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Qin Sun Stubis was born in the squalor of a Shanghai shantytown during the Great Chinese Famine, which killed more than 30 million people. Growing up amidst the Cultural Revolution, she quickly learned that words could thrill – and even kill. She saw her defiantly honest father imprisoned for using the wrong words. Shunned as political pariahs, Qin and her family sustained themselves with books and stories of adventure and past glory. With the help of a borrowed radio, an eccentric British teacher, and a fortuitous assignment as a library assistant, Qin discovered and fell in love with Western literature, committing to memory the strange but beautiful sounds of Keats, Wordsworth, and Lincoln.
But it was in bed late each night, after scouring local parks for enough firewood to cook the family’s meal of rice, that Qin and her three small sisters heard the dramatic stories found in her work. The girls listened to their mother, an aspiring actress in the early days of Asian cinema, recount colorful tales of pirates, prophecies, fortunes won and lost, babies sold in opium dens, glorious lives and gruesome deaths. Based on actual experiences and family lore from Imperial to Post-Revolutionary times, these stories represent a wealth of colorful but largely overlooked Chinese history.
Today, Qin is a newspaper columnist and writes poems, essays, short stories, and Chinese tales exploring traditional Asian themes. Her writing is inflected with Eastern and Western flavors in ways that transcend geography to touch hearts and reveal universal truths.
Reviewed by Asher Syed for Readers' Favorite
Once Our Lives: Life, Death, and Love in the Middle Kingdom by Qin Sun Stubis is a non-fiction memoir that traces the author's family legacy back generations and forms a full picture from the evolution of the Chinese Communist Revolution to the Cultural Revolution. Stubis begins with a written family tree and timeline, and a story that originates with her grandmother's continued telling of a curse on Stubis' father, An Chu. His life is heavy with adversity and while Stubis' mother, Yan, starts on a different path, the joining of both is part of the catalyst that rocks their lives and those around them, for better or worse. Yan comes from an affluent adopted home, an upbringing that is in direct opposition to the Revolution, which she supports, and An Chu who she marries. As we know from hindsight, the CCR doesn't go well, and the reality of An Chu and Yan's life becomes harder, following them even when they move to Shanghai.
As a South Asian man who is married to a woman of East Asian ethnicity, I was drawn to Once Our Lives: Life, Death, and Love in the Middle Kingdom by Qin Sun Stubis because the Revolution is a topic that her family lived through outright but refused to talk about it. There's plenty of fiction out there, but Stubis is of my generation, which makes her immediately relatable, and her family legacy goes much further than an accounting of what was experienced from A to B to C. The narrative is woven into stories, parcelled out like the pieces of a quilt; when all are sewn together they form as complete a picture as we can possibly get from the generations dwindling before us. This is described in detail with scenes such as one in a new neighborhood, where despite living conditions that included converted garages, the working class had formed a tight-knit community. Illness is rampant and while there is a recovery, a poster in a park shows this tight community that sweeping change is on the way. Overall, this is a well-written, beautifully immersive book that while non-fiction reads even better than fiction. Very highly recommended.
