Pageant News Bureau - Miss Chinatown USA

Her name sounds kind of "whitebread" if you don't listen closely. Betty Sue? No, something a bit more exotic: Betty Hsu. She's a sun-kissed California girl who just happens to be Chinese.

Ms. Hsu is also Miss Chinatown USA, but that didn't just happen. She won a pageant in San Francisco in early 2007 that was conducted in both English and Chinese and was a brilliantly staged blending of cultures.

The bilingualism is important. Ms. Hsu, born in San Francisco, has the kind of refined West Coast accent that has become the standard for American English. She talks like a CEO, a news personality or a movie star. But when she mentions Chinese names and places, she slips effortlessly into another world of sounds, uttering syllables that an untrained Anglo-Saxon tongue cannot hope to follow.

Her homeland is the world's current superpower. The land of her ancestors is the world's coming superpower. And she has one foot in each culture. (Each is attached to one lovely leg, in the best pageant tradition.)

Ms. Hsu is a highly educated woman working in the hyper-competitive world of pharmaceutical sales, but she was a video backup dancer for that indescribably improbable singer William Hung. She's a model who liked playing with Barbie as a girl, but before she entered the world of major pageants, she studied it like a college course.

Her next competition is Miss Chinatown International, to be held in a Chinese city. If she wins, she will represent the beauty, intelligence and elegance of Chinese womanhood around the globe.

Betty Hsu is a woman of destiny, a supepower in her own right.

Super Beauty