By Beverly Creamer
Advertiser Education Writer

In honor of Chinese New Year, I want presents of gau sent to key people in the state. To the Chinese, the stickiness of the dark, sweet, steamed pudding that's being sold now throughout Chinatown represents the family and the way it clings together, depends on each other, works together.

Not just because the members care about each other, but because they're stuck together, the way your fingers stick when you tackle a piece of gau.

In this time of new state budget challenges and looming new cuts for the University of Hawai'i system, I would send a hunk of gau to Gov. Linda Lingle and UH President Evan Dobelle and ask them to cut and share it.

Being dependent on each other to get out of that sticky mess, perhaps they'll see they have to stick together, too, to move higher education forward. That they are leaders of a family that needs to make the state institutions of higher education work for the rest of their family — Hawai'i's people.

And maybe they'll see they can't manage it without each other — or for their own glory — but must manage it for people like Keikilani Meyer, who now has a good-paying job because she went back to school at a community college and changed her future.

Because of a program supported with money from a far-seeing Legislature — which has already learned some of the lessons of gau — and administered with humanity by Honolulu Community College, Meyer is earning $31,000 a year as program coordinator for the Hawai'i Council for the Humanities, instead of $5,500 a year in state money as a welfare mom.

And she's giving back. As a graduate student last semester at the Manoa campus, Meyer organized an open market — something students and professors alike have wanted for years and something the new UH administration has set in motion. Now she's working at Kuhio Park Terrace, attempting to empower families to build on their strengths.

"For me it's not the physical infrastructure," says Meyer, a candidate for a master's in urban and regional planning. "It's the personal infrastructure."

The sticky gau fingers are going even further. As a role model for her 10-year-old son, Meyer is inspiring him to choose higher education, too.

But Meyer isn't the only one. Thousands of others have been served by the UH system at every juncture of their lives.

I'd also send pudding to Sen. Donna Mercado Kim and have her sit down and share it with Dobelle, as well. Then perhaps the discussion about the future of the state's astonishing system of community colleges and four-year campuses, with its new medical school emerging in Kaka'ako and dreams of expansion in Kapolei, would be respectful, unlike the discourse this week during a legislative hearing.

Perhaps there wouldn't be an "us versus them" tone, an "insider versus outsider" insinuation.

And I'd send gau to Sen. Sam Slom. As part of the emerging Republican family, his growing stature behooves graciousness. If he had sticky gau to enjoy, perhaps some comments would stick to his lips and stop there.

Eating gau together doesn't mean the end of disagreement or controversy. But perhaps it could spell the end of pettiness. Perhaps it could mean that, as family, living together on islands, there is something bigger than ourselves.

Reach Beverly Creamer at bcreamer@honoluluadvertiser.com or 525-8013.