Adeline Yen Mah: Chinese Cinderella and the Secret Dragon Society

"The Secret Story of an Unwanted Daughter" is the subtitle of Chinese Cinderella, Adeline Yen Mah's unforgettable and heart-breaking account of her lonely and unhappy childhood.

Yen Mah was the fifth child in an affluent family. Her mother died two weeks after Yen Mah's birth because of complications from the delivery.

In Chinese culture this tragedy marked Yen Mah as bad luck to the family. Already an outcast among her own siblings, Yen Mah's situation became more unpleasant when her father remarried.

Her new stepmother was a self-centred Eurasian woman who resented the five children she acquired with her husband. She was hostile towards all the children, particularly the unlucky Yen Mah, and went out of her way to inflict many petty cruelties on the child while favouring her own two children.

Starved of love and any small kindness, and facing both emotional and physical abuse from her family nearly every day, Yen Mah took refuge in her studies.

She hoped that by excelling academically she might win some respect and recognition from her family, but she also loved the work for its own sake and took great satisfaction from her books.

Books and stories became a lifeline for Yen Mah. For her, the Chinese proverb "Jing Xi Zi Zh" (respect and cherish written words) was almost a philosophy, a value that kept her going through the anguish of her childhood.

She used her pocket money to borrow tattered King Fu novels from a portable library service, and these tales of action and high adventure became models for her own writing.

Yen Mah's best friend was an avid film-goer, and she would relate the plots to Yen Mah, who was never allowed to go to the movies. She often borrowed the plots for her stories, and she was particularly inspired by a film called Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo.

The film was based on a real event in Japanese-occupied China during World War II. After the bombing of Pearl Harbour some American planes carried out a retaliatory raid on four Japanese cities.

The planes flew on to China after the raid but ran out of fuel. Instead of landing in one of the regions still controlled by the Chinese, the pilots were forced to land in one of the coastal regions occupied by Japanese troops. A few US soldiers were captured but the majority escaped, aided by local Chinese people.

Yen Mah found this event enormously inspiring and wrote a story about it. She called it "The Ruptured Duck" and it became a great success with her classmates.

Years after the publication of Chinese Cinderella, readers kept asking Yen Mah about the King Fu stories she had written as a child. Adeline felt she could not disappoint so many children and decided to write a book based on that long-ago novella "The Ruptured Duck".

Although Chinese Cinderella, or CC as she is nicknamed, is the central character of this new book, the story is not auto-biographical and is not intended as a sequel to Chinese Cinderella.

Chinese Cinderella and the Secret Dragon Society is a work of fiction, albeit influenced by many of Yen Mah's experiences.

Publisher: Allen &Unwin

Price: $18.00

Age: 10-16 yrs

Recommended by: Jenni Keestra