This article is dedicated to every woman who has faced a difficult fate, yet has never understood where she went wrong.
Have you noticed? The women who get hurt in entertainment gossip almost always share one thing in common: they lack parents who protect and watch over them.
This isn’t to say they grew up without a mother and father. It’s that their parents clearly never passed down the most fundamental wisdom a woman needs — how to protect herself.
Take the recent buzz about a certain young woman who dated a male celebrity for eight or nine years without getting married, only to be devastated when he cheated. Think about it carefully — what is this, really? It’s nothing but a run-of-the-mill romantic dispute, the most ordinary of male-female entanglements. To anyone with life experience, this is the most basic of tricks. How does someone still fall for this?
Don’t think Master Chi is being harsh. If you were raised in a healthy family with wise parents, you’ll know exactly what I mean.
Put plainly: any child raised with even a modicum of good family upbringing simply cannot fall into a trap this shallow. Parents with any real-world experience will warn their children about these risks early and clearly. When a man professes his love in words while constantly asking you to sacrifice your wealth, your youth, and your energy for him — for eight or nine years at that — any decent parent would have stepped in and snapped their love-blind daughter out of it.
The girl is certainly pitiable. But her parents also failed completely in their duty to protect their daughter, standing by and watching her be strung along before being cast aside.
The more people Master Chi encounters, the more I am convinced that a woman’s family of origin matters far more than a man’s. A man can come from nothing — a bare and empty household — and it won’t hold him back. The hardships and trials life throws at him may not even be a bad thing. So while a man’s family of origin matters, it doesn’t matter that much.
But a woman is entirely different. Her social position and the nature of her gender mean that certain wounds, once suffered, can cost her an entire lifetime. In that moment, a trustworthy pair of parents who offer even a word of guidance becomes invaluable.
Master Chi has said this before: the path upward is different for men and women. A man advances like iron being forged — charging headlong into the hardest obstacles, fighting upstream against the current. A woman advances through refinement and transformation — learning to recognize the right opportunities and the right timing, and moving with the current rather than against it.
So if your parents, and especially your mother, can draw on their own experience as a woman to gently illuminate the pitfalls ahead of you, you’ll naturally be able to sidestep hardships that might otherwise consume years — or even decades — of your life.
Sadly, for most humble-born sparrows, the support from their parents is negligible, nearly nonexistent. While other women have been carefully guided by their parents, the humble-born sparrow has no choice but to throw her already-fragile self against wall after wall. How many walls she manages to break through is left entirely to fate. But no matter how deep her reserves of fortune, the blood she sheds along the way is inevitable.
And so the gap between the humble-born sparrow and the woman raised in a prosperous family is vast from birth — and it cannot be closed by material wealth alone.
Master Chi, being in the consultation profession, has met no small number of women from excellent family backgrounds. What I admire most about such families is not their comfortable material circumstances. It’s that both parents genuinely engage in hands-on education and guidance, and truly understand how to have effective communication with their children.
Take, for example, the circle of noble Jiangnan families that Master Chi knows well. Their exceptional, wise parents offer companionship and care that spans their children’s entire lives.
In most good families, a daughter and her mother become intimate friends across the generation gap — talking about everything without reserve. The mother, of course, plays the role of a mature and gentle guide within that relationship, imparting the wisdom of how men and women relate to each other, and the essential understanding one needs to navigate the world.
Such parents never adopt a condescending attitude toward their children. Instead, they offer suggestions and guidance with warmth and approachability, while laying the groundwork for their child’s awareness at each appropriate stage of life. When their daughter enters high school: which close girlfriends are relatively trustworthy, and which complicated young women to keep at a slight distance. When she enters university: which academic goals truly matter, and which real-world experiences are genuinely valuable. When she enters society: what kind of men are worth getting close to, and what kind of people cannot be trusted — only managed.
Every detail is thought through. At every major turning point in life, the groundwork has been laid and the landmines cleared in advance. And crucially, these parents know how to position themselves so their children don’t resent or push them away — unlike some parents who have accomplished nothing yet remain full of themselves, their suffocating need for control driving their children to flee.
Because of this generational foundation of wisdom, girls raised in such families not only avoid the worst pitfalls in life — they also develop a maturity and intelligence far beyond their peers. After all, the strategists working quietly behind them are no ordinary people.
So look around: why is it that almost every woman getting hurt or deceived in the entertainment world is someone who clawed her way up alone? And why do women from good families almost never step on those landmines?
Because the former has no mother to guide her step by step, no infusion of fifty years of life wisdom from the generation above. Naturally, she lacks the foresight and experience to sense danger before it arrives.
So if you know that your own family cannot be relied upon, what should you do?
1. As Master Chi wrote in The Humble Sparrow’s Counter-Fate Record — the piece written for women — first establish a healthy distance from your family of origin. After fulfilling your basic obligations as a child, avoid becoming too entangled or burdened by them. The cleanest approach is to fulfill your duty of care and support using a reasonable portion of your resources, and leave it at that.
2. Young women, please make an effort to learn some Chinese classical studies. Even the most rudimentary knowledge of Western astrology can be enormously helpful, to say nothing of the more demanding Purple Star Astrology (Zi Wei Dou Shu). Because once you can accurately identify a noble benefactor (Gui Ren) through the lens of human nature, the gains go far beyond wealth. Even just taking them as a model to emulate — letting go of bad habits and cultivating better ones — is an enormous benefit in itself.
Much of what we need to learn cannot come from books. It can only come from close observation of others. In other words: observe these exceptional people around you, and use that as a mirror to identify your own shortcomings.
3. Don’t deliberately avoid certain people simply because of personal dislike. This easily leads to a lopsided worldview. Someone whose Chi field doesn’t match yours doesn’t mean they have nothing to offer. A woman’s broadmindedness is not only about making others feel comfortable — it’s about expanding your own exposure and experience.
Many women suffer precisely because their social circle is too small, leaving their perspective painfully narrow. They may be lively and active within their little world, but the moment they step into the wider reality, they’re lost — especially when it comes to social circles of men they’re unfamiliar with. Getting hurt under those circumstances is almost inevitable.
4. Stop spending your days gossiping with a pack of loose-tongued women. Take the flood of celebrity gossip circulating lately. Such women endlessly chew over the same few vapid talking points — like someone who can’t stop eating junk food and sugary drinks — wallowing in the so-called joy of spectating.
A smart woman, by contrast, can extract nourishment even from the most mundane gossip. From this season’s headlines alone, an intelligent woman will notice with sharp clarity: the longer a man drags out his promises, the more meaningless they become. True love is urgent — it rushes to prove itself and to protect. She’ll carve that understanding deep into her mind and hold it as a foundational truth.
In short: if you truly are an unfortunate little humble sparrow, you were never destined to have a dependable family of origin or clever, resourceful parents to lean on.
If that is the case, stop dreaming that someone will come to save you. They won’t. As Master Chi wrote in The Humble Sparrow’s Counter-Fate Record: The Complete Guide to Rising for the Woman Who Will Stop at Nothing — your only path forward is to force yourself, through wisdom, willpower, and tenacity, to learn and grow bit by bit. And in time, fate will naturally carry you to where you are meant to be.