I am Beautiful

I really am. No, don’t laugh, I’m being serious. I’m not being vain or making it up. I really am beautiful.

I have a Dulwich Picture Gallery fridge magnet* proving it. Look, there it is, there’s my name on it: the Chinese ideogram “May” that means Beatiful. It’s more usually written in the Western-style as “Mei” or even “Mai” but my parents spelled it “May” on my birth certificate. They had always thought they’d send me to the UK and they wanted to make it easy for the Brits to spell my name. But all my life in the UK, everyone exoticises my name and refer to me variously as Yang-Mei or Yang-Mai. Sigh.

If you meet a Chinese woman, there is more than half the chance that her name is Something-Mei or Mei-Something. In most Chinese families, there will at least be one daughter with Mei in her name. Why? Because every family would love their daughter to grow up beautiful, of course.

As for the “Yang” bit of my name, it means “reflection”. So putting both parts of my name together, I am technically the reflection of beauty and not beauty itself. To understand why this is so, I need to tell you about my grandmother and her elder brothers and a Chinese belief in the greed of the gods. For the Chinese, the gods are jealous and dangerous. If they see that you have something of value that you treasure, they will take it from you - just because they can. Back in China, when my grandmother was young, she had two elder brothers whom the family loved dearly. Being a Presbyterian minister, her father had turned to the Christian God and left behind old Chinese superstitions. He had named his beloved sons with names that anointed them heavenly and perfect. And for a few years, it seemed that he had been right to forget the old Chinese gods. But these his sons did not live past their twenties, one of them dying slowly and painfully of tuberculosis. The gods coveted the young men’s pure essence and took the boys for themselves.

So for the future generations in the family, to fool the gods, we have never been named for the pure essence and I am just the reflection of beauty - worth nothing to the gods - and not the thing that they might desire, beauty itself.

The fridge magnet is a souvenir from the Lion & Dragon exhibition of photographs from Old China, currently on at the Dulwich Picture Gallery.