Chinese Cinderella: Chapter 21: Playwriting Competition Summary & Analysis

Adeline returns to school a week before anyone else, spending her time reading and chatting with the school librarian. When she finds an announcement for an international English playwriting contest in a magazine, Adeline remembers Ye Ye’s encouragement and wish for her to succeed. The librarian encourages Adeline to send for more information and use the time before school begins to make an entry.

Adeline writes a play entitled Gone with the Locusts about a young African girl who is kidnapped by bandits, using her heroine to express her own grief built up through her childhood. “Into her lips I injected my loneliness, isolation and feelings of being unwanted. To my heroine I gave everything of myself.” When the play is complete, she dedicates it to Ye Ye and sends it to be judged.

School resumes. Adeline writes several petitions to Father and Niang to send her to study in England, but they never reply. During the year, her parents move house but do not tell her and Adeline only discovers the move by chancing upon the change of address form Father filed with the school. Six months pass without Adeline hearing any news about the playwriting competition.

That March, in 1952, Adeline receives word that Ye Ye has died and she is taken by Father’s chauffer to attend his funeral at the Buddhist temple. Though Adeline is sobbing throughout the funeral, no one else in the family shows any emotion. She is grieved that Ye Ye never got the opportunity to see her succeed, not even in the playwriting competition, which he had inspired her to enter. As the family leaves the funeral, Niang remarks that Adeline is looking uglier than ever the older she gets. Niang also informs Adeline that she must find a job for the summer since Father will no longer be paying her tuition and board for school. Adeline is crushed.

When the chauffer brings Adeline back to school, she finds Rachel, Mary, and her friends playing a game in which they each compare what they believe are their own best attributes with what everyone else believes their best attribute to be. They invite Adeline to join, but when it is Adeline’s turn to name what she likes best about herself, she answers that she has no good attributes whatsoever. Rachel is surprised by this, and responds that, on the contrary, the whole group believes Adeline will be the most successful in life out of any of them.

 The death of Adeline’s grandfather and Niang’s declaration that her school would no longer be paid for sends Adeline into an anxious depression for weeks. She still dreams of going to college and sends her parents a number of petitioning letters to send her to college with Third Brother in England, describing her list of academic achievements, but receives no reply.

One afternoon, while Adeline and her friends are playing Monopoly, one of the nuns calls for her and announces that Father’s chauffer has arrived to take her home. Adeline is filled with fear, unsure of what this could possibly mean. Arriving for the first time at her parents’ new home, Adeline is directed to see Father in his room. The rest of the family is away and the house is empty. When she enters his room, Father is sitting at his desk, seemingly happy, which fills Adeline with a mixture of relief and suspicion. Father shows her a city newspaper headline announcing that she has won the international playwriting competition and brought great honor to Hong Kong and to Father.

Adeline once more asks if she can be sent to England to study, and this time Father obliges. However, when she says that she would perhaps like to study literature, Father scoffs at this and insists she will become a medical doctor instead, a “foolproof profession” and guarantor of success. Adeline is happy to accept this fate, as it still means she gets to study in England. She thanks Father.