Adeline Yen Mah has used different literary features and language choices to present the various aspects of her relationship with her family. Throughout this extract it becomes apparent that her family is very isolated and unconcerned with her. At the very beginning of the passage we glimpse evidence that Adeline is distant with her family. We learn that Adeline is attending boarding school and that she enjoys it, as the thought of leaving school ‘throbbed’ at the back of her mind. We can deduce from this that she likes being apart from her family when she has the opportunity, and when she finishes school she would have to stay with them. We start to see how distant her relationship with her family really is when her father’s chauffeur picks her up from her boarding school. As Adeline runs downstairs ‘as in a nightmare’, we remark that she doesn 't go home unless someone has died. This shows the readers that she goes home and sees her …show more content…
It’s mentioned in the text that the drive home is a short one, which makes the reader wonder why the family hasn’t visited Adeline if their house is close by. When Adeline enters the house, she describes it as ‘quiet and cool’. This indicates that none of her family comes to greet her when she arrives. When asked by Adeline where everyone is, Ah Gum tells her where each family member is in short, separated sentences. This makes the family seem even more separate and isolated from one another. Before Adeline meets her father she feels overwhelmed, which indicates that it is out of the ordinary. This makes the reader feel sympathy for Adeline because she rarely sees her father and they don’t have a close relationship. Adeline then describes her father’s room as ‘the Holy of Holies’, because she has never been invited in and it is an important place in her father’s