Steve Cuden: On today’s StoryBeat…

Qin Sun Stubis: If you have a story sitting in your heart that is important to you, then you know that it’s unique. You know that it would benefit the others. You should write that story. You should write that book. 

Announcer: This is Story Beat with Steve Cuden, a podcast for the creative mind. StoryBeat explores how Masters of creativity develop and produce brilliant works that people everywhere love and admire. So join us as we discover how talented creators find success in the worlds of imagination and entertainment. Here now is your host, Steve Cuden.

Steve Cuden: Thanks for joining us on Story Beat. We’re coming to you from the Steel City, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. My guest today, Qin Sun Stubis is a newspaper columnist, poet, and author of the award-winning historical saga Once our lives, the remarkable true story of four generations of Chinese women who struggled to survive war revolution and the eerie power of an ancient superstition that seemed to change their lives for nearly 100 years.

Born in the squalor of a Shanghai shanty town, Qin overcame poverty, starvation, and the political persecution of her family to win admission to a prestigious Chinese university and immigrate to the United States where she became a successful writer. With more than 200 published works, she strives to strengthen the bonds of understanding and humanity that connect us all.

I’ve read once our lives and can tell you, I was deeply drawn into Qin’s tale of growing up in the most harrowing of circumstances. Qin writes beautifully and movingly about her family and their struggles to endure extraordinarily difficult conditions. I highly urge you to check out once our lives.

You can learn more about Qin and her work at QinSunStubis.com. And so for all those reasons and many more, it’s a great honor for me to welcome the outstanding writer, Qin Sun Stubis, to StoryBeat today. Qin, thanks so much for joining me. 

Qin Sun Stubis: Thank you, Steve. It’s my great pleasure to be on the show. 

Steve Cuden: It’s really my pleasure.

It’s my honor. So let’s go back in time a little bit. Your book, which we’ll get into shortly, is really all about your upbringing and the upbringing of your parents and various families around you. How old were you when you first started thinking about words and writing? When did it occur to you that writing was something that maybe you could do?

Were you a young girl? 

Qin Sun Stubis: You would be surprised. When I was a young girl, it was cultural revolution. I was very much afraid of words because my father spoke honestly. Whatever he thought was correct, he spoke his mind and he was imprisoned During the cultural revolution, it was 1968. I was barely eight years old and I was afraid of words.

So when I was in school, writing essays, writing anything, I tried to copy mal quotations, Karl Marxist sayings, because I figured if I would copy those words, I could not be wrong. So, yeah, I love the words ever since I was a little girl, but I was afraid of words because what had happened to my father. So what happened was I loved the words so much, so I enjoyed reading, 

Steve Cuden: and words could get you into really big trouble if you say the wrong ones.

Qin Sun Stubis: Oh, it was, it was crazy. People during the cultural revolution, they were not even allowed to talk about cat because the word cat has the same sound as the ma given name Mao. Hmm. So if was something happened to a cat and if you accused of hurting a cat, it was a political crime because you’ll be assumed that you are against the Mao.

And because Mao and Mao, they’re so similar. So Chinese language is a little bit different from the Western language. We have one sound with many, many tones. And each tone would represent a different word. And now even the same sound with the same tone, if you look it up, you probably some of the common words, you can find it like 50, 70 words of the same sound.

So as a result of it, it is a little bit of a scary to use the language if you’re not being careful. I used to be a tour guide for the Americans, so I used to joke with ’em, how complicated is the Chinese language? I said, if you can use one sound and you can actually make a sentence. 

Steve Cuden: One sound. 

Qin Sun Stubis: Yeah, one sound.

So I will give you an example with ma ma ma. You can see ma ma ma ma did a mother sc the horse. So you’ve got a verb, you got a, now you got everything even in a question form. Mm-hmm. All happened with one sentence in with one sound. So I was fascinated by language. I loved it so much. I actually eventually became a librarian.

Mm. In high school. My sole purpose was to hide behind the counter because, you know, it was like a revolutionary time. Students were not interested in books. 

Steve Cuden: How old were you when you first started to read? 

Qin Sun Stubis: My mother taught us early. I had an older sister who is two years older than me, so my mother was preparing my older sister for school at the time, so she wouldn’t be like six.

I would be four, and she forced me to sit with my older sister. She thought, you know, teaching one kid or two kids, it’s the same process, so why don’t I pull her in as well? I hated it because I was not ready. I used to drop pencils and drop things just to had an excuse to pick things up so I didn’t have to look at the words and have to write something.

So it took me a while. But when my older sister came back with like a hundred and the Chinese didn’t have a, B, C as the marking system, we had like 102 zero. So she would get a hundred. My mother would be so proud of her and I said to myself, I want to get a hundred. I wanted my mother to be proud of me.

So we also had a little, we had so little growing up, there was no television, there was not even a radio that much because our radio was so broken. Some people put a bunch of little tubes and things around together and putting in a very crudely made wooden box for my father because my father wanted to give my mother radio because my mother loved the radio and um, she grew up with a radio.

So anyway, but sometimes she didn’t have the money to buy batteries. Sometimes she put batteries in and the radio won’t work. She literally had spank the radio really hard sometimes she got so angry, she hid it so hard and then suddenly the radio would turn on. So we had no entertainment. So the only entertainment was reading books, but we were poor.

