Adeline Yen Mah's Falling Leaves was one of the publishing successes of 1998. The book's story of the abuse of a fifth youngest daughter by her Franco-Chinese stepmother, first in Tianjin and Shanghai, and then in Hong Kong, won the author a wide and appreciative audience.
This new book is very different, even though it does recount again incidents from Falling Leaves along the way. In essence, it is a compact guide to some of the constituent elements of Chinese civilization, from Confucianism to feng shui, Chinese calligraphy to traditional herbal medicine.
The problem with bestsellers is that they demand a sequel. And the problem with autobiographical memoirs, especially when written in middle age as Falling Leaves was, is that they tend to be one-off events.
You can almost hear the publisher pleading with this author to come up with something that would appeal to the audience generated by her earlier book. And the resulting book sometimes has the feel of a work that has been hammered out after extensive phone-calls and discussion meetings, not to mention editorial suggestions for an addition here and a learned digression there.
Because Adeline Yen Mah emptied her heart in her impassioned and moving account of her years of suffering, she has had no alternative this time but to resort to less private matters. She has nevertheless been advised, it seems, to try to make the result intimate and personal, so the text alternates between passages of exposition -- potted histories and concise explanations -- and passages of reminiscence.
The result has been cleverly marketed, and produced to appear congenial and un-intimidating. With its almost square format, and a decorative leaf printed at the corner of every page, you instinctively feel that this is a book that contains cozy wisdom, something you should settle down with lying on comfortable cushions, and maybe light a scented candle before beginning.
The good news is that, as far as it goes, this is a surprisingly sane and satisfying read. Mah is by profession an anesthesiologist, and she judges China's various traditions with an eminently reasonable mixture of scientific rationalism and modest cultural chauvinism.
Thus she decides that feng shui is "a mixture of common sense and superstition." "Do Chinese herbs work?" she asks herself. "Some do and some don't" is her sensible reply.
There are sections of the book that we are obliged to take more seriously than others. Mah is, after all, a medical professional who has, as she says in a rare moment of self-advertisement, "been invited to join the boards of three well-known universities." So, when she tells us that soybean products contain "phytochemicals and oligosaccharides, which help to prevent certain diseases," we really do have to take notice of what we're being told. Elsewhere, as when she remarks in a section on language that "human rights" is a concept untranslatable into Chinese, you feel a more elaborate discussion of the situation is called for.
She covers a good range of material. There are discussions of yin and yang, Taoism, Sun Tzu's The Art of War (
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