Early Life
Yen Mah was born in Tianjin, Republic of China on 30 November 1937, to Joseph Yen (Yen Tse-Rung), a businessman, and Ren Yong-ping, an accountant. She had an older sister, Lydia (Jun-pei) and three older brothers, Gregory (Zi-jie), Edgar (Zi-lin) and James (Zi-jun). She has stated in Falling Leaves that that she did not use the real names of her siblings and their spouses to protect their identities but she did, however, use the real names of her father, stepmother, aunt and husband, while referring to her paternal grandparents only by the Chinese terms 'Ye Ye' and 'Nai Nai' .
Yen Mah also writes of her Ye Ye's younger sister, whom she calls either 'Grand Aunt' or 'Grand Uncle Gong Gong', and cites as founder and president of the Shanghai Women's Bank.
When Yen Mah was a year old in 1938, Joseph Yen became infatuated and married a half-French, half-Chinese 17-year-old named Jeanne Virginie Prosperi. The children referred to her as Niang (娘, another Chinese term for mother), and she is called so throughout the whole book. They had two children, Yen Mah's and a younger half brother, Franklin and half sister, Susan (Jun-qing).
Her legal birthday is 10 November, as her father did not record her birthdate and instead he gave her his own (a common practise prior to the establishment of the People's Republic of China in 1949). Two weeks after her birth, her mother died of puerperal fever and according to traditional Chinese beliefs, Yen Mah was branded as 'bad luck' by the rest of her family.
Read more about this topic: Adeline Yen Mah
Famous quotes containing the words early life, early and/or life:
“Many a woman shudders ... at the terrible eclipse of those intellectual powers which in early life seemed prophetic of usefulness and happiness, hence the army of martyrs among our married and unmarried women who, not having cultivated a taste for science, art or literature, form a corps of nervous patients who make fortunes for agreeable physicians ...”
—Sarah M. Grimke (1792–1873)
“The Americans never use the word peasant, because they have no idea of the class which that term denotes; the ignorance of more remote ages, the simplicity of rural life, and the rusticity of the villager have not been preserved among them; and they are alike unacquainted with the virtues, the vices, the coarse habits, and the simple graces of an early stage of civilization.”
—Alexis de Tocqueville (1805–1859)
“Every creature is better alive than dead, men and moose and pine trees, and he who understands it aright will rather preserve its life than destroy it.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)