Steve Cuden: So how would you get those books then? 

Qin Sun Stubis: She would’ve saved her money. Pennies. There was nothing to be wasted. So if you eat a watermelon, you save the watermelon seeds. We didn’t have any watermelon, seedless. Watermelon like here. I mean, you can so lazy, just keep on eating watermelon and there’s no seed.

The watermelon was filled with seeds. Mm. So she would give each person a little cup and you spit the seeds into the cup and you eat the watermelon. And when the watermelon is consumed, she would wash the watermelon seeds and dry them. So in the wintertime she could toast the watermelon seeds. Sometimes she would even flavor them with little sugar, salt, and you know, whatever.

We would suck the flavor and then we try to crack the seeds even though there’s almost nothing in it. But it was a wintertime entertainment. 

Steve Cuden: Hmm. 

Qin Sun Stubis: And um, you know, the watermelon ride, you cut the pot with teeth marks and you cut the thing, dark green, hard exterior part. And the one thing in the middle, she would chop them into pieces and she would put salt and marinade them and eventually string them with a needle and leave them outside to be dried.

Sometimes she would’ve pickle them. So there is like nothing to be wasted. 

Steve Cuden: Everything’s got to be used. 

Qin Sun Stubis: Everything had to be used. So, and she would, uh, save the few pennies and she would buy us books and. All four sisters, we would’ve share the books together. 

Steve Cuden: And what kind of books would you read? 

Qin Sun Stubis: Oh, it was cultural revolution.

It was, uh, the time the country did not encourage education. So we didn’t have any like fables or old stories and old Chinese traditions. They were rather revolutionary about teaching you about how to love the country to growing sunflowers, which it was a symbol of all. Chinese people when the sunflowers rise and grow up and it would’ve always faced the sun.

And the sun was our great leader. So there would be books rather, um, revolutionary. But my mother wanted us to read, so she didn’t really care what book and she could afford anything that was for sale out there. She would buy us the books. 

Steve Cuden: The important thing to her was that you read that you learn how to actually understand words on paper.

Qin Sun Stubis: It meant so much to her because she grew up, she was deprived of that, right? Because she was a girl. My grandfather was rich enough to give her gold watches, but he was westernized enough to be converted to Christianity. He was baptized along with my grandmother, with my mother, but he did not. He was still deep down inside.

He was a Chinese man. Like a young women should not be allowed. To be sitting out there with the other people, they shouldn’t have a voice. So he actually tutored my mother himself. My mother had no education, but she was tutored by my grandfather. She learned to read and write to learn numbers, and eventually she was ambitious enough and also bold enough because it was the communist country, she felt my grandfather couldn’t control her anymore.

So she went out. She became a teacher to teach those people who couldn’t read, and she also then got into the entertainment business. She performed on the stage? 

Steve Cuden: Mm-hmm. The 

Qin Sun Stubis: plays. She was offered a job as a movie actress by the Shanghai Film Studio, and of course my grandmother suffered a third stage TV and it took her three years to die.

But my mother. Couldn’t go and take a job. She had to go back home to uh, care for her mother until my grandmother died. 

Steve Cuden: And that’s what I assume many families had to go through when someone got ill. Is that someone in the family had to take care? 

Qin Sun Stubis: Oh yeah, because China was, at the time, was all about the family because the whole reason you need to have children is that when you get old, your children will take care of you.

When you got sick, your children will take care of you. So my grandparents, this particular set of grandparents, they adopted my mother because they were childless. They felt it. If they could adopt a girl and having a child would bring them more children. So, yeah, the whole reason for them to have children was to take care of them.

Steve Cuden: As you’re growing up in this very difficult circumstance in Shanghai, at what point, as you’re reading, I guess, what you would think of as cultural revolutionary books, when did you become exposed to the notion of writers and writing? I’m assuming that the writing in the Revolutionary books probably was not as great as the great writers.

Would that be correct? 

Qin Sun Stubis: We had some great writers. They were most Russians, 

Steve Cuden: Russians, 

Qin Sun Stubis: the Russian writers, they were translated into Chinese. 

Steve Cuden: Like what books? 

Qin Sun Stubis: Well, I don’t believe at the time I’d read any of them because it was during really, really the revolution time. So we did not want to read anything.

And then by the time I was, uh, you know, in the educational system. China accused the Russia of Revisionism. So, but even the Russians were taken out. So when I was learning, there was very little to be learned. I did not even know how big the world was. 

Steve Cuden: So how were you then exposed to the notion of becoming a writer?

Because you’ve been doing this a long time. When did you start to write? 

Qin Sun Stubis: You’ll be so surprised. I did not start to write until about some 20 years ago. So I was in my forties when I started to write. Wow. But I was, because the reason that I loved reading, eventually I started to learn English. And I was very fortunate enough when I was in high school, I had self volunteered, a set of grandparents.

They wanted to be my grandparents and husband was a professor of English. So he was very popular at the time because China was opening up and it was 1976. So the government at the time was under De Xing. Mao died in 1975, 

Steve Cuden: right? 

Qin Sun Stubis: So De Xing encouraged intellectuality. He wanted China to start what we call the college entrance examination, which started from the Imperial Days in China, where all the people from all over China, no matter your position, your wealth or anything, they were called upon to the capitol to take a national entrance examination.

