Crown comes with sisterly love
| • | Miss Hawaii director finds his joy in teaching |
By Vicki Viotti
Advertiser Staff Writer
Never mind that stuff about all women being sisters under the skin. There's nothing quite so sisterly as true, blood sisters like Denby and Dana-Li Dung. When the judges chose Denby to wear the Miss Hawaii crown on June 15, her sister Dana-Li, also a candidate, was the first to burst out of line and bury her in a bear hug.
Eugene Tanner • The Honolulu Advertiser
"I was sooooo happy for her!" Dana-Li said later.
Sister and pageant contestant Dana-Li Dung, left, was the first to congratulate Miss Hawai'i 2001 Denby Dung with an affectionate hug.
Every cynic in the state wants to scratch away at the affection and uncover a core of sibling rivalry. Good luck. The four Dung children were born in a five-year span, growing up like stair-steps, close in age and, one suspects, in other ways, too. The 23-year-old Denby is a veteran of 10 pageants, but Dana-Li, 22, has done 16. She was the one who got her big sister into this pageant life to begin with.
It was not something that came naturally to Denby, who still remembers a difficult middle childhood as the family's fat kid. "This part is a good story," the new queen said with a wry smile. "I was in fifth grade, which was about the worst in my weight problem. I had a friend a year younger than me. I used to meet her at recess.
"One day I went there, and all her friends were making a barricade around her. 'She doesn't want to be your friend,' they said. 'You're fat, you're ugly ... you crack the sidewalk when you walk.' I said to her, 'I thought you wanted to meet me.' She just kept her head down.
"I had my baby sister, Darah, with me, and she kept saying, 'Don't listen to them! Don't listen to them!' "
A growth spurt helped to whittle away the pounds soon thereafter. So did years on the track team, something her athletic dad urged her to do. And now, the lithe, lovely and cheerful Denby Dung, who goes running regularly around the Manoa neighborhood, has shed the body of that overweight child, but not the memory. Beauty is not the element that springs to her mind first when she enters these scholarship pageants.
Scholarship is. Dung, whose mother was a singer and instilled a love of music in her kids, earned her bachelor's degree in music education a year ago. She plans to return to college for a master's degree in education and can do so using some of the $25,000-plus available to the winner.
There is a shot at much more money, too, when she flies off to compete Sept. 22 in the Miss America pageant. If nothing else, she at least will win a chance to speak within earshot of the entire country, pitching her pet project: promoting music education.
Denby Dung
Age: 23
Occupation: Saxophonist, Royal Hawaiian Band; music teacher and choral director, Trinity Christian School.
Family: Single; parents Dennis and Annette Dung; brother Dean, 25; sisters Dana-Li, 22, and Darah, 20.
Pageant history: Her previous titles include Miss Tropical Teen HawaiÎi, Hawaiiâs Asian Miss and Miss West OÎahu (her most recent). In 1996, she passed on her Tropical Teen crown to sister Dana-Li.
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Making the case for music education: "It connects logic and emotions ... its value is in its ability to stimulate both sides of the brain."
Nothing conveyed the tepid commitment society has made to teaching music quite like her own job hunt. Which schools are in the market for a music teacher?
"They told me they had to make the choice between P.E. and music," she said. "You shouldn't have to choose. You should have both."
Finally she landed a part-time post teaching music at Trinity Christian School. Then, in January, she got the call that the Royal Hawaiian Band had a full-time opening for a clarinetist (Dung also plays saxophone). The band goes dark Mon-days and Tuesdays, which is when she teaches at Trinity.
On top of that, the Miss Hawaii commitments are stacking up, each appointment entered in uncommonly neat handwriting in her daybook. But she seems to roll with the punches. The morning of this interview she dodged a few impertinent questions from radio jocks Lanai and Augie, but gamely read the part of a Chinese shrew in their "Hung Brothers" kung-fu spoof.
Her bandmates teased her much more gently, spangling the back of her rehearsal chair with the glittering words "Miss Hawaii." One of them, her sax teacher Todd Yukumoto, also contributed a little musical help. Knowing she was going to perform Kenny G's soprano sax tune "G-Bop" and not being a big fan of Kenny's, Yukumoto rewrote the intro for her.
"He said, 'It didn't swing right the way he did it,'" Dung said.
Sister Dana-Li, a fashion industry major at UH, has different career goals than Denby. But they agree that pageants have delivered ample satisfaction.
It's all about self-improvement, Dana-Li said, a lesson both girls learned from their mother.
"I was 13 when I entered my first," she said. "My mother told me if it ever got to be a competition with others and not with myself, I'd have to quit."
She has no plans to quit the pageant circuit yet. And she's happy with her own rewards from the Miss Hawai'i 2001 experience. "I got some scholarship money," she said. "And I got to do the pageant with my sister. I got what I wanted."
