FALLING LEAVES

                                                     FALLING LEAVES

FALLING LEAVES, had been written by Adeline Yen Mah. It’s an autobiography. We can see some history that happened about 80 years ago in China. Adeline Yen Mah chose a small part of the social as the entry point of her novel – her family life. We can see them have emotions like laughing, sadness and so on.

 When the female leading role wanted to go to school, her father thought that as a girl, marriage was the most important thing she should have done. Studying was just wasting money. And if girl learnt something about freedom at school at that time, they did not want to be a stay-at-home mom. This thought was against the traditional ideology in China. She also had a bad relationship with her second mom. Sometimes they quarreled because of the unfair distribution of property. After these things had happened many times, their relationship had broken down.

 Luckily, she had a good ending after all the bad things that had passed. She married a gentleman when she was 35 years old. Her husband loved her so much and they have a lovely baby. Adeline lives in the USA with her friends at the moment.

This book shows us a social miniature. Adeline felt lonely and she just wanted to find self-identity. I think that’s why she did some rebellious things when she was young.  She wanted to get more attention from others.  

Because the plot is about a family, when readers read this book, most of the things that we have seen in this book was just like the things we have experienced. Adeline Yen Mah was not a writer actually. She was a lawyer. She wrote this book because she wanted to introduce the things which happened in the past. Not the important things like the Nanjing Massacre. She wanted to show us how ordinary people lived in China in war times. That’s the most important reason why I liked this book. If you want to know the culture about one country, you cannot just read the newspapers or laws. You must go among the masses. Listen to how they feel. If you want to know traditional views, this is a good book for you. I think this book is difficult for teenagers. They can just understand the surface spreading. They cannot know the connotation. For the old people, because they experienced that time. They had some feeling by their own. I think the writer wanted to tell us a drift from place to place homeless and miserable.

Over all FALLING LEAVES is a good novel. If you like reading autobiographies, it is a good opportunity for you. The plot is not interesting but it is such a common touch.