Whoever achieved the highest then will be promoted. To become government officials, you would be given the assignment of like provincial government or you could go as far as the Prime Minister advisor to the emperor himself. So intellectuality, you know, knowledge was one way that would stimulate, people feel like this is a gamble.

If I learn enough one day I might become the prime Minister of China just because I’m smart and I’ll learn along. 

Steve Cuden: Sure. Would a woman be allowed to become Prime Minister? 

Qin Sun Stubis: No, maybe you have to. You have to be a man to pretend to be a man at that time. There are stories, you know, that uh, it’s made into a Disney movie called a Mulan.

Steve Cuden: Yes. Mulan. Yeah. 

Qin Sun Stubis: She had to pretend to be a man. Sure. There’s things like that, you know. So then Xing, we started it and it was the first time ever in modern Chinese history. We had an entrance, entrance examination for college. And I was just graduating from high school, so I was very, very fortunate. And then I had a professor of the English who was giving me private lessons.

So I remember learning the real English story for the first time. The professor told me, he gave me a story and he said, all you have learned is Chinglish. It’s Chinese English. Yeah, it’s translation now. Here is a real story. And it was ESOP’s fable. 

Steve Cuden: I know. ESOP’s fables quite well. That’s a actually a really good place to start because there’s so many morals in there.

Qin Sun Stubis: Yeah, I was so proud of myself. Like, oh, this is a real English. And then what happened was I got into the second. Best Language institute in China called the Shanghai Institute of Foreign Languages. So I really became a student of English and specifically more 19th century English literature. Mm-hmm. So I studied Elizabeth English, I studied actually all the way to Charles Spencer Milton Shakespeare learned sonnets and pride and prejudice in whatever you call gen air.

I read a lot, a lot of books ’cause I loved them of human bondage. Jack London in 

Steve Cuden: English, not in translation, all 

Qin Sun Stubis: in original English. It was a big struggle. 

Steve Cuden: What was the biggest challenge you had in learning? 

Qin Sun Stubis: Oh Lord. Everything. I mean, I used to have a notebook filled with English words like you start to learn, read the original novel every.

Three sentences, every two sentences, there’s a word that you won’t know. So you have a dictionary by one from one side, and you have a book on the other and you keep on reading. And I would sometimes write down phrases that I love so much, or the words that I felt that I love them. I didn’t understand archaic words, is anything like I totally collapsed the timeline.

To me a word has meaning and that’s it. I didn’t understand the concept. Like the word is no longer in use. It’s too archaic. It’s, it’s not a word anymore, but every word to me with a word. 

Steve Cuden: Well, many books that are in written in the 19th century in English, modern Americans don’t understand a lot of the words in there as well.

Qin Sun Stubis: I loved it. So four years. They transformed us, those students from the, like for me, the only thing I knew that was real English was an ESOP fable to when I graduated, I translated a short story by Thomas Bailey Ridge. I picked a particular story and he was the editor in chief at Atlantic Monthly, and I also wrote about why the story was special to me and the historical backdrop of the period that he was living in whatever.

I did all those things and when I graduated, and by then I read so much. I mean, I love the Louisa Maya Court. I love the Bronte Sisters. I mean, there’s so many, many of my favorites and I would just sit in the, we had a little movie house. It’s always showing some foreign movies to train our ears. I will be sitting like watching through the whole gun with the wind, the entire movie.

And I do not know how many times I sit there just watching the movie and I’m like, oh my gosh. I even could sympathize, you know, with like a Scarlet, because she was tearing the curtains and making herself an outfit. And how resourceful we lived through a cultural revolution and every little bit had to be used and there was no waste.

And how we, you know, like a piece of fabric, if you make a jacket out of it, the little pieces you still manage to make, like underwears and whatever little things you can make out of it. 

Steve Cuden: So a great phrase is necessity is the mother of invention, which is that you had. Nothing to work with, but you had a little enough and you could figure out how to make something out of almost nothing.

Is that what you’re saying? 

Qin Sun Stubis: Yes. 

Steve Cuden: And so you had to be very creative, didn’t you? 

Qin Sun Stubis: Probably I’d never thought about like that. You know, these days like children have, uh, uh, jacko puzzles, right? Yes. You, for for I was growing up, the Jacko puzzle was my mother. How to try to fit in as many things on a fabric so that almost nothing could be wasted.

And that’s the challenge, you know, if you have a, a, a, something bigger you’re making and then you try to make something even smaller in between the bigger pieces, uh, and to fit everything into things. 

Steve Cuden: Did you know when you were going through that, that you really had very little, did you have anything to compare to and go, wow, those people have a lot and we have very little, or did you not really understand it till later in life?

Qin Sun Stubis: Well, I lived in an area, interestingly, from the age of four. Around four and five, we moved out of the shanty town. Now, before that, I had a little memory of everything, but I knew that we had really nothing. My father made a little upside on wooden box, and it was really whatever the ground was that the, the soil with our, the ground in our house, and it was a piece of tin metal on the top and you could hear the roof, the rain falling.

It was like symphony going on. And with the cracking of the, of the thunder, it was pretty scary, uh, growing up. But we ended up in a little tiny house because shantytown was being torn down and the government said it was a not a healthy place to live. They suddenly realized that like. Hundreds of family living one place with a, a communal water tap area where people washed and did everything together.

