Hong Bao in the crisis of profligacy

Today, the greetings Kung Hee Fat Choy will be heard and read in many exchanges around our island and across the planet to meet the Lunar New Year in the Chinese calendar. This is the Year of the Ox, which serendipitously is also the first year of Year-of-the-Ox celebrant Barack Obama’s administration in the presidential office. And we thought he did not have anything in common with Nancy Reagan!

The greetings literally mean, “Congratulations and be prosperous,” though there are slight variations in pronunciation of the same characters, e.g., in Pinyin: Gongxi facai, that occurs in all the Chinese dialects, but the sentiment remains the same. The first two syllables, presumably the oldest, are a congratulatory phrase, not stoically but exuberantly, for surviving the past year, perhaps, the harshness of the winter. The last two syllables had been recent additions appropriate to the inroads of consumerism and capitalism into the China’s trade and commerce since the West started carving out pieces of the Ming Dynasty’s terrain, and flourishing in the current era began by the venerable Deng Xiao Ping of post-Tiananmen Square 1989 fame.

Common to everyone during this 15-day celebration (three official holidays in mainland China) is the giving of the ubiquitous red envelope or packet known as Hong Bao in Mandarin, Lai See in Cantonese and Ang Pao in Hokkien, the latter being the familiar name to Filipinos. The packet bears a monetary gift, which is given during the holidays, and also during special occasions such as weddings, birthdays and anniversaries.

Thus, when greeted with Kung Hee Fat Choy, children had been known to loudly scream: Hong Bao Na Lai—“keep the red envelope coming.” Adults have also picked up on it, though traditionally, the Hong Bao giving is from an older person to a younger one, or from one of a higher social status to another.

Now, to our American Hong Bao. Boston U professor Andrew J. Bacewich wrote in his rather very timely and relevant book, The Limits of Power, (2008) that the Jeffersonian trinity of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” is at the center of our civic theology, and has defined who we are and how we relate to the rest of the world.

“If one were to choose a single word to characterize that identity, it would have to be more. For the majority of contemporary Americans, the essence of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness centers on a relentless personal quest to acquire, to consume, to indulge, and to shed whatever constraints might interfere with those endeavors.”

This ethic of self-gratification, a penchant for consumption and self-indulgence is firmly entrenched in the American way of life, neither to be deplored nor celebrated, by Bacevich’s reckoning, only to be acknowledged. It is also the way of life that we have marketed, exported and successfully sold to the rest of the world as what it means to be a responsible citizen. In short, we have created a global altar to the great god of greed! (My word, not Bacevich.)

Two features in the history of the United States are the accumulation of power and the building of an empire of abundance. The colonial empires of Europe had mined the natural resources of their colonies but most of it had been in the field of agriculture and in human labor. With the industrial revolution in England, and the American pre-eminence in the use of oil since its discovery for commercial use in 1840 that enabled American industry to reign over the empire of production, we successfully marketed our Carnegie-Rockefeller-Ford mindset to the rest of the world, and in the process, developed the urban centers and suburban sprawls that now dots the global landscape, not to mention the smoke belching factories and motorized vehicles that shapes and sustains that life style.

Noting the dysfunction that we had built into our American economic system, we exported our American manufacturing to the industrializing nations of the world, both its useful and detrimental aspects, in the creation of the empire of consumption. The U-of-Chicago boys taught us that supply-side economics is no longer dependent on feeble “demand” for as long as we stoke the fire that inflames the empire of consumption, “build it and they will come!”

Americans led in the binge of consumption with the plastic card as our I.D. now worth a per family indebtedness of $6,000-9,000 in the United States. This culture of consumption has since sent Mother Nature into paroxysm of extremes of wet-and-dry, cold-and-hot, abundance in harvests and frequency of famine, alluring megamalls and disappearing mom-and-pop stores, widespread geographical wars and commercialized psychic peace.

Pollution levels in Los Angeles, Tokyo, Rio and Beijing, Hyderabad and Houston have reached criminal toxicity. Our population has grown alarmingly obese, while widespread undernourishment and starvation stalks the marginalized and disenfranchised.

The increase of neurological disorders suspected of being triggered by unaccustomed chemical preservatives and additives into the food chains, e.g., the geometric increase in the incidences of autism nationally and worldwide, has set emergency alert bells ringing. Now comes the collapse of Wall Street itself that sustained the empires of production and consumption, and everyone is clamoring for a piece of the Hong Bao from anybody anywhere. In short, we have thrown ourselves into the center of chaos, with America still clinging to its delusions of power and illusions of abundance.

Alas, even our PSS has become captive of the ways of our industries. Focus on standardized tests, like we were producing paper clips on a factory line, have replaced sharing of pedagogical practices that work; our bureaucratic structure is adept in the assessment of compliance but sorely deficient in the accountability of effective teaching and learning. Thus, we spend more money in recruiting teachers because the revolving still, as had been true with the garment industry, is cheaper and looks more favorable on the bottom line of the spreadsheet, rather than retaining the ones we have, no matter how well they have established a history of loyalty, diligence and effectivity! Our two-year contract cycle is a mirror image of the bonded servitude employment practices of commercial houses, rather than in the quality of their human capital, systems and resources.

Hong Bao Na Lai is what the financial institutions around the world are saying to their governments. The automobile industry is saying the same to Washington D.C., and the CNMI government had been snorting the same in an arrogant and childish way (shamelessly leveraging the marine monument, Uncle Sam’s strategic military interests in land leases, peculiar and narrow readings of the Covenant and the CNMI Constitution, and convoluted legalistic turns in the application of law, in my opinion).

For a former mendicant retiring “old man” without great social netting underneath, my next Hong Bao will probably come from Chapter 7 and the Food Stamps’ office. No matter. We have come this far and survived. We dare celebrate. Kung Hee Fat Choy!