Reverse thinking needed

According to media reports, a quarrel between a young couple, both single children, over whether they should visit the husband's or the wife's hometown during Spring Festival led to a divorce recently. The couple, based in Changchun, Jilin province, were married just six months ago. Perhaps the couple should have invited both sets of parents to their home, which they had moved into recently, instead of taking the extreme step, says an article in Yanzhao Evening News. Excerpts:

Since the divorced couple's hometowns are thousands of kilometers apart (Urumqi in the Xinjiang Uygur autonomous region and Guangdong province), they possibly could not have visited both during the short Spring Festival holiday. But they could have invited both sets of parents to their new home in Changchun to celebrate the Lunar New Year. That would have been a real family reunion.

Perhaps the real problem with the divorced couple is that they both are single children of their parents. Hence, they didn't want their parents to feel neglected. In such situations, couples need reverse thinking to avoid terrible fights and enjoy a real family reunion.

Such conflicts, however, are just a small part of the problems faced by young couples. Being an only child, such couples have to take care of their elderly parents, which demands money, energy and time. Therefore, if both sets of parents can join their children for a family reunion, it would save all of them a lot of unnecessary trouble.

There are millions of couples who are single children, and the Changchun case is an early warning of the problems they will face in their conjugal life. They have to find ways to overcome these problems to live a healthy and happy life. And the government should implement favorable policies for senior citizens to provide them pension funds, accessible medical treatment and affordable houses to ease the burden of young couples.

Waste not, want not

One of the main features of Spring Festival is dinner. But the amount of food that is wasted when such dinners are held in big or small restaurants is amazing. According to a conservative estimate, the annual waste of proteins and fat is 8 million tons and 3 million tons, enough to feed about 200 million people for one year, says an article on gmw.cn. Excerpts:

1942, a film released recently, shows the devastation caused by a famine just more than 70 years ago. Some members of the older generation have vivid but sorrowful memories of that famine as well as the one in the 1960s. Therefore, they rarely waste food and teach their children not to do so as well. Usually, in ordinary households, people store leftovers in refrigerators to be eaten the next day or later.

But the reality in restaurants is quite different irrespective of whether it is a private or official dinner. More often than not, the hosts order excessive amounts of food just to "save face", which is nothing but an attempt to show off one's wealth or power.

Such hosts think it is impolite to order just enough food for the guests and thus end up ordering so much that at times even half of the food has to be thrown as leftovers. No wonder, more than 200 billion yuan ($32.16 billion) worth of food is wasted as leftovers in China every year.

The central government has taken measures to stop wastage of food especially at official banquets. But with Spring Festival approaching, officials as well as non-officials should remember not to waste food, for it is no less than a criminal offense to do so.

(China Daily 01/29/2013 page9)