Chickens and, and the roosters and, and the ducks were running around with the children and just random things, weeds growing. There was not really any grass or lawn or anything, so we had three little tiny children. My youngest sister wasn’t born yet, so they thought that it was not humane. We had no place to go to my parents with three tiny little children.

So they said this little tiny house, if you guys wanted it, you could have it. And the tiny little house, they were using it for storing material. My father was working for a construction company, so they said We will move out everything and you guys could stay there. My parents were more than happy. It’s like, okay, great.

We’re gonna have a house, a real house. But that tiny little house was actually a servant bathroom showers. There were two shower stores. Really, our floor was made with like in Indian floor. Once half of it was mosaic. The other half was concrete. Hmm. And it was learned later. The concrete side was for men’s shower, the mosaic part with tiles up to, you know, halfway.

That was for the women’s shower. So, and there was a toilet inside them. And so we were very happy. It was finally had our own home, but it was the most prestigious living quarter in Shanghai in the old French Quarter. The place was a court Jubilee. Court. Jubilee Courts was built. By Sheik’s brother-in-law.

It was one of the song sisters married to him named Kangxi. He built the houses there and when we moved there in the tall building up there, they were ex-mayor of Shanghai. They were surgeons, army, like top army surgeons. They were famous movie stars. They were famous painters. Everybody had a social position.

Now you imagine in the 1960s, China didn’t have any cars. You could imagine everybody had a bicycle. You’re lucky to have a bicycle. Bicycle. 

Steve Cuden: Sure. Right, right. 

Qin Sun Stubis: We had cars parked in the lane all the time with chauffeur in white gloves because these were the highest people. 

Steve Cuden: So you went from extreme poverty into something that was a little more elevated then 

Qin Sun Stubis: more elevated?

Not for us. Really, we were locked down upon because we were the people living in the shower stores. Right. We were living, everybody living in, uh, apartment buildings or the villas. They all Spanish styles. And then this, this tiny little shower house looks like a dollhouse. And our family moved into it with four girls and my parents.

So all my classmates, they had a shining Peyton shoes, brand new blue pants Army jackets, even though they dressed like everybody else during the cultural revolution. But. They were very well dressed while I was ARAG doll because I had patches on my elbows, my big toes sticking out of my shoe, and my mother had four girls to attend, plus her husband.

She had to make all shoes, all clothes by herself, and she had to feed all of us. She had to do everything. It’s a one woman job. 

Steve Cuden: So the other kids were looking down on you then? 

Qin Sun Stubis: Oh yeah. Nobody wanted to play with us, so we luckily had each other and we also had a bunch of chickens in our little yard, and we lived in this tiny little house with a front little tiny yard and back, little tiny yard, and totally shut up by ourselves because we didn’t have really technically any neighbors.

We went to form the shanty town where every person, essentially it was a huge family. You can never keep your door closed. The people all running and out of each other’s houses and you hand out your laundries, the laundry will be flying, like colored the flags and suddenly we had nobody. We just would encircled.

We were imprisoned in this little tiny apartment. 

Steve Cuden: So much of what Ching is talking about right now is in the book, is in once our lives. It’s really quite fascinating and very difficult to understand how you survived all this. What led you to decide to write the story now about your family? 

Qin Sun Stubis: Well, I was a person who always wanted to look forward and never to look back.

Mm-hmm. If I had to look back, I don’t think I could have survived because are we constantly drooling on something that can never be resolved? I think that lot of us, we tend to be thinking our own problems. And then because we, our mind is always preoccupied with all our problems. We don’t have the energy to look forward to go forward.

So for me, I could not just stay where I am. My mind was always forward, what to do, what to write, what to read, what, how to go forward. 

Steve Cuden: Even as a young girl, you were always looking to go forward. 

Qin Sun Stubis: Yes. I wanted to grow up. I wanted to grow up so badly seeing my mother was going through, my father was imprisoned and they cut off my father’s wage and how we had no money and I wanted to grow up so badly because I wanted to be able to earn money to help my parents.

I wanted to grow up to protect my parents. And so yeah, I was always looking forward to do things to do better, to grow bigger. So in that regards. I never really looked backwards even after I came to America. I was in the grad school. I landed straight in the grad school studying communications, and I was analyzing Ronald Reagan and Dukas political campaign.

Imagine Uhhuh a Chinese woman who had never been in America, and my department told me, no foreigner had ever succeeded in this program. You better off be transferred to the Chinese department or Oriental Studies. I’m like, I’m Oriental Studies, or I don’t want to do more oriental studies. It was hard because I was.

Analyzing American family dynamics, study, political coercion in, you know, political power play, deterrence, everything. The corporations. We had organization communications, analyzing like a, at a time, Tucson Electric power Company, about their, their team building abilities and whatnot. But I am a fast learner and I wanted to do something.

I will not quit. So I was going forward. I get my degree, I get a job, I got married, I had children. I just going forward. And then one day it hit me when my parents were gone and imagine they were so far away from me. My parents never came to America. They never saw America. 

Steve Cuden: Hmm. 

Qin Sun Stubis: They died one after another.

I was unconsolable because when I was growing up, as I said, I didn’t have anyone. I just had my little sisters and I had my parents. We were like army soldiers in the same ditch we fought together and the fight, the war, the battle of for life, that’s what we did. And suddenly they were gone. I started to think back about the past.

