Saturday, January 14, 2006

When I first received the titles for ERP(or wadeva) this year, I was dumbstruck by the absence of fictional titles in the list. However, after reading thru half of "Falling Leaves", an autobiography by some Chinese girl(old woman by now), I do not regret the list a single bit.

At first, looking at the title of the chapters, I thought, oh, another lame book again. They have a chinese proverb for each chapter and an english translation. So, men2 dang1 hu4 dui4 is "the appropriate door fits the correct frame", dunno but english translations of wise souding chinese proverbs always turns into awkwardly clumsy phrases.

Cutting to the point, the book is really touching. The author is the fifth daughter of a wealthy business, but her mother died giving birth to her and her father then married a hot french-chinese mixed chick. Well, this stepmother is really bad, like even worse than Cinderallas stepmother.

Her father's father, who was also her grandfather, was a businessman too, and in order to fund his son's business, Ye Ye (the grandfather), gave his son(her father), all the money he got, in an act of faith in the then Confucian society. In return, Ye Ye had very little money left, and he spent the money to supply the five children with pocket money. Now, the two children of the stepmother were treated like god, and had all the nice haircut, costumes, and luxuries, while the author's three brothers had their heads clean shaven. After Ye Ye ran out of money, Niang (the stepmother), is unwilling to supply them with pocket money, and told them they had to beg for bus ride money.

The stalwart author refuses to beg Niang because doing so (to her) would be betraying Ye Ye. Now, because her father was so infatuated with his new wife, he actually became unfilial to Ye Ye, by telling him to approach Niang for money. At that time, where got grandfather ask daughter in law for money one? And Niang drove all Ye Ye's frens away, by practicing xiao4 li3 cang2 dao1(hiding a knife in a smile). Ye ye was of course unwilling to ask Niang for money, saying it was Yuan2 Mu4 Qiu2 Yu2 (Climbing a Tree to Catch Fish), and wrote the word ren3(tahan), saying that the dao(knife) in ren is his sons unfilialness poking into his xin(the bottom part of ren), but the dot on the dao is a sheath, meaning he is withstanding the pain with dignity.

Meanwhile, all is not well for the author. All the siblings had a duckling, with her of course having the smallest one, and it was her only friend, because she is discriminated in the family for being the youngest daughter and inadvertently causing her real mother's death. So just nice the father had dis dog in training, den the father want to test it, so he put the author's duckling in front of it. And of course you know what happened...

Later it became even worse. Because the author really nothing else to do, so she mug like hell and is the top in class lor, so she became the class monitor. Wanting to surprise her, her classmates followed her into her house and cheered her loudly, giving her presents. Niang promptly commanded her into her room, and asked her why got so many hooligans in their house. She told the truth, but Niang called her a liar and slapped her, she protested and Niang slapped her again, and again and again and again until she bleeding. Later the father come also and commanded her to throw all the presents into the rubbish bin, and threatened that theyll put her in an orphanage.

Ya, so anyway quite exciting, you should go read it also and do for erp :D