Falling Leaves return to their roots essays

Falling Leaves return to their roots essays Falling Leaves The Memoir of an Unwanted Chinese Daughter, by Adeline Yen Mah, is a story of a young Chinese girl growing up in an environment that most people would crack under. Under the reign of a evil stepmother, Mahs life was worst than most young unwanted Chinese daughters during the early 1900s. However, due to her strong will and the influence of a special Aunt she is able to over come such a horrid childhood. Today she is a medical doctor in America. However, if she did not have the strength of character to escape to America, where she attended school, is experiencing a fulfilling medical career and a happy marriage, her story could have never been told. The strong and intriguing meaning of her story, Falling Leaves is symbolic of Mahs life. Mah is represented as an individual leaf on the tree of life that has roots stretching back in time; each leaf has a different experience as shown by Mahs hardships, the significance of Falling Leaves is shown through Mahs insight of the beauty of life and its circle of renewal. All people have roots that reach far back in time that contribute to the legacy that makes up ones life in the present. Mah's family background, as she quotes in the story, [is with] a Shanghai family headed by my affluent father and his beautiful Eurasian wife, set against a background of treaty ports carved into foreign concessions, and the collision of east and West played out within and with out my very own home (Pg. 4). Since Mahs life is affected by the attacks that rocked twentieth-century China it is the presence of strong women that influence Mahs roots. Since Mah's mother dies shortly after she is born, Mahs female role model is her rebellious grandaunt, whom in an era during which Chinese women were still having their feet bound, founded a bank run by and for woman. Another woman who helped shap ...