The Reluctant Whore

Lin Miaoke, the girl who sang the Chinese national anthem at the Opening Ceremony of the Olympic Games last week actually didn’t sing at all; she mimed it. Apparently,Yang Peiyi, the girl who sang the recording had some fucked up teeth and the Chinese politburo thought it presented a less than polished image of what it’s like to live in China nowadays; ie. It’s always perfect and everyone smiles and children with fucked up teeth don’t exist because of the stellar human services provided to the Chinese people by their benevolent government. The government who cares.

The UK’s Daily News reports:

'We had to make that choice - it was fair both for Lin Miaoke and Yang Peiyi,' Mr Chen told Beijing Radio.
'We combined the perfect voice and the perfect performance.
'The reason was for the national interest. The child on camera should be flawless in image, internal feelings and expression. Lin Miaoke is excellent in those aspects. But in the aspect of voice, Yang Peiyi is flawless.'

The newspaper did not actually quote the talented ugly kid but they did print what she apparently said by writing:

She insisted she was not upset at the switch and was honoured to have her voice used.

I think we’re all fairly comfortable with the fact that it’s safe to assume Peiyi was in fact irreparably devastated over the fact that some talentless show pony kid came in to take credit for her work and she has probably now taken to infant alcoholism and her response statement was actually crafted by the politburo as she was kept out of sight under ground. Like fuck she was fine with it. She had probably already told the entire of her school she was singing and everyone said they wanted to come to her birthday party but now who’s going to turn up? Plus, even the nice ones who do turn up are just going to stand around at her party repeating the line “Don’t look at the teeth, don’t look at the teeth”. She’ll be happy and nice and then at some point she’ll just stop dancing about playing with prawns and feathers or whatever Chinese kids do at parties and she’ll stop and look at her guests and say, “you’re looking at my teeth, aren’t you?” and the other kids will stand there silently and stare. One kid will cry and run into the hall to hide.

Can I just say, this gesture isn’t so surprising either. The Olympics are like a huge party and China is the insanely high maintenance and desperate host so they’ve been acting weird and neurotic about this for over a year. I mean, they banned the sale of crispy duck outside public toilets. The list of their weird, inane changes is almost endless. I was covering it for a while and then I got so tired of the insanity because it was like giving attention to someone like Nicole Ritchie. All the chapters were always the same. [source]