When I first heard about Operation Rice Bowl at my church in America, I thought they were talking about something I knew so well from Chinese culture. I don’t have to tell you that the Chinese people eat a lot of rice—you have been to enough Chinese restaurants and seen enough Chinese landscapes with rice paddies to know that. But rice bowl was a term I heard all the time, and not just at mealtimes.
Growing up in Hong Kong, rice bowl indicated our overall well-being. If you say you have “a new rice bowl,” you have found a new job or started a new business. An “iron rice bowl” means your future prosperity is assured. A “solid rice bowl” is a good indication that you have a sure way to make a living. If you say, “My rice bowl is broken,” well, maybe you have fallen on hard times. And so on.
When you use rice bowl this way in Chinese culture, you are really talking about your livelihood. I have found no real equivalent in American English. It is some combination of steady paycheck and nest egg.
So, when I first heard about Operation Rice Bowl, that’s what came to mind. And, really, I was not far off.
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Posted January 26th, 2012 in by: John Lindner | 1 Comment »
Dear Friends,
I am so grateful and humbled to be able to greet you for the first time as president of Catholic Relief Services. Your wonderful solidarity with our poor brothers and sisters around the world inspires me as this new year and this new phase of my life begins.
When Ken Hackett first knocked on my door 8 years ago and asked me to consider becoming one of the first lay members of the CRS board of directors, I admit I was not that familiar with this great organization. Certainly, I knew of CRS from Operation Rice Bowl and other collections at church, but not much more. It was after I joined the board that I realized I was like the character in that John Denver song who was “coming home to a place he’d never been before.”
CRS completes a circle that began for me decades ago in Hong Kong. Then a British colony, Hong Kong was home to many people like my parents, refugees who fled China, first from the Japanese and then the Communist regime. Although I did not know it at the time, CRS was working in Hong Kong then, helping refugee families less fortunate than mine.
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Posted December 27th, 2011 in by: John Lindner | 6 Comments »
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