If they grew up in Rural China and weren't telling you stuff about their experiences of "The Great Leap Forward" or "The Cultural Revolution", particularly the extreme amounts of selfishness one had to utilize to simply survive, they, like many people who have had to exist in destitute conditions, They're probably not telling you the whole story, and never will because they do not want to deal with the social judgements from people over actions they took to survive.

There's a good chance that for the survivors from that era, their parents almost certainly did some extremely evil things to survive.