The New York Times bestseller Adeline Yen Mah writes her compelling story of heartbreak. Chinese Cinderella: A True Story of an Unwanted Daughter shows how she goes through hard times and tries to stay strong. Adeline Yen Mah is born into a family who neglects and hurts her physically and emotionally. Her aunt and grandparents are the only ones who believe in her and show their love to her. Mah’s stepmother, Niang, hates her and tries to keep Adeline from having a life outside her home. Her rewards and prizes from school won’t help her family love her. In fact, they dislike her more and more every time she comes home with one. Her siblings take her things and hurt her. Killing her duckling, PLT, and insulting her in front of her family is only the surface of the hard things Yen Mah has to go through. Her father and stepmother send Adeline to different schools but she still is tied to her home, hoping for a letter from her family. Through torment and sadness, Adeline tries to find herself and the world around her. Throughout the novel, the author tells her story through her own eyes. She tells the reader to be strong and that we are all special and unique. She stresses how important it is to be truthful, loyal, and to have a talent you share with the world. Her moral is to be the best person you can and to enjoy even the little things in life. Although her life was not easy, she believes that she should show people how she can be strong and determined to pull through. Adeline Yen Mah writes in an interesting way to pull readers in. She tells her story as if she has something to prove. Adeline remembers her life and tries to write about it. The reader can understand what she went through and feel the pain that she had to encounter. Most readers can relate to Yen Mah and her story in some way. This book is a heart-felt memoir that touches anyone. I enjoyed how it makes you react to the novel. It is told in so much detail that you actually feel like you are in the story. The story moves you before you even read all the way through. It's never difficult to understand what the author goes through. Some situations are vague and lack detail but when you read the book you understand why. When Adeline Yen Mah describes her boarding school in Tianjin, it is described in little detail. She improves the book by trying to let the reader understand how alone she feels and help us create our own images in our mind. Mah tells a story of love and acceptance. Readers will connect with the memoir and believe in change for innocent people and their families. Thanks to Adeline Yen Mah, hope and healing is a place in the world for everyone.

In Adeline Yen Mah’s Chinese Cinderella, we discover the horrific events of an unloved daughter. Her family loaves her, blaming the death of their wife and mother on the meek and frail child. She faces many difficult obstacles through her adolescent life such as being forgotten to take to school, being left in border schools by herself, and dealing with domestic abuse previous to this. Mah’s goal is to retell the tragedies of her childhood, get the point across that life isn’t always fun and daisies, and give strength to those that are in a similar situation as she has been in. If you notice in the very first sentence of the memoir, Mah’s tone has a passionate air towards the book she wrote, Chinese Cinderella. Stating that she has “always cherished this dream of creating something unique and imperishable.” She sounds rather lavish with a sense of a small child with their head stuck in the clouds. While Mah’s objective sounds youthful, her book is quite the success. Her approach towards Chinese Cinderella is quite plain; being a journalist and reporting facts from her childhood experience. As it is seriously not hard to tell, the main topic is about being unwanted/mistreated as a child and how lack of affection can affect character in a person. Although the tale is a nice one for anyone to read, it is mainly directed towards other children who are/were deprived of love. Also, that someone out there understands and cares. Chinese Cinderella is a haunting story, one that surely will not be leaving me soon. A very interesting, yet of course sad, read. All of this being based on the events that unfold throughout the book. As you read through the book, you pick up that the general theme: being unwanted changes who that person is. Some key information about Chinese Cinderella is the list of Chinese names in the preface. I highly suggest to at least skim over it to be able to interpret the text and not be as confused later on. Chinese Cinderella as a whole lacks a lot of emotion and is rather simplistic in the beginning of the memoir: “Ye Ye took Big Sister, Big Brother, and me for an outing.” The book is clearly written, but would have been better had it included more feelings. Mah achieves her target of retelling about her life growing up, and reached it fairly well. The story suggests that with patience, things will get better over time. As a child, I grew up with a lot of yelling and arguing as well… I relate to the feelings of wanting to blend in with the surroundings so as not to get pulled into that hot mess. Most importantly, I found the book to be so interesting because--though written in first person--the story has an objective feel to it. The fact is, the story is extremely biased to a specific audience, that being other mistreated children. My only other problem with the book would be the time gaps towards the ending… A fascinating tale for anyone interested in memoirs and sad stories. I would definitely recommend Chinese Cinderella to those groups of individuals.

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