goodbyes at the baggage carousel at JFK.  I have made some new friends and learned a great deal about the pageant world in China.

Stay tuned to see how the finals go in August.  Want to learn more or volunteer at the pageant, checkout the website at http://misschinesepageant.com.

To Hefei from Nanjing, Thanks for Everything! Love, Miss NY Chinese XOXO

Monday, July 4, 2011

Waking up at 7AM this morning was such a luxury.  The girls had a few appearances to make around Nanjing before we headed the three hours to Hefei.  After breakfast at the hotel, we made our way to Softech, one of the pageant’s major supporters.  We took a few quick pictures and were then treated to an elaborate breakfast on the 47^th floor of the Intercontinental Hotel.  I overheard the chefs chatting while I was in line for breakfast.  One chef commented that the girls ate so little.  His colleague pointed out that they were in a beauty pageant which is akin to being a model and asked him if he had heard of any models who ate large amounts of food.  The light bulb went off in the chef’s head.  Little did he know is that most of the girls had actually just had breakfast at the hotel.  The food was amazing . . . a lot of dim sum inspired breakfast items.  I also learned in line that all of the chefs were from Guangzhou and Hong Kong, so dim sum seems to be a natural product of their backgrounds. Speeches of gratitude and the presentation of gifts representative of Nanjing and New York are exchanged.  Everywhere along the way, the red and gold banners welcoming the pageant contestants had been well-organized and hung before our arrival, so we always had a prepared photo opportunity no matter where we popped into along the road.

Next stop was the Nanjing Hospital where television crews were at the ready for this affair.  It was graduation day for a lot of the interns, which meant we had just that many more onlookers.  The flurry of media caught me by surprise because it had just been the four of us on the trip and maybe one or two additional reporters or cameramen.   The banner advertisement welcoming them was signed by each of the girls. Some of the questions the Chinese media asked were expected such as “do you like China” or “what do you think you will take away from this experience”.  Other questions were quite a bit more intrusive, but the girls bared the burden of these questions like true women.  The  mistress of ceremonies from the hospital did make a good point that being a beautiful woman and being intelligent in China is an extremely hard combination to maintain, so the school is proud of its female students and the contestants for staying true to developing both mind and body.  For all of the questions the contestants answered for the media, one theme was apparent, natural beauty comes from intelligence and those are the most important things in life.  A gift is presented to New York contingent, and we head off in the direction of Hefei.

We stop at a rest area and hurry as quickly as possible.  The expectation of the quality and state of a government maintained rest area differs greatly between the US and China.  In the States, we expect toilets that are maintained on an hourly basis with toilet paper, sometimes toilet seat covers, hand soap, sinks with working faucets, and some way to dry our clean hands, or perhaps a combination thereof.  In China, the most anyone expects is a door on your stall and a trashcan for the toilet paper that you can’t flush.  Today, that was all we got more or less.  We did get a side of flies with the facilities.  So, remember, when you travel outside of the US, keep a pack of tissues and some paper or liquid hand soap on you for those long roadtrips.

We checked into the hotel with a grand reception banner and lantern style balloons.  The hotel is called the Lakeside Hotel Hefei,  and its claim to fame is that Chinese President Hu Jintao stays at this very building in the hotel whenever he is in the Anhui Province.  We all got ready for the big reception dinner thrown by the Anhui Radio and Television studio in the main building of this expansive complex.  The welcome was more than I was expecting.  It was fully outfitted with mixed media elements on a very large LED screen.  Dish after dish came out in quick succession and were whisked away just as quickly.  Every few moments, there was a photo opportunity, but eventually, this writer gave up trying to capture all of the great moments on “film”.  There was just such a crush of people at any given time around the contestants that the large amounts of flash affected my shots, so I decided to just continue capturing the moments with the written word.

Our MCs for the evening were Pan Pan and our very own Stacy Wang, 2007 winner of the Miss NY Chinese title.  Each of the contestants introduced themselves and spoke a little about their interests and what this trip to China has meant to them.  Some of the contestants speak Cantonese, so Stacy did a wonderful job of interpreting for our only Mandarin speaking guests.  This is the first ever trip to China that the Miss NY Chinese Pageant has taken, and all of the guests were excited to have China’s prodigal daughters returned.  There are VIPs from Anhui Radio and Television, the Anhui Plastic Surgery Hospital, and even a government official or two at the head table with the co-founders of the pageant, William Yip and Eric Yuen.  The dinner follows tradition with the VIPs toasting with every table to welcome us to Hefei, and the banquet ends with announcements and the schedule for the next day.

Tomorrow, we have a tour and press event at the plastic surgery hospital as well as a visit to the TV studio where the girls will be every afternoon while we are in Hefei.  I have to say, it’s really nice to be able to stay in one place for a few days.