Bookpleasures.com is excited to introduce Qin Sun Stubis, author of Once Our Lives.

Qin is a storyteller with a remarkable life journey.

From a Shanghai shantytown during the Great Chinese Famine, her family faced trials that shaped their destiny. From political struggles against poverty, torture, and an assassination attempt, their resilience found strength in their family history.

Despite the struggles, their family nights were filled with stories of marauders, prophecies, accomplishments, and setbacks, bringing reassurance.

Qin is known for her newspaper columns bridging Eastern and Western cultures and wove her stories into Once Our Lives, a nonfiction book that draws from experiences across Chinese history. 

Published in June 2023 by Guernica Editions, the book sheds light on a lesser-known part of Chinese history, told by those who lived through it.

Norm:  Good day, Qin, and thanks for participating in our interview.

The saga spanning multiple generations detailed in your family biography sounds immensely captivating. What initially inspired you to delve into your family’s history during the Chinese Revolution for your first book?

Qin: I have always been enchanted by storytelling and find it endlessly fascinating how writers paint with words and turn people’s life events, emotions and surroundings into vivid pictures.

I was an English literature major in China some forty years ago and studied classic poems, essays and novels during my four years in college. My education also gave me a deep appreciation of sonnets and romantic stories. 

I adored the great British and American writers but never thought I could ever write anything like they did, for, after all, English was not my mother tongue. 

When my parents left the world one after another some twenty years ago, I found myself grieving deeply and was struck by a powerful urge to revisit their past as a way of not letting them go. 

Their dramatic, riches-to-rags stories played like movies in front of me. The more I revisited their past, the more I realized what extraordinary lives they had lived. 

My parents represented the brave, smart, kind, loving and deeply honest Chinese people who had lived through some of the greatest historical events of the twentieth century. 

I told myself that if I didn’t write their stories down, I would always regret it. Little did I know that the writing and publishing journey of Once Our Lives would take up the next twenty years of my life.   

Norm: The blend of column writing, poetry, short stories, and a family biography showcases your diverse writing skills. 

How did your experience as a columnist and a poet influence your approach to crafting a long-form narrative like this biography?

Qin: Those experiences were tremendously helpful. When I first started out, I couldn’t think in English and type at the same time. 

I wrote my stories down in the old-fashioned way . . . with a pen and a notebook, jotting down the rough outlines of various episodes as they occurred to me. 

After a while, I had quite a collection of various scenes that spanned nearly 100 years in my family’s history. 

It was then that I was introduced to Diane Margolin, the publisher of The Santa Monica Star. Intrigued by my background, she offered me a space in her paper. 

I had never written newspaper columns before but decided to try it out, authoring 500-word pieces on everything from everyday life, to food, parenting, the environment, and the similarities and differences between Eastern and Western culture. 

Since I was writing for a Los Angeles paper and yet came from the Orient and lived on the East Coast, I called my column, “Reflections from the East.” 

Writing hundreds of essays over the next fifteen years helped me hone my skills and helped me to express myself more fluently in English. 

It also improved my storytelling and editing ability when it came time to polish all the episodes I had written for my book and put them into a dramatic narrative arc. 

Writing poetry also helped me in the same way that sketches help an artist working on a large canvas.

Norm: Your book has an almost folkloric quality. Can you elaborate on how you balanced historical accuracy with storytelling elements to create this unique narrative atmosphere?

Qin:  In some ways, my book could not be more Chinese if it were written in Chinese and incorporates centuries of cultural beliefs, traditions, superstitions and actual life experiences. 

Once Our Lives was born out of the real but sometimes stranger-than-fiction stories my mother told me during the twenty-nine years I spent with her in our tiny house in Shanghai. 

I wove them, along with detailed scenes and snippets of our everyday conversations, into the fabric of historical events going on around us. 

I documented the happenings I experienced and were told to me as faithfully as I could, filling in any gaps using my close, personal knowledge of the main characters in the book. 

Still, since I am not a historian, I did thoroughly fact-check the accuracy of key events surrounding the stories that were related to me and also sent my manuscript to a renowned professor of Chinese history.

 I’ve been gifted – or sometimes, it feels, cursed – with a photographic memory, so I remember the past and stories of the past in rich, detailed scenes and colors. 

As I wrote the book, I could often hear my mother’s voice talking. I am simply a storyteller, telling the tales of the lives of two families over four generations and how they lived, loved and struggled. 

Norm: Your mother Yan’s journey from an upper-class adoptive family to supporting the revolution is intriguing. What kind of research did you undertake to understand the mindset and motivations of individuals like Yan during that period?

Qin:  My mother, Yan, witnessed and experienced a lot of gender oppression. Both of her mothers (she had two of them!) had bound feet and their marriages were arranged through a matchmaker. 

She herself was given away partly because she was a girl, and she was not given a formal education because her father did not want her to sit among boys and talk in public. 

In the old days, people believed Confucius’ maxim that “Ignorance is a woman’s virtue.” But my mother was hungry for knowledge and welcomed opportunities that would give her more freedom. 

She managed to learn to read and write through her father’s tutoring at home, and fell in love with Chinese opera and acting by listening to the radio. 

When the communist revolution seemed to promise greater liberty for women, she felt that she could finally throw off the shackles that bound her and so many other women. 

