What Is Real Beauty?
Yang Lingyuan
本篇是96年湖南省第二届非英语专业大学生英语演讲比赛团体二等奖获奖者之一的演讲辞。其中引用正、反两方面的事例来论述“真正的美不在外表，而在内心”这一观点的方法值得学习与借鉴。
It is human nature that all of us should be fond of beauty. Everybody was born with a heart for beauty.
Today in China,with the rising of our living standard, people's requirement of beauty has been heIghtened accordingly. Some people spare no money or energy on beautiful clothes, fashionable hair styles,the decoration of their houses and even the improvement of their looks. But it seems to me,all
these are more or less confined to the beauty in appearance,or rather,the outward beauty.
In my opinion,we shouldn't only pay attention to beautiful appearance and neglect the beautification of the mind and what we are after should be the perfect unity of the outward beauty and the inner beauty. As we all know,so far as objects and animals are concerned,there is only beautiful appearance to be mentioned, but to us humanbeings, although the outward beauty really matters, the inner beauty is much more important. This was confirmed by a famous Russian writer in words much like this: "A person is
not lovely for being beautiful but beautiful for being lovely. "
Here, I'd like to quote two typical instances and I'm sure, my dear friends,from them you'll find out what real beauty is.
Recently I learned from the radio an unpleasant incident about a well known singer. She is very charming with a sweet beautiful voice and very famous for singing the song."Devotion of Love". Not long ago,she was invited to Zhejiang Province to give performance. The moment she was to appear on the stage,she suddenly asked for more reward. Worse still,after her request was satisfied, she didn't begin to sing at once. Instead,she took her time to count all the money piece by piece. Thus she kept the audience waiting for half an hour. So when she at last showed up and started to sing "Devotion of Love",a man rose up from his seat and shouted at her,"You don't have any devotion of love. You are not qualified to sing this song ! "Hearing this, the singer stopped singing and began to shout abuses with her finger pointed at the man. At this time the whole audience burst into an uproar.
How disappointed her keen listeners were when they learned this! It is the singer herself who spoiled her beautiful image in the eyes of others.
Now, I'm coming to another true story. It's about a poor, ordinary looking old woman. She was a widow without any children, living barely from hand to mouth by picking odds and ends from rubbish heaps. However,she took in more than ten homeless orphans successively and managed to bring them up. Every day she labored from morning till night. In order to earn as much money as possible to raise the children and to keep them in school,she even went to a hospital regularly to sell her blood. She got so weak for the loss of blood that she sometimes fell in a faint on her way home.
(96年“21世纪杯全国大学生英语演讲比赛”二等奖获得者，北京外国语大学 徐义成)
Facing this audience on the stage, I have the exciting feeling of participating in the march of history, for what we are facing today is more than a mere competition or contest. It is an assembly of some of China's most talented and motivated people, representatives of a younger generation that are preparing themselves for the coming of a new century.
I'm grateful that I've been given this opportunity, at such a historic moment, to stand here as a spokesman of my generation and to take a serious look back at the past 15 years, a crucial period for every one of us and for this nation as well.
Though it is only within my power to tell about my personal experience, and only a tiny fragment of it at that, it still represents, I believe, the root of a spirit which has been essential to me and to all the people bred by the past 15 years.
In my elementary years, there was a little girl in the CLASs who worked very hard but somehow could never do satisfactorily in her lessons.
The teacher asked me to help her, and it was obvious that she expected a lot from me. but as a young boy, restless, thoughtless, I always tried to evade her so as to get more time to enjoy myself.
One day before the final exam, she came up to me and said, "Could you please explain this to me? I want very much to do better this time. " I started explaining, and finished in a hurry. Pretending not to notice her still confused eyes, I ran off quickly. Nat surprisingly, she again did very badly in the exam. And two months later, at the beginning of the new semester, word came of her death of blood cancer. No one ever knew about the little task I failed to fulfill, but I couldn't forgive myself. I simply couldn't forget her eyes, which seem to be asking, "Why didn't you do a little more to help me, when it was so easy for you? Why didn't you understand a little better the trust placed in you, so that I would not have to leave this world in such pain and regret?"
I was about eight or nine years old at that time, but in a way it was the very starting point of my life, for I began to understand the word "responsibility" and to learn to always do my duties faithfully and devotedly, for the implications of that sacred word has dawned on me: the mutual need and trust of people, the co-operation and inter-reliance which are the very foundation of human society.
Later in my life, I continued to experience many failures. But never again did I feel that regret which struck me at the death of the girl, for it makes my heart satisfied to think that I have always done everything in my power to fulfill my responsibilities as best I can.
As I grew up, changed and improved by this incident and many other similar ones, I began to perceive the changes taking place around me and to find that society, in a way, was in its formative years like myself. New buildings, new commodities and new fashions appear every day.
New ideas, new information, new technologies. People can talk with each other from any corner of the earth in a matter of seconds. Society is becoming more competitive.
Words like individuality and creativity are getting more emphasis and more people are rewarded for their hard work and efforts. Such is the era in which this generation ,grows and matures.
Such is the era in which this generation will take over the nation from our fathers and learn to run it. Yet in the meantime, many problems still exist.
We learn that crimes take place in broad daylight with crowds of people looking on and not assisting. We hear that there are still about 1 million children in this country who can't even afford to go to elementary schools while enormous sums of money are being squandered away on dinner parties and luxury cars.
We buy shoddy medicines, or merely worthless junk in the name of medicines, that aggravate, rather than alleviate our diseases since money, many people believe, is the most important thing in the world that must be made, even at the expense of morality and responsibility.