Photo courtesy of the Associated Press. Read more, click here.
The successful launch of SpaceX’s Dragon on May 30, 2020 has become a landmark in US space history. The historic event has garnered several firsts—the first time that NASA astronauts were rocketed away from American soil in nine years after NASA retired its space shuttles in 2011, the fifth domestic launch in US history. SpaceX has become the first private, domestic company to launch astronauts for NASA. The long-awaited return to human spaceflight is also a watershed for the US to enter into an era of private spaceflight. US corporate power has given NASA flexibility and independence to regroup resources on deep space research. Perhaps in the near future we will have more of the Kennedy Moments—a national celebration of NASA’s space endeavor.
To relive the Kennedy moment is more than an impulse to me. The month of May marks a rite of passage of many high school and college graduates. This year’s graduation is one of a kind. Because of the pandemic, the traditional in-person graduation ceremonies in many institutions were canceled. No prom parties, no flying-the-caps photography. If you’re in need of a good laugh, check out Ellen DeGeneres’s commencement here.
As an observer and a current master’s degree student, I take pleasure in watching many Zoom commencements. I am one of the many in this nation who are hungry for aspiring speeches from prominent figures during this trying time. We’re on a four-year drought for uplifting inspiration from the White House. Instead, incidents of racial disparity and social inequality resurface, adding to the mental burden of hundreds of thousands of Americans who are at wits’ end coping with the new normal resulting from job losses and intensive care shortage.
Perhaps because 2020 is an election year, our former President Obama was active in May to make a couple of engaging speeches for the newly graduates and the American people. If Obama legacy lasts, so will the Trumpism.
This is not a normal time. If you are like me and would like to relish some familiar voices from the White House and the empowering messages from the commencement speeches, I hope my selection can quench our thirst. I delved into NASA archive as I relived the Kennedy Moment. The words in President Kennedy’s Moon Speech (1961) are still ringing in our ears as we see the irreversible future unfolding before our eyes.
The commencement speech (click on the name of the speaker):
Last but not least, the Kennedy Moment of the selected Moon Speech (1961) is timely and relevant to modern days.
Transcript of the selected speech by President J.F. Kennedy in the video:
Why Choose to Go to The Moon? (1961)
We meet in an hour of change and challenge,
in a decade of hope and fear,
in an age of both knowledge and ignorance.
The greater our knowledge increases,
the greater our ignorance unfolds.
Despite the striking fact that most of the scientists that
the world has ever known are alive and working today,
the vast stretches of the unknown and the unanswered and the unfinished
still far outstrip our collective comprehension.
There is no strife, no prejudice, no national conflict in outer space as yet.
Its hazards are hostile to us all.
Its conquest deserves the best of all mankind,
and its opportunity for peaceful cooperation may never come again.
But why, some say, the moon?
Why choose this as our goal?
And they may well ask why climb the highest mountain?
Why, 35 years ago, fly the Atlantic?
Why choose to go to the moon.
We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things,
not because they are easy,
but because they are hard,
because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills,
because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept,
one we are unwilling to postpone, and
one which we intend to win. . .
It’s worth mentioning that SpaceX’s Crew Dragon reminds me of the symbol of dragon in Chinese culture. According to NASA, it will take the Crew Dragon spacecraft about 19 hours to reach the ISS. That’s not much longer than my long-distance flight from the east coast of the US to Hong Kong. SpaceX allows private citizens to dream about space travel. Only if I were one of the crazy rich Asians.
Image courtesy of the World Meteorological Organization.
Whether you’re a climate change believer or a climate denier, global warming is happening. As the world is slowly returning to business as usual at the same time it is battling the first, second or third wave of the novel coronavirus outbreak, the Earth’s fever only gets stronger like the tropical cyclones hitting our shorelines. Humanity is heading for an irreversible future.
Unlike the covid pandemic that a forthcoming vaccine may curb, and antiviral drugs may pronounce the viruses dead, the destruction of a climate crisis cannot be undone. The native vegetation in the Amazon and the endangered species won’t come back to life after they die by human-induced forces.
The loss of agricultural crops in East Africa and India in the locust invasion this year sounds an alarm that there will be a spike in the loss of lives due to hunger and poverty. As warmer days are prolonging, the loss of seasonal changes in subtropical regions will cause a domino effect in our food chain—half of all life is moving as climate conditions shift. Climate refugees are on increase, and in the Arctic the male polar bear chases and eats the cub.
The warmer the weather gets, the more demand of electricity soars as people turn up their air-conditioning. If we still rely on fossil fuels as our energy sources, yes, business-as-usual, the oil and gas producers are happy for the market demand. But the Earth’s fever will reach its breaking point—the point of no return. Sadly, it’s not as melodramatic as a song with the same title in the musical The Phantom of the Opera.
Population grows regardless of the pandemic. As we return to business as usual during COVID-19, economic productivity continues and more people can afford basic needs including paying utility bills. The electricity demand soars, so does the emissions of CFC, the compound, chlorofluorocarbon, which contains carbon, chlorine and fluorine. CFCs are also known as freon that used for refrigeration.
Back in the 1980s through the early 1990s, CFC emissions had threatened ozone depletion. Climate skeptics until today still believe the Earth has fixed the ozone problem itself. Back then, the responsiveness in global governance made intergovernmental corporation possible. Bound by the Montreal Protocol, signatory countries gradually phased out the production and consumption of ozone depleting substances (ODS) including CFCs and HCFCs.
However, today is a drastically different world. It is a norm that countries run by populism and pseudo-populism like Trumpism will cut off global cooperation and politicalize basic science education. The US is now withdrawing from the World Health Organization; the withdrawal from the Paris Agreement will take effect soon. The type of article that ran in 1992 about good and bad ozone is a rare fossil in today’s journalism. There is a knowledge gap about climate change and its impact, from governments to businesses, from lawyers to public school teachers. Science knowledge is fundamentally polarized among religious and political groups.
The pandemic has forced us to learn and adapt a different lifestyle. Yes, we lost tens of thousands of jobs created in the pre-pandemic business-as-usual. Nevertheless, during the pandemic, there are also hundreds of thousands of dollars being invested in online services led by Amazon, development of goods delivery by drones and robots, streaming entertainment services led by Netflix, grocery delivery and pick-up services such as Instacart and WalMart, communications tech firms such as Zoom Inc. and Facebook Messenger Rooms. And even bike sales have soared 300% in some major cities.
