Falling leaves
Falling leavesIn order to explain the first scene in this memoir, Adeline Yen Mah has filled the opening chapters with lusty images of an emerging nation amid burgeoning commercial & international life at the end of an empire & the start of a revolution. Falling leaves, with its endearing cover photo, touching chapter titles & sprinkling of Chinese language characters, is about her family in the French Concession of Shanghai; about her Buddhist grandfather’s generation and how he first meets her grandmother at their arranged marriage; about their children, among whom are Adeline’s father & his sister, Aunt Baba.
It is after Adeline’s birth, during the Japanese encroachment around Tianjin in 1937, that her mother succumbs to puerperal fever leaving five children motherless & the household rudderless. While Grandfather Ye Ye & Aunt Baba & the nameless servants tend to them all, they watch as Father seeks & marries a beautiful Eurasian woman whom they must call Niang, a most formal title for a mother.
From here on Adeline Yen Mah’s memoirs take on a dour & malevolent aspect. In her scrupulous honesty, Adeline muses that Niang must have been happy in the beginning, giving her stepchildren English names, setting the tone of a fashionable household & relegating elders to back rooms & financial subservience. Niang forces siblings to choose sides, spy on each other & curry her favor. This most beautiful of stepmothers singles out the infant girl with particular venom, although beloved Ye Ye & treasured Aunt Baba are able to provide, for the first few years at least, a loving shield and some powerful if painful teachings.
Until Niang banishes Adeline to boarding schools. I survived that particular isolation myself, so I found Mrs. Mah’s descriptions devastating as well as healing. How achingly familiar were those dreamy, homesick, segregated years, except for the interesting times she lived in, post World War II China & Hong Kong.
Not even Niang’s giving birth first to the favored son & then a daughter, destined to teeter on the edge of unwantedness herself, softens this stepmother’s heart. You must watch as the father abdicates his sense of justice & I found myself screeching at someone to notice how forlorn & unwanted were this father’s father and sister. How sickening the skill with which these children learnt to connive, taunt & betray. And then Grandmother dies and Grandfather Ye Ye is desolate. Meanwhile the Japanese invasion recedes & Communism arrives.
I was glad to see this unwanted girl’s stubborn, enduring courage blossom under the concern & care...
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