 Welcome to Tough Love with Loretta Chen, where Hawaii's changemakers talk tough on the islands they love. Our guest for today has dedicated her life to preserving traditional culture and is passionate about childhood development. She is a globetrotter, having worked in over 20 countries in diverse fields such as public communications, management consulting and marketing. Since 2001, she has been studying with Buddhist masters from the Himalayas and Bhutan and began leading field trips to preserve folk music as well as develop a music education curriculum for children. She has also been working to preserve traditional handicrafts and created her own sustainable fashion line. And in 2012, our guest founded the Academy of Himalayan Art and Child Development, an NGO dedicated to preserving Himalayan wisdom and art to share with the world. Please welcome Kun Kun Tsuan. Hello, Kuzuzangpo. Kuzuzangpo. Thank you so much. So, you know, I first met you, Kun Kun. I mean, one of the arts, right? A Singaporean girl meeting a Chinese lady here in Hawaii and we both bonded on Bhutan. I think, let's get started on Bhutan. I think many people are like, huh? Where is Bhutan? Why don't you tell our audience who have never heard of the Himalayan region and Bhutan? Tell us a little bit more about Bhutan. Okay. To those of you who haven't been to Bhutan, Bhutan is called the happiness country in the world. It's located in the corner of Himalayan region. Between India and China and next to Nepal. And it has population less than 800,000 people. And in their constitution says, and 60% of land has to be covered by forest. And one of the hobby for Bhutanese people is to plant trees and to accumulate merits of life. And they don't measure their life by GDP, but to measure their life with gross national happiness. So on that note, yes. One of the things that I think a lot of our audiences probably don't even recognize is that while 60% of the constitution says that 80% of their land, 60% of the lands must always be covered by forestry, actually 84% is being covered by forestry. And yes, every time I go there, the students are planting trees, they're going on excursions. But let me just quiz you and get our audience up to speed and explain to us what is gross national happiness. What is G&H? So G&H is a philosophy and a way of living developed by the brilliant, enlightened force king of Bhutan. And His Majesty actually developed this philosophy when he was only 17 years old. While he's seen the world is developing with a faster speed of consumption and the Mother Earth is bearing more and more things from the human being. And he's thinking really far future for the human and the Bhutan young generations. So he developed this new system in which he applies to, from any decision the government make, the project make, and the social entrepreneurs make all based on the national gross happiness, which is not only for development of economic, but for the well-being of the whole society, and whole environment, and whole community. That's right. And it's predicated on, it's very much human-centered, right? That its objective cannot be just the relentless pursuit of GDP and money, but really it is based on the philosophy that the individual, all individuals want to achieve peace and happiness, right? So they actually came up with four different theories, which is conservation of the environment, equitable and sustainable development, good governance, and the preservation of culture. So, I mean, I'm with you because you know, I've been an international consultant to the government of Bhutan, but a lot of Americans or a lot of our audiences are like, may just say like, but what is GNH? I mean, this is hogwash, right? How do we ground it in real actionable goals? I mean, you have done it and I want you to tell us what have you done? And so 20 years ago, I started to, because of my practice of Buddhism, I started to look into preserving the, finding out Himalayan music and culture, handicrafts. So I took my team and traveled through villages, and while I go in through villages, I start to find out the true essence of Himalayan culture, actually is harmony, is peace, and why this whole region is impacting the Earth for thousands of years and has so many hidden wisdom is because they knew only if one, as human being, to get deep connection with themself in harmony and to have harmony with community and family, and to have harmony with nature, and then everyone can live in peace and the life can go on sustainably. And so far, all the troubles are so-called crisis we're having on Earth, whether it's climate crisis, it's economic crisis, or it's education crisis, and actually if we look at the root cause, it's because our human nature crisis. That's right. I mean, I think we have a slide on you on how a lot of the crisis that we have is really a conflict between ego and ego, right? Yeah, I think right now we have a little visual here as well that shows ego and ego, but then if we take a look back at the visual before that and we look at how we've developed in the last 20 years, you want to share with us a little bit more about how- Yeah, I guess everyone think U.S. and China and the East-West culture is a major difference complex, well, a lot of things. Actually, as a human being, if we look at life as a long history, looking back in the 1960s, if we can look at that chart again, so this chart has been well used in the economic research and on human development economic research. And by 1960, collectively, all the human being on Earth, from human development beginning of this civilization to 1960, we only used up half resources of our mother Earth. From 1960 to 1980, we break even. That means all human being on Earth just used one enough that mother Earth has to supply us. But something dramatic happened. From 1980 to 2010, we used up one and a half mother Earth all the resources. And at that time, United Nations had the big call to the world to talk about we really need to take some conscious actions for our future development of Earth. So the prediction is if we don't change our way of living, a way of thinking, a way of acting, by 2050, we will consume three Earths. What