During the pandemic, vaccine trials are on the fast track by cutting corners. Scientific publishing is also fast forwarding and become accessible through preprint servers. Working from home may be actually more money-saving for some office folks than the pre-pandemic life they led. They save time commuting to their offices and they don’t need to rent expensive housing just to be near their offices in downtown. To money-sensitive employers, they also find their saving by not paying overheads like utility and office supplies during the lockdown months. Office rentals may be less desirable if employees and employers both find convenience in working from home with part-time office appearance just for social activities.
Chinese people are more experienced in responding to COVID-19 after the SARS outbreak in 2002-03. China’s presumed economy may decline during the covid months, but China’s online economy was impacted little during the same time. Back in the SARS outbreak, Chinese people were restricted from travel and the market was like what we are experiencing now during the covid months. But the SARS was a turning point for China’s e-commerce, giving birth to Taobao (Alibaba’s customer-to-customer retail website), JD.com and many other online retail competitors.
Drawing from the lessons of the SARS outbreak, perhaps we’ll be more open-minded about our irreversible future. Economy won’t go away but the finite natural resources will. Despite the pandemic, people still consume water, energy, food and entertainment in their shelters—they eat, work, learn, virtually socialize, shop and sell; technology has made all these activities possible at home. Like climate change, the housing economics is transforming our lifestyles as well.
Even for the labor-intensive tasks like meat packing and online order packing and shipping, the spread of automation and AI will replace humans. The pandemic has sped up this trend. Workers who use their hands today will need vocational training to use their brains for the future. To save American jobs, we need to boost the brain power of the American labor force.
Education is the key. Education is the missing link in our broken system of economics and social wellbeing, from pre-school education to adult learning, from the C-Suite training to the assembly line tutorials.
And yet, the low-rung labor force is the very group that lacks proper K-12 education. Getting a college degree for many low-income families is like going to the moon. Many of them rely on church support and nonprofit scholarships to finish basic education that is needed. A 2019 Gallup survey found that 40% of US adults believe in creationism, namely that God created them in their present form as opposed to evolution. A pre-pandemic survey shows 84% of Americans saying vaccinating children is important, down from 94% in 2001.
And mass media is not helping with the enhancement of public knowledge.
For an ordinary Joe, I can’t politicize my search for toilet paper during the covid months. But I do see the more toilet paper is made from non-recyclable sources, more trees will be chopped down, more fossil fuels and water will be consumed during manufacturing. And during the pandemic, our essential workers at the sewage treatment plants are also dealing with the epidemic of wipes and masks that plagues sewers and storm drains. Drain clogs have become a more costly and time-consuming headache during the pandemic. Who will bear the cost to repair? The beleaguered local governments especially for those who fought in the battle of public health crisis? Or the residents? Watch out for your utility bills.
I don’t care who has the highest rating on social media about the most graphic moment. I do care if I follow the presidential instruction to drink bleach and take hydroxychloroquine, I will die sooner.
I do care that not only health professionals but jobless folks are on the brink of mental fallout. Suicidal thoughts permeate in our nation—self-destruction is awful; mass shootings are fatal for innocents too.
We need hope. We need solutions. We need relevant news coverage.
Under COVID-19, few media outlets cover the gains side of the employment opportunities. Nor does it educate the target audience about the impact of climate change.
Perhaps we can start with the mass media, or even with journalism education, which has been shaped by interests of business-as-usual economy, to get more climate stories published. These stories involve ethics, equity, justice, business, economics, diplomacy, military, bio-rights, arts and science.
If the New York Times put climate stories on its front page every single day, if NPR’s on-the-hour headline included at least one climate story, or if the primetime TV news moved the White House story and presidential tweets to a less inconspicuous slot in the lineup, and instead, give front-and-center coverage on a small town in the Mississippi Basin combating flood risks, or a farmer in California struggling with drought, or climate refugees in Florida dealing with their uninsured livelihoods. Perhaps this sort of coverage would allow ordinary folks to connect better with mainstream media better as a means to find knowledge to adapt to the irreversible future.
This year’s World Oceans Day falls on June 8. To most people, this UN holiday is no different from other official UN holidays like World Bee Day which was just past on May 20, or World Day for Cultural Diversity for Dialogue and Development on May 21. However, as climate change is happening and is gaining attention in the public, the World Meteorological Organization brings oceans on the agenda of the concurrent World Meteorological Congress. The theme of this year’s World Oceans Day is gender. According to a recent UNESCO report, women make up 38% in ocean science, 10% higher than in science overall. Gender-diverse and inclusive ocean science and marine meteorology are vital to create sustainable opportunities in the ocean space.
When we have a fever, we put ice on our forehead. When the Earth’s fever is relentless, we must find ways to cool the big body of water that composes the Earth.
I often like to talk about this analogy. On a rainy day I may complain about the bad weather, but the guy who sells umbrellas may have his best day. Here is another old analogy. A boy kicked a ball at the window of a barber’s shop. The window was broken. The barber had to spend the money he saved for an upgrade of his mirrors on the replacement of the glass. So the money didn’t go to the mirror seller but to the glass maker. In other words, the amount of money is the same, it depends on how the owner spends it.
Robert Frost’s poem “The Road Not Taken” can’t be more timely in this irreversible present that leads to our future. He wrote:
“Two roads diverged in a wood / and I – I took the one less traveled by / And that has made all the difference.”
We’re heading for an irreversible future. However, if we can take the other path that is less traveled with the same amount of money, perhaps we will spend less on the damage and create more new opportunities that will actually bring more profits than we make from a world of business as usual. And that path is called sustainable development.
Amidst heated protests or even just a meltdown from a child with an adult custodian, we often hear this poking question: Where is justice?
Where is justice when tens of thousands of African and Hispanic minorities took to the streets across major American cities, mourning the death of an unarmed black man named George Floyd from Minneapolis? He died from a chokehold on his neck by a white police officer. This is an unfortunate and recurring American tragedy.
Where is justice when judiciary appointments to federal courts are on the smooth track toward conservative leanings, and the incumbent administration is rolling back in silence pivotal environmental legislation? Not only contemporary Americans during a span of one generation but also the minors and the unborn will have to live in a society with environmentally health risks and huge contention. The intra-and-intergenerational equity is going farther away from the underprivileged.
