As Chung participated in and organized more pageants and events, she became a fixture in the Chinatown community. She grew up there with an immigrant widow mother who didn’t vocally support Chung’s pageantry, but nevertheless gossiped about her daughter’s success with fellow seamstress workers. Winning, which she did in 1981, ushered Chung into a world of previously inaccessible community events and the great networks of family associations in San Francisco’s Chinatown.
To Chung, the honor affirmed intelligence, culture, and leadership potential. Growing up, Chung dreamed of being crowned Miss Chinatown in the annual pageant hosted by San Francisco’s Chinese Chamber of Commerce. It was Rose Chung’s love of pageants that lead her to found Miss Asian Global. She had already submitted her application to this year’s pageant, the first one she had ever considered joining. Jessica ChouĪt the panel, at least one woman was convinced: “How do you talk openly about self-doubt? How do you overcome it?” The questions came from Zhou, the Pinterest engineer. By providing a place where women are celebrated for the things that might be a hindrance in Silicon Valley-their femaleness, their Asianness, and yes, maybe also their beauty-MAG organizers believe they are cultivating a cohort that is empowered to break into leadership.īeauty pageants remain a familiar event with a dubious aim: parading women’s bodies, even if in tandem with their minds, for judgment. According to a 2017 report, Asians are the least likely racial group to be promoted for leadership and management positions in Silicon Valley, a phenomenon nicknamed the “bamboo ceiling.” The report also found that race, more than gender, remained a more significant factor when it came to career advancement. And yet their career trajectory is limited. Asians and Asian-Americans are ubiquitous within tech companies, their food is appreciated by white CEOs, their homelands replicated by ethnoburbs like South San Francisco, Fremont, and Daly City.
Online pageants competitions professional#
Jessica ChouĬrowning women with visibility and responsibility, MAG organizers hope to prepare its entrants to navigate the challenges of their professional lives. In the cultural-attire event, participants donned outfits that celebrated their ethnicity, often with a modern flair.
Held in the Bay Area for the last 33 years, MAG is structured like an ordinary beauty pageant-contestants compete on an optional talent, cultural attire, evening gowns, a Q&A round called “Platform and Poise,” and a swimsuit division bearing the moniker “Form and Fitness.” Organizers and participants argue that MAG disrupts the sexy standard of Miss USA or Miss Universe, combining instead the wholesome goodness of Miss America with professional achievement, which organizers say is important for them to be taken seriously. The directors of MAG, however, hope their pageant can serve as a résumé builder. “It doesn’t look good,” she recalled them saying. Laughs erupted when Nisha Baxi, a director of marketing at Salesforce, mimicked her father’s Indian accent to note his wisdom: “Fake it till you make it, beta.” Wearing bright, Barbie-doll-pink heels, Crystal Lee-a Stanford graduate, cofounder of a Dropbox-like online vault, and the first runner-up to Miss America 2014-spoke of how her male colleagues told her to omit her pageant experience from LinkedIn. “When in doubt, think like a mediocre white man,” the sex-toy mogul, Ti Chang, encouraged the audience. This talk, for instance, was themed around the subject “girl boss” and included an all-Asian panel of women: a sex-toy mogul, a skin-care specialist, a community activist, a marketer, and two former beauty queens. They had gathered for an Imagine Talks forum, one of the TED-style leadership panels organized by the Miss Asian Global and Miss Asian America pageant-a competition that hopes to remake the rules of pageantry into a culturally rewarding, even feminist, event.īy offering workshops on subjects like women’s empowerment and entrepreneurship, MAG, as the pageant is often called, aims to transform the beauty pageant into a useful platform for its participants by including only Asian women, the organizers say, it’s helping contestants think about their ethnicity as something to be celebrated. But this May, the Pinterest engineer found herself among a cluster of young professionals in a San Francisco coworking space, ready to be converted to the gospel of pageantry.
Kathy Zhou never considered herself the type of woman who would enter a beauty pageant.
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