The road that we went, walked through, all these things came back to me like a movie. I couldn’t stop myself. 

Steve Cuden: It was very vivid for you. 

Qin Sun Stubis: I have a great memory. I’ve learned only LA much. Later on when I started to write, I actually have a photographic memory. 

Steve Cuden: Wow. You’re lucky. 

Qin Sun Stubis: Yeah. I remember things. I remember colors.

I remember the color of the clothes I was wearing, you know, in front of the book. There’s an image of the four little girls. I had a little checkered skirt. I remember the colors. I remember the top did not coordinate at all because the top was orange, like a creamsicle color, and the little skirt was white, red and black checkers.

We didn’t think about the color coordination. We’re just happy to have clothes, but luckily it’s a black and white photo. Nobody can see anything. 

Steve Cuden: This part of it fascinates me because you obviously didn’t keep notes or do journals or diary or anything like that as you were growing up, so you had to rely a lot to write this book on your memory, and you believe you have a photographic memory.

That’s amazing. 

Qin Sun Stubis: Yeah. You know, I grew up, I was afraid of words. The last thing I wanted to do is write my diary, 

Steve Cuden: right, 

Qin Sun Stubis: because it’s dangerous. My mother said, your words have been kept inside. You 

Steve Cuden: sure 

Qin Sun Stubis: you can think about it. You can talk about it. Only within those four walls where we are, when you go outside, you don’t say things.

Steve Cuden: So when you went to write the book, did you then go do further research beyond your memory, or is it strictly out of your memory? 

Qin Sun Stubis: It took me 20 years. Imagine. Oh wow. It was not just a memory, it was very as if, imagine using a knife, digging into your chest, because a lot of the stories were painful. Very, very painful.

The reason I would know about my family four generation over a hundred years was because my mother, being a theater person, she had a great memory because she had to remember all the lines on the stage. So she used to tell a stories, you know, at five o’clock in the summer, imagine the lights were off because we couldn’t afford electricity in the wintertime, sometimes four o’clock.

So what did we do? We lie in bed, listen to my mother talk about the past, about my grandparents, about her life growing up. So I’ve heard a lot of the stories about my mother, about how she met my father, about why they left Shanghai to go such a far away place. It’s on the old Silk Road. That’s the place where camels used to be.

It’s a desert. And yet she gave me all those stories. Throughout years. I spent 29 years in China. I heard those stories so many, many times. And now as I grew up, the stories of course were enriched according to my age because certain things when I was little, she would not want to tell me. But as grew older, I felt they were more fillers that I learned about her life and my father, how they ended with finally got married and all those things.

And what happened was you listened to it so many, many times, I felt I was, my mind was sculpting her 

Steve Cuden: stories 

Qin Sun Stubis: by literally all different versions mingled into one. So I had so many, many stories in my head given my, my mother throughout the years and then. After. You know, of course my father was imprisoned.

I was old enough even though I was only seven and a half, close to eight, I remembered everything vividly. I was cursed with a memory. Many people told me so, because the good stories, they’re great. When it’s not good stories, people do not want you to repeat them, and yet I can never forget them. They have been imprinted in my head.

So there’s so many, many stories came out now. I still didn’t think I could be a writer. I never written much of anything, and I felt that in my life. All these great writers, I’ve read their stories, they were my heroes and heroes. I never would’ve imagined that I could be one day like them. To do the writings like Charles Diggins.

I’m like, oh my gosh. You know, it’s just everything was so good to me that I, I’d never fancied that I would become a writer, but those stories won’t go away. And I really suddenly realize a time that my children should know those stories. They, they’re Americans growing up here, they will never understand how life would be if it’s in a different circumstance.

And I thought about Anne’s diary. I thought about the story of my life by Helen Keller, and I was motivated. I felt that there are a lot of people that they write because they are pressured by circumstance. They’re not born writers. And the stories, stories themselves should be kept. So in order to keep the story, you have to turn yourself into a writer.

So. I had these little notebooks and I keep little notebooks in my purse wherever I went with my children, doing ballet classes, clarinet lessons, things like that, tennis lessons. I would have a pen and then write on the notebooks about the stories of our lives. Gradually, I accumulated a stack of those notebooks.

They were very crude, the stories, but they were the initial, the brick stones to build the building of a book. 

Steve Cuden: Well, you needed to start somewhere and that’s where you started. And I think the listeners should really pay attention to what Ching is talking about. She carried with her a pad and a pen. You could do it other ways.

Obviously you could do it into your talk, into your phone if you wanted to, but it’s really important that you carry something with you to record these ideas. 

Qin Sun Stubis: You should. Even if you wake up like three in the morning, you had a great idea. I can promise you, you can fall back to sleep and when you wake up again, you will never remember what you thought.

Like 

Steve Cuden: that’s absolutely right. 

Qin Sun Stubis: Yeah, that was a great idea. Why didn’t I write it down? But you can’t capture it, so you, it’s important because those were the foundation of my book. I then try to look at them and then I try to use the computer when I had a chunk of time by myself. When I’m not somewhere doing things, I try to put those stories down, more kind of a connected, more like a story, and eventually I accumulated a bunch of stories.

Steve Cuden: Was there anyone left who you could talk to and interview from back then? 