Where is justice when one can manipulate power to cover his misconducts and gets away with murder? Autocrats can do even further to glorify their sins because they can mute the public opinions, fire the watchdogs and rewrite laws to their advantage. Under the hit of the COVID-19 pandemic, while the public are confined in their homes and shelters for the public safety, the rulers use the pandemic to expedite their agendas of absolute power.
Brazil government’s environmental deregulation is yielding results. Mining and farming communities in the Amazon are expanding their land use on the already vulnerable “lungs of the planet.” According to Mapbiomas Brasil, a multi-institutional initiative, 99% of all deforestation in Brazil in 2019 was illegal—a total of 4,705 square miles, nearly the size of Connecticut, of native vegetation lost.
As the world is still battling the pandemic, China approves the Security Law to tighten control of Hong Kong. There was neither consultation nor due process. The top-down decision from Beijing caught the SAR administration as well as the local judiciary organs off guard.
National security is always how the ruling power sees it. Lifting the Security Law is justice to some but not to the opponents. Liu Xiaobo, the late Nobel Peace Prize laureate, wanted China to become democratic but his advocacy endangered national security in the eyes of the ruling power. Joshua Wong wants Hong Kong to have self determination and universal suffrage but the ruling power sees his advocacy the action of a traitor.
Adopting the same relativity lens to see the US legislation on national security, I don’t think Edward Snowden will be given a fair trial in the US because Snowden is a traitor in the eyes of the ruling power. Edward Snowden may be a hero to many global citizens but not to the US federal government. Likewise with Joshua Wong from Hong Kong to the Chinese authorities.
And the counter-espionage law is like lips and teeth to national security. Such law serves, as always, only the lawmakers who are loyal to their motherland in a democratic state, or are loyal to the ruler and his one-party regime in an authoritarian state.
To the pro-Beijing Hong Kong politicians, the Security Law is a defacto counter-espionage legislation aiming at anti-China intelligent activities in Hong Kong. Two former SAR Chief Executives—Tung Chee-hwa and Leung Chun-ying—have validated this point. Regardless of their lack of popularity, they have mentioned a piece of lesser-known history. Slamming on Beijing’s espionage network in Hong Kong, young Hong Kongers and the pro-Hong Kong advocates in the West may not bother to question the justice of the intelligent activities of the democratic states. Like diplomacy, it takes two to tango for intelligence work. That’s what makes crime mystery novels an all-time favorite to global readers.
Hong Kong is a safe haven not only for criminals but for spies. “The Pearl of the East” as Hong Kong is dubbed by the Chinese was once seen as a Casablanca of the East in terms of espionage due to its free-wheeling entrepot status under British rule. If you like James Bond movies, you may see that Hong Kong is a frequented rendezvous of Bond’s noteworthy missions.
Under British rule, there was the colonial-era Special Branch in Hong Kong. This agency was equivalent to a domestic intelligence agency like the CIA and FBI in the US, or Britain’s MI5 and MI6. After the Hong Kong Handover to mainland China in 1997, the British defacto intelligence agency in Hong Kong was also disbanded.
Six years later in 2003, on the heels of SARS—the viral cousin of the coronavirus, Hong Kong government proposed the Article 23 National Security Bill. The proposed bill caused an public outcry and a massive demonstration on July 1 to mark the sixth anniversary of Hong Kong’s Handover to China. The bill was shelved.
Without such legislation, Hong Kong government could only expel suspected spies without charges—presumably the foreign nationals will be banned from entry of Hong Kong while the Chinese nationals will defect for elsewhere after their spy cover are exposed. The most recent household names are William Wang (Wang Liqiang) who was an alleged Chinese spy fleeing mainland via Hong Kong for Australia; Simon Cheng who allegedly was tortured in mainland China for working for UK consulate in Hong Kong. The world renowned Edward Snowden also picked Hong Kong as his hideout locale. As Snowden recounted, hiding in a marginalized community in one of the poorest areas in Hong Kong was “genius.” He said, “[Hong Kong was] definitely the one place that no one was going to look for me.”
Giving such a free jail card to the party’s enemy definitely did not please Beijing. And fast track to 2020, on the heels of COVID-19 whose impact is no longer regional but global, Beijing this time finally voiced its pent-up anger and plugged the loopholes of a city without a so-called counter-espionage law.
Where is justice? I dare to ask further. What is justice?
Justice is the end of Government. It is the end of civil society. It ever has been, and ever will be pursued, until it be obtained, or until liberty be lost in the pursuit.
And yet, the country is reopening to business as usual without adequate test kits and medical aids. The ruler of the United States was seen playing golf at his Virginia course.
Where is justice?
Photo courtesy of The New York Times. Read more, click here.
You’re not mistaken. It’s not the English word “German,” but “gaman,” a Japanese word. The Japanese word in kanji, the ideograms adapted from Chinese characters, looks like this: “我慢.” I can easily interpret it with its Chinese literal meaning—I slow. However, in Japanese, what it looks like “I slow” to Chinese people actually means “putting up with it.”
After learning the Japanese expression “もう我慢できない” (I can’t take it anymore), I’ve grown in love with this expression. Saying “mou gaman dekinai” in Japanese is typically cathartic and timely under the stay-at-home order because of COVID-19. In Japan, especially for professional women, saying this phrase takes courage. Many businesses in Japan require working women to wear heels or pumps between 1.9 and 2.75 inches (5-7 cm). Thus, a hashtag KuToo movement is born to fight against the discriminatory dress code. The name is a reference to the MeToo movement and two plays on words with “shoes (kutsu)” and “pain (kutsuu)” in Japanese.
In the US, with no sight of the federal leadership in all aspects of our life, instead, I see frustration, anger, pain and sorrow all over ordinary people’s faces, in speeches and through action. I reiterate “mou gaman dekinai” over and over and over again, as if I’m a language student trying to remember a new phrase by repetition. But I definitely add more emotion to say this phrase. Like acting—if you can read your line with emotion, even though the line is not written by you, your emotion will fool the audience. Mou gaman dekinai!
Following the Crazy English method in China of shouting English at the top of one’s lungs to boost one’s confidence of speaking a foreign language and help memorization, I repeat saying “mou gaman dekinai” a few times out loud and clear. Each time is louder than the previous. Each time as I shout the phrase, I feel the sound of it has penetrated an inch deeper in my eardrum, my heart and mind.