She welcomed the equality and freedom the new regime offered her.

Looking back, her actions were not so much about supporting the revolution but enjoying the new privileges given to her, including the chance to be a teacher, attend film school, and become an actress. 

For millions of people, the pull of this chance for freedom was powerful.

Norm: Integrating historical context is an essential aspect of your book. How did you balance weaving historical events with the personal narratives of your family members?

Qin: The two were really inseparable. I wanted my readers to see and understand the flow of history in China and how ordinary people coped during some of the most extraordinary chapters of the 20th Century.

 In some ways, laying out the content of this book was like crafting a patchwork quilt with people and events being swatches of cloth tailored by history. My challenge was to arrange them into a unique design to make it special.  

Norm: The Chinese Cultural Revolution profoundly affected your family's life. Could you share more about how you conveyed their struggles during this tumultuous period?

Qin: During the ten long years of the Cultural Revolution, millions of families’ lives were disrupted – mine, perhaps as much or more than most. 

My father, who was a good, generous and honest man was arrested for being too outspoken and was falsely imprisoned twice – once for supposedly being against the Cultural Revolution and then, paradoxically, for supposedly being supportive of the Cultural Revolution. 

It was a no-win situation. My mother, my three sisters and I all lived without a husband or a father in a tiny, one-room house. 

Even though both of my father’s parents were alive, and I had many aunts, uncles and cousins, no one ever visited us or wanted to have anything to do with us. 

They avoided us for fear that associating with us could damage their lives and taint their own futures. Being a political pariah was dangerous to everyone around you. 

When our father’s meager salary was cut off, my mother said with a sigh, “If we all starved to death, no one would ever know.” 

It was hard enough to live through the experience once and writing about it forced me to delve back into the darkest times of my life for a second time. 

Mine was a drawer of memories I had closed decades ago and didn’t want to reopen but I knew I had to. My book is about real people and real life. 

I wanted my readers to experience what we had endured. I had to screw up my courage and walk back down this crooked memory lane, mentally reliving our hardships so I could retrieve the past and write it down. 

I forced myself to remember how we shivered in the winter, wearing our thin, patched clothes . . . how we slept on a concrete floor when the summer’s heat became unendurable . . . how many nights we went to bed with empty stomachs, not knowing if our father was alive or dead. 

Writing this book is probably the hardest thing I have ever done. It was truly a twenty-year labor of love. 

Norm: Your story traverses a broad historical canvas, from the Chinese Communist Revolution to the Cultural Revolution. 

How did you balance historical accuracy with storytelling, ensuring the reader could connect emotionally with the characters’ experiences?

Qin: I’m telling the stories of the lives we once lived, the family lore my mother had told me again and again during our twenty-nine years of life together, and the life I lived during the Great Chinese Famine and Cultural Revolution. 

People around the world know a lot about China more at a macro level, through important headlines in the news and official, historical analyses of China; 

I want my readers to learn more about this great country and its people at a smaller, more intimate level – the details of what actually happened in ordinary people’s lives far from the giant political personalities and historical headlines. 

I covered the history of China as more of an epic backdrop to the story of how two families lived over four generations.

Norm: Where can our readers learn more about you and Once Our Lives?

Qin:  I have a WEBSITE  and I’d love your readers to get just a taste of Once Our Lives through this short book trailer. 

You can also see a bit more in this CBS television interview and for a more comprehensive dive into the book, listen to this one-hour podcast of Asian America: 

The Ken Fong Podcast, which is archived by UCLA’s East Asian Studies department. 

Norm: What is next for Qin Sun Stubis?

Qin: Publishing a book is like giving birth to a new life so for the moment I am continuing to promote Once Our Lives and will talk about it to anyone interested in listening. 

Right now, I’m still doing events at bookstores, attending book club meetings and holding talks at libraries. 

After the book is fully launched, I would love to find a publisher to introduce people to my short stories and Chinese Tall Tales, which are original fairy tales based on traditional Asian themes, as well as my collection of poems, which I call “Sketches in Lyrics” and cover a variety of whimsical subjects from fire hydrants to infinity pools, the strange little animals known as coatis, the adventures of wheat stalks, life, and (of course) death.  

Meanwhile, I’m continuing to write new columns for The Santa Monica Star and am contemplating a larger project, a novel or a second historical memoir, perhaps.

Hopefully, it won’t take me another twenty years to complete.   

Norm: As we wrap up our interview, can you provide some insights into the message or themes you hope readers will take away from your book, considering its extensive scope and the variety of experiences your family went through?

Qin: First, as thoroughly as I tried to tell the story of my family, it is impossible to cramp the complete history of four generations into a single book. 

I just wanted to paint a picture of ordinary Chinese people living through war, revolution and the tremendous cultural tides sweeping over them. 

I hope my readers will be inspired by their love, endurance and bravery. We all go through difficult times in our lives and I hope this book will encourage people to meet their own life’s challenges, whatever they may be. 

I also hope that in a time of rising anti-Asian sentiment, it will help build understanding between East and West, help all of us better understand our common humanity, and inspire readers to hold onto their own hopes and dreams as once we did during very hard times.

Norm: Thanks once again and good luck with all of your endeavors.

Once Our Lives  is available through Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and independent bookstores.