June 26, 1998
FALLING LEAVES
The True Story of an Unwanted Chinese Daughter
by: Adeline Yen Mah
Wiley. 278 pp. $22.95
By D. L. Muñoz
which were to later bear fruit within Jung-Ling (later to be known by the European name Adeline), were first manifested in her Grand Aunt.
"Grand Aunt (known as Gong Gong) at the age of three showed her fiery independence by absolutely refusing to have her feet bound as was the custom. Grand Aunt would cut off or tear off the bandages as soon as they were placed on her feet. Grand Aunt finally prevailed by rejecting all food and drink until "her feet were rescued and set free," said Adeline Yen Mah in her autobiography FALLING LEAVES.
Yen Mah spins a story around her family which tells a Confucian tale of her suffering at the hands of her stepmother, brothers & sisters. In stark foreboding terms she paints a rejection of her by her family. A rejection that she suffers all her life.
China had a major encounter with the Western world when the Opium War of 1842 opened up Shanghai to the world. Briton, France and the United States were among the first to establish foreign settlements within the city of Shanghai. Within these settlements, foreigners and/or Chinese, who lived in the settlements, were exempt from the laws of China.
The Chinese Emperors, the Mandarins, the Taoist, Buddhist, Muslims and Confucian people all hated the foreign devils and by implication the Chinese merchants and workers who lived in the foreign settlements... China had been violated! "All Chinese were considered as inferiors... all this was bitterly resented," said Adeline. Jung-Ling's Grandfather Ye Ye , was to move his entire family, including her Grand Aunt, into the French Concession where he prospered, while the rest of the nation starved.
In 1858, the second Opium War opened up Tianjin as another treaty port. Grandfather Ye Ye moved some of his enterprises to Tianjin and opened new ones. In 1918 when Grandfather Ye Ye moved to Tianjin, the last Qing Emperor had been disposed. China fragmented into fifedoms governed by war lords. Meanwhile, Japan took control of Shandong Province after the end of World War I and then marched on Manchuria. Eventually. The family prospered while the Japanese pillaged and murdered the Chinese populace.
Jung-Lin's mother Ren Yong Ping met and married her father Joseph Yen. The marriage was happy. They had four children. And them came Jung-Ling in 1937. Her mother died two weeks after her birth with complications generated by her birth. Jung Ling became the least loved because her mother had died in childbirth and therefor consider unlucky. Her family life turned into a life of pain and isolation. No matter what happened in their life, she was to be the unwanted child. She was never able to throw off the symbolic shackles that bound her heart and soul.
Confucianism-religious control structured the whole society. Jung-lin's birth which killed her mother, made her the hated sibling... Her father remarried to Jeanne Prosperi,who was part French, part Chinese and all European. She manifested the new China. She was hated by her stepmother, who gave her the European name of Adeline. From that moment on, Adeline's life became a living hell from which she was to find no escape until her step mother died.
Adeline struggled to gain respect and love from her stepmother and Father, was denied. She could not win their love even upon their death.
Adeline Yen Mah will live her life in the United States till the day she dies. She now realizes she is an outcast from her own family living in China, still unloved and unwanted. As an Asian-American, she now realize's that her happiness now lies with her Chinese-American husband and her own children. She has bared her soul for the world to read and in the process cleansed out a deep wound in her heart that had weighted her down all her life.
Xin Ru Si Hui:Hearts Reduced To Ashes
(If I were to give star ratings to a book "FALLING LEAVES" ranks FIVE STARS.)
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