Chinese Cinderella and Falling Leaves
By Adeline Yen Mah

If only I had read Chinese Cinderella during my so called turbulent childhood days, I definitely would not have ended up as a Class-A sloth. I wouldn’t have shirked my chores and homework and would’ve swot my way to a PhD! No kidding.

This thought has passed through my cerebral cortex and has undergone some degree of intellectual assent. My conclusion? My childhood was way too comfortable.

John Milton was right when he said, “The mind is its own place, and in itself can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven…”

Looking back at my thus-termed turbulent childhood, I realized that much of the turbulence actually came from within. Sure, the physical world outside me then wasn’t entirely conducive to a growing child. My dad was commanding, authoritative and sometimes vindictive. My mom, on the other hand, was barely out of her teens when she had me. How could she have guided me through the rough and tumbles of growing up when she was probably too busy trying to find herself and making sense out of her un-thought of union with a man almost two decades older than she? And my teachers with their dagger looks were just downright terrorizing. School resembled a horror-house cum boot camp. (Those who went through traditional Chinese schools in the roaring ‘70s can substantiate that claim.) There was less time for play and more time for study. Home-life was equally dismal. Weekends were reserved for more homework which savagely curtailed TV-watching thereby reducing my time for Super Friends and The Wonder Twins. Mealtimes were spent daydreaming of the kid-staples that I was ruefully deprived of – ice cold Coke and Jack n’ Jill Chippy, while my father would extol the virtues of vegetables and warm milk. Family chats were devoid of convivial pep-talks. Just sibling squabbles and parental directives punctuated with my father’s hoarse sonorous voice. The closest thing I had to a hug was only during the perfunctory mano we carry out to the folks.

Yet my supposed-despair was not even a fraction of what Adeline Yen Mah went through as a child. As I pore through the pages of Chinese Cinderella, I couldn’t help but be thankful of my childhood. Maybe, I’ve given too much attention to my rebellious streak, and left no chance to see that there was after all, a good side of life. Perhaps, I was too engrossed feeling sorry about myself forgetting that I actually had a choice to do something about it.

The book is an autobiography of Adeline Yen Mah who was born into an affluent and powerful family in China in the 1930s. Adeline tells the story of her own more personal struggle, her grim, gruesome childhood. She was the unwanted daughter, the child that "killed her mother" (in reality, poor post-natal hygiene killed her mother). Her family has labeled her ‘bad luck’ for causing her mother’s death. Her situation became intolerably worse when her father married a second time, to the beautiful but cruel Niang whose primary goal in life seemed to have been manipulation and emotional abuse. There are a lot of depressing and sometimes infuriating parts but in the end, Adeline emerges out triumphant.

After reading Chinese Cinderella, I found myself hankering for more of Adeline’s story. So I grabbed a copy of Falling Leaves. The former is geared to the younger audience while the latter is a more complete account of Adeline’s struggle for love and recognition amidst deceit and pain. The saving grace is how Adeline prevailed over her sorrow and emerged as a victor in life. It isn't just the story of a wretched childhood or adulthood. It’s a story of overcoming one.

Both books are the hard-to-put-down-read-through-the-night kind of books. And needles to say, they struck a chord in me…most especially because I was reading them during the first Survival Guide for 2007 of the Renaissance Alternative University in Baguio a couple of weeks ago. The guide is some sort of a symposium on the how to’s of studying and other important matters in a student’s life. Which consequently led to another deep regret on my part.

I’m glad I came with my daughters to the guide. My greatest rankle though is I wish I attended the guide during my purpose-less-student-life days. Perhaps, I would’ve finished school with honors and would’ve been panalo instead of being just pasado while staying afloat on a sea of 3s that eventually earned me a pasaway badge and a chip on my shoulder.

Marcus Aurelius Antonius smacked it right on target, “ A wrongdoer is often a man who has left something undone, not always one who has done something wrong.”

I must admit that it’s hard to shake off that guilty feeling that I’ve not given it my all. That at one point in my life, I did waste my youth in unnecessary anguish. After much rumination, I’ve unsuspectingly grasped the recipe for the making of a sloth. 1/3 c of comfort mingled with ½ c of purposeless-ness added with a generous helping of self-centeredness. Mix thoroughly and bake in an oven heated with amorphous boredom. One can never truly overstress the pernicious effects of comfort, purposeless-ness, selfishness and vague languor a.ka. I’m-so-Bored-with-life!

Enough of ranting. Now the raving part.

Chinese Cinderella and Falling Leaves were written with the mid-20th-century-China as backdrop. The reader gets to explore a completely different culture and a life so foreign. There are a great deal of retelling of Chinese history and liberal smatterings of Chinese words and phrases. Literature and history fans will surely find a surprising treat at the end of both books. Sorry about the spoiler. But those “surprise” stories promise to make both reads more interesting.

To sum up, the books personally spoke to me about the powerful message of hope – to believe that in the depths of winter, there lay an invincible summer within – giving truth to the Chinese phrase, Shan kao, shui chang, you he bu ke? (The mountain is high, the river is long. Is anything impossible?)

Merrilee R.C. Montana The author has long repented of her youthful folly and is now assiduously studying Mandarin to rectify her past mistakes. She fervently prays that by God’s grace, she’s able to rear all four of her children as swots in the school of life.