Book Review: Chinese Cinderella // Adeline Yen Mah

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“…As for Father, he doesn’t even remember my name. In his mind, I’m nothing. Less than nothing. A piece of garbage to be thrown out…”

If the name ‘Cinderella’ evokes thoughts of a poor girl mistreated by her step-mother, then you’re headed in the right direction, but without the same happy-ever-after.

Adeline Yen Mah tells the true story of her childhood during the 1940s, during the midst of many wars in China. Yen Mah’s mother died giving birth to her, so for her whole life she was blamed, hated, discriminated against, and made to feel unwanted by most of her family, save her Aunt Baba and her grandparents. Yen Mah struggles for years yearning for the approval of her father and step-mother, Niang, through her academic persistence – but even topping her class for weeks on end gets her scolded for being “too proud”. This maltreatment culminates with Yen Mah being abandoned in a convent school in Tianjin, where everybody is fleeing from, as the Communists were winning the war and taking over larger areas of China: “A Chinese student in a foreign convent school is seen by them as a member of the same religious order and will be persecuted along with the nuns if they win the war.”

Chinese Cinderella is easy to read but difficult to put down. The way Yen Mah writes thoroughly submerses the reader into a world not so long ago, yet so unnervingly different, in her simplistic but engaging writing style. Within the first few pages, you become a fly-on-the-wall in this poor girl’s childhood. But aside from the historical viewpoint of the novel, it also displays the Chinese superstitions and the importance of honor and the appearance of one’s family. Yen Mah suffered in her abusive home, deemed “bad-luck”, and was too scared to tell even her closest friends of the horrors she faced when she arrived home from school everyday.

The part of the novel that struck me the most was the chapter on PLT (a baby duckling Yen Mah named Precious Little Treasure). Each of the children received a duckling as a gift from the father’s family friend, Yen Mah got the tiniest, scrawniest baby bird from the bunch but this did not stop her from glowing with pride watching the duckling eat worms from the garden or observing her waddling around the bedroom on her small legs. The love Yen Mah showed this bird is superlative and wonderfully heart-warming as, even in a lovelorn home like hers, she can still show the utmost compassion and care for even the smallest of creatures.

While the novel ends with a prospect for Yen Mah’s academic future, it is still a mildly unsatisfactory ending – you can’t help wishing there was a nice “happy-ever-after” to subdue the distress you faced with Yen Mah through those few defining years of her life. But all in all, Chinese Cinderella is a heart-wrenching novel of despair, strength and growth.

Words by Eve

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