The Beauty Inside
Last week I got 1,800,000 links when I googled “Chinese opening ceremony girl singer”.
It has been all over the news, with Chinese and international voices crying foul over the “lip syncing incident” at the beautiful opening ceremonies of the Olympic Games in China.
Yes, it certainly seems “unfair” and “disingenuous” to show a “perfect” (the Chinese have used that word a lot) Lin Miaoke singing “Hymn to the Motherland”, rather than the real singer, Yang Peiyi.
The Chinese have a saying: ‘Gold and jade on the outside, but just cotton on the inside’. Hmmm. Is that applicable here? Perhaps. What strikes me is how quickly the world jumped to criticism and what appears to me to be hypocritical judgment about this incident. This happens everywhere. Obese people are continually discriminated against. A study published in the June 2004 Journal of Applied Psychology demonstrates that tall people make more money. (“The results suggest that tall individuals have advantages in several important aspects of their careers and organizational lives.”) The plain fact is that in spite of pithy sayings like, “It’s what’s on the inside that counts”, the world’s current definition of success seems to give merit to physical qualities more often than what lies beneath.
David Cooperider, founder of Appreciative Inquiry states: “We grow in the direction of the questions we ask”. With that in mind I ask the question: What is possible if each of us were only to see the beauty inside?
Tags: Chinese Singer, Olympics, Real Thoughts