Yen Mah started attending kindergarten in 1941, aged 4. They had two children, Franklin and Susan (Jun-qing). The children referred to her as Niang (娘 niáng, another Chinese term for mother), and she is called so throughout Chinese Cinderella. When Yen Mah was one year old in 1938, Joseph Yen married a half-French, half-Chinese (Eurasian) 17-year-old girl named Jeanne Virginie Prosperi. Two weeks after Yen Mah's birth, her mother died of puerperal fever and according to traditional Chinese beliefs, Yen Mah was called 'bad luck' by the rest of her family and because of this, was treated harshly throughout her childhood. Yen Mah's legal birthday is 30 November, as her father did not record her date of birth and instead he gave her his own (a common practice prior to the establishment of the People's Republic of China in 1949). The story of Yen Mah's life from 1937 to 1952 is recorded in her autobiography, Chinese Cinderella.Īdeline Yen Mah was born in Tianjin, Republic of China on 30 November 1937 to 30-year-old Joseph Yen (Yen Tsi-Rung), a businessman, and Ren Yong-ping, an accountant. Shuzhen's colleagues would often call her 'Gong Gong', meaning Grand Uncle. She cites Yan Shuzhen as founder and president of the Shanghai Women's Commercial and Savings Bank. Yen Mah also writes of her grandfather's younger sister (Yan Shuzhen), whom she calls 'Grand Aunt'. She has stated in Falling Leaves 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 had an older sister called Lydia (Jun-pei) and three older brothers, Gregory (Zi-jie), Edgar (Zi-lin), and James (Zi-jun). Mah with whom she has a daughter, and a son from a previous marriage. She grew up in Tianjin, Shanghai and Hong Kong, and is known for her autobiography Falling Leaves. Sacred Heart Canossian College, Hong KongĪdeline Yen Mah ( simplified Chinese: 马严君玲 traditional Chinese: 馬嚴君玲 pinyin: Mǎ Yán Jūnlíng) (馬嚴君玲) is a Chinese-American author and physician.
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