Falling leaves
always come up to the roots. It is a story of a growing Chinese girl through
much emotional hardship. Adeline Yen Mah is the youngest child in a well off
Chinese family. Subsequent to her birth in 1937, her mother passes away. For
this reason, she is taken as an object of a little importance and her siblings
treat her with a difference. Though she is from a wealthy family, but barely
entitled to any of the privileges like other children.
Her real
nightmare begins when his father remarries Niang, a woman of half-Chinese and
half-French descent. It is truth that she abhors all children from the previous
woman but holds an incorrigible grudge against Adeline. Adeline’s only lifeline
is her spinster Aunt Baba, who too often tussles between various crises, thus
finds it tough to openly express her grievances against Niang because she has
already taken the husband under her command. Due to the rise of communism in
China, her family is forced to move to Hong Kong, where her father not only
saves and resurrects his business but also takes it to new heights.
It is her
academic brilliance that keeps her alive and later she gets an opportunity to
study medicals in England and thereafter she moves to America with a husband of
her choice. Her life, in a basic sense, settles down. But strangely, she has an
irrepressible urge to win the faith of her family. So, she keeps coming to her
family on various occasions, be it sad or happy. But nothing fruitful comes out
for her. After her father’s death, she finds her name on the will and realizes
that her father loved and cared for her though he could not show it fairly and
openly. All her life, she struggles to get the acceptance and love of her
family but finally she finds its reflections in the will.
It is a memoir
of an unwanted Chinese daughter who recalls all the bad episodes she went
through in her life. The tone of the book is flat as the narrator has
disparaged almost all characters except herself.
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