does it mean to consume three Earths? That means we have eaten up our grandchildren's food. We have drank up the fresh water of our grandchildren. And they will be left over with all the polluted land and water and trash. And if we can take action from 2010 collectively from all human being on Earth to a sharp turn, do reflection and modify our way of consumption by 2050, we might have a hope to bring back one Earth. And this is a very challenging job to do. But actually it's also an easy job in the Bhutanese's view because they have been living in such a way which the foundation of life is contentment. And our perspective of life actually decides our way of living. So that's why in the GDP system is ego-based, self-centric, individualism. And in a GNH, it's echo-based. It's talking about collective consciousness, well-being with all beings, seeing and unseen with our eyes. That's why in Bhutan, they're targeting to build their forest with forest bridge across the country. Why? They don't want their animals cross-road. They want their animals always have a forest, grass paths to go. Which country does that for their animals? Yeah, so again, like I said, I'm with you because obviously I consult for Bhutan and I'm in Bhutan a lot. It is my second home. But for people who are in industrialized countries, you know, in big cities, right? And they will say, yeah, right. Like how am I going to build a little footpath, you know, to allow the animals to coexist harmoniously with me? How do we even begin to apply this practically in today's terms? And then you have a little solution for that and that's why you're starting from trying to change the mindsets of children from when they were young. So you started this nonprofit and you also started this concept of happy school. Tell us a little bit more about happy schools and what do you intend to do to get us all happy and what does that education look like? Yeah, basically, happy school is developed based on national growth, national happiness, which is developed also after United Nations in 2016 did western research on Asia Pacific schools and education systems. Sadly enough, in that report, we found out the more score, the so-called STEM scores are higher, the more sick, the well-being of our children are worse, like suicidal rate and depression and PDD children develop rate are higher in the region or particular school, especially in Korea, Hong Kong and Singapore rank it very high. So United Nations actually put out a call to the earth that our future school on earth should be happy school. Our education purpose should be focused on develop the well-being of our children first because when we talk about sustainability nowadays, what we're assistant? If we don't have assistant children, a generation, young generation, how can we have a sustainable future of our mother earth? Because if our children are not healthy, happy and violent and they can only do violent things, wrong things to our mother earth and we dump 180 million tons of trash in our ocean. I mean, coming to Hawaii, I learned aloha. When you understand aloha, you understand the gene age. It's the same concept. You have to live in harmony with all lives and to respect mother earth. And so the happy school concept was developed from Bhutan, applied in Vietnam, Europe now, even with exercise, or even tried in China. Mainly because the report from UNESCO found out the biggest cost for education's failure of well-being of our children is three disconnections. The number one disconnection is self-disconnection. Our children don't know who they are when they grow up because they're filled up with things, not learning how to be. And being is not having, but our current consumption environment is only telling our children having more, being more competitive is the way to success of life. But that's not a fact. Other parts of the world don't live like this. And the second disconnection is disconnecting with families and communities. And so that caused social problems, depression of our children. And then third depression, disconnection is disconnecting with mother earth. Because from a childhood, they are disconnected. They were not taught properly how to respect mother earth. You can't expect a child never being on ocean, being a forest, to love ocean forests when they're 30 or 20. They will not have this action of love. And because our children's development has a rhythm, under 14 years it's the time you build their value system. You build their harmony within, sustainable system within. So the goal of happy school is to build, help children to cultivate, harmonize life, start a young age. Then extend it to family supporting. So the parents has to be part of. It's no happy parents, no happy children. That's right. On that note, we're going to go for a little happy break as well. And then when we come back from the break, we're going to quiz Kun Kun more on how exactly we're going to implement this. Because a lot of people may just say, oh, this is just talked by crazy rich Asians. How do we actually implement it? So stay tuned. We'll come back after your happy break. See you later. Thanks to our think tech underwriters and grand tours. The Atherton Family Foundation. Carol Mun Lee and the Friends of Think Tech. The Center for Microbial Oceanography Research and Education. Collateral Analytics. The Cook Foundation. Dwayne Kurisu. The Hawaii Community Foundation. The Hawaii Council of Associations of Abarbon Owners. Hawaii Energy. The Hawaii Energy Policy Forum. Hawaiian Electric Company. Integrated Security Technologies. Galen Ho of BAE Systems. Kamehameha Schools. MW Group. The Shidler Family Foundation. The Sydney Stern Memorial Trust. Volo Foundation. Yuriko J. Sugimura. Thanks so much to you all. And we're back on The Tough Love with Loretta Chan, where I quiz some of Hawaii's changemakers on the things they're doing to make Mother Earth better, or worse. So today we're talking to Quinn Quinn Duan, who's a dear friend of mine, but she's also the founder of two NGOs, one that looks into education and the other to look into a childhood development. So before the break, we were just having a conversation on how we create happy