Narrative approaches have been used sparsely in family business research though it has potential to provide empirical material that is difficult to access by other methods. The purpose of this paper is to illustrate this potential by emphasizing the interaction between researchers and informants over time when life stories are explicitly used for encouraging (self)reflection in a Chinese family business. The paper illustrates that stories which are told changes over time and that stories that were not told from the beginning comes to surface in later phases of the research process. In family business research the use of life stories for (self)reflection is of special interest to provide insight of issues such as family business succession and business family conflicts which are considered as ‘taboo’.