It’s nothing unusual for a small and far-off town such as ours to have a power failure. In fact, I could say brown outs are already our people’s everyday fixation. That said, it no longer came out as a shock for me to wake up this morning in a trickle of sweat because the stupid fan suddenly stopped working…and what else what else…but power outage.
It was early and I had nothing to do. No computer, no tv, no electric fan, no radio…What a lame life. I had my thousand attempts of going back to sleep but they were futile seeing as there wasn’t even a whirl of wind around and the heat waves were simply killing me. So what else was better than dying but reading. I took out my newly borrowed book and started reading to pass the time. It was short and I finished it around the time power was restored (three hours later). But boy did I not expect myself to be a sobbing mess almost all throughout the book. I swear it was overly tear jerker it should have been banned! ;p
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The Chinese Cinderella, the true story of an unwanted daughter. It was my first time to read Adeline Yen Mah, and I must say that thru this book, she managed to give me a rather excellent first impression of herself. As the title reveals, this book chronicles a slice of the author’s life from zero to early teens, with her having to deal with the insufferably dreadful reality of being an unwanted daughter. After her mother died of giving birth to her, Adeline was instantaneously subjected to her family’s disdain. Her own father and siblings considered her nothing but bad luck, a piece of garbage they were all better off without.
To make matters worse, her stepmother, along with her half brother and half sister, didn’t seem to treat her any differently. Or even if they did so, it was for the better…better cruelty, better brutality. All things considered, it was such a crappy childhood that was made even more crappy by her crappy family and their crappy behavior.
The number of times I cried every time there would be painful blows of emotion! It was like Tuesdays with Morrie all over again. The only difference was that in TWM I cried because the situation was unbearably good whereas in this novel, I cried because the situation was unbearably bad. The torment that happened to Adeline, they were never physical. They were always emotional. A dead right stab of words specially created to evoke the deepest and nastiest pains that no matter how thick-skinned a person is, (s)he wouldn’t be able to go on without admitting even to a slightest cut. So how much more for a defenseless little girl?
And that’s the point when I get to admire Adeline for her unwavering spirit. Instead of being discouraged by all the negativities surrounding her, she persisted. She was treated as rubbish and yet she never let on the idea that she was nothing as her family wanted her to believe so. In the end, she turned the table against them when she used the painful memories as her reminder and driving force to prove her family wrong; that she was not a worthless piece of crap but rather an extraordinarily intelligent girl with a grand future. And a grand future it had been, for she would later on be widely known as both a physician and a writer with a thriving and laudable career either way.
-end-
*cyber sniffing sniffing sniffing*
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