schools. And lots of people obviously understand that school stress is now on the rise. There is a correlation between a high depression and suicide rates in societies and countries that score really well in STEM. And I can speak for ourselves, because my husband's Korean and I'm from Singapore. We're both from these very high stress societies. I mean, we do well in school, but that's why we're here now in Hawaii. We're like, okay, we need to kick it back a notch. But jokes aside, how do we really begin to implement this notion of happiness and happy schools in say an American system? Because a lot of people will say, yeah, sure, we all want to be happy, but is this just something that crazy rich Asians do? We take our children to happy, expensive schools. I mean, how do we make this affordable, viable? How do you propose we do that? Actually, happy school is a concept that not only applied for school, and we not only now are testing or exercising. This is not newly born. We've been exercising for the last 10 years in Bhutan. Now in Asia, in Vietnam, 45 public schools are adopting happy school system. In Switzerland, in Geneva, the city of Geneva is thinking to make Geneva the first happiness city in Europe. So actually, outside America, a lot of happy actions are going. But basically, when you talk about transforming society, I think we have to come back to the fundamental question is our perspective of life, individual life. So we need to start from self-healing to social transformation, which I'm promoting from happy mom education, from individuals, from a family. And at the same time, we're also offering training for school teachers, because who spends most of the time with our children? The teachers and parents. So we have to work two legs, and one side emphasis on happy family and one side on happy teachers. And we have series of practice workshops and travels. People have to see it first. This is not newly invented. Actually, there's a country on earth called Bhutan are living, practicing daily with around 80,000, 800,000 people. So I see solutions coming up from West education system. It's like a bandage. So you need to look for a cost, root cost, which we need to start to respect in life from a different perspective, and we need to respect the rhythm of our child development, which we don't. We're just pushing our kids competitive, more competitive, but actually this earth has a boundary. If everyone is competing to have more resources in three generations, we're finished. So how can we, living in Hawaii, bring me this conscious awareness that we are actually living on an island called earth, and aloha ha ha means breath of life. We don't share common ground. We share common breath. And if we think about that, just bring the simple awareness of aloha to everyone, we actually can connect each other at a higher conscious level and start living more respectful to each other and to our children, to our society. And people will accept more the concept of changing daily life in a more self-content way and an environmental way. So let me just ask you this again, it's tough love. So why don't you just play devil's advocate, right? Do you not see a danger in us becoming so content? I mean, one of the things I love about living in Hawaii and Bhutan is that I do feel happier. I do, I do. I feel happier, I feel more content. Is there a danger, though, that we can go and become a little bit too content where it conflicts with the desire to work harder, to be more productive? I mean, I think really tempted, since I've moved to Hawaii, to just go spend my time at the beaches, you know, or when I'm in Himalayas, to just go spend my time hiking up mountains. How do we begin to balance the need for productivity and the sense of contentment in a healing? I mean, balance is always the key, right? How do you, for the first reason, begin to do that or unravel that? That is like the age-old dichotomy, East-West, right? And how do we even begin to unravel that? Yes, this is a very important question, which leads to the fundamental question again, the cause, that different perspective of life. You see, productivity has different meaning in different culture content, in culture. In Bhutan, this is called productivity. This piece of a coat I designed is used a two-year-long hand-waving fabric. So in Bhutan, people would spend two years to meditate over a piece of beautiful fabric and wave it, synchronize their appreciation to culture and to their spirituality and to the five elements of nature and all the beautiful patterns of nature. And they manifest through their artistic finger into the fabric. And then what? And they would wear this fabric and design into clothes for their children, for the beloved families, and for the respected gurus, teachers. And they also sell at a good price in the market to the customers who appreciate it like me. And everywhere I go in the world, I wear Bhutan fabric because it's a piece of art. So when you consider the overall well-being of a life as the first priority, productivity is to support the well-being. It's not your well-being sacrificing your well-being to support your productivity, which in the GDP system we're sacrificing our nature resources, our human resources. Listen to the English. Language is the skin of our culture. Our English language, we call everything resources. Because why? We want to use up resources. Resources is to serve the single ego purpose of human greed. So there's no respect in this language. And which in Hawaiian language is a totally different direction in the Eastern Chinese language and in Bhutan the same. So this come back to how do we define life goals? If our life goal is to work together to make our country, our society, our young generation to move together in harmony with mother nature, then that's any productivity is designed based on balance and harmony. But if our goal is only to pay attention to our investors of shareholders or increase of our productivity of things, then that's another difference. And we're sacrificing everything. So I think we need to first to bring awareness of life that what is the certain definitions of things we're so used to and which has been put in