A Woman We Love
Deborah Henry
In our December Dubious Achievements 2011 Issue, our Woman We Love was beauty queen, model and human rights advocate Deborah Henry. Already well-known for her poise and beauty, she made headlines here with her surprising non-win at the Miss Universe 2011 pageant at Sao Paolo. As the year comes to a close, she reflects on her year, and what happened in Brazil. Here's an excerpt:
When Deborah was fourteen, her life changed. All she did was walk along Jalan Telawi one evening with her high-school friends, and a modelling agency person stopped her. It’s strange, how history pivots on the most mundane of tasks. If Stefani Germanotta was never spotted singing in an empty bar on a chilly New York night, we might never have met Lady Gaga. No calligraphy class in Reed College, no pretty Mac fonts. Chance toys with you, loves to surprise you when you least expect it. Or maybe chance doesn’t give a s*** about you. How exciting! How terribly unfair.
That’s how she started competing in pageants—by chance. After years overseas, she returned to Malaysia and wanted out of the industry because “modelling here doesn’t afford the same type of respect which they do in other countries.” Off a friend’s suggestion and a whim, and really, as someone who was “never an advocate for pageants”, she put her name in for Miss Malaysia World in 2007, and won. Suddenly, the media fell in love with this royal doll. The public were smitten with this statuesque girl with a penchant for charity. Now that’s a beauty queen, we thought. Articulate, unique, carried herself like she just stepped out of a horse carriage. So when this year’s Miss Universe pageant in Sao Paolo rolled around in September, we didn’t dismiss it with the usual back-hand. Maybe, you know what, she could, could we ...
“I was in it to win it,” she says. That sounds like a wholly un-Malaysian thing to say, but she was. She worked her a** off for seven months, gym sessions, tennis twice a week, samba classes for a swimsuit body to die for. Whispers gathered grass and turned into a rolling stone when she touched down in Brazil. Blogs that handicap Miss Universe races every year tabbed Deborah as the biggest of favourites. Global Beauties picked her as their winner, Miss Universe Blog wrote “no doubt in my mind that Deborah Henry [will] be crowned Miss Universe this year”. They weren’t just cyberspace tattletales either. “You can just feel it when you’re there,” she says. Industry stalwarts showered her and national director Andrea Fonseka with compliments, and it was a foregone conclusion she would make the Top Sixteen. We believed it. She believed it.
“I don’t ...,” she says, slowly, carefully. “I don’t surrender myself to things easily. And I did with this. I really did. I really believed. I think when you open yourself up like that, when you fall, it hurts. A lot. A lot more. So I was very upset, very disappointed.”
Watch the Top Sixteen announcement clip again. As Miss Philippines is announced as the fifteenth entrant, the camera swoops to capture her reaction, and for a split second, you see Deborah next to her. Clapping, left leg bent, smile unshaken. Perfect, poised. Inside? She was stunned. She did not make the Top Sixteen.
(The story refers to a moment from 6:15 onwards)
“I was numb. I couldn’t believe it. You know, you’re standing on the world stage, millions watching, you’re like an open book.” When the losing girls walked off stage, contestants started coming up to Deborah and expressed their sympathies. You should be up there. We thought you were going to win the crown. The event interpreters who do this shindig every year told her “honestly Malaysia, we all had you in our Top Five.” That night had turned into her requiem for a dream, flashes and snapshots that exist as a Gaussian blur in her memory. What do you say? What can you do?
“Did you leave jaded?”
"I ...,” and there’s a pause. Maybe she’s thinking about decorum. Then. F*** it. “I don’t know. I shouldn’t say this, but it’s hard for me to have respect for an organisation like that.”
"Why?”
“Why?” Voice rising. “Because what’s the point? Is it a game? I mean, I don’t think it’s a game. I’m not an idiot. I didn’t need to do this, just to have an experience with eighty-nine girls in Brazil. Ya, it’s a great memory, but just because these girls are young, doesn’t mean they’re stupid. Don’t make it such a joke, where nobody knows why girls win, there’s no marking criteria, and nobody knows what everyone’s looking for, and it’s based on so many other reasons.”
“Until now, they haven’t given you any reason?”
“No.” The global accent reaches a peak. “Andrea e-mailed them and asked them what happened, and I don’t even think she got a reply. I’ll never know. For some girls, they don’t take it seriously, they just went there for some fun, and that’s fine. But some girls really took it seriously and, I’m not saying, I’m so good, I deserve to be in the Top Five, but it’s just not ... you know there’s more to it than that.”
“Did you feel like you disappointed others?”
She clears her throat again. “No, nobody was disappointed, I mean. They were disappointed at the organisation, it shone a light to show how crappy and political it is ... no one made me feel like I didn’t do a good job. Essentially, all I had to offer was there, online. They saw me walk in my swimsuit, they saw me walk in my evening gown, they saw me talk. What more can I do? People can judge for themselves, just because Miss Universe picked Miss Angola, doesn’t mean that everyone thinks she was the best girl for the job.”
I list all the reasons people had for her loss: her too-simple dress, her age, Portuguese-nations doing extremely well. “Oh, I knew all that. I’ve always known it’s political. A lot of us are pretty aware of how this works. It’s just that the whole front is all so perfect, and it ... it makes it feel like it’s something that it’s not.”
She’s come full circle, I say. The girl who never gave a second thought to pageants, now she’s gone through the whole journey ... Irony can be a b**** sometimes.
“It’s funny. I mean, I don’t regret it. In everything I do today, with the kids, refugees, World Vision, it’s [winning Miss Malaysia World and Universe] helped me so much, I would have never got this platform otherwise. But in a way of what it means. The local media can be so blur sometimes, they don’t get it, but a lot of the foreign media, there is already a given to them that these pageants are rigged. The way they ask questions, they’re so cynical anyways that it’s rigged. We all know what it’s like. Right?”
Right.
To read more about Deborah - her rise into beauty pageants, and what she plans to do now - pick up our December Dubious Achievements 2011 Issue. Words by Jon Chew. Photographs by Marcus Wong. Styling by Andrea Wong. The kids in the photo are San San and his sister, two Myanmar refugees that are part of the Zomi Association MLS, a Burmese rights concern run by director Khampi. Feel free to email Khampi at tg.kham@gmail.com to get involved.
December 8th, 2011