Anecdotally, there are a number of visible minority women who have used beauty pageants as a means to develop their careers, one of the most prominent being Nazanin Afshin-Jan. Encountered at least one political staffer with a similar trajectory:
The world began opening up for Anastasia Lin after she arrived in Metro Vancouver as a 13-year-old from China, where she had been a fiercely patriotic leader in the Young Pioneers, a Communist organization.
Her discoveries have thrown her on an international roller-coaster ride, bringing both fear and fame.
Since a pivotal moment in 2015, when she was barred from re-entering the land of her birth, Lin has been warning of the threat China poses to the world and especially its overseas critics. She has experienced the intimidation.
After Lin was crowned Canada’s Miss World in 2015 and was refused entry to China to take part in the Miss World competition, she began to make headlines around the world as an actress and human-rights advocate.
Lin has been on the front pages of global newspapers, given talks at Oxford and other universities, met with leading politicians and worked in the film industry, all while getting out the message China’s leaders are infiltrating the West and bullying dissenters.
The transformation of Lin began when she moved with her divorced mother to Metro Vancouver in 2003, leaving her businessman father and other family behind in China.As a teenager, Lin soon began realizing how “relaxed” life was in Canada compared to Hunan province of China, where she and other students from well-off families routinely had to attend school each day until 7 p.m. — and then start doing their homework.
In Canada, liberated from Communist propaganda, Lin slowly learned what was going on under President Xi Jinping, she explained from New York City, her temporary home.
Lin’s mother still lives in their family home in suburban Vancouver, where her daughter might be returning for film work. But Lin, 31, who is otherwise talkative and self-revealing, apologizes she can’t be specific about her mother’s location.
Her businesswoman mom, and her side of the family in China, have already been hounded by security agents and by ethnic Chinese in Canada who demand she make her daughter stop saying the leaders of China are a danger.
Heightening the intensity, Lin suggests the hard squeeze put on her mother and family has been relatively moderate compared to the repression falling on her businessman father in China.
“My father has been pressured to the point of breaking,” she says.
“Two sentences into our phone calls he now starts telling me: ‘You have to go to the Chinese consulate, you have to submit an apology letter, you have to love China.’ It’s come to a point where talking has just become traumatic for both of us. And we know on the other side of the phone, there is someone listening.”
In contrast to her ideological upbringing in China, Lin remembers coming to Metro Vancouver as a teen and, after a year or two, her mother quietly leaving brochures and newspaper articles on her bed. Some were about the Tiananmen Square Massacre of 1989, China’s occupation of Tibet, the detention of Uyghurs and the mistreatment of the Falun Gong spiritual movement, with which she’s now associated.At the same time Lin’s eyes were being opened, her “tiger” mom kept pushing her to learn English, advance in academics and excel at the piano. She would often take the SkyTrain to New Westminster or Richmond to teach piano to ethnic Chinese students.
When she was in university one of her students belonged to China’s persecuted Uyghurs, a Muslim group of more than one million. “The Uyghur family were telling me how they escaped torture in China — and how they were forced to eat pork (which is forbidden in Islam).” Later she learned how tens of thousands have been forced into re-education camps.
In Canada, Lin realized she wasn’t just learning about China’s past, but about its here and now. “It was really another world, I could not believe it. When the patriotic brainwash I’d received in China was taken away, there was room for truth to come in.”
Lin went on to study theatre at the University of Toronto. To raise her profile and gain experience, she ran for and won the title of Miss World Canada in 2015. But she wasn’t allowed a visa to re-enter China for the final Miss World pageant. Her presentation at the Canadian pageant had been on how China harvest organs from prisoners.
She’s appeared in numerous documentaries that Chinese Canadian and Chinese American dissidents have produced about China. With flashes of glamour, her Instagram page shows Lin with the Dalai Lama, Henry Kissinger and Nazanin Afshin-Jam, the Iranian-Canadian human rights author.
In 2018 she was appointed ambassador on Canada-China relations for the Macdonald-Laurier Institute think-tank. She believes her ultra-high profile protects her somewhat from China’s direct retaliation, although she says she’s often accused by loyalists of being “anti-Chinese.”
Lin hesitates to generalize about what the 600,000 people in Canada (171,000 in Metro Vancouver) who were born in China feel about today’s Chinese Communist Party. But she knows the ones she has heard from are suffering in silence and afraid to speak out. They call her brave.
