Miss Chinatown Diary no. 4: A letter to the next Miss Chinatown

I came from a party last Sunday and a girl I was talking to asked me this question: “Besides the cash prize you get from winning Miss Chinatown, what else do you get?” And this leads to a deeper question that asks, “What is the purpose of this pageant?”

Well, the answer is, Miss Chinatown is an ambassadress of the advocacies of the Miss Chinatown Foundation, which is the preservation and celebration of the Chinese culture, language and traditions. On a bigger scale, having the Miss Chinatown title puts you in a position where your voice could be heard and you are exposed to all these mass media platforms to increase the volume of your voice to the maximum, demanding people to hear what you’re going to say. This year, we have forwarded our advocacies by conducting the Chinese Storytelling Caravan around 11 Chinese schools in Metro Manila, visited various charitable institutions (a number of charitable events we’ve attended can be found in this blog under the header Miss Chinatown 2014, if you’re interested to know more), and soon we will be launching a Filipino-Chinese Youth Organization for high school students all over Metro Manila (wait for it!).

All these experiences are a once in a lifetime opportunity that has allowed me to give something good back to the world. That in my own little way, I could touch and be touched by the lives of new people I meet in all the events I attended. Becoming a queen gives you a chance to do something real in this world, a chance to find the good in you and become that person entirely.

But surely, as my maxim in life goes, “Make the most out of every opportunity”. This is why I am set on giving the Miss Chinatown crown a whole lot of meaning with my efforts in forwarding the foundation’s advocacies this year and I hope you would hold this value of adding more meaning to the crown during your reign. Making dreams come true won’t be easy, but you will find a lot of people here who would see that creative vision you thought only you could see in your mind, and I’m one of them.

Click on the video below to see the activities I’ve gone through as Miss Chinatown 2014: