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Although Adeline Yen Mah was born into a wealthy family in Tianjin, China in 1937, her childhood was an unhappy one. Born female in a culture that often devalues women, her situation was made worse by the fact that her family blamed Yen Mah for her mother's death, which occurred just after she was mehr anzeigen born. Her autobiography, Falling Leaves: The True Story of an Unwanted Chinese Daughter, details the emotional abuse she suffered from her father, siblings and, in particular, her stepmother. Most notable was the fact that her family, fleeing to Hong Kong in 1948 as the Communist army gained control of China, initially left the 10-year-old Yen Mah behind, in a boarding school in northern China. An international play-writing competition made it possible for Yen Mah to escape her unhappy family life when she was 14. She won the competition, and this convinced her father to send her to a boarding school in England. Yen Mah remained in England for 11 years, attending college and earning a medical degree. When she returned to Hong Kong in 1963 to do an internship, however, Yen Mah found that her family's attitude toward her had not improved. She left again, this time to accept a residency in the United States. In the U.S., Yen Mah found professional success, eventually becoming the chief of anesthesiology at Anaheim Community Hospital in California. She also found personal happiness with her second husband, Bob Mah, and their two children. However, she was always troubled by her estrangement from her father and stepmother, and after their deaths she went through a period of severe depression. She began writing Falling Leaves as a way to work through her feelings of rejection, never imagining that her story would become an international bestseller. (Bowker Author Biography) Adeline Yen Mah is a physician and writer. She divides her time between London, Hong Kong, and her home in Huntington Beach, California. (Bowker Author Biography) weniger anzeigen

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vdt_melbourne | 50 weitere Rezensionen | Dec 19, 2023 |
Part memoir, part philosophy and part history of the Chinese culture. Unfortunately, only a 2-star for me. Not that it was badly written, but for the fact that I didn’t understand a lot of it. I've always admired and loved learning about certain things of the Chinese culture, but a lot of her writing was way over my head. Her memoir "Falling Leaves", which is on my TBR list, will probably be more up my alley.

Adeline, a Chinese, was the youngest of seven in their family. At age 10 (a later page says she was 11) her step-mother, who didn't like her, sent her to a boarding school until she was 13 years old. Her step-mother then told her she could no longer attend school because Adeline's father couldn't afford it and she had to go get a job. At age 14 she left China. Adeline had won a writing competition, which allowed her father to send her to England to study. She is now an American Chinese and was a Physician in California. She quit that job to pursue her passion: writing. Today, she would be about 83 years old. You can Duck Duck Go Adeline Yen Mah images to see photos of her.

She notes that more and more Chinese have immigrated to America looking for education, freedom, prosperity and happiness. Adeline introduces us to Eastern thought. This is a book of her personal memories as examples that introduce some of the philosophies of life obtained from two of the oldest Chinese classic books today, "I Ching" (pronounced: ye jing and means Book of Changes) and "Tao Te Ching". Also, Confucianism, Taoism and Zen Buddhism play dominant roles in how the Chinese think and live. She goes into the history of how all of this came about, while inserting little pieces of memories of her life that are relevant to each part.
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MissysBookshelf | 6 weitere Rezensionen | Aug 27, 2023 |
Canceled midstream. Threw my arms up and surrendered. Such a horridly, tediously terse style packed with details that are so trivial as to make one's head pop. And yet such an intriguing plot.

I hate it when they hook you right in with some type of foreshadowing. It's the worst type of offense when a writer decides to say, "This bizarre and terrifically terrible thing happened" and spend the entire book explaining everything that happened before it (and I mean everything, from the late 18-effing-00s) until reaching that point (which I have not yet reached, and do not intend to, thank god) and realize that the whole book was a waste of time.

Please spare yourselves. Surely, you can Wiki this Mah Yen and read her CONDENSED life story in five minutes rather than read this book. Long, painful, and without anything to merit reading it, a quite futile attempt at interesting memoir-writing.
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Gadi_Cohen | 50 weitere Rezensionen | Sep 22, 2021 |

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