Qin Sun Stubis is a writer, communications consultant, and mother of two living in the New York City area.
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Be The Architect of Your Own Life
Whatever we deem our lives to be, we know one thing for sure: Life is never fair. Every day someone comes into this world with a silver spoon in his mouth, while another is dropped onto a dirt floor in a slum without the presence of even a midwife.
This is life. We don’t choose our birth, its time or place. Our parents have chosen for us. What is poignant is how we shape our lives once we grow out of our dependent phases of infancy and childhood. We hear extreme stories of privileged lives ending tragically. We also hear courageous stories about those who manage to overcome poverty and unimaginable disasters. But, for a lot of us, life can be just a chore we repeat daily until we eventually get old, sick, and tired. Sometimes we forget that we build our own life stories, be they happy or sad, sweet or bitter, or simply boring.
Just as the actress Katharine Hepburn realized she was born into a world where she was “totally wanted, loved, and treasured,” I learned very early on that I was one too many, ignored and useless.
I had plenty of grandparents, uncles and aunts who lived within walking distance, yet, none wanted to have anything to do with me–all because I was a girl! Worse still, I was one of the four girls in a family without boys. According to the Chinese beliefs of the time, we suffered the worst kind of poverty because we didn’t even have a poor family’s “riches and pride: sons. “ All our relatives were ashamed of us.
By any standard, my life didn’t start out very well and my childhood was filled with starvation, loneliness and the political upheavals of the Cultural Revolution. If one’s birth determined one’s life, mine would have been doomed. But, I didn’t want that to happen. I learned how to find my own riches, ones that money couldn’t buy, and the companionship that my relatives denied me–through books. I read and read and read. I grabbed every book I could find. In this way, a girl born in a shantytown, a daughter of a political prisoner, went on to graduate school in America.
The American poet Henry Wads-worth Longfellow described life as a process of building within the walls of Time: “Nothing useless is, or low; Each thing in its place is best.” So be your own architect. Build the life you want to live and you can thrive. You can always reach me at qstubis@gmail.com.
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