From beauty pageants to rights activism
In 2012, Reese Witherspoon was considered all washed up, says Ann Patchett in Vanity Fair. She was 36. It had been 11 years since she’d starred in
Legally Blonde, and six since she’d won an Oscar for Walk
the Line, and the parts were just no longer coming her way. Then her husband had an idea: if there weren’t enough good roles for women of her age, why not create them? Using her own money, she set up a production company, and
– as an avid reader – started optioning books. The result was Gone Girl, Wild (which won her a Best Actress Oscar nomination), and the TV megahit Big Little Lies. Today, she runs her own book club, to promote reading and the books she loves; and would love to write one herself. But there’s a problem. “I always have ideas about how things begin, but I never know how they end.”
Anastasia Lin was 13 when she and her mother left China for Canada. “She thought a liberal, open, Western education would be much better for my outspoken personality.” Lin soon felt at home and, before long, she began entering beauty pageants. “I thought it was a Western tradition,” she told Julia Llewellyn Smith in The Times. Her father, who’d stayed in China, didn’t approve, but she carried on regardless – and used the platform to raise awareness of China’s human rights violations. In 2015, she was crowned Miss World Canada. In the Chinese media, she was described as the “pride of the country”, and her father was delighted. Then, her campaigning came to light. “I started being depicted as a twisted, anti-China figure.” Although she had been advised that if she remained in the spotlight, it would be harder for Beijing to retaliate, her father begged her to stop. “He said very hurtful things like, ‘You’ve doomed my family.’ But I knew from his tone that this was a survival instinct.” Relations grew cold; then, in 2016, the pair met in Taiwan, where they could speak freely. “He told me he was proud of me, which was the one thing I needed to know,” she says. “I realised this was something the CCP [Chinese Communist Party] couldn’t do – it can make my father feel he has to hurt me in order to survive, but it can’t take away the innate love for family.”