Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, 2016

When the hotel elevator doors open, Jeff Lee, now 30, smiles and glides into the lobby. After a 26-hour odyssey of Ubers, flights, and layovers to get from Palo Alto to Southeast Asia, Lee is looking fresh: hair combed, jeans crisp, sport coat a calming shade of blue. Under his arm is a snappy portfolio containing stats and photos of fourteen pageant contestants—a bona fide binder full of women.

"So, so, so good to see you!" says Carey Ng, the director of the Miss Universe Malaysia program, rushing over when he enters the rehearsal room. Thanuja Ananthan, Miss Malaysia World 2009, gives Lee a hug. Nearby, fourteen contestants rehearse walking from point to point in sequence, doing their best to pretend the drab, fluorescent-lit conference room is a stage. The national pageant is in three days. The winner will advance to Miss Universe.

Lee has arrived at this decaying, relentlessly themed host hotel, the Palace of the Golden Horses—there are horse statues, horse paintings, horseshoe patterns in the rugs, even horse-shaped soap bottles in the bathrooms—to advise Ng (pronounced "ing") on which of Malaysia’s contestants will have the best chance of bringing home the Miss Universe title on an international stage. He is the pageant's youngest judge.

Certain Latin American countries have a word for his kind of work, Missólogo—Miss Universe–ologist—and as the contestants practice the opening parade, he paces around them with a cool, clinical stare. They are young women between the ages of 17 and 26. A few are models from Kuala Lumpur, one a YouTube personality, another a former Singapore Airlines flight attendant, several still students from Penang, Selangor, and Borneo. All gorgeous, to be sure.

But their walking isn’t good enough.

"GO! GO! GO! GO!" yells an exasperated catwalk coach. "Oh, my GOD!"

The Malaysians are in trouble. Though the pleading slogan on the contestants' identical black T-shirts might want you to believe otherwise ("Miss Universe Malaysia 2016: Hip. Urban. Relevant. Real"), no Miss Malaysia has made the Universe semifinals in 46 years—only Sri Lanka and Honduras have worse records, says Lee. Further complicating matters, for the past two decades there has been a fatwa—yes, a fatwa, a state-enforced decree—prohibiting Muslims, 61 percent of the country's population, from competing in pageants. (Three women were arrested at Miss Malaysia Petite 1997).

Lee has coached top performers: Miss Albania 2010, Miss Chinas 2011–2014, Miss Indonesia 2015, and all save one have made the semis or, at the very least, brought home a prize like Miss Congeniality. Now, with time and sharia law stacked against him, Lee must help end the Malaysian drought.

That night Ng dresses the women down: "Every single time you step out of your room, you need to be ready. Today, a lot of you looked like you'd been sick for a week, OK?" Her eyes are hard, unforgiving. "You need to be ready. Every. Single. Time!"

Lee will tell you that from 2005 until Donald Trump sold the Miss Universe pageant last year, the billionaire quietly handpicked as many as six semifinalists—"Trump cards," they were called.

In Miss Universe, Lee later explains, the decisive battles take place during the days preceding the pageant. There are preliminary swimsuit, evening gown, and interview competitions, and also countless extracurricular charity dinners and press junkets that are no less crucial. The international selection process is opaque, so Lee has done his best to reverse-engineer it. The women are judged on their raw beauty, of course. But from what I gather they can be evaluated for their poise, personality, and wit, too—as well as their humor, imagination, style, generosity, sensitivity, authenticity, aptitude for small talk, ability to eat without spilling, patience with small children, patience with geriatrics, patience waiting in line, cheerfulness, kindness, boldness, self-awareness, and finesse under duress. It also helps to have a certain je ne sais quoi. This state of total judgment is the perverse result of decades of wars between pageant organizers and critics, dating back to pageants' early days as bathing-suit parades in 1920s Atlantic City. Every time decriers complained that pageants were superficial, organizers made the judging criteria even more insanely holistic. See, we measure the whole woman.