I grew up in a family of pageant fans. While other families bonded over Scrabble, tennis, or scholastic pursuits, our family's favorite communal pastime was taping broadcasts of our favorite beauty pageants and watching them together, followed by enthusiastic discussions about the contests' results. Until I became a teen and got distracted by other activities outside the home, we never missed a single year of Miss USA, Miss America, Miss Universe, and a host of smaller, less prestigious, Vietnamese pageants. We passionately debated the merits of the judges' decision and had a grand time analyzing the finalists' often politically correct answers to canned interview questions. More likely than not, we would be disappointed with the accuracy of our picks when it came to American pageants, but most of the times, our top choices were dead-on for Vietnamese pageants. We've either got the Vietnamese benchmarks for beauty well-pegged, or become so experienced at being lazy-couch honorary judges ourselves that we were seldom denied our predictions.
After I got married and moved out of the nest, I stopped following pageants on my own. In fact, I stopped watching TV altogether. My then-husband happened to be a regular TV surfer while I was exactly the opposite. To this day, I have no clues how to turn on the telly and its paraphernalia at my own home. Regardless, either my mom or one of my siblings would periodically call me with an announcement that one of our favorite pageants was going to be on, and never failed to catch up with me afterwards to discuss the finalists' rankings. It's become almost a Nguyen tradition to dissect each event of every contest to death. My favorite has always been the evening gown competition, while the males in our family naturally preferred the swimsuit portion. In the Miss Universe pageant, we all agreed that Venezuela was the single country that consistently produced the most ravishingly beautiful winners. As for the Miss America and Miss USA pageants, we held on to our theory that for whatever reasons, Miss Texas and Miss California were heavily favored over the other contestants and therefore would more often than not be included among the Top 10, sometimes undeservingly.
Growing up in the midst of both silent and vocal pageant fans, Audrey, my oldest daughter, was naturally influenced somewhat. Watching DVD's of Vietnamese pageants as a young teen, she'd casually flirted with the idea of becoming a contestant some day. My dad was always supportive of the idea of promoting our own homegrown entry, often saying, "I'd like to see my granddaughter do that walk before I become too old and feeble to attend the live event," to which Audrey would reply, "Awww... Grandpa!" and promised she would take him up on his offer when she felt ready.
When she was a middle schooler, Audrey and her American girlfriends had an informal pact to enter a pageant together, before they found out that Vietnamese beauty contests were restricted to those with at least part ancestry. Back then, Audrey thought of pageants as just another girly activity, like the makeup and styling sessions she'd staged for her friends to prepare for their almost monthly photo shoots. In her senior year, she founded an activity club at her high school, the DeZine Club, and turned all her friends into models for her ever-growing portfolio.
For her 18th birthday, Audrey asked her friends to be her subjects of a coming-of-age photo shoot...
Roaming in Neverland
She commented on her website about this particular portrait:
She commented on her website about this particular portrait:
"Overworked, but a piece that will in time come to be a marker for growth.
This was taken for a Peter Pan photo shoot, which required an incredible amount of work, foresight, and cash. Of the latter – I'm well aware that professionals spend more on a single lens, but as an unemployed amateur, it was quite the hefty investment. Ultimately, it was worth it. I still am unable to think of an eighteenth birthday better spent than with a camera and my lovely ladies.
Oh, and Peter actually is present. He's the youth that lives in all of us (: and there, friends, we have the cheesy theme of my transition to adulthood."
Audrey as Tiger Lily
Laura as Tinkerbell
Sana as one of The Lost Boys
Josie as Captain Hook
Ellen as Wendy
Jen as Wendy's brother, John
Makeup and Styling: Audrey Nguyen
Photography: Audrey Nguyen & Hai Au
Photography: Audrey Nguyen & Hai Au
Despite feeling at ease in front of and behind the camera (she has informally modeled for her photography class for a few years now), Audrey didn't want to submit any of her photos from the class as part of her application to enter the Miss Vietnam Global Pageant this summer. Instead, she'd posed for new pics taken by her younger sister, Andrea, at her instructions. I thought those submissions were not representative of Audrey's looks, and that she'd have a better chance with studio shots, or at least stock images from her modeling portfolio, but Audrey had very definite ideas about what she liked and didn't like, so when the time came, she went with what made her feel comfortable. It was enough to get her entry approved and we found out in mid July that Audrey would be going to Las Vegas to compete against nearly 40 other contestants, many representing the USA, but there was also a smattering from other countries... Germany, France, Norway, Canada... and most prominently, Vietnam. The latter were typically professional beauty queens promoted and sponsored by well-known entities in the fashion industry such as modeling agencies. As an example, Huong Giang Tran, last year's second runner-up who also garnered two other sub-titles at the same event (Miss Photogenic and Miss Ao Dai), was a famous model and a pageant circuit regular with many prestigious distinctions including that of being the first Miss Vietnam to ever place among the top 12 finalists of Miss World Beach Beauty competition, first runner-up in the Miss World Top Model competition, and Top 16 finalist at the Miss World 2009. Nevertheless, she lost the crown to Alex Tran, a well-spoken and very pretty 22 year-old Rice University student from Houston, Texas, who at 5' 4" (she actually looked more like 5' 2" to my eyes) was almost a head shorter than her competition. Since the girls from Vietnam had always placed but never won the contest in any year, I wondered if there was an unspoken bias against them, as they were believed to possess an unfair advantage language-wise (they of course were naturally fluent in Vietnamese as compared to the stateside contestants who speak halting Vietnamese) and financially, as many of the official entries from Vietnam didn't have to pay their own way, with the tab for their pageant clothes as well as travel accommodations being picked up by deep-pocket business sponsors.
http://www.missvietnamglobal.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=32:huong-giang-gianh-ngoi-a-hau-2&catid=5:press-info&Itemid=11
Huong Giang, last year's surprise second runner-up
Alex Tran, Miss Vietnam Global 2009
When my sister Terra and my mom saw Audrey off at the Long Beach airport on a promotional-fare JetBlue flight to Las Vegas, we never anticipated that her trip would be the beginning of a crazy turn of event that eventually became the most memorable family vacation we've ever had. Stay tuned to read the next installments of my blog giving you a backstage pass to the 2010 Miss Vietnam Global Pageant!
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