Chinese Cinderella: Chapter 1: Top of the Class Summary & Analysis

In her first week of kindergarten, Adeline comes home with a shiny medal pinned to her dress: an award for being the top of the class. She shows her award and the certificate to Aunt Baba, who is thrilled. Aunt Baba cannot read the certificate since it is written in French, but she opens up her locked safe to store the certificate with her jewelry.

A picture of Adeline’s Father and stepmother falls out. Adeline asks Aunt Baba if she has any pictures of her “dead mama,” but Aunt Baba seems pained by this and says she does not. She offers to show Adeline wedding pictures of Father’s marriage to her stepmother, since Adeline was only a year old at the time. Adeline is uninterested in this, asking when her real mother died. She had died of a fever two weeks after Adeline was born, Aunt Baba explains. Adeline, though she is only four years old, intuits that it is a painful subject. Big Sister had once told Adeline that her mother and Aunt Baba were best friends, and that her death after giving birth to Adeline means that Adeline is to blame for it; she is “bad luck.”