I haven’t met any beauty queens from my home country so you could guess why meeting Vu Hoang My, Vietnam’s representative to the Miss Universe pageant in September this year, is such a big deal.

She’s actually the 1st runner up from the 2010 Miss Vietnam pageant.  Unlike in the Philippines where we crown three beauty queens for Ms. International, Ms. Universe, and Ms. World, here the government approves who will represent the country for any of the beauty pageants they would be joining in.

My friend and I saw her in RMIT’s White Day AIDS Awareness event.  Luckily, she was without entourage as some celebrities usually have and she was milling freely around checking the different booths.

Lots of students were taking her photos wherever she’d go but my friend and I who are just normal, starstruck Filipinos that we are, decided to ask her for a photo.  So you can imagine what happened after we asked her — lots of other people asked for a photo too!

It was kinda awkward having my pregnant self photo taken beside Hoang My’s statuesque frame.  She was nice, articulate, and chatted with us a bit.  As it turned out, she’s currently a student in RMIT studying multimedia and design.

Photos don’t do her justice.  She is so much prettier in person and surprisingly does not have this “celebrity” air around her.  If she doesn’t utter a word, you’d think she’s Filipina.

You can say, my friend and I stalked her quite a bit — then my friend had a brilliant plan of asking her for an autograph.  We got a couple of those flags being given around and went up to Hoang My.  We figured she’d never see us again anyway so it doesn’t matter if we seemed awestruck.

Here’s my flag with her autograph!

And yes, the other guests started hounding her after too for an autograph!  Hehehe!  I’m keeping this picture because my son suddenly wants the flag for a toy!