Mou gaman dekinai. I can’t take it anymore because I’m afraid that socially concerned American citizens are waging a losing battle. One of my favorite titles from the Bard is “Much Ado About Nothing.” It can’t be more timely to adopt this title for the situation of some American states which have been under voluntary lockdown in the past two months. Low-income individuals impatiently urge businesses to reopen, and highly-educated intellectuals also can’t stand the delay of mass distribution of test kits and medical aids. According to the US Commerce Department, the US economy fell 4.8% in the first quarter of 2020. 47% of the 4.8% decline was from the nation’s health care sector, partially due to the requirement that hospitals, overwhelmed by COVID-19 patients, temporarily stop all non-emergency surgeries. How ironic.
Mou gaman dekinai. I can’t take it anymore because the mainstream or side-stream media is chasing the disinformation from the liars who hold important positions without holding them accountable. Nothing else can the public learn except knowing the liars have lied again. What is the correct information? How can the public protect themselves from harm’s way? Where are the success stories for the vulnerable citizens to draw lessons from? The social-media-driven, current event coverage is weakening public trust in credible organizations and institutions, and turning neutral facts into emotionally-charged anecdotes.
Mou gaman dekinai. I can’t take it anymore because I have learned to speak up whether I am learning a language or I am giving voice to my thoughts on a page. The power of writing is beyond words. But the chances are limited for foreign-born Asian-Americans to make writing a career. After all, particularly in the traditional publishing world that is dominated by a few Big Houses, Asian American writers are marginalized and their subjects of writing are, unfortunately, pigeonholed into a widely-accepted stereotype in the West. The situation in the literary world is no different from the predicament of an ethnic Asian American actor. He or she is often required to play only the Asian characters in Hollywood. A Hispanic-American descendant is deemed to speak Spanish and English with a Spanish accent. What about the European Americans? Does an Italian last name arouse an image of the Mafia in your imagination? Or does a red-faced Caucasian remind you of Irish ancestry in the Great Famine?
I remember in my early days of creative writing, as apprentices, we were often asked a classic question for all writers: Why do I write? A decade later, I still often think of this thoughtful question. I’m blessed to establish myself as a published author with my memoir Golden Orchid. Writing is never easy for me. But when it comes to writing, I would say the affirmative form of “gaman,” that is, “我慢する” in kanji, in the sense of persevere and endure.
In light of the pandemic, I revisit one of the Bard’s quotes: “We suffer a lot the few things we lack and we enjoy too little the many things we have.” I find the Japanese ethos of “gaman”— to endure with fortitude and dignity, self-restraint and control, patience and tolerance—will take us a long way in the public health crisis in the US.
Photo courtesy of Handout. An artist’s impression of China’s space station with Tianhe module at its heart.
While the world is combating the pandemic, on the one hand, China is no exception; on the other hand, the world’s second largest economy is achieving the impossible in the space as well as undersea. O America, America, where is thy good with brotherhood, from sea to shining sea?
For space, China has made one step closer to building its permanent space station by launching several tests. China’s space station core module is called Tianhe (天和号核心舱), meaning literally “Harmony of the Heavens.” The Tianhe module is expected to be launched in 2021 on a Long March-5B rocket. And on April 24 China’s “Space Day,” the country marked its 50th anniversary of the first satellite launch with the announcement of the name for China’s first Mars Lander—Tian Wen-1 (天问一号), meaning literally “Questions to Heaven.” The name is taken from a long-form poem by Qu Yuan (屈原), a Chinese poet born in the 4th century BC. Qu Yuan was so highly regarded that China’s Dragon Boat Festival was dedicated in his honor on his death anniversary—the 5th day of the 5th lunar month. (The traditional holiday usually falls in the month of May or June in the Gregorian calendar.) The Tianwen-1 mission with the combined Mars orbiter and rover spacecraft is undergoing testing toward launch in July.
As for the undersea, as part of China’s 13th Five-Year Plan, construction of the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macau Greater Bay Area (GBA) is in full swing. This project traverses over the busiest waters in South China, home to 70 million plus people. In October 2018, China officially opened the world’s longest sea bridge, 34 miles linking Hong Kong, Macau and the mainland Chinese city of Zhuhai. The GBA project is also regarded as an economic lifesaver for Hong Kong, ever-polarized by Beijing’s tougher rule. In April 2020, construction began for the first section of what is expected to be one of the world’s widest undersea tunnels. This part-bridge-part-tunnel transport link will stretch for 15 miles connecting the Chinese mainland cities of Shenzhen and Zhongshan in the Pearl River Delta. When completed by 2024, the undersea tunnel will handle 8 lanes of traffic.
The part-bridge-part-tunnel-part-island transport link in the Greater Bay Area, South China.
With perseverance and willpower, even a foolish old man can move mountains. This is what Chinese people are told since childhood about a well-known Chinese fable. And this April, Chinese engineers from Huawei and China Mobile were building against all odds the world’s highest 5G base station on the Chinese side of Mount Everest. In the meantime, 53 Chinese surveyors were scaling the world’s tallest peak to measure its height following a difference of four meters with Nepal’s measurement (8,848 meters). (For the US reader, 8,848 meters is roughly 29,029 feet. 4 meters is roughly 13.13 feet.)
On the other side of the Pacific, the United States is watching but rather not collaborating with China in space and in medicine. The arrogant and fearful incumbent administration has weaponized anti-China rhetoric. The Hawks in the Pentagon have succeeded in making the U.S. Space Force the sixth military branch and launching a big recruiting drive in 2020. The move has placed the US in a new space race with China, further strengthening the US-China space isolation spearheaded by former Congressman Frank Wolf of Virginia. Thanks to Rep. Wolf who sponsored legislation seven years ago, just before he retired, forbidding NASA from working with China and forcing it to reject China’s request for international partnership for a space station, and also thanks to the like-minded policymakers and military strategists in the incumbent administration, China is becoming more resolute to develop its home-made space program in order to overturn the fact that Chinese astronauts are banned from the International Space Station.
Whether it is the construction of a space station, a 5G network, or the quest for a COVID vaccine, the stronger the US is pushing back against collaboration with China, the more relentlessly China is reaching out with other international partners and looking for opportunities elsewhere outside the US.
