Our miss on a mission

By Mike Strobel

Cinderella, the ballet, is playing at the Four Seasons Centre this month. 

You know the story. 

Beautiful underdog dreams of donning a ball gown and foiling the powers that be.
A similar tale is playing out in the enchanted land of Scarborough.
In this case, Cinderella is no wimpy kitchen maid. 

This Cinderella brandishes a sword.
Anastasia Lin, 26, Miss World Canada, is trying to get to the global finals next month — and has launched a GoFundMe campaign.
Her quest? World peace? 

Sort of. 

The lovely Ms. Lin will use the pageant to stand up to mighty China and its human rights abuses.
She is a miss on a mission.
You may recall her as Canada’s rep last year, too, when China hosted the Miss World pageant — but the People’s Republic branded her a beauty non grata and wouldn’t let her in to compete.
China’s beef: She is an outspoken critic of human rights abuses in the country of her birth, especially, though not only, against fellow practitioners of Falun Gong. 

The worst of it is reported to be harvesting organs from state prisoners.
A noble, important message. 

But to deliver it at the gala, our Cinderella needs a fairy godmother. 

Hence, GoFundMe.
Most national beauty queens travel to world pageants with an all-expenses-paid entourage — chaperones, coaches, hair and makeup. 

But the Miss World Canada franchise is undergoing a management change and, since Ms. Lin was granted a repeat because of the China snub, there wasn’t even a pageant. 

So scratch the retinue.
“It’s just me against the world,” Lin chuckles. 

Her GoFundMe target is $45,000 and by Sunday evening was near $22,000. 

She tells me most of the money will go to a video required by the pageant, plus airfare and the like, not to mention a white gown that will “look like a cloud on stage.”
Leading local designer Stephan Caras has sponsored most of her wardrobe, while her mom, from Vancouver, and a couple of friends will be her support team when she finally mounts the Miss World stage Dec. 18.
What a year. 

China’s 2015 rebuff “sent me into a depression,” she tells me. 

“I wanted to be a voice for the voiceless, but I didn’t understand how hard that is.”
She and her father, still in China, rarely talk, assuming their phones are tapped. 

She says his business dwindled from hundreds of employees to two since the controversy, and he was denied a visa to see the Washington pageant.
Some friends with ties to China avoided her. 

She was even a fashion victim — her former gown-maker vamoosed.
“I don’t blame them. I might do the same in their shoes,” says Lin, who came to Canada at age 13.
“China intimidates and threatens. You don’t get access if you don’t do this or that.”
We saw that firsthand last summer in Ottawa.

China’s foreign minister Wang Yi threw a hissy fit over a reporter’s human rights question — and the Trudeau government shrugged and snivelled.
Well, I bet the bullies of Beijing are sorry they ever tangled with our Cinderella from northern Scarberia. 

They’ve lost a PR world war to a 5-foot-6 pageant queen with eyes you could swim in.
Ms. Lin has been on a whirlwind of speaking gigs, including at a U.S. congressional committee on China, the National Press Club in D.C., and a UN summit in Geneva. 

She debated human rights versus trade at Oxford.
She screened The Bleeding Edge, a thriller based on China’s organ harvest, for British MPs. 

She won a Leo Award (British Columbia’s Golden Globes) as best actress for her role in that film as a jailed Falun Gong follower.
“Step by step, I found my courage,” she tells me. 

“It’s not like I started out to take on a huge country. It’s not as hopeless as it seems.
“I’ve talked to enough Chinese people who got around the China Fire Wall (of Internet censorship) to know ... how fragile the government is — and how powerful the Chinese people.”
I’ll say. Imagine what 1.4 billion Anastasia Lins could do.