ADELINE YEN MAH has two elder brothers and a younger half-sister in Hong Kong. But the author, who has homes in Los Angeles and London, doesn't see them on her yearly visits to the SAR. Since the publication of her first book, Falling Leaves (Penguin $87), she says she has been shut out of her siblings' lives.
More than a million copies of Falling Leaves have been sold since it was first published in 1997, timed to coincide with the handover of Hong Kong to China. Primarily a memoir of her unhappy childhood, it is openly critical of her entrepreneur father, sisters, brothers and, most of all, her 'wicked' stepmother, Jeanne Prosperi Yen, known to the children as Niang. It claims the whole family, apart from her grandfather and beloved Aunt Baba, blamed Mah for her mother's death soon after her birth, and considered her 'inferior and insignificant' as a result. Though the family was wealthy, she remembers having a tormented childhood - against the backdrop of the Japanese occupation and the civil war - in Tianjin, then Shanghai and eventually Hong Kong.
After escaping communist rule and starting afresh in Hong Kong, Mah's parents enrolled her in the Sacred Heart Convent School and Orphanage on Caine Road, Mid-Levels, and left her there from the age of 12 to 14, even during holidays.
'At that stage in your life, you think it's going to last forever, even though it's only three years,' she says. 'In Shanghai, I always had my aunt, but here, there was nobody.'
When she won an international playwriting competition, her father agreed to her completing her education in England. She undertook medical training there too, returning to Hong Kong in 1963 to work for a few months as a special intern in the department of obstetrics and gynaecology at the University of Hong Kong, before moving to the United States in 1964. She continued to practise medicine full-time until she began writing again in the 1990s.
She was back in Hong Kong in 1988 for the reading of her father's will (he made his wife executor, and she announced there was no money in his estate, according to Mah); and in 1990, when Niang died, Mah discovered she had been disinherited with the words: 'In no event is my daughter, Adeline Yen Mah, to receive any portion of my estate.'