She has many friends at school who love her for who she is, but they do not know about her inside life. Adeline immerses herself in striving for academic achievement in the hope of winning her family's appreciation, but also for its own rewards as she finds great pleasure in words and scholarly success, progressing in things that her father and step-mother had never expected, for example by topping her class. She did not get very much love from her parents, she finds some solace in relationships with her grandfather (Ye Ye) and her Aunt Baba, but they are taken from her as Niang deems them to exert a bad influence on the children. The book outlines Adeline's struggle to find a place where she feels she belongs. She regards his first five children, especially Adeline, with distaste and cruelty while favouring her younger son, Franklin, and daughter, Susan, both born soon after the marriage. Soon, her father remarries Jeanne Prosperi (referred to as "Niang" in most of the story, an old fashioned way for "mother" in Mandarin Chinese), a beautiful half-French woman. Her father's first wife died two weeks after giving birth to her, the fifth child. An extract of this book is also part of the anthology of Edexcel English Language IGCSE new specification.Įver since Adeline was born, she had been rejected coldly because her family believed her to bring bad luck. Her father remarries a woman who stays at home and looks after the children for a living while treating Adeline and her step-siblings harshly and spoiling her own children with many luxurious things. Her mother died after giving birth to her (of blood loss) and she is known to her family as the worst luck ever. First published in 1999, Chinese Cinderella is a revised version of part of her 1997 autobiography, Falling Leaves. Chinese Cinderella and the Secret Dragon SocietyĬhinese Cinderella: The Secret Story of an Unwanted Daughter (Wishbones) is a non-fiction book by Chinese-Canadian physician and author Adeline Yen Mah describing her experiences growing up in China.
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