In the end, who is the loser? (By the way, “loser” is a word that is frequently used by the 45th President of the US.)
Global interaction and international collaboration are inevitable. As long as humans rely on undisrupted supply chains to make a living and to improve wellbeing, and as long as the corporate power is growing in American Capitalism (to some extent, it has overshadowed goverance), let’s face it. China is more of a strategic partner than a rival power to the US.
Confucian philosopher Mencius in the 4th century BC once said, “A gentleman pays attention of his own self-culture while cornered by chaotic circumstances, and endeavors to benefit the world when he succeeds.”(孟子曰：穷则独善其身，达则兼济天下。)
The US has long-standing traditions of democracy and judicial independence. Rather than finger pointing at other countries’ faults, the US can do better to honor our long-standing traditions and set an example for other nations. China cannot thrive without the partnership with the US, neither can the US progress by isolation. Amidst the battle with the pandemic, we, as a nation, are longing for leaders to put the well-known verse into action: “O America, America, God shed His grace on thee; And crown thy good with brotherhood, from sea to shining sea.”
Before we find a vaccine for COVID-19, any sensible human being might understand that a simple mantra of test, trace and isolate is the only procedure we can do to contain the outbreak.
The mantra sounds simple but its implementation is harder than climbing Mt. Everest. In poor countries, ordinary people don’t have easy access to a comprehensive public health system like that in the developed countries. Infectious disease testing and medical treatment are challenging for both health providers and patients. And because of the growing population in these countries such as Nigeria, India and Thailand, social distancing becomes a luxury unless you can afford to live on an island alone. Ghettos, slums and subdivided flats share similar conditions: crowded, cluttered and most likely unhygienic. I can relate this housing condition to my childhood home, No. 14, as I described in my memoir, Golden Orchid. Thank god that I only lived with my parents in that rundown tiny house. But I knew the new tenants after my family who lived in that house amounted to six to seven. Risk abounds for poor people to be infected with human-to-human transmission of disease.
The wealthy countries are not any better. I can’t say the United States is setting a good example. Far from it. But like the U.S., many western countries regard freedom of movement and freedom of information more than anything else.
Isolation is punishment to many people as if you were given a house arrest sentence. People usually voluntarily isolate themselves in the aftermath of a mental shock such as a bereaved spouse. A child may become quieter after being bullied at school.
In the US where governments regardless of sizes and localities are often depicted as an obstruction of the free market. Because of misinformation and disinformation in the mass media, the public has less trust of government.
All of these factors have made a nationwide stay-at-home mandate because of COVID-19 unattainable. Tracking those suspected COVID cases after diagnosis arouses controversy over infringement of privacy.
So the fate of our desired business as usual is in limbo. So are our local governments who are depleting resources in this public health crisis.
According to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, sales taxes make up on average 32% of state tax revenue collected. I gather the state governments want more badly to reopen the market than their citizens do given the fact they’re devastatingly broke after the pandemic. When we need to make a choice between life and livelihood, I don’t think you will disagree that life is priceless. The trade-off has spoken itself.
This is my take on individualism as opposed to collectivism in the face of a public health crisis:
Do you want your freedom of movement by breaking social distancing? The consequence will be an infinite suspension of pre-pandemic activities due to high risk of infection.
Do you want your data privacy stay intact? Without the tracking devices, it won’t be possible to minimize the spread of an invisible killer (i.e. COVID-19) that has taken tens of thousands of lives.
It’s unnecessary to highlight the uncomfortable trade-offs between protecting privacy and public health. I can tell you that your privacy is a compromise as long as you participate in any e-commerce activities or using any mobile applications.
Think about those who design these mechanisms to provide the convenient services to you. Amazon can’t grow into a giant in one day. The more we shop on Amazon, the better Amazon customizes its multifaceted services. Thanks to the loyal and addictive shoppers, Amazon has grown from an online bookseller to a titan of e-commerce, logistics, payments, hardware, data storage and media. As a saying goes, Amazon’s fingers and tentacles are in every pie we consume.
And now in response to the demand of tracking COVID-19, Amazon has bought cameras from Chinese tech firms which have been blacklisted by the US federal government in order to meet the precaution requirement to take temperatures of its warehouse workers.
In the business world, sustainability is sometimes framed as risk management. There is no absolute solution about how we can return to business as usual in the pre-pandemic state. But when the US is lacking federal leadership and aid, when testing and tracking equipment are scare, when the public is getting antsy about staying at home too long, to flatten the curve of infectious disease, we need to pull ourselves together to minimize potential risk of COVID recurring.
Chinese reformer Deng Xiaoping once famously said, “It doesn’t matter whether a cat is black or white, as long as it catches mice.” In the Year of the Rat, we don’t want to confine ourselves to the life of a rat. Perhaps giving up individual preferences is the cat we need to test, track and isolate collectively in response to this big rat of humanity—COVID-19.
Do you know what is the greenhouse effect? Have you heard of Eunice Foote?
When I was working on my sustainability coursework, I happened to discover that Eunice Foote was the first female scientist who discovered the greenhouse effect more than 150 years ago. She spearheaded modern climate science even a few years before her male colleagues did in the 1850s. Her legacy reminded me of astrologist Henrietta Leavitt who preceded her male colleagues in the Harvard Observatory to discover the fluctuation brightness of new variable stars which led to the mapping of the Milky Way and beyond.
I was so excited at my discovery of Eunice that I interjected “Eureka!” literally as exuberantly as Archimedes who rose naked from his bath tub. Water receded as Archimedes lifted his body out of the bath tub; my phone flopped off my fingers when I read with elation about Eunice’s remarkable legacy.
A couple days after my learning curve was bent over Eunice Foote, the Overlooked obituaries series in the New York Times also paid tribute to Foote. My learning curve rebounded. Using glass cylinders, each encasing a mercury thermometer, Foote found that the heating effect of the sun was greater in moist air than dry air, and that it was highest of all in a cylinder containing carbon dioxide. As Foote wrote in her 1856 paper:
“An atmosphere of that gas would give to our earth a high temperature; and if as some suppose, at one period of its history the air had mixed with it a larger proportion than at present, an increased temperature. . . must have necessarily resulted.”
