My brush with indecent proposals

Source: Asiaone

YOUNG, aspiring and a little naive back then, but she wanted to have some fun and, perhaps, a stab at stardom.

When she made it to the list of the top 20 finalists in a beauty pageant in Hong Kong in the 1980s, it was a dream come true.

In an interview with The New Paper, actress Constance Ho said: 'I was like, wow, how did I manage that? I thought I was a little too short.'

But her euphoria was short-lived.

Three days into the intensive training and grooming programme, she was told: Have sex with a bigwig if you want to win one of the top three titles.

Constance - or He Jie, as she is better known here - refused. And 24 hours later, she was kicked out of the pageant for falsely declaring her marital status.

The actress, now in her 40s, said: 'If you did the sums, you'd know it was not a mere coincidence.'

That was not the first indecent proposition she received in Hong Kong.

She recalled: 'I'd gone to cast for a role in a new film but was told I had to strip on the spot. I refused and well, I didn't get the role, of course.'

That too was in the late 1980s.

But bringing back that past for Constance is the recent suicide of Korean actress Jang Ja Yeon, whose death has prompted an investigation into unseemly practices in the country's entertainment industry.

She was found dead in her home on 7Mar. Korean police are now investigating allegations that she was coerced - by her management agency - into having sex with various public figures.

More proof that Asian pageants are all fixed. In Vietnam for example every tear a girl from the north wins. A girl from the south can never win. I think the Jang Ja Yeon case has also proven that showbiz is a nasty business. All those squeaky-clean actress on Asian dramas that little girls idolize.. they've all slept their way to the top. Sometimes you see a good actress in a series and they disappear while a poor actress continues series after series. The turnover rate for actresses and singers in Asia is much higher than those in America.

So the next time you hear, she's so sweet, she's so shy, she's so innocent in this tv series!! She's not.