Chinese Cinderella

These early chapters are rife with establishing information, including the Dichotomies Between Home Life and School Life for Adeline. The silver medal is the first sign of Adeline’s academic excellence, placing her at the top of a hierarchy in her class. This dynamic is reinforced by her repeated success: “I was winning the medal every week and wearing it constantly” (15). However, when brought into the home, the medal becomes a dangerous target for bullying, and Big Sister’s decision to grab the medal from Adeline and slap her is emblematic of her family’s entirely dismissive attitude. The juxtaposition between Adeline’s high position in the academic hierarchy and her low position in the family hierarchy establishes her divided sense of identity throughout the memoir, a key source of conflict.

Throughout, Adeline’s tone as the first-person narrator is innocent and youthful, signifying that she is not yet fully aware of the severity of her family’s abuse and neglect. In her conversations with Aunt Baba and Big Sister, this innocence is particularly apparent. Her naive question for Aunt Baba in the first chapter, “Is this a picture of my father and dead mama?” (2), is asked so forthrightly that it is clear that Adeline has not fully processed the implications of her mother’s death. During these earliest stages of her childhood, Adeline cannot tell the difference between friend and foe, indiscriminately placing her trust in her older family members. When this trust is consistently betrayed (except by Aunt Baba and Nai Nai), Yen Mah evokes pathos for Adeline, her younger self. Young Adeline is thus an archetypical underdog protagonist; this archetype is designed to engage readers by prompting them to cheer on the protagonist.

In addition to establishing the social dynamics and conflicts within the Yen household, these chapters also provide historical and cultural context. References to the Opium War and its practical effects on Adeline’s daily life tie her story to the grandiose history of modern China. When discussing the westernization of Chinese port cities, Yen Mah adopts a straightforward tone, delivering information as bluntly as possible: “The conquerors parceled out the best areas of these treaty ports for themselves,” she writes, “claiming them as their own ‘territories’ or ‘concessions’” (5). In a matter-of-fact way, she thus ties the hierarchies within her family—which considers her French stepmother and siblings superior—to the political hierarchies being exercised in the outside world.

Because Adeline is too young to comprehensively explain this information from her contemporary perspective, the expository voice is sometimes filtered through the words of her elder family members. On the Japanese occupation of China, she writes, “Aunt Baba told me that Japan was a strong country that had conquered most of China […] We children were supposed to show our respect and bow whenever we ran past Japanese soldiers” (16). This use of indirect dialogue reveals how reliant Adeline is on her elders to make sense of the world. Additionally, the intensity of this historical content is juxtaposed with her innocent tone, resulting in an eerie portrait of childhood experience amidst war and colonialism. Adeline’s early perceptions of the Japanese and French, therefore, introduce The Impact of External Culture Wars on Internal Conflict. The rapidly changing cultural landscape of the country is made even more poignant by Adeline’s fixation on Nai Nai’s bound feet, which come to symbolize both Chinese cultural heritage as well as its misogynist underpinnings.