If you are an adult still angry about your childhood please read this as a cautionary tale and get some help.

books:


	• Falling Leaves: The Memoir of an Unwanted Chinese Daughter Adeline Yen Mah Broadway, 1999 - 304 pages average customer review:based on 345 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

A moving life story

I cried through the first half of the book... I was deeply moved, and empathized with author's pain, her acute anxiety, her desire to be accepted and loved by her own family. Her inner strength, her patience, perseverance, her excellence in studies driven by and desire to be accepted essentially provided the platform for her success in life and the ultimate triumph over her cruel and cold Niang.

I disagree with one of the reader's comments about Adeline not being grateful to her parents for the education. Quite the contrary, throughout her life, she has been showing nothing but respect, loyalty, and gratitude to her family, despite the cruel and heartless way they all have been treating her. The entire family is nuts, and I think her stepmother had a mental illness.

Being a very independent and defiant woman myself, I really didn't understand why instead of moving away, and forgetting her family Adeline kept going back to her family, keeping all ties, try to mend the differences... I would've done what her half-sister Susan had done. This what I would've done, but this Memoir is not mine. It is Adeline Yen Mah's, it is her life, her story to tell... it's not a fiction and I believe it's tactless to criticize someone's life. You were not in her shoes and cannot possibly comprehend what she had been through.

Overall, I believe that Adeline is the happiest of her entire family. She has endured unbelievable emotional and physical abuse, had a successful carrer, a soul-mate, and the closure that came after reading her Father's will. I think every one else in her family is miserable, no matter how much money they had received in the end.

Anyway, the book is wonderfully written.

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A Powerful Lesson for All Daughters

There have been many memoirs written that detail the Chinese way of life before, during, and after Mao's Cultural Revolution. But it amazes me that each book has something different to offer the reader. Falling Leaves has excellent history of China - specifically Shanghai and Hong Kong - from the 1930's to the 1990's. What distinguishes Falling Leaves from other memoirs of the period, such as Wild Swans, is that the author was not part of the People's Army or the Red Guard. Rather, she was the poor stepchild to the wicked stepmother who married her widowed father - her millionaire father whose new wife was Eurasian: half French and half Chinese.

Adeline tried hard to please her parents, to no avail. She was basically dumped in a boarding school. No one came to visit her, and the teachers thought she was an orphan. Yet she was very bright, and fiercely driven. This combination of brains and hard work enabled her to make a life for herself. Yet, she kept making poor choices because of her low self-esteem. She stays for many years in an abusive marriage, explaining away black eyes to co-workers. And this is a PHYSICIAN, not a high-school dropout with no other options. This is the terrifying part of the memoir - the lesson all of us can learn of the dangers of trying to please others - even family - who really don't care about you, and betraying yourself, as she says she did.

The book has many Chinese proverbs, in pinyin and in characters. The only thing missing is the tones, so you unfortunately do not know how to correctly pronounce the phrases. Nevertheless, anyone interested in studying Mandarin will find this language inclusion helpful.

After the success of this book, Yen Mah gave up medicine and now writes full-time. She has a website that is very interesting. Many have signed her guestbook over the past five years, saying how Falling Leaves, and it's children's version, "Chinese Cinderella," has touched their hearts and lives.

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If you are an adult still angry about your childhood please read this as a cautionary tale and get some help.

Falling Leaves begins on the eve of the Japanese invasion of Northern China. Adeline is the youngest of five children. Her mother becomes ill shortly after giving birth to her and dies. The household includes the paternal grandparents and the father's sister, Aunt Ba. Yeye, the grandfather, is a very wealthy business man. His son, Adeline's father, manages to hide Yeye's assets from the invading Japanese. Father then marries a Eurasian teenager named, Jeanne, and together they have a son, Franklin, and a daughter, Susan. Father eventually surrenders all willpower to Jeanne. Life becomes hell for the five siblings from the first marriage, especially Adeline. She is bullied viciously by her older siblings and her father and stepmother really couldn't care less. Adeline does find an ally in her Aunt Ba and her grandfather, but they are powerless to mitigate the abuse.

After a period of separation due to the war toddler Susan doesn't recognize her mother. Jeanne takes it as a personal slight and begins beating her. Adeline tries to rescue her younger half sister and incurs the wrath of Jeanne. This incident sets the tone for the story Jeanne barely speaks to her daughter Susan from that day on and they never reconcile. Adeline becomes the permanent scapegoat and Franklin is treated like royalty.

The father is spineless throughout but, apparently stands up to Jeanne, one time, by sending Adeline to medical school in England along with her brother. Father is the one who insists that she become a doctor. Even though Adeline makes better grades than her brother Father gives him more spending money "because he is a boy." In med school there is only one other women in the class and they face a resentful male student body that plays malicious pranks on them.

