Chinese Cinderella Analysis

Adeline Yen Mah is a Chinese girl growing in knowledge with a wealthy family. Then, a new threat arrises... Niang! She is the evil stepmother that tries to burden Adeline with as much issues as she can. Adeline tries to conquer these problems with the help of her other loving family members. In the novel, Chinese Cinderella, by Adeline Yen Mah, the author shows that being unwanted can be overcome by consulting family. She proves this by showing the help that Adeline received from her Ye Ye (grandfather) and her Aunt Baba.

For instance, her father said, “‘I’m afraid I’ve forgotten your Chinese name.’ A pang went through me. I meant so little to him, I was such a nobody, that he didn't even remember my name!” (Mah 124-125.) This made Adeline feel very neglected. He forgot her age and birthday as well. This shows how little her parents care and how uninvolved they are in her life. Her parents decided to send her away because they thinks she has bad behavior, and when they dropped her off at the orphanage-school, “Neither of them bothered to look up or wave goodbye. I watched the taillights of Father’s car disappear and an awful loneliness sank in. They had tossed me aside like a piece of garbage.” (Mah 127) This shows how unimportant she is to them. Niang and Father would never do that to their children, Little Brother and Little Sister. They are both very bias and their favoritism is

Judging from most classic fairy tales, a prerequisite for being the heroine of the story is being incredibly beautiful. Beauty, in life as well as literature, is incredibly valued. To be beautiful is to be good and vice versa. This line of thinking is well-represented in classic fairy tales. “Cinderella” by Lin Lan is one of the best examples of how a piece of literature, as well as a society, sees the relationship between virtue and physical attractiveness. Lin Lan’s Cinderella, as with many fairy tales, believes that beauty and goodness are strongly correlated, shows this through the characters and how other characters value beauty, and represents the opposite as well: to be evil is to be ugly. This point of view shown in “Cinderella” is

Culture is similar to personality. In a person, the personality is made up of the values, beliefs, underlying assumptions, interests, and experiences that create a person’s behavior. Culture is made up of the values, beliefs, underlying assumptions, attitudes and behaviors shared by a group of people. Culture is the behavior that results when a group arrives at a set of rules for working together. Chinese Cinderella; an autobiography written by Adeline Yen Mah expresses the Chinese culture through Yen Mah’s personal experiences as a child. In Chinese Cinderella, Adeline Yen Mah returns to her roots to tell the story of her painful childhood and her ultimate triumph

In my short analysis of “Cindarella”, understanding the basic concepts of the story was not as easy as I had once predicted. The author Elisabeth Panttaja explains in her essay different views and ideas in the sense that Cinderella is successful because of the magical powers created by her dead mother. The author tells that “It is not suprising . . . that modern criticism of (Cinderella) . . . has been so strangely indifferent to the roles that Cinderella’s mother plays in the story.” This to my knowledge is giving me a different view on how people thought Cinderella acted to the situations that occurred.

As Adeline suffers at the hands of her parents, it causes Adeline’s life to be very lonely and hopeless.

Cinderella’s story is undoubtedly the most popular fairy tale all over the world. Her fairy tale is one of the best read and emotion filled story that we all enjoyed as young and adults. In Elizabeth Pantajja’s analysis, Cinderella’s story still continues to evoke emotions but not as a love story but a contradiction of what we some of us believe. Pantajja chose Cinderella’s story to enlighten the readers that being good and piety are not the reason for Cinderella’s envious fairy tale. The author’s criticism and forthright analysis through her use of pathos, ethos, and logos made the readers doubt Cinderella’s character and question the real reason behind her marrying the prince. Pantajja claims that

The true story of Chinese Cinderella is an ‘autobiography’ written by Adeline Yen Mah, describing the many complications she experienced in her childhood and young teenage years. Unlike most children, Adeline struggled to live a ‘normal’ life. She was often looked down upon by most of her family and was neglected and abused in a way that was totally unacceptable. This is significantly repeated throughout her juvenility. An important idea that recurs throughout the story Chinese Cinderella is, unwanted and mistreated by your family and relations.