Qin Sun Stubis: Well, if you read my book once our lives, you wouldn’t know that my, uh, father’s family didn’t have anything to do with us because we had four girls, my mother’s family because my mother was given away, and then she refused to go back, and so they didn’t have anything to do with us.

So I had five aunts, one uncle from my father’s side, and four aunts, and two uncles from my mother’s side. But I really didn’t have any relatives. 

Steve Cuden: Were you able to talk to anyone from back in the day? Your sisters or anyone? 

Qin Sun Stubis: Yeah. My sister’s the only one. My older sister who is older, two years older than me, we frequently speak together.

She still lives in Shanghai. She is legally blind right now. She actually is learning how to be a blind person, how to work with this blind person sick, and should she come to that point because her one eye is totally dark, the other eye is mostly dark, and she had her retina torn several times, had to be reattached so she wasn’t born correctly because, you know, my, my parents went through so much and my mother conceived her during the three years of famine in over in the desert.

It was nothing to eat. Her eyeballs are not round. They actually are in the shape of an olive. 

Steve Cuden: Hmm. 

Qin Sun Stubis: So she was always having problem with her eyesight. She could never see the blackboard. She had problems seeing things, but now she’s at a stage where she cannot see practically at all. 

Steve Cuden: Oh, that’s a shame. So I speak 

Qin Sun Stubis: to her.

Yeah. 

Steve Cuden: Was her memory good too? Was she able to share things with you that triggered other memories for you? 

Qin Sun Stubis: She is very sharp. She remembers everything. And she was actually more the literary person in our family when she was like 10 years old. She had an ambition of working on a novel. She actually wrote novels and filled her notebooks with all the stories, and eventually she burned them all.

Steve Cuden: Oh. 

Qin Sun Stubis: So you know, she still is a very good writer in Chinese. I always enjoying receiving her little emails used to write me. You know, letters and she’s a fascinating person to talk to. Yes. So I did ask certain things. 

Steve Cuden: So you had that, did you go back to China to do further research? 

Qin Sun Stubis: No, I haven’t been to China for 15 years.

Steve Cuden: I see. 

Qin Sun Stubis: Yeah. So I do not know when I will be able to go back. You know, there’s just so much going on in my world. Mm-hmm. Here. But after my parents were gone, I used to go there all the time when my parents were alive. Mm-hmm. But I think that if my sister really loses her eyesight, at some point I have to.

Think about, you know, making my ways back there again. Mm-hmm. 

Steve Cuden: So you open the book with this incredible line, which is everyone says, my father’s life was ruined before he was born. What a great opening line ex. Tell the listeners what that huge statement means. Why was this said about your father that his life was ruined before he was born?

Qin Sun Stubis: Well, according to my grandmother, my father’s mother was a Buddhist, so she believed in a lot of superstitious things. Even though it was during a cultural revolution, her beliefs couldn’t be changed because she already had all these beliefs. So she used to tell me a story all the time about how she was visited by a beggar for an entire week, every day.

Uh, she was 19 years old when my father was born, so she was feeling very vulnerable because. She lived in a little seaside village where there was no doctor, no nurse, but only the midwife, and she saw young women like her giving birth and died. So she was very, very scared. And then there was this beggar every day.

At the same time, visiting her, she felt a sympathy for the bagger. Also, she felt that she was keeping the bagger alive, as if that would, in a Buddhist situation, you do good deeds, you will be rewarded with good things. So she wanted to make sure that she would’ve survived this childbirth. So every day she was feeding the beggar and the, the last day, the seventh day, the beggar came, and the beggar told her that he’s coming.

He’s coming. So my grandmother. Did not really believe the bagger, whatever the bagger was saying. No, he looked very pathetic, right? He always just walked down all the food and then he would burp, and then he would leave. And that night my grandmother actually had my father. And the next day, you know, the Chinese women, you have to stay in bed for an entire month after the child is born, you’re not supposed to touch the ground.

You’re supposed to stay indoor to be fed, taken care of. And my grandmother went to the door. She wanted to feed her beggar. He never came back. Wow. The beggar never came back, ever. And one day, my grandmother, look at her baby, look at my father. And she suddenly realized the beggar was not a person. He was what Chinese would call a Y one, a wandering spirit.

Was looking for the host of a body, and she believed that that wondering spirit jumped into my father because he liked the fact that my grandmother was nice to him and he wanted to be born into that family. But my grandmother knew a beggar, a beggar’s fate. Imagine your child born with a beggar’s fate.

Everything bad would happen to you because a beggar’s life was bad, was hard in any way, you know, as if the human life is not hard enough. So she believed that my mother had four girls, was also because of the beggar. The beggar brought her unlucky things. Including giving her only granddaughters and no grandson.

Steve Cuden: And that was considered not a good thing in those days. 

Qin Sun Stubis: Well, my father was firstborn son, grandson, so they were expecting him to have a boy. And then my mother kept on having girls, more girls. And uh, they didn’t care. They felt they wanted to have nothing to do with us, even though my grandmother loved my father to the end of their lives.

And, you know, it only can be revealed the be spirit. How it concluded at the very end of the book, which was, by the way, the hardest part of the story. 

Steve Cuden: Why? 