One of the accusations the Chinese Communist Party and its backers make against anyone who tries to speak out is they are fomenting anti-Chinese racism, said Lin. But while aware any ethnic group can be stereotyped, she said “Chinese leaders do it to try to shield themselves from being scrutinized for their brutal human-rights abuses in China. They claim they’re Chinese people’s protector. But it’s the biggest hypocrisy.”
Maybe the tide is turning, however. Ever since making her speech about a new Cold War last year to the Oxford Union, at the same time that Chinese authorities were covering up the origins of the coronavirus in Wuhan, the amount of public support she has been getting from expatriates from China has been rising.
The YouTube video of her Oxford talk has so far been watched 661,000 times, receiving four times more thumbs up than thumbs down.
Interesting comment “even had people suggest they won’t vote for her husband because she’s Muslim. In fact, MacKay was raised Catholic and still practises that faith.” Likely reflects some parts of the Conservative base.
I knew her professionally when she was a board member of the Canadian Race Relations Foundation and I was DG – Citizenship and Multiculturalism. My mini-review of The Tale of Two Nazanins can be found here):
In some ways, she is the daughter of a revolution.
Born in Tehran in 1979, the same year Ayatollah Khomeini and Iran’s Revolutionary Guard came to power, Nazanin Afshin-Jam MacKay has a fierce passion for defending democracy and human rights — especially those of women and children.
Her father was the manager of a western hotel in Tehran at the time of the revolution. Unaware of the changes the takeover would make, he conducted business as usual, allowing men and women to mingle and allowing alcohol to be served in the hotel — all forbidden by the Islamist regime.
One day, the Revolutionary Guard broke in and arrested him. He was imprisoned and tortured, but was saved from summary execution by a fluke.
Freed as soon as his wounds healed, he fled to Spain and was joined by his family two months later. They moved to Canada shortly after.
MacKay, wife of Conservative Party of Canada leadership front-runner Peter MacKay, was a baby at the time. Still, her family history instilled in her a passion for human rights. She is co-founder of the group Stop Child Executions. [Inactive since January 2016]
In 2006, MacKay heard of another Nazanin in Iran. Nazanin Fatehi was about be executed after she fought off three men attempting to rape her and her niece. One of the men died. Fatehi was charged with murder.
After that campaign, other families got in touch with MacKay, asking for help saving their children in similar situations.
“I realized there were a lot of children condemned to execution,” she said.
The organization counted more than 160 children on death row in Iran, along with a handful in other countries who needed help. She estimates they were able to save 12 children.
MacKay has an impressive resume. The mother of three small children, she is a former Miss World Canada and runner-up in the global Miss World. She has a pilot’s licence and was once a recording artist. But her main focus is her fight for human rights of oppressed people.
Her favourite song from her recording days is Someday.
“It’s a revolution song, encouraging the people in Iran to rise up and one day, this regime that shackled the people will be gone and we’ll see a free and democratic country that takes into account the voices of the people,” she said.
She used the Miss World competition as a platform to shine a light on the rights of women and children.
One discouraging aspect of the ongoing leadership campaign is how her Mideast background has been misrepresented on social media. She has been falsely accused of supporting Omar Khadr’s $10.5-million payout, and even had people suggest they won’t vote for her husband because she’s Muslim. In fact, MacKay was raised Catholic and still practises that faith.
The accusations that she supported Khadr’s payout are nonsense.
“There’s nothing further from the truth,” she said.
At the time, she made it clear that Canada had national and international obligations to its citizens.
“Whether we like it or not, he’s a Canadian citizen. It’s horrible what he did and he definitely should not have been compensated with that money,” she said.
“But we’re a country that follows the rule of law and we have our own obligations. I didn’t agree necessarily that we repatriate him back to Canada and that he be set free like any other citizen. I said we have to wait and see what the courts order.”
She believes Khadr should redeem himself by giving the money to the family of his victim.
If her husband wins the leadership, don’t expect Nazanin to sit on the sidelines. She speaks her mind.
“He’ll definitely hear from me, whether he likes it or not,” she said with a laugh.
With degrees in international relations, political science and diplomacy, she has a lot to contribute.
Her story is quintessentially Canadian: like so many others. She came here for a better life, found it, and now gives back to her new country.
Multicultural Meanderings 