It does take several generations.
1. My great grandmother was a homeless woman after getting kicked out of the household because she was the second wife of a husband who had passed, leaving my grandmother in orphanage during WWII when the Japanese invaded China.
2. A couple of years later, her family came back for her. My grandmother worked odd jobs here and there, and my great grandmother gambles it away. My grandmother, fed up, left her to go live in Hong Kong with an uncle.
3. My grandmother's uncle was only employed from time to time. They lived on one meal a day, some rice, flavoured with a few drops of pig fat. My grandmother wanted a better life. She signed up as a labourer to carry tens of kilograms of dirt everyday on her shoulders[1], as part of a project to clear a mountain. Her uncle said she wouldn't last 3 days. It was such painful work she almost went home on the first day. But with such a stark challenge from her uncle and she didn't want to lose face, she stayed for 3 months. She was 14. She went on to work as a servant, but more or less treated as a slave, getting yelled at and beaten, and then finally someone taught her the business of picking up factory fabric scraps, weaving them into clothes to sell them. And that's the business she was in, even until the time I was following her around when I was 5 or 6. She bought factory scraps in bulk, using her sewing machine, made shirts and pants, and in 1995 or so, sold them for HK$10 each. It put my mother through school and nursing school. [2]
4. My mother was a nurse, and it was a well paid profession. However, my parents lost almost everything from their real estate investments in the 1997 Asian financial crisis. Debt can ruin you like that. They sold everything, my mother left her position as chief nurse in a hospital, and using a skilled migration visa, we moved to Australia, starting from zero.
5. Today I'm working as a software engineer in Australia. When I was tempted to slacken for my university exams, when I was tempted to lower my ambitions and stay in an unskilled job, when I was tempted to take an employer's low ball salary offer based on my living expenses, I remember what my grandmother had gone through, to put me here. And I will follow her example, and do the same for my family.
"Stay hungry, stay young, stay foolish, stay curious, and above all, stay humble."
[1] A carrying pole. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carrying_pole
[2] My grandfather had an accident while fixing a lift, and lose control of his legs. Unable to provide for the family, he killed himself. My uncle, my mum's brother, grew up mentally ill. My mother also had a sister. My grandmother brought up three children and supported my great-grandmother, on her own.