What I found most unfortunate is that after graduating med school, she chooses to return to Father and Jeanne in Hong Kong (they fled the Communist takeover). She allows Jeanne to dictate her adult life and continue to treat her like crap. She decides to escape to America. Her millionaire parents refuse to lend her the money for a plane ticket, but she finds a way. Unfortunately, her mental baggage also accompanies her across the Pacific. She marries a sociopath who mooches off of and abuses her. She spends the next several decades trying, unsuccessfully, to win the love and approval from her father and stepmother that they denied to her in childhood. Unfortunately, her siblings also remain treacherous to the end.

When she returns to China after the Cultural Revolution she finds her beloved Aunt Ba a broken woman living in a hovel. I wondered during the period after Dr. Yen-Mah's divorce, when she had childcare issues, why she didn't try to rescue her Aunt Ba. Maybe she did and I missed that part. Her energy always seemed to be focused on the past and gaining the respect of her father and stepmother and somehow validating her self-worth through inheriting. (I don't think it was so much about money since anesthesiologists in the US make can make $500,000 a year.) She also has very little to say about her relationship with her own children.

Unfortunately, it never occurs to Adeline, a medical professional, to get help for this festering anger and unrealistic fantasy of reconciliation that is precluding present and future happiness. Adeline certainly suffered a lot of childhood cruelty, but she had the love and support of her Aunt Ba and her Yeye, she got to go to medical school, became an anesthesiologist in the US, had an abusive 1st marriage, but a happy 2nd one, has two sons and a granddaughter (and is now a bestselling author with the proverbial last word). I didn't get the impression that she really had any appreciation for the blessings that came into her life or a realization of just how much worse things could have turned out. That in and of itself would have been a major milestone and it would have been an inspiration to readers struggling with similar issues.

As for the claims of cultural misunderstandings my response is that her slightly younger half-sister, Susan, appears to have been able to walk away and move on with her life. The book opens with the reading of the will and Adeline points out that "Susan of course wasn't there". So, Jeanne also disinherited her only living biological child. (Franklin, the favorite and spoiled brat, died in childhood of typhus. Otherwise he, no doubt, would have inherited everything.) The difference seems to be that Adeline had an expectation and Susan didn't. Apparently Susan saw the futility of keeping up a relationship with Jeanne and chose not to become embroiled in the family intrigue. (Adeline's abusive older sister, Lydia, ingratiated herself to Jeanne by making up a lot of bad stories about Adeline.) In other words Susan was the only sibling who refused to allow a loathsome irrational woman, who unfortunately was also her biological mother, to wield power over her adult life.

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wonderful

A true story, well-written, about survival against all odds. It is also a look into 20th century China. Not all families made it through the struggle and to see how perseverance won for those who survived is inspiring.

Moving memoir, but too narrow focused

I picked up the book under a false pretext. I'd thought the memoir was about a child who was unwanted due to the restriction on the number of children per family. In that way I felt cheated, but still got engrossed in the book anyway.

What bothered me about the book was how years later, and despite her advanced age, the author still seems to carry so much baggage on her. She still remains in victim mode, years after the death of her father and step mother.

While I admire her childhood coping skills such as weaving fantasies and visualizations, I can't help but notice that despite awareness of the historical background, she doesn't seem to have gratitude that at least her parents kept her in school, as opposed to sending her out in the streets or selling her into prostitution. As an adult, she seems incapable of clinging on to this silver lining, and using it as a way to get a new future.

Throughout the course of the book, I cringed at the extreme docility the author exhibits. I felt angry at some of the atrocities, yet the author doesn't seem to feel any. In her desire for acceptance, she subjects herself over and over to the worst emotional abuse. Certainly as a child, she didn't have a choice (thought she was lucky to be sent away) but as an adult, there's no reason for coming back!

The whole book is a tragedy. We see how the abused turn into abusers. Franklin abuses his sister Susan, Adeline is abused by Gregory and Edgar, and to an extent, James as well by his betrayal and "see no evil, hear no evil" attitude. When we see Lydia abusing her aunt and benefactor, the possibilty that abuse is a learned trait becomes very real and chilling. We see the same abuse when Adeline allows her child to be abused by her first husband, waiting for her parents approval to leave the union.

The siblings are mostly pathetic in their desire to play puppets to the manipulations of Adeline, whose consistency lies in remaining teenage brat throughout her life. One can't help but wonder though, if the story would have been different had there not been money involved.

The person who earns my admiration is Susan, who breaks free and reclaims her self. While I think the author has made a positive step by writing the book and breaking the emotional shackles (and earning her birthright that way too), I still think she'd be better served by therapy so she can finally shed the victim mantle!

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reviews: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, page 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17

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