Eunice Foote was not known to the public at that time mainly because women were deliberately overlooked by men in the male-dominant science world. Her discovery paper was presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) on August 23, 1856. But she did not present her paper. A male colleague named Joseph Henry did it on her behalf. Neither Foote’s paper nor Henry’s presentation of it was included in the conference proceedings. What’s more sexist, in modern language, three years later, John Tyndall demonstrated more sophisticated experiments to verify and improve Foote’s finding. In his publication, Tyndall gave credit to male colleagues such as Mathias Pouillet for his work on the passage of solar radiation through the atmosphere, but didn’t mention Foote. Roland Jackson, a biographer of Tyndall, believed that Tyndall and other physicists of the time probably did not know of Foote’s work.
I reserve my skepticism. The presentation at AAAS to climate scientists is like making a speech at the Oscars to actors and filmmakers. Despite that Foote’s work and her presenter’s name were forgotten in AAAS’s history, Foote’s discovery was not only verbal but it was written as well. There isn’t even a known photograph of her today.
The more I learn about American history, the more similar stories like Foote or Leavitt I encounter. It is hard not to view gender difference, both biologically and socially, as a deciding factor to understand the world we are living in. I grew up with Chinese history dated back thousands of years. It’s interesting to me that in the many, many years before China and the US formed diplomatic ties in 1979, women weren’t equally treated with men in both countries. Patriarchy was an innate social system in many countries long before global trade or cultural exchange. I come across in literature quite a few synonyms of male dominance such as male chauvinism, male superiority, misogyny and many more. In Chinese monarchy history, there was only one female emperor, Wu Zetian, who happened to be in the Tang dynasty (618-907 C.E.), the most prosperous and affluent dynasty in history. I don’t like using empress just as female actresses regard themselves as actors. Without an open and stable society in the Tang dynasty, a woman monarch would have been a pipe dream. But at least, China is ahead of the US in the score of female leadership.
Eunice Foote was more than a climate scientist. She was a women’s rights advocate. Seven years before her scientific paper, Foote was present at the first Women’s Rights Convention in Seneca Falls, New York, on July 19-20, 1848. She was one of the signatories of the Declaration of Sentiments. I see this document as significant to the development of the women’s rights movement in the US as the Declaration of Independence was to the country’s founding history.
I appreciate that the New York Times recognized that its renowned obituary section needs to be inclusive. As the paper wrote in the introduction of the Overlooked series: “Since 1851, obituaries in the New York Times have been dominated by white men. Now we’re adding the stories of other remarkable people.” Had Eunice Foote not lived a remarkable and influential life, perhaps she would never have been in the New York Times obituary.
Think about those 70,000 plus souls in the U.S. who have died in the COVID-19 pandemic. If obituary writing is more about life than death, a testament to a human contribution, how many pages of overlooked obituaries should there be to amplify the narrative of this tragic disaster of humanity?
Traditional Chinese Medicine is a complex and profound health paradigm.
TCM (中醫) stands for Traditional Chinese Medicine. So my curiosity about TCM is relighted because Chinese experts are sharing their coronavirus treatment with the world. TCM is often mentioned in these experience talks.
I don’t have any medical background, nor did my parents. But TCM has been practiced in China for thousands of years and many ordinary Chinese people, including my late mother, found more benefits from TCM than from Western medicine. I remember when I cared for her fourteen years ago, I was introduced to a plethora of TCM names in Chinese. When I wrote my memoir Golden Orchid, one of the challenges was my translation of TCM into English. Back then, few TCM journals and Chinese original texts were translated into foreign languages. While researching for my book project, I could have written my own dictionary of TCM alongside my memoir.
It was a fun journey to find my way to explain in my book what is qi, and what are the more familiar yin and yang to English readers. With my finesse in bilingualism, I could detail the more complicated TCM treatment for intestinal diseases. I’ve been asked often during my book presentations about what I think of TCM. I reiterate that TCM is a magical field of medicine if you believe in its efficacy and are wholeheartedly devoted to explore its breadth and depth. By studying TCM, one will learn not only medicine, but also ancient Chinese literature, language, history, geography and philosophy.
When SARS hit China in 2002-2003, TCM was used to treat patients. Seventeen years later, the cousin coronavirus of SARS, namely, COVID-19 or novel coronavirus, hit China. TCM is in use more extensively than ever before. About 92% of the confirmed cases adopted TCM treatments, especially in the epicenter Wuhan, Hubei Province. China’s National Health Commission suggested a list of Chinese herbal prescriptions for use on patients, depending on which of the four Chinese medicine categories their conditions fell into—“damp, hot, toxic, bruised.” Precisely, there’re six TCM categories to describe the cause of COVID-associated pneumonia: cold (寒), damp (濕), hot (熱), toxic (毒), deficient (虛), bruised (瘀).
As we hear a lot about shortage of ventilators in hospitals around the world, it’s easy for medical layman like myself to misconceive the powerful effect of a ventilator on critically ill respiratory patients. I had thought ventilators saved lives until I read an article from NPR. Several small studies from the US, China and Europe have found that ventilators are no panacea for critically ill COVID-19 patients. The tough news is most coronavirus patients who end up on ventilators go on to die.
I have a personal experience with the use of a ventilator at the dawn of my late father’s death. He had acute respiratory difficulty, and I was told by his physician that if a patient, who was as weak as my father, was dependent on a ventilator, he might find it more difficult to be weaned from the machine. For that reason, I decided not to let my father undergo the travail. Ventilators are successful when used to treat common forms of pneumonia. But in treating coronavirus patients with ventilators there’s risk.
According to a TCM doctor from China, ventilators could be the culprit for creating a high mortality rate. In the case of a viral attack, it’s not only the oxygen that gets pumped into the blood stream by a ventilator, it is the coronavirus as well which causes sepsis. The coronavirus often does a lot more damage to a person’s lungs than pneumonia associated with the flu.
In a normal, non-COVID-associated scenario, when ventilators are in used, patients receive antibiotics in the process of recovery. Antibiotic drugs usually kill bacteria but they aren’t effective against viruses. I guess that’s why the demand for blood donations from COVID-recovered patients is high because antibodies in their plasma can attack the virus.
Under the microscope, a virus is between 100 and 500 times smaller than bacteria. TCM herbal preparations such as Ma Huang Tang (麻黃湯) and Ma Huang Xi Xin Fu Zi Tang (麻黃細辛附子湯) are recommended to COVID-patients in China to circulate the qi of the lungs and restore yang. If you read the 3rd century classic text Shang Han Lun(傷寒論), you’ll know more about the TCM treatment on cold damage diseases, including viral infections.