our brain since a young age. And again, like I said, this is Tough Love with Loretta Chan. So I have to ask you tough questions. I'm with you because when I was in Bhutan, this piece of fabric that I'm wearing is from Bhutan. And I remember when I was in Bhutan, they don't have a lot of money. So what they'll do is, you know, exchange for, you know, because I go there and I teach and I train them. So they give me a piece of fabric that they've woven for an entire year. And I'm like, right, this is with their entire years of time. The point I'm trying to make is people will say, yeah, but that's great, Quinn Quinn. That's because, you know, maybe you are well-established and you're able to pay $10,000 for this coat. The average working class, middle class, professional or student will be like, I want to support sustainable fashion, but it's too darn expensive. And time is money. I need to go out there and, you know, work to pay rent. How can the average person begin to incorporate sustainable practices in their life when they are strapped for cash? Because we got to admit eating sustainable organic food and dressing up in sustainable fashion is expensive. How can the average person do that? I think this would take some time because we have been in this GDP system which is controlling the earth for the last 100 years, but speeded up last 30 years really did some damage on the earth. But I think if we start to educating people, show people, share people what is the fundamental relationship. Let's see from life, from fashion. If you understand your skin is your second biggest breathing organ beside your nose, that if you understand 25% fertilizer chemical used for growth of cotton and almost majority of the fabric on the market has toxic to your skin, you would think you want to live longer with healthier life. Especially with expensive health care. Yes, and you would want to search into organic fabrics and for your children's health and growth. And actually there's many hope in the young generation. I know many young designers and young people are searching to learn organic dye and it's cotton. This is silk, silk is the most expensive thing now in organic fashion. But we can build the learning about organic wearing fashion from a young age to a young mother's education. And also we need to teach young people you don't need to own so many clothes and you need to own high quality. You want a high quality that is benefit to your health, your spiritual, the holistic life. And so one last. I mean a fabric in Bhutan like this pass on generations I have collecting antique fabrics from Bhutan which been varying for four generations. And they are still beautiful. You still can wear them. And so it's really matter of how you look at life, how cherish. How much you cherish yourself. And this come back to the self-connection again to the happy school. We haven't taught children putting healthy food in their mouths, putting healthy clothes on their body. It's important for their well-being, for the society well-being. Then they will never do it. So if we start from a young generation now we will see a difference on earth. I mean in fact we are already seeing difference. I mean we see how youths are now striking you know not you know striking for climate change. 16-year-old climate change activist Greta Thunberg who is like you know person of the year she gained recognition when she went on strike from school right lasted to protest climate change and now it's a whole series of worldwide demonstrations most recently the September 20th strike that drew an estimate of above 4 million people right. She's led by example. She's been around Europe by train. In fact in August she traveled on a zero emission sailboat to the US. So just very quickly we now have just like under three minutes. I mean what she's doing now is creating all this awareness on climate change right. In fact the reports of Swedish airports that have now reported a decline in travelers because a lot of activists now have attributed this to the Greta effect because a lot of people are so aware of humanity's impacts on the planet that they now are trying to cut back on their travel. How do we begin to suture these thoughts right. On the one hand we want people to travel to become more aware of what's happening out there and looking for sustainable practices but then now we're also seeing perhaps like a backlash. People don't want to travel because they're like oh no now I'm contributing to greenhouse gases and carbon emissions. What do you say to that in 90 seconds? Okay so travel is a huge industry. Why actually is ranked number two I think impacting the mother earth. It does bring environmental issues but as a learning journey for youth travel is important. I think it's not a matter not to travel it's matter how we travel. When we travel mindful selectively with high awareness and then works the program we launched called Operation Earth Travel and in Asia between Bhutan, China and Hawaii we are promoting when the young travelers go and we will offset their travel emission by planting a tree in the local region where they go in and bring their we developed this organic tea product skin care set for them to travel with and we developed the travel gears for them they it's reusable. So during the travel try to learn from the culture where like Hawaii can teach them how to reconnect with nature because mother earth so beautiful here you don't want contaminated mother earth here in the ocean in the forest young people get it very fast actually. So make travel as a moving education a moving happy school is my goal and my team's goal and of course we need reduce unnecessary travel because we're living in such internet world but certain travel to help local community and to gain their confidence actually if more visitors come to Hawaii with respect learning with the intention with the intention learning about aloha I think we help the community in Hawaii to appreciate their own culture. That's right and with that thank you so much thank you for watching tough love with Loretta Chen because tough times don't last but tough loving people do thank you so much Kunkun thank you so much thank you