In the 1980s, CBS aired a children’s program called “CBS Storybreak” that would take popular children’s books of the time and make them into short, animated movies. My mother would sometimes tape these specials and I would watch and rewatch my favorites, including an episode that adapted the book Yeh-Shen by Ai-Ling Louie. “CBS Storybreak” titled the episode “Yeh-Shen: A Cinderella Story from China,” a title that easily convinced my small child brain that this story was just another version of Cinderella, but set in China.[1] It was a long time before I learned that a more accurate description for Cinderella should be “Cinderella: A Yexian (Yeh-Shen) Story from Europe.”
Cinderella is the undisputed Queen of Folklore and Fairy Tales. She is older than many of the cultures that claim her in their local folklore, and probably older than her first written appearance in 853 C.E. China in Duan Chengshi’s Miscellaneous Morsels from Youyang. From here, Yexian’s story traveled throughout eastern and southeastern Asia, becoming a popular figure of folklore throughout much of the continent.[2] In fact, Yexian was a superstar long before she made her European publication debut in 1634 Naples.[3]
In Europe, her story would be collected and published in the folklore and fairy tale anthologies of Charles Perrault and the Brothers Grimm, usually with some variation on the name “Cinderella.” Then Walt Disney produced a movie about her in 1950 that cemented her reputation as the quintessential princess ideal, her name becoming shorthand for the American belief that hard work and hopefulness were all anyone needed to make their dreams come true (It’s become our most enduring and devastating myth).
It makes sense that Yexian and Cinderella have become international icons, though. There is a universal connection with a person stuck in a bad situation and a dream for a better life. That’s human existence for as long as there have been humans. Who doesn’t want to be saved from their lowest points and given a brand new, extra shiny life free from want? We all yearn, on some level, for our own Cinderella stories, and that’s why she remains popular in so much of the world today.
There is so much more to the story of how her tale has journeyed through numerous cultures and nations, as well as time and history, but that’s research I hope you’ll explore with your freshly piqued curiosity. Instead of going through the past, today I am offering you three books that run with the idea that Cinderella is a part of our universal consciousness, so human she can appear in any story or any genre, while still being relevant and original.
The Magic Fish by Trung Le Nguyen
This beautiful graphic novel begins with a mother and son reading together. Hiền reads picture books with her son, Tiền, at first as a way to help nurture her English. Their favorite stories are fairy tales. As the years passed, reading together became a way for the two of them to maintain a bond as their lives grew and changed, and their worlds seemly diverged.
The Magic Fish is told through shifting narratives. Both Hiền and Tiền are pulled into competing worlds where neither is fully prepared to travel. Tiền grew up in America, while Hiền emigrated from Vietnam without the rest of her family. Tiền wants to reveal his true self to his family while Hiền is reconciling the home and family she left behind with the home and family she built, two separate cultures thousands of miles apart.
Throughout this narrative the characters encounter the specter of Cinderella’s story, a tale that has also been fractured and reshaped through time and migration. Through dreamy and wispy illustrations, readers journey with Hiền and Tiền as they read Grimm’s “Tattercoats,” as they remember the Vietnamese fairy tale of “Tấm Cám,” and as they rewrite Hans Christian Anderson’s “The Little Mermaid.” And just as these fairy tale heroines morph with their ever-shifting settings, so do Hiền and Tiền.
Real life does not guarantee happy ever afters, but, honestly, neither do fairy tales. And being torn apart and broken down doesn’t mean you can’t be rebuilt. As Hiền and Tiền explore their lives and where they fit into the world, they learn that there is meaning in the love of family and owning your own story.
The Magic Fish is a beautiful book, and it will make you cry in the end. But it will also remind you that life plays out differently for everyone and we are our best selves when we are uplifting others.
Cinder by Marissa Meyer
Let’s rewrite our heroine again, this time with more space travel!
Cinder is modern sci-fi, YA retelling that pays homage to both the Chinese origins of the story and the European reimaginings, while also centering around a cyborg in the future battling the evil Queen of the Moon. Not enticing enough for you? Cinder is also the first in the Lunar Chronicles series, giving this story the epic scope all space operas require to fully envelope you into their universe. As the series progresses, our titular hero teams up with futuristic reworkings of Red Riding Hood, Rapunzel, and Snow White as they work together to overthrow an evil queen who wants to conquer all!
But as a starting point for the series, Cinder hews closely to the general tale of Cinderella. Cinder is a girl with a mysterious past living under the questionable guardianship of an unscrupulous stepmother. She does not have the complete freedom of other humans because she is a cyborg, a human girl with cyber-enhancements. She is already struggling with her status in society when she meets a handsome boy who, of course, turns out to be a prince.
And then Queen Levana of the Moon arrives on Earth, and Cinder’s already complicated existence only gets more complicated.
All of this should be too bonkers of a concept to work, and yet it does. It’s an incredibly fun adventure from the Earth to the Moon as our heroes fight for their freedom and to save the world(s).
Cinderella is Dead by Kalynn Bayron
This time around, our heroine is kicking ass and dismantling the patriarchy!
Welcome to Lille, a kingdom where women are oppressed through a wicked King’s perversion of Cinderella’s story. Women have no rights and are expected to make themselves available to whatever man claims them for his own. It is a bleak place for any woman to harbor dreams and desires of their own.
Sophia does not want this life. She’s already found love in her best friend, Erin. But when Sophia and Erin are summoned to a ball where they’ll be part of the night’s menu, Sophia reaches her breaking point and sets into motion what may become Lille’s final act.
As Sophia plots the King’s downfall she meets Constance, the last living descendent of Cinderella herself. Constance wants her ancestor’s true story to be known and to find redemption her family. Together they will learn the real history of the fairy tale heroine while leading the women of Lille into a better and brighter future.
Footnotes:
[1] “Yeh-Shen: A Cinderella Story from China” featured an almost all-Asian cast in the mid-80s and was significantly more fun than the Disney film that became widely available on VHS in this same era.
[2] (Beauchamp, 2010, p. 466). While she first appeared in print in 853 C.E., there is evidence to suggest her tale was influenced by older Hindu texts that were themselves migrating through Asia.
[3] (Beauchamp, 2010, p. 482).
Reference:
Beauchamp, F. (2010). Asian Origins of Cinderella: The Zhuang Storyteller of Guangxi. Oral Tradition, 25(2), 447-496. https://doi.org/10.1353/ort.2010.0023
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