The woman who answers the door of the Chelsea penthouse in London is tiny, elegant and composed. She has short black hair, and is wearing a black body under a turquoise suit with muted gold jewellery on her ears, neck and wrists. She is 60 years old, but looks 40. There is no edginess about her, no hint of anxiety, that would let you know that here is a woman who has broken one of the Chinese world's most deeply-felt taboos: "Jia chou bu ke wai yang (family ugliness should never be aired in public)". And when you meet her gentle, loving husband, and she shows you pictures of a beautiful grandson, you would certainly not guess that here is a woman who survived a childhood of horror and deprivation.
Adeline Yen-Mah's mother died two weeks after Adeline was born. Her father, one of China's wealthiest men, then remarried a Eurasian girl in her late teens. Adeline's stepmother was the stuff of fairy tales; as cruel as she was beautiful, she treated her husband's five children as second-class citizens in their own home, singling Adeline out for particularly harsh treatment.
"My siblings, and maybe my father, blamed me for my mother's death," she explains. "My siblings said, you're bad luck, you brought death to our family. But my stepmother never said that to me; she told me I had bad blood from my mother, you're no good," she said.
Adeline's father and stepmother went on to have two more children. All the children in the house seemed to take their cue from the parents' tyrannical behaviour, turning on Adeline. Adeline's memories from childhood are of the family dog being thrown choice bits of food, while she went hungry upstairs, and of her brothers lacing her orange juice with their urine. She was beaten with a dogwhip, and when the others were given New Year gifts wrapped in red tissue paper, hers was always empty.
The conspiracy to exclude Adeline continued into adulthood; after the death of her father and stepmother, Adeline's siblings inherited their father's huge fortune - around $15 million each: Adeline inherited nothing. Today, her siblings are well-known, wealthy Chinese socialites. Her brother James, who in her childhood she once saw as an ally, lives a cosmopolitan life with houses in Monte Carlo, London and Toronto. No member of her family today speaks to her.
For 58 years Adeline kept silent about her family; in the meantime, she had become a very successful doctor in America. But two years ago she gave up medicine and sat down to write her story. Her book, Falling Leaves, was rejected many times by publishers. Finally, an editor at Michael Joseph said it touched her, but that they'd be lucky to sell 3,000 copies. Falling Leaves is now an international bestseller and Adeline's story has been bought by NBC television.
Adeline's way of coping with the bullying at home was to excel at school. Partly, this was because she always believed that if only she tried harder she could earn her parents' love - a feeling she has only recently conquered. She was shocked to be left out of her father and stepmother's will, and it is only since writing the book that she has realised that nothing she could have done could have made those people behave better towards her.
But she also has another explanation for why she did so well at her studies. "People ask me why didn't I rebel. Well, a child rebels because inside she knows she is hurting her parents by hurting herself - you read about self-mutilation, and so on; they're hurting themselves but they feel they're getting back at their parents, because they really know their parents care about them. But in my case, I felt that if I jumped out of a window, or maimed myself in some way, I know that she (my stepmother) would have been really, really happy. `That shows your bad blood', she would have said."
Adeline explains her father's behaviour in the context of the China of the time - at the time he remarried, the country was still under French influence. His new wife was half French, and Adeline believes her father invested her with all the superiority the Chinese had been domineered into thinking the French possessed. But his harshness was breathtaking. During one fury he said: "Look, if you're not happy here, go elsewhere." She was 10 then. Two years later, her father and stepmother put her into an orphanage.
During one holiday period in the orphanage - Adeline was never taken home when term ended - sitting in the empty library, Adeline saw a playwriting competition advertised, open to all English-speaking children across the world. She entered, and won, and the news made the front pages of the Chinese papers. That day her father brought her home: she had no idea she had won. Her father was pleased by the literary prize, and decided that Adeline should now be allowed to go to England to study medicine.
This was Adeline's escape. She says she always believed, as a child, that she would escape. What is so sad though, is how incomplete her escape was - until the publication of her book, probably - for she always yearned to be accepted by her family.
"I wanted to be independent, and yet not separate from them. When I graduated from medical school all I wanted was to go back to Hong Kong and for him to be proud of me; that was the dream. I never realised that it was impossible."
The story revealed in the book is complex - and beautifully, achingly told. Adeline came from a line of strong women: her great aunt at the age of three refused to have her feet bound, as was the custom then, and later founded the Shanghai Women's bank. Her father was proud of this relative. There is also the contrast of Susan, (now married to a billionaire Hong Kong banker) who was the daughter of Adeline's father and stepmother. Susan also inherited nothing - she fell out with her mother when she married - but she seems to have made a more complete break than Adeline: she didn't continue to yearn to belong. But even so, Adeline tells me that Susan is the only sibling to have spoken to Adeline since her book came out, and that was one phone-call to berate her for having written it.
Before Adeline's father died, her stepmother transferred all his assets into her own name. It then became up to her to designate what each child received. In fact, her manouevrings to make the children hate each other continued beyond the grave. Under French law (and the stepmother was French) it is illegal to disinherit a child, and so Adeline could have fought the will - but she did not. She knew that was what her stepmother would have wanted, to have involved them all in years of court battles - and for Adeline to be seen as the cause of that wrangling. Adeline also knew that what she was seeking money could not give her. In fact, nothing could.
For me, the worst bit of her story is when she is sitting with her brother James after the stepmother's funeral, and he says to her: "Your problem Adeline, is that you're always transferring your own feelings and reasonings into others. You wanted to believe that we all shared your dream of a united family. In fact, no one cared except for you."
Falling Leaves by Adeline Yen Mah is published in hardback by Michael Joseph, and in paperback by Penguin.