The coincidence wasn’t perfect, but it felt auspicious. October 1 was the Chinese Autumn Festival or Moon Festival, whose central figure is a goddess named Chang’e who is said to live in the Moon and be visible in its surface. She has a pet rabbit by the way, long story. The holiday is roughly analogous to Thanksgiving, in that it’s grounded in the autumn harvest and family gatherings that affirm bonds of blood, community and gratitude. On October 2, the same day that Donald Trump was airlifted at golden hour from the White House lawn to the hospital, the nearly full Moon appeared in our night sky closely attended by the planet Mars. I read this in the news and reminded myself to have a look, thinking it would be interesting.
I was surprised by my reaction. On one hand, they’re just two familiar lights in the sky, one milky pale gray and large, as celestial objects go, and the other burnt orange, the size of a bright star. I see them all the time. But with only one or two degrees of sky separating them, they took on depth and charm and beauty that made me exclaim out loud and laugh. This was a no-telescope, naked-eye experience. As astronomical sights go, it was low-hanging fruit. But it was magic, making the orbital plane of our Solar System palpable, I suppose because any spatial relationship becomes more vivid with three points of reference, as opposed to two.
This juxtaposition of the sky and calendar was more portentous than I first realized. Because we’ve got a Chang’e in our family. When we adopted our 21-year-old daughter from China ten years ago, she chose to keep the name given her by the machinery of the Province of Sichuan when she was abandoned at about 6 years old - Fong Chong. Officially she is Fang Chang, with a short A sound as in the word far, but Chinese in America tend to go with the compromise O to avoid the tendency of people to say their names as if they rhyme with Hang Bang. That said, our daughter’s Chang or Chong 嫦 is the same word and character as the woman in the Moon. That FC was born in a year of the Rabbit (as was her American mom, by happenstance) is a bonus that we dwell on in our family lore.
In the wake of my celestial viewing on Friday night, I was struck that our Chang is being shadowed by Mars more closely than any parent would want. If Chang is China’s goddess of the Moon, Mars is our god of War. In the Roman telling, Mars is an honorable strategist. His Greek equivalent is more ruthless and violent. Either way, while no civilized person wants a future with Mars in ascendance, there are reasons to be afraid. America’s relationship with China is more fraught and acrimonious than at any time since Mao, and in those pre-Nixon days, China was only a threat to its own people and a few of its neighbors. Today it’s a juggernaut that just steamrolled over a free Hong Kong, with designs on Taiwan and its entire region. It’s a country and culture that our family admires and in which we have active interests, but we are aghast at its government and President Xi, a much more capable and charismatic authoritarian than our own. My wife’s import business is already being impacted by the American trade war with China, and it’s likely that the free and easy travel between here and there that we’ve enjoyed will not return soon. Even a shooting or cyber war with China is no longer a remote or silly scenario.
More broadly, as is oft noted, young adults like our daughter are inheriting a country and a world skidding on the edge of several precipices at once, from the economic to the political to the environmental. My faith in human goodness, resilience and ingenuity is not dimmed one bit, but I’m less sanguine that our business and political structures are open and competitive spaces anymore. Vital, overdue ideas for clean energy, smarter farming, water management, health care and economic equality are out there, but the powerful have never in my lifetime been more self-interested, protectionist and brutally obstinate. In the years before we adopted Fong Chong, we were led to believe it was obvious that we’d be “giving her a better life” by bringing her to America, but her first lesson in our civics was watching this country elect a leader who scapegoats China as easily as breathing while fomenting racist anti-Asian sentiment domestically. And yet, we look abroad and see China becoming a ruthless surveillance state with ever-mounting social control, reversing two decades of growth and opening. And while conservatives roll their eyes when we evoke the infuriating resilience of the old Anglo hegemonic patriarchy, it’s interesting that the glyphic symbol of masculinity, the circle with an arrow, is also that of Mars, the red god of violence. If the future is made by Trump, Xi, Putin and these other men, I don’t see room for our daughter. I’m of the belief that the most viable future for her, and for all of our daughters and our sons, is feminine. It’s time for fewer gods and more goddesses. It has something to do with the Moon.
Photo lifted from u/Daf95 at Reddit. Many thanks to @ChelyWright for inspiring this essay.