Sadly to note, the West looks up to South Korea as a leader in efficiently responding to the COVID-19 pandemic. And yet, South Korea emulated China’s disease control measures closely so that it was also able to quickly contain the spread of COVID-19 by testing, quarantine, tracking and using traditional Chinese herbal preparations in the treatment. Why doesn’t the West learn from China in the first place? It’s about ideology. Sharing the same fate as the Olympic Games, global public health is politicalized by leaders who are fixated on ideological dominance. The WHO’s daily tally of global COVID-19 cases and fatalities is like the Olympic medal table but with no honor whatsoever, except for a sense of awe and grief.
It took more than two months for the WHO and the US CDC to make a U-turn on wearing masks. I don’t think China’s or even South Korea’s TCM treatment will be adopted by the West, especially in the US, the COVID-19 infection leader in the world. The Cold War-style ideological battle has not dissipated in the 21st century. On the contrary, the overriding sentiments are inflamed by the partisan leadership in the US. I think when it comes to foreign ideas, China is more adaptable than the US. China is good at incorporating new ideas with its own development. The US is skeptical of almost anything foreign, especially ideas from China whose ideology is starkly different from the US. Alas, above all else, besides ventilators, TCM may be worth a try for the critically ill COVID-19 patients in the US.
China’s “San Yao San Fang“(三药三方) to treat COVID-19 patients with six different TCM prescriptions.
Fifty years ago, before I was born and as I was told by history, a US Senator from Wisconsin named Gaylord Nelson founded Earth Day after he witnessed devastation caused by the 1969 oil spill in Santa Barbara, California. Senator Nelson and Congressman Pete McCloskey recruited Denis Hayes from Harvard University to coordinate a national staff of eighty-five who promoted events across the US to raise public awareness of environmental issues. On the first Earth Day on April 22, 1970, 20 million Americans rallied together to demonstrate for a healthy, sustainable environment and for protection against the deterioration of the environment. Subsequently, the national movement led to the creation of the United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and a series of bipartisan legislation of the Clean Air, Clean Water, and Endangered Species Acts. In the 1990s, Denis Hayes expanded the Earth Day Network to 141 countries. Today, more than 180 nations observe Earth Day as a global secular holiday.
I’m glad that the celebrated alum Rachel Carson from Chatham University is mentioned in the Earth Day history. Ms. Carson’s seminal work Silent Spring (1962) “represented a watershed moment” as history recorded it. (See book cover here) I’m even proud of the United States (in its bipartisan political climate fifty years ago) for leading the country and the world on all forefronts of environmental topics such as water, energy, air and wildlife.
Moving forward fifty years later, in 2020, the US is the only nation in the developed world that has signed but not ratified the Basel Convention on hazardous waste. There is no US federal law that requires the recycling of plastic waste or includes a ban on foreign export of e-waste. And the US is withdrawing from the Paris Climate Agreement under the current administration. The withdrawal will come into effect on November 4, one day after the 2020 US presidential election. Earth Day is more than a one-day demonstration; it symbolizes lifelong civic engagement in fighting for a cleaner, safer, more just and sustainable world.
It’s a stereotype to label a person who advocates for environment and nature an activist. In some literatures Rachel Carson was regarded as an environmental activist rather than a female scientist. Don’t you think a person who values economic growth higher than anything else is an activist as well? I think in our society we have many a financial activist and economic activist who has led, or misled, us toward wasteful consumption behaviors and money-oriented mindset. We’d rather cover our ears and eyes to the truth, allowing such activism to dominate our lifestyle and judgement.
I’ve been told by people with high socioeconomic status that in a capitalistic country such as the US, it’s not uncommon that people with power monetize strategies in order to make a change for good intention or not. You can reward someone with a buy-one-get-one-free coupon, for instance, for buying your new product. You can also reward someone with a big fat bonus for not going to a competitor company. There’re too many examples like this. We can reward someone for doing something or not doing something. We can penalize someone with fines for breaking a rule. Corruption involves bribery, and bribery is about money. No matter whether corruption gets full explosure, corruption is happening in businesses and in governments. Money means a lot to all of us but it’s not everything. When we feel the economic pinch such as COVID-19-related unemployment, we ask for help from our employers and governments. A trillions-of-dollars-worth economic rescue plan is granted.
But what about a pay cut or job loss resulting from poor health or the need of caring for newborns and an ailing family member? The healthcare system in the US is far from good compared with OECD counterparts, a club of industrialized countries. American people need to wait for days and weeks for non-emergency medical consultations. Administrative bureaucracy is as cumbersome in the health industry as in governments. And many people’s insurance premiums go up year-on-year, and yet the services dwindle and a wide range of exams and drugs are not fully covered. Many folks who died of COVID-19 could not even afford proper healthcare because they were mentally, physically or even financially unable. Do health inequities get the same bipartisan attention as wealth inequities from our governments?
What about the burdensome price tag of daycare to many new parents? Politicians like using zip codes to gauge their polling demographics. The longer I live in America, the more I understand why zip codes unofficially determine Americans’ social status. Different zip codes do matter in the education quality of a child and the accessibility of fresh produce and a healthy diet in stores. Different zip codes do demonstrate the administrative discrepancy in exercising the voter’s right and pricing the same consumption goods in different chained stores. All of this, health, education, and employment, is social capital. As we look back the last 50 years from the first Earth Day, in the US and many capitalistic countries, economic growth has outpaced social development.
If you’re an economist or like one, perhaps you’ll agree with me that we’re all activists because we advocate for different needs. In order to survive, we have our needs and we demand our needs to be fulfilled. For sustainability, we value individual wellbeing as much as our material needs.
Ideally, if a majority of global citizens can benefit from a good quality of healthcare, affordable housing, lifetime education, efficient mass transportation and safe and sustainable food sources, we will do less damage to the world of finite natural resources and the ecosystems on which other living things—other than humans—also depend for their survival.
What if part of the trillions of dollars rescue package is allotted for creating jobs to build healthy, sustainable institutions and systems for social capital? Will we be less susceptible to risk that will cost us more to rebuild than to prevent that risk from happening?
