BEIJING
When scandal erupted over the lip-synching girl at the opening ceremony of the Beijing Olympics, some people defended the Chinese government by saying that the two girls were quite happy and didn't mind the fakery.
That justification has now been demolished by the teacher of the girl who was shunted aside at the opening ceremony. In a sad footnote to the lip-synching controversy, the teacher has given a poignant account of the girl's crushed feelings when Chinese state television celebrated the more attractive girl who had mimed the song.
You'll remember the original controversy. The ceremony's organizers, including a senior Politburo leader, decided that the patriotic song “Ode to the Motherland” should be sung by the girl with the best voice, a seven-year-old girl named Yang Peiyi. But they also decided that this angelic voice should be matched up with a girl who had a “flawless” image.
The seven-year-old singer was deemed to be flawed, perhaps because her face was slightly chubby and her teeth were uneven. So in the opening ceremony, with a massive television audience around the world, her singing was mimed by a cute pigtailed 9-year-old girl, Lin Miaoke, who apparently was considered to be “flawless” in appearance.
When the deception was revealed and the controversy erupted, the Chinese media insisted that the two girls were quite content and “satisfied” with the switcheroo. But now comes evidence to the contrary.
Yang Peiyi's teacher, who has a blog on the Chinese Internet, described how the girl had become “hurt and depressed” when she saw how China was glorifying the fake singer and ignoring the real singer.
A few days after the opening ceremony, the young singer had come across a Chinese television show that celebrated Lin Miaoke and two other girls who had appeared in the opening ceremony. Yang Peiyi remembered the three girls as her playmates from the rehearsals before the opening ceremony. “Excited, she was sitting there, watching the television on tenterhooks, without a move, with an expectation that the anchorwoman or those playmates would mention her role in the performance,” wrote the teacher, Wang Liping, in her blog.
But throughout the entire television show, nobody bothered to mention that Yang Peiyi was the singer. Instead the miming girl was the star of the show, treated as an up-and-coming sensation.
“Watching this, a disappointed look spread across Peiyi's face,” the teacher wrote in her blog.
“She waited until the program ended, the advertisements ended and the next program started, in a daze, and went to bed without a word. The next morning her family found a line of deep teeth marks on her little arm.”
