There is a delicious irony here, but wait a sec before you go laughing at this woman:
Beverly Zu, 19, who changed her name to Zhu Yi to compete for the Communist country at the 2022 Winter Olympics in Beijing, first tumbled to the ice during Sunday's short program, CNN reported. She failed a jump in the opening combination and crashed into the wall, then fell again later in the program to finish with the lowest score of the event: 47.03.
Following the event, the phrase "Zhu Yi has fallen" started trending on Weibo — the Chinese equivalent of Twitter — as commenters pummeled the young athlete for her poor performance, which bumped China to a distant fifth place in the overall team competition.
Before it was censored Sunday evening, the trending hashtag had been viewed more than 200 million times.
Yeah, so Beverly, aka "Zhu Yi," is a U.S. citizen who grew up in California to Chinese immigrant parents and benefitted from everything a free constitutional republic has to offer, coupled with the world-class training facilities found in the United States and Canada. Her father left a top job as an A.I. researcher at the University of California, Los Angeles to join Peking University in Beijing in 2020.
Despite all that privilege, she wanted to compete for her ethnic motherland, and so she renounced her U.S. citizenship in order to compete for China.
She failed so badly, however, that she ignited a firestorm on Chinese social media.
A day later, Zhu was back on the ice for the women's free skate. But once again, she was unable to get through the performance on her skates. After landing the first two jumps, she fell to the ice on the third, a triple flip, and fell again on her very next jump, Yahoo Sports reported.
Here's the video of the second flop:
And here's where the not-so-funny stuff comes in.
"This is such a disgrace," a comment with 11,000 upvotes said, CNN reported.
The outlet noted that some mocked her for not being able to speak fluent Chinese.
"Please let her learn Chinese first before she talks about patriotism," one critic said.
The last thing you want to do in an honor-shame culture is bring shame to your family, community, and nation.
When you couple that with a communist dictatorship in which the Party is always right and always strong, however, you get a recipe for disaster.
Have you ever wondered why Chinese athletes often cry when they place 2nd or 3rd? It's because they know the CCP will ruin their lives... if they are allowed to live at all.
As the Epoch Times puts it:
Athletes are under tremendous pressure to succeed, as state media makes their performance a matter of national pride. Those who finish last have given tearful, televised apologies for "shaming the motherland" or have been branded as failures by the media.
Many athletes are subjected to lives of utter poverty and crime, even if they win gold metals.
And although the opinion of dishonor for failing to win gold has diminished among the Chinese public, the CCP isn't going to like the optics that this defector of theirs has very embarrassingly failed for the world to see.
To that end, I gotta hope Zhu Yi has a strong resolve, because she's chosen to run into the arms of communism and all it stands for!
P.S. Now check out our latest video 👇
