As far into family history as I know of, my grandfather's father is a Tsing Dynasty's provincial government official. My grandfather was born into a family of 80 family members. Back in the days of kindoms, wealthier Chinese families were bigger.
During the war (WWII and the Chinese civil war), my grandfather was a nationalist. Once, in northen part of China, they were surrounded in this city, then they persisted, then they ran out of supplies and had to eat dead human. They were cooked into fillings Bao Zi (for which the best explanation I can give is something similar to semispherical burrito). I don't know how my grandfather adapted from possibly "the priviledged" to selling potatoes on the roads after the war, but I guess you adapt to anything when there's no choice.
The same year China declared independence (independence from no one. It is just an declaration that the war is over, and a new government has formed when the major war had been over for a few month in most part of China but places in the west were still under military action.), my father was born. He grew up in a family of one older brother, one older sister, and one younger brother.
When it was time for him to enter university, the cultural revolution broke. He worked as a bank clerk for a few years and when the revolution was over, he and my mother both when to the geologist institute in Changchun, northern China (At that time in China, my impression is that education is centered in the north. Shanghai and Hong Kong were far less prosperous and we learned most of our science from our "Bigger brother" Soviet Union. And hence our analysis style in math.). After they graduated, my parents came to Beijing to work in the National Geology Institute of China.
My father is smart and a hard worker. He discovered a big oil field in the west (Or by discovering, this is I think how geology works. You collect samples from the wild and analyze the earth's structure. So my father thought, oh, there might be oil there. Then people went and boom, there lies the biggest oil field in the west of China.). He was awarded a national science contribution second prize and he wrote several geology books in his early thirties.
MIT invited him to study geology,probably Chinese geology, for them. But they had another big crisis in China.( I don't know how it is internationally refered to, but a direct translation from Chinese would be the "June 4th event".) So he couldn't go and nobody could go anywhere.
Despite his academic achievements, we were really poor. And the whole geologists community was poor. A few of my fathers' colleagues thought about going to Saudi Arab to sell suitcases and other manufactored products. That didn't work out eventually without me knowing why.
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