No Fear to be Silly

My daughter’s friends who all slept over are out in the other room laughing.  Kids are unstoppable.  They did a great job at the Pilgrims meet the Indians play last night.  I can’t imagine having to perform lines from a play in Farsi or Portuguese at the age of nine. I’m already back from having driven my older daughter’s friend over to the school.  These kids all board there, so for them to have attend a “Thanksgiving Party” on a Thursday night, called for a special dispensation.  “Sleep overs” aren’t so common here, so I think this was a pretty big deal for most of them, and certainly for their parents. 

We invited all the parents.  But nearly all of them demurred. I can understand.  If some family has a birthday party, I’m happy to drop my daughter off and split.  If they sent us a text ahead of time saying, please stick around for our “Ancestor Grave Sweeping Day” party we’re going to have with food and drink, I'd likely have passed.  But it can be hard to connect with other kids families, without some of the “normal” institutions you might have suburban American community. This, and of course, language, and culture. 

It was a good time though, this come-all-ye’ Thanksgiving bash we threw.  I burned the Brussels sprouts.  Discovered too late that I was in over my head with a pumpkin pie I was trying to make for the first time.   Saw this morning that I’d completely forgotten about another a walnut pie I’d bought.  But the bird was good, and that’s the main box tick.  All the other things came together, as planned.  Not much left this morning. 

My one regret was loosing my cool with my younger one.  A friend’s young son ( aged 4 or so) kept wanting to play with me, and I’m working around the oven.  So you politely tell him to depart five or six times and by the time your own child ignores you once, you yell.  And she cries.  And you apologize.  I gave her a hug this morning and told her she was a star in the play.  And she was.  And like I told my mom, she was not only the star but the producer.

The kids are off to school now and the house is quiet.  There are some chickadees chattering outside.  I’ve a 1962 disc by Bill Hardman on, appropriately named “Coffee”.  The tune is “Assunta” and it dropped into a convincing swing after an absolutely majestic, somber intro that sounded like the most beautiful thing ever composed for a moment there.  I have no idea what “assunta” means.  OK, I looked and apparently it's the assumption of the Virgin Mary into Heaven.  The intro resonates differently now.  But what I was going to write was “I don’t know what “assunta” means, but I know “coffee” and am reaching out for mine now to steady myself." 

China is claiming air space this week.  And the U.S. immediately and Japan and South Korea subsequently called China’s bluff, by flying military planes through the space, unannounced, as they traditionally have.  So many mixed feeling here.  On the one hand I consume this story primarily through U.S. media.  Therein, it’s portrayed as a brash, awkward attempt by China to disrupt the existing status quo.  Awkward, because it was immediately shown to be something China was not prepared to back up. 

Every Chinese person my age or older knows the Maoist phrase “American Imperialism is a Paper Tiger” like it was the Flintstones theme song.  Now the Chinese press is suggesting that China is, through this episode, a “paper tiger.”  Those are most assuredly fighting words.  But that Chinese civil society can have a debate, rather than simply a propaganda deluge, is certainly progress. 

Then the question becomes, is this something that was a well planned or done abruptly by a brash unit within the defense establishment.  Was this a methodical,  well timed gesture designed by masterful weiqi players to ratchet up pressure and bolster their claim, that was well understood and agreed to by the central leadership before it was done?  Or has a PLA unit simply decided to assert itself.  The latter is unlikely, but not impossible.  But if we default to the prior, it’s hard to imagine the benefits to loudly asserting a claim that you have no intention of defending, knowing full well you’ll swiftly be embarrassed on the matter.  Unless you were willing to take the hit in the short term, because your goal was on shifting perceptions gradually, over decades. 

The “world order” works well enough for the people who made it.  It is not in most nation’s interest or capacity to disrupt things.  Smaller states that try to, without much wherewithal to sustain significant change, like North Korea, Iran, Venezuela, we disparage as “rogue states.”  But China and India are critical actors within the world economy and they are absolutely not satisfied with the “order” they inherited that was created on someone else’s terms when they were weak, and helpless.  China will continue to stress this order and as they’ve done with standards in technology, they may look silly the first time and the second time, but each time they learn and get better and eventually don’t look silly at all. 

I understand that South Korea may not be ready.  But I feel very strongly that this kind of incident, should be their chance to step-up and show nuanced leadership. South Korea understands the Chinese distrust of Japan, and they understand the Japanese distrust and annoyance at China and they know as well as Japan and China that America will not be able to maintain this “order” for ever and that cooperation, not capitulation, is what’s in every country in this region’s best interest.  以夷制夷[1] didn’t work then and no one will like the results this time either.  

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[1] yǐyízhìyí：  to use foreigners to subdue foreigners (idiom); let the barbarians fight it out among themselves (traditional policy of successive dynasties) / To use western science and technology to counter imperialist encroachment (late Qing modernizing slogan).