12. Biography · Memoir · Autobiography

Chinese Cinderella:
The True Story of an Unwanted Daughter
By Adeline Yen Mah

Annotation:

Beginning with her tragic childhood identity as "'Wu Mei,' the Fifth Younger Sister and unwanted daughter who caused her mother's death," Adeline Yen Mah recalls coming of age in 1940s China -- detailing the life lessons and literature that have led to transformation and happiness ever after.

Recommendation:

Adeline Yen Mah delivers her emotionally difficult, culturally complex coming of age saga with the beguiling simplicity of a storybook. The title, Chinese Cinderella, carries great significance. The literary and cross-cultural implications make it the perfect name. Also appropriate -- Mah's subtitle: The True Story of an Unwanted Daughter. To be sure, the autobiographical account of isolation, abuse and abandonment is not the wistful stuff of kid's books. Still, the memoir's clarity of theme and intention give it a timeless, mythic quality.

Two weeks after Yen Jun-ling (Adeline) is born, her mother dies -- and the baby is immediately considered by her family to be bad luck. Resented and ridiculed by siblings, she is thereafter referred to as, "'Wu Mei,' the Fifth Younger Sister and unwanted daughter who caused her mother’s death." Her father quickly remarries, having met a haughty young "Eurasian" girl who is half French, half Chinese . . . and half his age. Though none of the family's five children are treated well by their new stepmother, "Wu Mei" is singled out for abuse.

"I couldn’t possibly tell anyone the truth,
how worthless and ugly stepmother
made me feel most of the time. How I was
held responsible for any misfortune, and
was resented for simply being around."

The legend of Cinderella is ancient and universal. There are likely thousands of versions of the tale. Plot particulars vary from story to story, but the themes are consistent and involve variants of these basic elements: humility, imagination, hard work, hope, and magic reversals of fortune. Chinese Cinderella is found to incorporate each of these ideas. Although Adeline Yen Mah's life story does not involve any dancing mice or magic slippers, there is a sense of fate and fortune running through her memoir -- a force which is finally identified in the book as "serendipity."

Set in the mid-1940s, Chinese Cinderella relates the excruciating truth of Jun-ling's experiences growing up in Tianjin and Shanghai. Mah's autobiographical work -- chronicling the emotionally and intellectually significant events of her youth, along with a host of historical details -- is a model of literary integrity and cultural competence.

"I read because I have to.
It drives everything else from my mind.
It lets me escape to find other worlds."

Adeline Yen Mah methodically recounts the emotional upheaval of her entire adolescent years, as she moves through several different cities, schools and living arrangements. She also records her increasingly impactful encounters with literature, most notably A Little Princess by Frances Hodgson Burnett, and Shakespeare's King Lear – both of which include the major elements of the Cinderella legend itself.

Eventually becoming popular under the name, A Little Princess, Burnett’s 1905 children's novella first appeared in 1888 as Sara Crewe: or, What happened at Miss Minchin's Boarding School. Whether this lengthy label informed the wordiness of Chinese Cinderella: The True Story of an Unwanted Daughter is anyone's guess. Burnett’s plot, however, has unquestionably influenced Mah's memoir.

Interesting side note: Burnett’s book was inspired by Charlotte Brontë's unfinished novel, Emma.

A Little Princess involves prim and proper protagonist, Sara. She is away from home at school when news arrives that her father has lost his fortune and died. Happy at the chance to put the “little princess” in her place, Headmistress Minchin removes Sara from school and works her as a servant. Despite the harsh conditions, Sara thrives by withdrawing into the imaginative worlds of books and stories. Through a final un-twist of fate, Sara’s fortune is recovered and Miss Minchin’s machinations are exposed.

“This fairy tale . . . gripped my imagination as no other book had ever done before. I read it again and again. Suffered Sara’s humiliation, cried over her despair, mourned the loss of her father, and savored her final triumph," Mah writes. "For the first time I realized that adults could be wrong in their judgment of a child. If I tried hard enough to become a princess inside, like Sara Crewe, perhaps I, too might one day reverse everyone’s poor opinion of me."

"Transcend your abuse
and transform it into a source of
courage, creativity and compassion."

Shakespeare’s young and true, Cordelia -- who was once "most rich" but is made "poor" -- is outcast from King Lear and her two ruthless sisters, Regan and Goneril. Shakespeare’s play provides Mah a platform for memorializing her dear grandfather and contextualizing her stepmother’s seemingly wicked delight at humiliating the helpless old man.

Jun-ling's growing awareness of great books and great truths -- and the gradual acceptance of her own ability to articulate experience through writing -- is reflected in the text’s shifting dimensions. The memoir becomes a chrono-kaleidoscope, recalling personal moments of growth, historical moments in the broad sweep of memory, and literary moments of dramatic action that travel through language across time.

"In August 1945, when I was almost 8 years old, America dropped the atom bomb on Japan. This ended the second World War. America was the new conqueror. At school we were given surplus C rations for our lunch left by China’s new heroes, the U.S. Marines."

With its explicit connections to works by Wordsworth, Shakespeare, Burnett and others, plus subtle links to an array of world literatures, Chinese Cinderella embodies the very concept of cultural competence. Jun-ling's struggle for self-worth and personal identity, amidst the international collision of World War II, maneuvers the reader through multiple cultural perspectives.

It is from confidence gained through the wisdom of her Buddhist grandfather and the urging of Mother Louisa, a French nun at her Catholic high school, that Jun-ling finds the courage to enter an English playwriting competition. Winning this contest eventually leads to Jun-ling becoming the first female in her family to attend college. Though based on her own experiences, the protagonist of her winning play, she explains, is a young African girl. "Into her lips I injected my loneliness and feeling of being unwanted. To my heroine I gave everything of myself." In the end, she says her African heroine "triumphs over adversity through her own efforts."

"To me, writing was pure pleasure.
It thrilled me to be able to escape the horrors
of my daily life in such a simple way.
When I wrote I forgot that I was an unwanted
daughter who caused her mother’s death.
Instead, I could be anybody I wished to be."

The richness of Adeline Yen Mah’s slim, 240-page book -- achieved through a consistent clarity of language, style and purpose -- gives her story a great deal of weight. Her imaginative thematic structuring provides meaning through a weave of historical facts and personal findings. Deepening and expanding the expectations and possibilities of its genre, this memoir is found to be both metacognitive and metacultural -- that is, of the transcultural foundation that transcends culture.

Adeline Yen Mah has devised a unique, nonfiction fable for the multicultural young adult. Chinese Cinderella is a storybook for real teenagers -- about an adolescent with real problems -- who, through fortitude and faith, finds a way to make her dreams come true.

Nomination: Yes

Genre Classification: Autobiography/ Memoir, Coming of Age, Multicultural

Citation: Mah, Adeline Yen. Chinese Cinderella: The True Story of an Unwanted Daughter. New York: Delacorte Press, 1999. Print

Adeline Yen Mah info:
http://adelineyenmah.com