Rong Hailan's "100-year-old Rongjia" heritage

When communicating face-to-face, within a minute, you will be infected by Rong Hailan's willfulness: her self-deprecation, her laughter, all crystal clear, like the sapphire on her neck. Rong Hailan is the granddaughter of Rong Zongjing, a famous entrepreneur in the Republic of China, and the niece of former Vice President Rong Yiren.

Rong's century-old, through the changes of mountains and rivers, the flow of years, is still a rich and powerful person whose influence cannot be underestimated. As the third generation of the Rong family, Rong Hailan is a veritable golden lady born with a golden key, and has enjoyed everything from childhood: she completed the coming-of-age ceremony in Italy according to the most standard aristocratic traditional etiquette; her birthday gift when she was 19 years old was two townhouses in Manhattan; she had 43 rooms of antiques, designers, luxury goods from all over the world... It can be said that for her, material life is to give and to take, nothing more.

For people with great material abundance, wealth often becomes some kind of "curse", hollowing out people and making people out of control. However, Rong Hailan lived soberly and wisely. "Many rich people are empty in their hearts, have no direction, and are completely lost," she told Ci Media's "China Philanthropist", "In the case of everything, whether they can cherish everything they have, whether they can go out of their own way, whether they can share their love with others, this is the most important." ”

She is always looking for a path of her own, in search of true happiness. She describes herself as a "crane in the clouds" and "only doing what she loves to do." "When she modeled, acted in movies, choreographed plays, and founded cultural and artistic centers, she did so; She is especially like this when she goes to rural China, where she is not familiar with her life, to carry out public welfare charity projects.

"Pretending to be an aristocrat"

"I'm going to turn every second of my life into a pearl, and then string them together into a pearl necklace until I die with it at the end of my life."

Rong Hailan does not deny that she "already has everything", but at the same time, she repeatedly emphasizes that this is only a kind of "luck", and in order not to let this "luck" slip away, she will cherish it in all aspects such as words and deeds, rather than squandering.

A hundred years ago, Rong Zongjing and his brother Rong Desheng built a family from scratch and became the first generation of private entrepreneurs in China. Rong Zongjing died in 1938, and his three sons inherited part of the property, and in 1949, they left the mainland for Hong Kong, and then to the United States and other places, always maintaining a rich and noble life. Most of Rong Desheng's army remained on the mainland, inseparable from politics, and became a typical red capitalist.

Rong Hailan believes that family education is an important reason for her to develop such values. In Wuxi Rong's Plum Garden, there is a widely praised couplet: "Make a wish of the highest class, make a medium-term relationship, and enjoy the blessings of the inferior; stand on a high place, choose a place to sit on a flat place, and walk towards a wide place." "This is a family motto that every descendant of the Rong clan must learn and remember from an early age."

Rong Hailan liked this couplet very much, and often asked people who were good at writing to copy it. She admits that she has used many famous brands since she was a child, but they are all because she likes their workmanship or materials or design, rather than to compare with others and show off to others. Born in a rich family, she knows that wealth can become a constraint. Many of the people she knew were very wealthy, but eventually went to lose and commit suicide. Therefore, she also knows the true meaning of the nobility as an aristocrat: "Pretending to be an aristocrat cannot become an aristocrat, what the nobles need is a spiritual thing, a return to the heart of the child." ”

This is true for individuals, and it is true for a family. She analyzed that the key to the Rong family's ability to continue for a hundred years is not because of how much money it has, but because it has formed a heritage that can be traced, and this heritage can be continuously inherited and renewed through generations of family education.

In Rong Hailan's view, this heritage of the Rong family is, first of all, a kind of "TRUE LOVE" (true love) that can be freely given and accepted. She mentioned more than once that her grandfather Rong Zongjing became rich, donated funds to build bridges and roads, helped the poor to study, and did many great good deeds that have affected him to this day.

Rong Hailan recalled that when she was a child, her parents often used her grandfather's words to educate her: "We eat, don't forget the people who didn't eat." "Those workers depend on us, and we have to work harder to make them live a better life." These family pasts, ancestral training, and family education have become the foreshadowing for Rong Hailan's future philanthropy.

