Chinese Cinderella: The True Story of an Unwanted Daughter (1-41)

Chinese Cinderella: the True Story of an Unwanted Daughter by Adeline Yen Mah tells the factual story of an unwanted daughter in a rich Chinese family. Her birth mother dies after childbirth and at a very young age, Yen Mah has been hated by her family members for something she didn’t intentionally do. Yen Mah’s grandparents, who are the head of the family, are nice to her and don’t have the hatred that everyone else holds. Beside her grandparents, Yen Mah is close to her Aunt Baba but deep down her aunt has a grudged against her for killing her best friend. Though Yen Mah is recognize in first grade for her achievements, her siblings mistreat her behind the adults’ backs and are ashamed of her. There are times in which no one remembers to drop and pick her up from and to school. Yen Mah’s father is wanted by Japanese business men during World War II and he flees their home; her stepmother, Niang, and her young stepbrother leaves with him for a year and a half. Yen Mah and her siblings live a life with more freedom and happiness in their life, though Yen Mah is still abused. During this time, her grandmother Nai Nai experiences a stroke and pasts away. Later, Yen Mah and her siblings moved to Shanghai to be reunited with the rest of their family in their overly decorative home where there are treated as a group by their parents rather than individuals. Niang takes over as the head of the house and everyone dares not to talk back to her. She expresses her hatred to Yen Mah by threatening her and when Yen Mah needed tram money, she refuses to beg before her stepmother, unlike her siblings who did. At a young age she was already looking out for herself.

“Hearing this, I’d feel a stab of anguish because I was the only one always excluded” (Yen Mah 41).

When I read this sentence and many of the other sentences relating to her feeling, I felt pity for Yen Mah and what she had to go through as a child. She lived as a person being hated and she didn’t do it on purpose but her family members don’t see it that way. They think that she was the cause of her mother’s death though it was really a disease that murders her mother; they just put their disgust on her by blaming her. She was always excluded in the family and as a child she doesn’t have the say in the family. When her grandmother was alive, Yen Mah’s life was better than the one she was experiencing after her death. This is an important quote because as a young child she was already experiencing negative emotions which she could’ve encounter when she’s a bit older.