In the text “Chinese Cinderella”, Adeline Yen Mah is both a fortunate and unfortunate child. A fortunate child is someone that is favored, lucky, loved, happy and thriving. On the other hand being unfortunate is to be unlucky, poor, cursed, miserable and Adeline is neither. In the text, it is presented that she has had multiple occurrences with bad luck. Continuously it shows that she is unfortunate because her family does not care about her. Due to Adeline having a horrendous childhood shows that she was an inarguably an unfortunate child.
Adeline was not loved by her family. After her mother died a few weeks after giving birth to Adeline, her family to think she was bad luck, nobody in her family loved her except her Aunt Baba. When her mother died Father remarried and had more children. Father then stopped caring about most of his other children and preferred Niang’s children. Due to Niang feeling animosity toward Adeline and her father not caring at all about his daughter they sent her to a boarding school. The boarding
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Throughout Adeline’s life, Niang has loathed Adeline. It all started when Adeline stood up for Little Sister. Niang went on a six-month outing to South Shanghai after Little Sister was born, because of the outing Little Sister did not remember her mother, she only new Aunt Baba. They tried to make Little Sister go to her mother but she did not want to go to her. Niang became furious and started slapping little sister. In ‘Chinese Cinderella it states “I knew I should remain silent but words choked me and I felt compelled to spit them out. Finally, I could bear it no longer. Quaking with terror, I blurted out, ‘Don’t beat her anymore. She is only a baby!” After this Niang becomes enraged then screams “I shall never forgive you! Never! Never! Never! You better watch out from now on! You will pay for your arrogance!” from then on Naing’s hatred for Adeline was
The first aspect of Adela’s characteristics is that she is very proud of her family history, but in a negative way. She
The bitter cold bit against the starved girl’s skeletal body. She was tired. Her parents discussed ways to get to good lands. They told her the only way to have a better life was to sell her into slavery. The girl, only ten years old was silent. She dreamed of fine clothing and good food. The girl went to the House of Hwang. She was too ugly to be in sight; she was kept in the scullery. All dreams of any kind were lashed out of her young mind. Mistreated, beaten, and underestimated, young O-lan learned to work hard and became resigned to her fate. One day, the Old Mistress summoned her and told her that she was to be married to a poor farmer. The other slaves scoffed, but O-lan was grateful for a chance to be free - they married. O-lan vowed to return to the great house one day in fine clothing with a son. Her resolve was strong; no one could say otherwise. Her years of abuse as a slave had made O-lan wise, stoic, and bitter; whether the events of her life strengthened or weakened her is the question.
Adeline had been treated like trash all of her life by her parents. “Nothing will ever come to you.”(Yen Mah 103) Niang is a very strict, distasteful, and hated person in the book. This is important because it shows that Niang is cruel. “Girls like you should be sent away.”(Yen Mah 103) This is important because it shows that Niang hates Adeline. All in all, this shows that when Adeline was a child, she was treated like trash by Niang.
The character Cinderella in Cinderella could be illustrated and analyze in Erikson’s stage of identity versus role confusion. Identity versus role confusion was when a young people earlier conflict was resolved negatively, or if society limits their choices to one that does not match their abilities and desires, they may appear shallow, directionless, and unprepared for the challenges of adulthood. This stage begins with Cinderella’s father dying and leaving her to live with her stepmother which shows her true colors. During this period, Cinderella is kept with an evil stepmother and two stepsisters that don’t like her and will do anything to make her feel bad. This is where her terrible life begins.
Adeline encounters many hardships but always perseveres, similar this quote, “You may encounter many defeats, but you must not be defeated. In fact, it may be necessary to encounter the defeats, so you can know who you are, what you can rise from, how you can still come out of it.” (Maya Angelou). In the novel, Chinese Cinderella by Adeline Yen Mah, Adeline and Aunt Baba have a close relationship in which they both depend on each other in similar ways. In the story, they both rely on each other for love, acceptance, and making each other feel better.
People in the Chinese culture have honor in their family. Their family wanted other people to think of them as amazing. Each family wants to be superior to each other. Family names were a status symbol in China. Father told Adeline to get good grades and make the family proud multiple times. Honor was also shown when Adeline refuses to take the tram fare from Niang. Adeline said, “I simply couldn’t force myself to go to Niang and admit that I (and therefore Ye Ye) had erred in the past” (Yen Mah 40). Adeline stood up to Niang and refused to apologize to her. She knew that she didn’t do anything wrong and shouldn’t have to apologize. Niang wanted her to apologize for taking tram fare from Ye Ye and Aunt Baba. Adeline showed honor and didn’t let Niang tell her what to do.