"Coming to China to do charity is a big challenge"

"Doing charity is not a difficult thing for me." Rong Hailan, who has been studying and practicing charity in schools and well-known foundations such as Rockefeller since childhood, is quite confident, and she emphasizes that she is a "regular army" in the field of public welfare and charity.

In 1991, in two Manhattan townhouses where her parents gave her a gift for her 19th birthday, Rong Hailan founded an NPO (non-profit organization) cultural and artistic center to promote the excellent traditional Chinese culture to American society. In addition, Rong Hailan often participates in some non-governmental charities to help people in distress such as AIDS children.

In 2004, when she flew to China alone and wanted to carry out public welfare and charity in China, she did not anticipate what happened later. It wasn't until she actually started doing it that she deeply understood that "coming to China to do charity is a big challenge."

The root of the challenge is that Chinese and American societies "do things, the system of companies, the norms of the law... The most important thing is that people do not interact with each other in different ways." When she first came to China, although Rong Hailan understood Chinese, she often did not understand what others were saying, because she was familiar with the communication style of american directness rather than Chinese euphemisms.

On the other hand, due to the limitations of China's general environment, many of her philanthropic ideas cannot be realized or fully realized. "China lacks love without any impurities... Philanthropists donate a lot of money, but very little is spent on children in the end. She made no secret of her indignation, "Hanging red stripes, waving flags, children have become dramatists for acting, what have they got?"

However, after receiving all this, Rong Hailan did not "retreat". She loves challenges and sees a challenging life as "a fun GAME." Therefore, she began to study, feel and understand the "Chinese style of charity" with her heart.

Ten years later, she was confident that she was "more mature" and had finally "made a way." At the same time, she believes, the Chinese government today understands better than in the past what philanthropy is all about. Therefore, she decided to gather the strength of entrepreneurs and non-governmental organizations to re-promote her philanthropy in China under the premise of reaching an agreement with the Chinese government.

"Equality is the best way to heal"

Rong Hailan and her special fund under the Red Cross Foundation of China, the Dragon Family Fund, are brewing an education poverty alleviation project. She said that unlike sending cattle and sheep to Inner Mongolia in the past, inviting Ophthalmologists from the United States, and building love book houses in rural primary schools, this project will integrate potential intellectual development, psychological counseling, dream stimulation, personality development education, physical and mental integration of response ability training, etc., to bring children something that others can never take away: "wisdom".

She also pointed out that the direction of this project is not only applicable to China, but can be spread to the whole world. Because for the "new human beings" of the current 80s, 90s and 00 generations, the times are progressing rapidly, the world is getting smaller and smaller, and the exchanges between people are becoming more and more frequent, although countries are slightly different in education and other aspects, but the various pressures experienced by people are similar.

Although he will start a path of "Chinese-style charity", Rong Hailan still stressed: "This does not mean that I do not have my own ideas." "She is also the Rong Hailan who freely pursues the positive energy cycle of people's hearts, human nature, and human behavior.

In Rong Hailan's philanthropic vision, the way to do charity can "go with the flow", but the true heart of doing charity cannot be abandoned under any circumstances.

In the past philanthropic practice, Rong Hailan attaches great importance to observing and appreciating the actual needs of the recipients. She often eats, plays, and talks with the children she sponsors, and is more deeply involved in their real life environment and finds ways to help them solve practical problems.

In the future, she hopes to use her strengths and make some of the situations she sees in the process of doing charity in China into micro-films or TV series, so that more people can understand Chinese - whether they are helpers or recipients - to understand their inner world and real needs.

For Rong Hailan, "doing charity is a kind of mutual inner touch, inner happiness, and inner harvest." And "equal love" is the key to achieving the common harvest of this kind of charity: "Equality is the best way to heal, whether it is internal trauma or external poverty." ”

Ci Media "Chinese Philanthropist" wrote an article _Xu Huitan Photography_Zhang Xu