When China opened up to the West in the 1980s, author jinittowinit’s mother embraced icons like Marilyn Monroe. For her daughter, the idealization of American beauty was a little more complicated.
Marilyn Monroe, Crucifix II, The Last Sitting®, 1962. © THE BERT STERN TRUST.
But while Jin Ge is my legal and formal name, my family calls me Mengmeng, a pet name chosen by my mother, after the American actress Marilyn Monroe, known in Chinese as Meng Lu. Mengmeng is an almost absurdly soft complement to Golden Ax:means “dream.” My mother named me after Meng Lu for one reason only: She wanted me to be beautiful.
More than just clothes—anything ostensibly American was fashionable. For the first time in her life, my mother could read Western novels, listen to rock and roll, watch Hollywood movies, yearn for Nikes., a cognate of “yankee.” For my mother and her peers, America was synonymous with paradise.
My mother didn’t know any of this when she named me Mengmeng. In a way, my mother’s ignorance was Monroe’s own doing. The actress was so talented at reinvention that she disappeared into her own image. But Stern’s photograph, taken in 1962, just weeks before she died from a barbiturate overdose at the age of 36, hints at the layers between fiction and reality, viewer and subject. It was the last shoot Monroe would ever sit for, and she had asked to see the images before they went to print.
It was also the beginning of many years of hardship. In Shanghai, my mother was a practicing physician, but in America she had to start over as a lab tech and research assistant, eventually redoing years of grueling residency. My parents raised me on students’ salaries while sending money back to their families in China. We lived below the poverty line; somehow, my mother had won a new life where she was once again the poorest of the poor.
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