Jimmy, her boyfriend, is deeply connected to his family and community and he declares in the novel that he would "never leave the village" (Robinson 153). This representation can be seen as a kind of connectedness that Adelaine longs and does not want to lose. Moreover, she does not want to stay in Vancouver, where she is safe from her uncle’s abuse, she does not want to be away from her boyfriend and home, but neither does she want to stay in a situation where her own mother can not defend and protect her: "I knew that she knew. I thought she’d say something then, but we ate breakfast in silence" (Robinson 154). Fagan states that Adelaine is able to utilize humour as a means to communicate without directly speaking about her abuse and manipulate an impossible
Adeline, from the novel Chinese Cinderella, has many hardships and difficulties in her life, particularly abuse, neglect and loss. It’s clear that she never gives in and is always able to overcome these difficulties, with her determination and resilience, her optimistic and hopeful attitude, the support from loved ones and her imagination. By using these strategies, Adeline is able to push through her troubles and eventually win in the end.
Chinese Cinderella is a compelling autobiography by Adeline Yen Mah, a struggling child, yearning for acceptance and love in her dysfunctional family. In this novel of “a ‘secret story of an unwanted daughter”, Adeline presents her stepmother Niang, as a violent, impatient, biased, domineering and manipulative demon. Analysing the language used by the author, we can discover how effectively she does this.
Adeline doesn’t get much support from her family, except for two, Aunt Baba and Yeye. With the constant depressing situations in the book, Adeline has been blessed with two people who actually care. Aunt Baba and Yeye actually want to encourage Adeline to do her best because unlike the other members in her family, they do not treat her as just an unwanted child. In the novel, Chinese Cinderella, by Adeline Yen Mah, Adeline is greatly supported by Ye Ye and Aunt Baba although out the book and I do not believe that she would've succeeded without them.
Is it because he was a woman that he cried out at the sight of a child being harmed? Did he not cry out at the death of his wife because she was a woman? The role of the female in this story reveals a sense of inferiority towards women. These questions that the story raises show how women were viewed as inferior and weak in the eyes of the Chinese culture.
Cinderella is a story read by many people from various cultures. It is a universal story any culture can relate to it in an anthropological, psychological and sociological perspective. Although Cinderella is a story enjoyed by children, it can also be analyzed and understood by adults. Through a general perspective, the story seems like finding love but it has many more meanings. The story displayed gender roles, family and marriage roles, conformity and obedience, theory of development and the feminist theory. Cinderella provides people the knowledge of how life was like during that age. After analyzing the story, Cinderella can strongly influence children and their behaviour. The story of Cinderella can be further broken down to life lessons, history and the ideology of the society at that time.
The complexitities of any mother-daughter relationship go much deeper then just their physical features that resemble one another. In Amy Tan’s novel The Joy Luck Club, the stories of eight Chinese women are told. Together this group of women forms four sets of mother and daughter pairs. The trials and triumphs, similarities and differences, of each relationship with their daughter are described, exposing the inner makings of four perfectly matched pairs. Three generations of the Hsu family illustrate how both characteristics and values get passed on through generations, even with the obstacles of different cultures and language.
Although she got pregnant by someone other than her husband they did not look at the good and joyful moments the child could bring. Having a baby can be stressful, especially being that the village was not doing so great. The baby could have brought guilt, anger, depression, and loneliness to the aunt, family, and village lifestyle because having a baby from someone other than your husband was a disgrace to the village, based on the orientalism of women. Society expected the women to do certain things in the village and to behave a particular way. The author suggests that if her aunt got raped and the rapist was not different from her husband by exploiting "The other man was not, after all, much different from her husband. They both gave orders; she followed. ‘If you tell your family, I 'll beat you. I 'll kill you. Be, here again, next week." In her first version of the story, she says her aunt was a rape victim because "women in the old China did not choose with who they had sex with." She vilifies not only the rapist but all the village men because, she asserts, they victimized women as a rule. The Chinese culture erred the aunt because of her keeping silent, but her fear had to constant and inescapable. This made matters worse because the village was very small and the rapist could have been someone who the aunt dealt with on a daily basis. Maxine suggests that "he may have been a vendor
The young maiden, called “Cinderella,” responded with kindness to this harsh treatment (Perrault 237). Cinderella could not go to a ball that a prince was throwing, but her fairy godmother helped her go for being so kindhearted (Perrault 238). In Sexton’s “Cinderella,” a dove gives Cinderella whatever she wants, and at the end, the dove pecks out both of the stepsisters’ eyes, just like in the second source (Sexton 249-252). This violent act is not what young readers should take from stories, due to their impressionable minds.