Falling Leaves: The True Story of an Unwanted Chinese daughter by Adeline Yen Mah
Published by: Penguin Books
Autobiography/Memoir, 278p
Rating: 3 and a half/5 stars
Book summary:
Adeline Yen Mah’s childhood in Chin during the civil war was a time of fear, isolation and humiliation. The cause of this was not political upheaval but systematic emotional and physical abuse by her step mother and siblings and rejection by her father. Falling Leaves is the story of a ‘Fifth younger daughter’ and her determination to survive the pain of a lonely childhood. The author’s memoir of life in mainland China and after the 1949 revolution–Hong Kong is a gruesome chronicle of nonstop emotional abuse from her wealthy father and his beautiful, cruel second wife. This book is a look at a culture, a country, a family and relationships that just didn’t work for any of the children.
My Review:
I had picked up Falling Leaves since I love to read about different countries and cultures and because this book looked like it had quite a story to tell. And what a story it tells in its 278 pages! With Chinese proverbs as chapter names, Adeline Yen Mah’s autobiography is an unwavering account of growing up in a very well to do family fraught with distrust and discord. The book opens with the reading of the first page of Adeline’s father’s will and the disbelief that builds up amongst her siblings when it is announced that the entire estate of Joseph Yen has been left to Jeanne, his second wife who declares that nothing is left of her husband’s properties. The family is instructed not to read or discuss any further of the will and everyone quietly hands back their copies of the will, thereby setting the tone of the story that unravels further.
Adeline then takes us back to the world of Shanghai in the context of the Opium War and the women in her family who rebelled and made their own path : how her grand aunt rejected all food and drink for days at the age of 3 until her feet ‘were rescued and set free’ and another aunt whose business acumen leads her to start a successful women’s bank. Her accounts of her grandfather setting up a flourishing business in Shanghai that is made more successful and enterprising by her father makes for a gripping read for its takes us to the global place that Shanghai occupied with foreign traders making a beeline for trade prospects.
Adeline’s narration of the way marriage alliances are fixed and then carried out in China were not new for me as I have read many other books set in China but what did stood out for me was the way women were still being treated as lesser than the men even in the well to do families where the family elders are educated. The narration gets stark by the time the author is born for her mother dies just days after her birth and soon her father who has been widowed at the age of 30 gets married to Jeanne a strikingly and beautiful woman whose father is French and mother, Chinese. Her addition to the family leads to division of loyalties amongst her four siblings, which Jeane uses to control the children and she soon has total control of the family in terms of who gets to say what, when and how much. Jeane also sidelines her father in law and her husband’s aunt, the later who brought up the children while foregoing her own marriage. Her preferential treatment towards her two children later gets lop sided when her son dies and her only daughter ends up as persona non grata.
I had difficulty controlling my tears reading Adeline’s account of her stay in the Sacred Heart School and Orphanage once her family moves to Hong Kong while the anecdotes that she describes how she is treated by her own siblings in keeping with the way she is treated with disdain are gut wrenching. It is only when Adeline wins a prestigious writing competition that her father ultimately agrees to send her to England for further studies where she is an exotic outsider who is supposed to speak pidgin English. The nature of abuse and trauma she has faced in her earlier years contribute to Adeline reconciling to suffering and lack of affection by people towards her and this manifests in the way she gets into an emotionally abusive relationship with an older Professor who has schizophrenia and then a hasty marriage to a man she hardly knows who physically abuses here. What I liked about Falling Leaves is in the way it is written: as an account of what happened: emotionally fraught at times but there is no victimhood, no crying out loud in misery, no blame. I particularly liked it for the way it not only took me on a journey of a dysfunctional family but also for the way it captures the socio political and cultural history of Shanghai, Hong Kong and China.
Books and Conversations 