Plot
Adeline's family considers her as bad luck and they don't pay attention to her throughout her early childhood. This is the story of her struggle for acceptance and how she overcomes the odds to prove her worth. Born the fifth child to a wealthy Chinese family, Adeline's life begins tragically. Adeline's mother died two weeks later after her birth due to complications bought on by the delivery, and in Chinese culture she is considered as bad luck. This situation is compounded by her father's new marriage to a lady who has little affection for her husband's five children. She displays overt antagonism and distrust towards all of the children, particularly Adeline, while favoring her own younger son and daughter born soon after the marriage. The book outlines Adeline's struggle to find a place where she feels she belongs. Denied love from her parents, she finds some solace in relationships with her grandfather (Ye Ye) and her Aunt Baba, but they are taken from her. Adeline immerses herself in striving for academic achievement in the hope of winning favour, but also for its own rewards as she finds great pleasure in words and scholarly success. Adeline progresses through various situations in life, from boarding school to studies abroad.
Read more about this topic: Chinese Cinderella
Famous quotes containing the word plot:
“We have defined a story as a narrative of events arranged in their time-sequence. A plot is also a narrative of events, the emphasis falling on causality. “The king died and then the queen died” is a story. “The king died, and then the queen died of grief” is a plot. The time sequence is preserved, but the sense of causality overshadows it.”
—E.M. (Edward Morgan)
“Those blessed structures, plot and rhyme—
why are they no help to me now
I want to make
something imagined, not recalled?”
—Robert Lowell (1917–1977)
“James’s great gift, of course, was his ability to tell a plot in shimmering detail with such delicacy of treatment and such fine aloofness—that is, reluctance to engage in any direct grappling with what, in the play or story, had actually “taken place”Mthat his listeners often did not, in the end, know what had, to put it in another way, “gone on.””
—James Thurber (1894–1961)