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Plucky Sister Phoenix wrestles with the Statue of Liberty

(China Daily)
Updated: 2010-12-10 09:39

Is it love, or the fascination of watching an accident waiting to happen? Either way, it's hard to stop following Sister Phoenix. The vertically challenged, tangentially talented and virally popular Internet sensation is in New York chasing her American Dream. Predictably perhaps, she's found a nightmare instead.

Let's begin at the beginning. She was first spotted by sharp-eyed netizens shopping on the Big Apple's 5th Avenue. It turned out she was interviewing for the New York-based SinoVision TV and hoped to become a roving reporter. In the video of the interview that was released by the TV station, Sister Phoenix demonstrated her trademark confidence.

"I'm the hottest Internet celebrity in China right now," she says. "If you type my name into Google or Baidu, you'll get heaps of data about me."

She says she admires former US presidents (Abraham) Lincoln and Roosevelt (not sure whether it was Theodore or Franklin D.) and reckons that getting an interview with the present incumbent would be no hard task.

"I read two pages of a speech he gave and I thought it was OK," she opines. "I'll wait for him and ask him for an interview when he passes."

Having aced the first round interview (obviously), the 25-year-old was scheduled to do some news gathering with some real reporters for the second test. Instead, she went into a tailspin and wrote on her micro blog that she realized the TV station was shamelessly using her for publicity purposes and didn't intend to offer her a job in the first place.

She called SinoVision a "garbage TV station" and added: "They can trample on my dignity, but not my life." She also added, for good measure, she was considering committing suicide on the SinoVision office doorstep.

One of the reasons Sister Phoenix is so hard to ignore and so easy to love, yes we said it again, is she has this American kind of confidence in her abilities. It's kind of unique among Chinese, who generally emphasize the Confucian-influenced virtue of humility. It's as though she's swallowed a library of self-help books and really believes in the power of self-transformation.

But she's a breath of fresh air precisely because she doesn't look like a toothpaste advertisement model. In an environment that emphasizes a winning smile over substance, Sister Phoenix is the exception to the rule. She works hard, she's fearless and impervious to the naysayers. She's a heroine to the masses, like Joan of Arc, or Mulan. What's not to love?

Finally, the Canadian comedian who's a Chinese celebrity, Dashan, has discovered he's a "big stupid egg". On his micro blog he revealed that his brothers were named Ben and Dan. Put them together and what you get in Chinese is bendan, meaning stupid egg. Since Da (shan) means big, that means he's a "big stupid egg."

He says his parents were ignorant of this fact when they chose their children's names, as they don't speak Mandarin, which got Dashan thinking it was an act of God that he learned the language.

"Otherwise, who in our home could understand His humor?"