Perfect pitch
For the hoarse and the coarse female job-seekers in the capital, the latest fashionable extra is none other than pitch-alteration surgery. Among some trendsetters in Beijing, cosmetic surgery is so 2005, if not a lot earlier. Those who were so inclined have long enjoyed the perceived benefits of an augmented nose, slit eyelids and silicone implants.
Much of this effort and expense was done to please prospective employers. Invariably male, the theory goes that they place more stock in the interviewee's physical attributes than anything else. But what if the overall package is still not hitting the right note? The job market is getting increasingly competitive, and those in the hunt for jobs are seeking any possible advantage.
Much value is placed on a woman's voice here. Whether she is answering the phone in an advertising agency or whispering sweet nothings in the back of a car, conventional Chinese wisdom says her pitch must be higher than high; her tone sweeter than sweet.
Even beautiful actresses are not above such societal judgments. When Hong Kong actress Cecilia Cheung Pak-chi was shooting The Promise, director Chen Kaige apparently felt that - although she looked like an angel - she sounded like a death-metal singer with a throat infection. Thousands were auditioned before he found a voice sweet enough to dub over his star's words.
The desirability of high-pitched tones is encouraging an increasing number of women to let a surgeon's knife do the talking. Specialist voice-alteration clinics are singing all the way to the bank as patients fork out thousands of yuan to have their voice boxes tampered with. Some of the clients are men who feel their voices are too high-pitched; others have undergone sex-reassignment operations and want to sound more like a woman. But the majority are women who want to shift their range up an octave or two.
During the operation, a surgeon can insert tiny titanium plates between two muscles in the throat, causing the vocal chords to stretch - raising the pitch. Alternatively, an incision can be made in the vocal chords, or they can be partly burned away with a laser. The resulting scarring stiffens the vocal chord, thereby raising the pitch of the voice. Like other operations, it goes wrong occasionally, and is not always effective.
There are no conclusive figures available on how many such operations are being carried out in Beijing. But a handful of clinics in the city are providing the service, and some say they are doing up to 50 a day. The women, they say, all want greater social acceptance and good jobs.
The competition in the job market these days is, after all, cut-throat.
