After the loss of Adeline’s beloved Nai Nai, she was left with her ruthless, cruel stepmother, Niang. Niang demonstrated the most cruel actions that Adeline mentions throughout the entire book. Niang was very manipulative and violent and blatantly showed favoritism to her own children over her husband’s children, whose birth mother passed away giving birth to Adeline. Adeline told the harshness of her family with her own experience and made the reader feel the pain she suffered through during her childhood. Niang, unashamedly, went out of her way to make Adeline feel unwanted and hated. Niang obviously showed her favoritism by setting strict rules that only apply to her stepchildren, ignoring the needs of Adeline and her brothers, and shunning out …show more content…
She would give everything her kids wanted but when it came to the needs of her stepchildren, she just simply didn’t care and went on without providing them, with their needs. Adeline, her brothers and sister were only allowed to three small meals a day without any snacks in between and were limited to what they were allowed to eat. While they were practically starving, Niang’s children, and eventually Big Sister, were wasting their food and throwing it off the balcony. They were so unbelievably spoiled and it’s easy to see that if, even for one day, they swapped places with Adeline, they wouldn’t be able to go on. Adeline was very strong and resilient and did her best to ignore this horrible gesture from Niang. Adeline wouldn’t even have proper fitting clothes for school. She would even walk to school and back home everyday because she wasn’t given money for the tram fare. Adeline would sometimes get away with getting a ride from her classmate and friend, Wu Chun-mei but would grow anxious because she didn’t to be caught. Eventually, Niang grew impatient with how “unloyal” Adeline was to her family and sent her