Qin Sun Stubis: Because. I did not want to think about how my father died, how he went to prison the second time. Usually those people who were imprisoned during the cultural revolution, when the revolution was over, these people were being apologized.

They were giving back their income, they were given back their positions. And my father, instead of getting an apology, he was sent to the prison again, being accused of four cultural revolution. 

Steve Cuden: He was imprisoned for statements made against the cultural revolution. 

Qin Sun Stubis: Yes, that time from 1968 to 1975, and now in 1982, he was incarcerated again.

For this time for four cultural revolution. And he was sentenced to seven years in the Shanghai prison. I did not want to, he came back. I, I tried to encourage him to live. I was working and I was in a very tough position because government to me, assigned me to working with Americans at a time. And the done shopping said even if you don’t come from a good family background, if you are good at something, they would encourage you to do something.

So they gave me a job that was under foreign ministry and tourism ministry. At the same time, I had a father as a political prisoner in a prison, so I made sure no Americans ever knew that I was in such a situation I made up. Mm-hmm. My father was a lawyer, was a, a worker, was a doctor. I could say anything except.

My father was in prison and I was making money to support the entire family because he was imprisoned. They fired him officially and my mother had no money, so I was supporting. I was the father of the family for seven years and he came out, he became quiet. He wouldn’t talk anything to us, and also he dressed like a bagger.

He had clothes full of holes, even though we bought him brand new clothes. Brand new clothes were all in a closet stacked never opened. He was wearing all the broken clothes. 

Steve Cuden: Why do you think that is? 

Qin Sun Stubis: That made me write the book the way I did because I felt my grandmother’s story when I look back after my father was gone.

Was he really the beggar, but he was certainly the image, the beggar. And my grandmother was so confused. My grandmother, I believe, had a dementia at the time, and, um, she couldn’t even understand where the beggar started, where my father ended. He, she couldn’t even tell the difference to her. The two of them were one.

Steve Cuden: Hmm. That’s weird. 

Qin Sun Stubis: Well, you know, she, all her life she blamed herself for feeding the beggar, being nice and kind. 

Steve Cuden: That’s powerful. That, that feeling and that that belief, uh, filtered through that. It’s very powerful. 

Qin Sun Stubis: And they died within hours of each other. 

Steve Cuden: Oh, that’s really interesting. 

Qin Sun Stubis: I wrote at the end of the book and every word of it was true.

I actually had a different ending and it was through the process of final editing, I suddenly realized this is a historical book. I didn’t even change the names. All the names in the books are the real names of the real people that once lived. And I had to have courage to put the last bit of the story together 

Steve Cuden: mm-hmm.

Qin Sun Stubis: As it happened. But it was very, very painful to me to see my father that way. And, um, how it ended. 

Steve Cuden: Well, as you were writing it, did you relive it? Did it go through your mind that way where it was that kind of pain? 

Qin Sun Stubis: Yes. I felt that I had to relive my life so many times in order to put the book together.

And by reliving my life so many times, in a way, I felt it was very therapeutic because I felt that horrible pain in a way hurt me so much. Almost felt, what’s the meaning of life? Why am I here? My husband told me that I should probably consult a psychologist, probably should have. I’m like, who would understand me?

My life? I mean, what had gone through I’m, I have lived as if I have lived the lives of many people. 

Steve Cuden: Oh, yes. And that that clearly is there in the book. In fact, your book reads more like a novel. It’s beautifully written and it reads more like a novel than a memoir. Was that your intention to have it read and feel like it had that kind of thrust of a novel?

Qin Sun Stubis: I don’t believe I did. I was more digging out my heart and wanted to remember my life once it was, and that’s why I name it once our lives, there is a nostalgic feeling to it, and I wanted all the readers to be able to place their feet inside the shoes of these Chinese people who lived through that particular historical period.

Steve Cuden: I think you succeeded at that quite extraordinarily well. When you’re reading the book, you feel what you are trying to get us to feel. The book is not like a distant thing, it, it has real heart and depth. Have you tried to find a way to maybe turn this into a movie or a TV series? 

Qin Sun Stubis: I would’ve loved that.

I would’ve loved anybody who other listeners out there or anybody you wouldn’t know to recommend to me. I would’ve loved to have it to turn into a movie. I felt also this book is not just about my family. Anybody who’s going through a war revolution, famine, they’re struggling. Our basic human feelings are all the same.

It doesn’t matter. Your Chinese, your African Americans, your people living on different continent, we are all the same people. We are made of blood flesh, and we have feelings. We have tears. Not that one kind of people have tears and the others don’t. We all have the same feelings. I what I wanted people to understand is we actually, through this story, we will understand we are much stronger than we think we are.

You always say like, oh, I may be not able to live through it. This is so hot. It’s so unimaginable. What is unimaginable? Could happen to anyone at any time. You know, the world is like our weather, like the clouds up there like, oh, it’s not going to have rain. And guess what? The next second, it’s raining. 

Steve Cuden: Yes it is.

Qin Sun Stubis: Yeah. So we don’t really know. We should count our blessings. When time is good, we should treasure the good times. When bad time comes, you say, you know what? This is life. Life actually teaches us to be stronger. If we always live through good times, we become very soft. We worry too much. But when we go through the really bad times, when your house is burned down, when you are running out and you have no food, you don’t know when the next meal is gonna come from.

