Shenyang slip slush sloshing away encounter

I went downtown from outskirt Daoyi Friday looking for a U.S. map for my English class of pilots heading for U.S. training. I was prepared for a two-hour bus trip. Instead, as China’s northeast took its turn on what hit the U.S. northeast in October, a rainy day turned into a blizzard that would make a Canuck freeze in his muffs and miffs!

At the coffee shop where I took shelter after making my purchase at the local Xinhua bookstore, then back at the dorm where I watched the street crew pour salt on the increasingly slippery road six hours later, I reflected on the slush of today’s news.

My pedagogy assumes that “image” is the unit of knowledge in our brains. The day’s images began with U.S. President Barack Obama and Aussie PM Julia Gillard cozying it Down Under, sharing a peck, a podium, and promises as American foreign relations shift focus from the explosions of North Africa and the Middle East to the implosions in Southeast Asia where ASEAN’s biggest trading partner is China. America sails its 7th fleet on the maritime lanes of China Sea, now permanently basing 2,500 combat-ready grunts with their Australian counterparts on Oz’ northern territories. Pinoy Noynoy’s Kalayaan (freedom) islands is counting on the consistency of oil thicker than the ebb and tide of diplomatic verbiage and is banking on Uncle Sam’s muscles!

As Obama’s Sino-aimed “play by the rules” missiles flew in Honolulu to placate his domestic audience this election campaign, and rubber darts were returned by China’s Hu Jintao to save face, we are reminded of how much the images we live by, provided by the media, is all too contrived. Take the media “beating” Obama took in junking APEC’s tradition of dressing up country executives in the traditional attire of the host country. The so-called Hawaiian shirt is a tourism creation that no self-respecting Hawaiian would drape on his back; the islands’ muu-muu was the Christian missionary’s cover to overly exposed wahines’ thighs (Gillard might have preferred the hula skirt anyway), and on these in islands where cold might mean something up the mountain peaks but hardly noticed on the tropical shores—in fact, the bikini in Waikiki rules—wearing granny attire is for the Congregationalists of New England.

South Korea is trying to pass the Korea-U.S. free trade zone legislation already signed into law in the U.S. but still to be ratified by the SK legislature that is finding widespread opposition for its alleged lopsided bias against local labor. Korean workers find inequity in having the markets of both sides open to each other’s parity reach. With Korea’s per capita income now among the world’s top 10, it does not take much to imagine a U.S. company sub-contracting production in dirt cheap labor markets and bringing the products to Korean consumers, as similarly, Korean corporations can outsource labor for Korean products marketed in the U.S., at the competitive disadvantage of Korean (and we might add, American) local labor. Workers Myung Kim Son and Jin Ba Eun do not find a level playing field in the treaty. Nor do the OWS folks.

So the SoKor media is diverting attention to the Chinese trawlers caught fishing within 150 miles off Korea since that constitutes intrusion on the Law of the Sea’s 200 exclusive economic zone provision! But Japan’s Noda got the SK/China executives shaking hands at the ASEAN summit so the Hu-man factor is not lost.

A rare Hillary Clinton went into extra-diplomatic giggles when a half naked torch lighter darted across her news background at a local southeast Asian hotel, the only levity so far in this heavily slush-burdened day. Unless we count Saipan’s persistent casino “messiah” still in the running but that involves real pain and faked laughter.

Taking the economist Kenneth Boulding’s insight on images as the unit of knowledge, we say that when one person is within seeing/hearing distance to another, they “meet,” and if they exchange information, they “recognize and/or acknowledge” each other’s presence; if they express feelings and articulate ideas one to another, a “dialogue” occurs, and when one’s existence intrudes on the existing image of another, an “encounter” occurs. Most academic lesson plans, and diplomatic gatherings, at best, aim for a dialogue. We are all shy and reluctant for real encounters.

In the East Asia Conference meeting, we are intrigued over the possibility that Obama and Wen Jiabao might actually have “encountered” each other, difficult as this may be in the present instance, given the structural adjustments required of both. Sixty percent of U.S. annual discretionary budget goes to military and related expenditures so Obama in this election year will flex his muscles and rattle sabers for the boots-and-cap and military-industrial complex denizens.

Hu Jintao on the tail end of his public service term, perhaps, a bit miffed with Obama’s grandstanding on home turf, but lucid that China’s economic development is hardly balanced and sustainable and needs another decade to add broad-based equity into the equation, only needs to flash a Hu-manly enigmatic Mona Lisa smirk, and leave the reworking of existing structures to the younger set of leaders. The amiable Premier Wen exits a year later so he can keep repeating his last name “Wen,” which in Ilocano, means a definite “Yes.” That puts him clearly in our corner of the “Yes we can” team!

I think Gaia this winter will slip slush sloshing away a lot!