Yen Mah's legal birthday is 30 November, as her father did not record her date of birth and instead he gave her his own (a common practice prior to the establishment of the People's Republic of China in 1949).
[11] In 1942, Yen Mah's father (Joseph) and stepmother (Jeanne) moved from Tianjin to Shanghai to a house along Avenue Joffre.
When Susan arrived, she was too young and too close to Aunt Baba to recognise and approach her mother, Niang, who thus beat her loudly in frustration and anger.
At the age of fourteen, as her autobiography states, Yen Mah won a playwriting competition for her work Gone With the Locusts, and her father allowed her to study in England with James.
[18][19][9] Yen Mah left for the United Kingdom in August 1952, and studied medicine at the London Hospital Medical College, eventually graduating with an M.B.B.S.
[2] Before the start of her career in the United States, she had a brief relationship with a man named Karl, and practised medicine in a Hong Kong hospital at the behest of her father, who refused to give her air fare when she expressed plans to move to America.
[9] Initially, Yen Mah pursued a career in medicine, including establishing a medical practice in California.
[citation needed] Yen Mah's autobiography, Falling Leaves, was published in 1997, shortly after Jung Chang's memoir Wild Swans.
[24] Her second work, Chinese Cinderella, was an abridged version of her autobiography (until she leaves for England aged 14), and has sold over one million copies worldwide.
A Thousand Pieces of Gold was published in 2002, and looks at events under the Qin and Han dynasties through Chinese proverbs and their origins in Sima Qian's history, Shiji.
There is also an award dedicated to teaching Australia over the Internet for free, and the foundation has established a poetry prize at UCLA.
[26][27][28][29] In 2021, the Falling Leaves Foundation donated $30 million toward the construction of a medical research facility at the University of California, Irvine.