I mean, I had to go through garbage to pick the remains of the charcoal. I mean, I remember the stinky feelings in a garbage dump and how to use my, we didn’t have gloves. Okay. My little tiny hands digging through. And you have to feel the weight of these charcoal remains because they all look white. But the unburned charcoal actually way heavier than the burned charcoal.

And you would know that and put ’em in a little basket and take them home so my mother could use them ’cause we couldn’t afford to buy charcoal. 

Steve Cuden: Well, that’s the kind of storytelling that Qin has in once our lives. That’s very powerful and very emotional and gets right into your heart as you’re reading.

I would be remiss as we’re talking, uh, to, if I didn’t ask you a little bit about writing your column, you’ve now written how many at columns, how many stories have you written? 200. 

Qin Sun Stubis: Oh Lord. I have written over 200, like 216 columns. 

Steve Cuden: Wow. Okay. So what are most of your columns about? Are they also related to your family or what are they about?

Qin Sun Stubis: My columns actually is, from my perspective, it’s called the Reflections from the East. It’s, uh, on the Santa Monica Star and uh, it’s a local newspaper in Santa Monica. Mm-hmm. And I write about how I feel from my perspective as someone grew up in China through all these things. And, uh, now living in American society about parenting, about the events, about, like, I just wrote, um, a column about International Children’s Day, um, about how hard it was to be a child growing up.

And because I never felt it was a minute that I could be a child, always had to help out, always worry about things. But when I was in school. That was the time that I was a child. I didn’t have to worry about anything. I could just sit there and listen and absorb whatever knowledge that was given to me.

Steve Cuden: And so your columns then are really based on your life then your perspective? 

Qin Sun Stubis: Mostly. 

Steve Cuden: Mostly, 

Qin Sun Stubis: yeah. I could not stop writing about them. I write about my children. I write about, you know, my dog. I write. I also have interviewed a lot of people who was in the Iron Learn. Suffered from polio. Polio, yeah. And how he grew up and all different things.

So I write about everything, whatever I found that is interesting to me. 

Steve Cuden: Well, I think folks should check that out because as I say, you’re a, a wonderful writer and the fact that you are not a native English speaker is even more remarkable because the writing is quite well done. So I congratulate you on that.

I have been having a very, very wonderful and interesting conversation for an hour now with Qin Sun Stubis. And, uh, we’re gonna wind the show down just a little bit. And I’m wondering, Qin, can you share with us a story more than what you’ve already shared all these great stories. Do you have a story that you can share with us that’s either weird, quirky, offbeat strange, or just plain funny?

Qin Sun Stubis: Well, I think that, uh, you know, as a writer we always have to write query letters, try to get a book published. So I have here is a very fun short at the time, you know, I, it was very hurtful for me and little story that someone replied to my query letter for having my book published. And she said if I would allowed her to rewrite my book in my voice.

And, um, I said, no, I already have my voice. Why do you have to rewrite my book in my voice and then get my book published? Does it make sense? 

Steve Cuden: That makes no sense. No, you have a voice. You have a very powerful voice. 

Qin Sun Stubis: So that’s, uh, how sometimes when you try to get stories published, your book published, you know, people would do crazy things.

Write to you. And I think as a writer we should know what makes sense when it doesn’t, not because you say you’ll get my book published. I would agree to anything. 

Steve Cuden: Well, that’s what a lot of people will do though. They’ll bend over and say, yes, I’ll do whatever you say if you’ll publish my book. But you stood pat, you stood still on your own voice, which is I think, the right way to be because you have to believe in what you’ve written or why bother to even publish it at all.

So I think that that you did exactly the right thing. So last question for you today, Qin. I’m just wondering, in all your experiences, are you able to share with those that are starting out in the business as writers or maybe they’re in a little bit trying to get to the next level, some piece of advice or a tip that can help them?

Qin Sun Stubis: I would say it’s very, very important if you have a story. Sitting in your heart that is important to you and you know that it’s unique, you know that it would’ve benefit the others. You should write that story. You should write that book, no matter how hard it is. Even though it took me 20 years. Here I am, after 20 years, I have a book, and I’ve learned so much through the writing experience, and I think that it’s important.

People always say like, oh, it’s too difficult, it’s taking too much time. But if it’s worth it, it’s something that’s important to you. You don’t want to have a regret in your life someday. Oh, I could have done it. I should have done it. So pick up your pen and start it right now. 

Steve Cuden: I think that is absolutely wonderful advice.

There is no substitute for being a writer other than writing. You must write. It’s the only way. And I think that that is, uh, tremendously valuable advice and I can’t thank you enough for spending time with me today, Qin. Your wisdom and your energy are just fantastic and those that are interested, once again, the book is called Once Our Lives and you can find out more about qin@qinsunstubis.com.

Qin, thank you so much for being on the show with me today. 

Qin Sun Stubis: Thank you so much, Steve, for having me. 

Steve Cuden: And so we’ve come to the end of today’s StoryBeat. If you like this episode, won’t you please take a moment to give us a comment, rating, or review on whatever app or platform you are listening to. Your support helps us bring more great story beat episodes to you.

StoryBeat is available on all major podcast apps and platforms, including Apple Podcasts, YouTube, Spotify, iHeartRadio, tune in and many others. Until next time, I’m Steve Cuden and may all your stories be unforgettable.