Chinese Cinderella, by Adeline Yen Mah is a heart-rendering autobiographical novel. Throughout the text, Adeline describes her cruel family and the trauma she was confronted with at school, trying to satisfy her heartless father with educational achievements. Together we relive the childhood life of Adeline through her words and hear, what it feels like to be a rejected and unloved daughter. Furthermore, Adeline owns a special quality that helps her to handle the cruelty of her upbringing and rise above many obstacles. Adeline has been always resilient. She is very strong and tackles everything that comes her way. By being friendless and having a pet duck as a friend, she distracts herself from her coldblooded reality.

The Disney Version of Cinderella and the Egyptian version are different and similar in several ways and they have different cultures, characters, looks, and the characters and the actions taken by them are different. There were also some similarities found amongst these different things. These two stories are both very different and similar in the ways that were described. Many places have different cultures, the Disney version of Cinderella is based off of the American-European culture, whereas, the Egyptian version, Rhodopis, is based off of the Egyptian culture.

In the Cinderella tale the events of the story is that those who do good and treat others well will be rewarded in the end. Cinderella was treated unfair but through all the bad obstacles, Cinderella managed to stay strong and persistent. Giving up was not in Cinderella’s vocabulary, she continued to work hard no matter how difficult things got and she was kind while she was being mistreated. There is a lot of young women may not be as strong as Cinderella was in the fairy tale. Even though the Cinderella story is a fairy tale, people are being treated wrongly by their step parents in the real world. Therefore, Cinderella was continuing being righteous and having a spiritual heart, it helped her overcome the way see was treated.

In the book Chinese Cinderella it is apparent that Niang has had a positive and also a negative impact on Yen Mah. In the book Chinese Cinderella Niang makes the narrator feel a mixture of negative emotions such as neglect, foreignness, and also a feeling no one should feel, insignificance and humiliation. This is shown when the narrator writes “Niang predicted a hopeless future for me.” (Page 124). This had a very pronounced effect on Yen Mah. Therefore as a result of Niang suppressing her, the narrator was able to aim for something greater and also bring recognition to herself. Niang also affected the narrator’s mental stand point because Yen Mah was treated as a servant when compared to Niang’s own children. In which the way Adeline Yen Mah was treated was very immoral because it gave Yen Mah the feeling of being not as wanted as Niang’s own children. If Niang did not treat the narrator the way she did Adeline Yen Mah may not be the person she is – one that aspires to succeed and also one that sees something beyond her circumstances. In Chinese Cinderella,

On Google.com the word “significant” refers to something that is “sufficiently great or important to be worthy of attention; noteworthy.” For something to have a significant impact on someone, it must be meaningful, relevant, and important. As stated by Thomas Hardy, “A story must be exceptional enough to justify its telling; it must have something more unusual to relate than the ordinary experience of every average man and woman.” It must have something meaningful, something that pulls a reader in- so that the audience can laugh when the character laughs or cry when the character cries. It must be significant. A story that fits the definition of “significant” is one by Adeline Yen Mah. In the novel “Chinese Cinderella: The True Story of an Unwanted Daughter,” Adeline Yen Mah pulls the reader in by using the themes of loneliness and acceptance- something that is faced by nearly all at some point in their life.

The book Chinese Cinderella, written by Adeline Yen Mah has four main themes. They are: family & relationships, abandonment & loneliness, self-esteem and history. The author Adeline Yen Mah, also wrote the book Falling Leaves but Chinese Cinderella was written for younger audiences. Chinese Cinderella is actually an autobiography, not a fairy tale. Adeline (the protagonist) has to work for her dreams, not by wishing from a fairy godmother. This book was set in the 1900’s (1941-1952). At that time WW2 was happening making Adeline’s life harder. The moral of this book would be that no matter your circumstances, you can work hard and achieve your dreams. This book is really captivating and it tells the reader not to underestimate anyone. That’s why I think this is an amazing book for everyone to read.

In “Cinderella: Not So Morally Superior,” Elisabeth Panttaja makes a claim that the Grimms’ version of “Cinderella” provides reasons that Cinderella may not have been so fortunate due to her being “good and pious.” One main point that she discusses within the article is the mother/daughter relationship Cinderella shares with her deceased mother, in comparison to the mother/daughter relationship shared between the stepmother and stepsisters. Panttaja argues that the mothers in each relationship are both motivated by the same thing, “to ensure a future of power and prestige for their daughter” (Panttaja). Panttaja continues to identify how both mothers’ motives are similar, but her argument falters when she attempts to bring Cinderella’s