On the 50th anniversary of Earth Day, the first (or maybe the only) 50th anniversary that I observe in my lifetime, I think we really can do a lot for not only the voiceless environment and endangered species, but also for our own survival on this Planet.
Waste management is a big industry. How can other living things live for tens of thousands of years without causing environmental disasters? Animals also pee and poop in their own right. Plants emit carbon dioxide at night when sunlight is not available for photosynthesis. Humans produce waste: solid waste, food waste, electronic waste, packaging waste, water waste, air pollution, to the topical medical waste, you name it. It’s inevitable that we’ll handle tons of medical waste during and after COVID-19. But the human waste seems to contribute little positively to the environment. Mother Nature has her limits to turn waste into treasure, but humanity’s ingenuity is boundless. Sadly, we haven’t acted quickly to protect social and natural capital as we did to rescue our economy in the fallout of COVID-19. Don’t you see there’s a problem but also an opportunity for humans to invest in waste management?
To celebrate Earth Day 2020, I’d like to borrow the statement from earthday.org to remind us all: “We have two crises: one is the COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic. The other is a slowly building disaster for our climate.” If only the United States could once again lead this climate movement. If only we, the capable, could help those underprivileged to increase social mobility, our world will be a better place—like Michael Jackson sang—if we make efforts toward inter- and intragenerational equity and sustainable development.
Umm. . . how about a toilet paper cake? (Photo courtesy of REUTERS/Attila Cser.)
If you feel every day is like a Groundhog Day under the COVID-19 stay home order, you’re not the only one. I’ve been telling my friends that the garbage truck comes twice a week in my neighborhood to collect trash. That’s how I anchor myself to the day of the week. Instead of having a window view of an empty parking lot all to myself during the day, I’m now writing at home with a view of a parking lot filled with cars every day.
This is an unusual Easter. Let’s not get used to this new normal where the Internet and online activities are penetrating every aspect of our life. The spring is outside. The hens are laying eggs as usual, no day-off!
This is an unexpected change of routines for many people. Let’s take it as godsend bliss. We spend more time with immediate family members now. We discover what we don’t know in the household or reacquaint ourselves with what we know. We may understand the deeper meaning of “Home Sweet Home” as we live in it.
This is an untedious period of learning. We learn to love and relove a hobby or a living thing. We reflect on what we had and did pre-lockdown to allow us to cherish our life and respect for others. Our Planet is celebrating the 50th Earth Day on April 22 merrily, because after a very long time living things—other than humans—can now breathe the fresher air, sing in a quieter common land, and frolic in clearer waters. Villagers in northern Punjab India can see the Himalayas clearly for the first time in almost 30 years due to the clearer air because of India’s lockdown.
To break my cabin fever, I’ve done something different this Easter weekend at home. I tune into the sound of coronavirus (click here to sample), which is a nearly two-hours of pure music consisting of chime bells, twanging strings and lilting flutes. MIT scientists have translated coronavirus protein structure into music to find sites on the protein where antibodies or drugs might be able to bind. This is a new technique called sonification. Scientists assigned each amino acid a unique note in a musical scale, converting the entire protein into a preliminary musical score. While listening to the soothing sounds representing the coronavirus spike protein, I doubt the virus is that spiky. The sounds aren’t pitchy to me at all. I can easily fall into my auditory hallucinations. So to stay sober I change the music channel to this ensemble by 45 French musicians singing from their homes the famous 60s oldie “La Tendresse.” The song was first sung by French comedian and singer Bourvil in 1963. Be sure to watch the scene in which Aurélien Merle in Augères-Bourgogne used several rolls of toilet paper as his props.
For weeks, I’ve been looking for an explanation to satisfy my bewilderment that why toilet paper is one of the most-wanted items for people to stock up, especially in the West. (Chinese people were queuing for masks at pharmacies as the epidemic news broke.)
It’s been weeks now (at least during my rare visits) in my local stores that shelves for paper towels and toilet paper are empty. I was surprised to see the last toilet paper package in my recent hunt for essential goods. Standing on the shelf was the one-and-only six-roll item. It cost more than six dollars, pre-taxed. If my father were with me, he’d convert the US dollars into RMB, the Chinese currency. “OMG!” He’d most likely scream and said, “Nearly fifty yuan for six rolls of toilet paper!” With this amount of money, one can have three meals at a noodle shop in Guangzhou, China.
What makes us no different from one another regardless of nationalities and races is in the face of a pandemic, we see panic buying everywhere in the North or South Hemisphere, Eastern or Western world. Toilet paper is a must-have. I come across this article from the World Economic Forum and it’s given me food for thought. As Niki Edwards from Queensland University of Technology said, “Toilet paper symbolizes control.” To maintain control in an uncertain time, amassing toilet paper satisfies our mental need of maintaining control over hygiene and cleanliness.
I’m amused by Brian Cook from University of Melbourne’s view that the bulky toilet paper can provide visual contentment to panicky mortals. By looking at the toilet paper stockup in our home storage, we can tell ourselves that we’re doing something and we’re protected in the abnormal time when we feel at risk. And Alex Russell from Central Queensland University believed that nothing can substitute for toilet paper in terms of its functionality. In my sustainability study, I’ve learned about fungibility, an economic term meaning the ability of a good or asset to be interchanged with other individual goods or assets of the same type.
So dear reader, if you want to make a difference for our Planet, buy or stock up, if you will, eco-toilet paper, which as its name suggests, is made out of recycled materials. I remember in the 80s and 90s companies were discussing how to reduce overhead expenses by introducing a paperless office. Now we’re more paperless than not because of emails, smart phones and cloud computing. I haven’t seen a way out yet to a paperless bathroom. However, if you’re smartly swerving to eco-toilet paper, such as Ecoleaf, Essential, Traidcraft and Who Gives A Crap (the recycled paper version), we can do our parts to reduce deforestation. Forests, like those that were burnt in California and Australia or cut down in the Amazon and East Africa, are the Planet’s lungs to absorb emissions.
If we have bad lungs, we’re unlikely to survive in the battle with novel coronavirus.
If the Planet has bad lungs, we’ll inhale as much bad air as all living things need.
If you become a toilet paper collector like Juli Gudehus from Germany, or a small business innovator like the owner at Ronttosrouva bakery from Finland who turns rolls of toilet paper into a cake design, you’ve made your 2020 spring an untedious one.
