“We’re on our way to another ‘Miss’ thing,” a Ukrainian girl said from her seat with a groan.

I was hired as Miss America; Anna, despite being Brazilian, as Miss Chile. It would have been the strangest 36 hours of my life—if, over the previous two months, I hadn’t done it twice before.

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My first stint as Miss America for hire had been that September, in the desert oasis of Dunhuang, for the city’s International Grape Festival. It was a surreal experience in which 40 models, including me, were paid to walk down a catwalk for about 2,000 locals. Later, we rode camels across the dunes of the Gobi Desert, crisscrossing the sand in single file. The photos of all 40 of us on camelback—some only in bras, to dodge tanlines—are wonderfully absurd.

For the second pageant, in October, I was hired to cruise around Dalian in a fake gold Mercedes golf cart with five other girls for three days, in an effort to lure potential buyers into investing in a miniature replica of Versailles. A printed guide to the event offered fictitious backstories in Chinese about each contestant, and her purpose there. We wore dresses whose colors the organizers must have thought somehow corresponded to our countries of origin. As Miss America, I strangely, and perhaps unpatriotically, wore a teal-tinged baby blue.

Pageants like these typically serve as glittery infomercials for the cities where they take place—“Visit Ordos, or Dunhuang, or Dalian, or Chengdu: wealthy enough to import foreign pageant queens!” The events are usually funded by investment-hungry real-estate developers, city tourism departments, or, in the case of my pageant in Ordos, China Central Television. Photos and film captured during the event can live on via promotional materials for months, even years. In Dunhuang, billboards advertised the pageant using images of models from the previous year’s event.

Models booked for these pageants aren’t actual beauty queens—they’re aspiring runway models sent to Asia by their “mother agencies,” which are usually based in their home countries and serve as their main managers. In return for placing them abroad, mother agents take a cut of models’ pay (typically 10 percent). Once in China—popular cities for work include Beijing and Shanghai—models often build their portfolios with magazine spreads, runway shows, and catalogs. Most contracts stipulate that a model can’t reject jobs, however dubious, or her contract will be broken and she’ll be sent home.

Less reputable agencies in China provide models with few details about the jobs they'll be doing, calling gigs “fashion shows” and sending them on their way. Of the nine “fashion shows” I booked while in Beijing, only two were on a runway. The rest were fake pageants, car shows, and trade shows—but I was not informed of their nature until I was en route to the events. Models flagged as having low earning potential will do fake pageants frequently, as they’re easy to book. I once met a Russian teenager who was stuck traveling on a bus for 10 days across rural China as “Miss Argentina.”