China 2: Beauty

We were sitting around to lunch when Uncle Richard mentioned, off-hand, that the prettiest ladies in China are probably from Beijing.

We all took a good look around.

You're right, Uncle Edwin said. After further observation, he calculated that if you were to throw a stone, you could probably hit a few pretty ladies, here in Beijing. Far more than you would hit if you were in Singapore, since Beijing's population stands at four times that of Singapore's. My dad spoke up then, the eternal devil's advocate.

"Look, if Beijing has four times the number of pretty ladies as compared to that of Singapore, then wouldn't the number of unpretty ladies be four times more as well? So if you were to really throw a stone, the chances of you hitting an unpretty lady would be much higher too!"

We all took another good look around. It seemed to me as if the unpretty ladies in Beijing were doing a pretty (no pun intended) darn good job of avoiding thrown stones.

Truth is, it's all in the attitude. The Straits Times mentioned in an article last year, how sociologists found that a person's behaviour directly influenced the way others perceived them. Thus, the good-looking but badly-behaving people tended to score good first impressions but slid down the appraisal scale quickly (how many of you envy Paris Hilton?). And of course, vice versa.

Just think about it, how many secret crushes have you had on someone who wasn't conventional Maggie Chung or Hanting material? And even as your close friends think you mad or tasteless, you know deep inside that you've seen something special in that crush that your unfortunate friends haven't yet noticed. It's just like the moral Will Smith expounds in Hitch - beauty might create opportunities, but ultimately it's you who's going to decide how to proceed with the opportunities.

So please, all of you who are on diets that are so miserable even bacteria would go elsewhere to colonize. Eat up, worry less, and polish that smile of yours.