Thang Nguyen 555

From Kushner to Kamala: emphasizing the positives and erasing the negatives. Hire a ghost writer. Voila, leave behind the 4th L (legacy).

Once I worked in the International Telecom field. Oh my! Customer data dump, on an Excel spreadsheet, showing long and winding last names: from Croatian to Pakistanis, from Chinese to Vietnamese. Had it not been for Customer ID, we would have gotten their LD phone bills mixed up.

Yet these folks got along fine, their children’s education first their well-being last.

My Mom and Dad did. For us, their three children. Then grandchildren. Hardly can you find less than a bachelor certificate with our “funny” last names on them (even taking on Ecuadorian one for a change. Talking about self-reinvention and adaptation).

America’s last names in Exhibit A at the 9/11 Memorial, in contrast to the Vietnam Wall roster. Fast-changing demographics. (Just look at world population, at 4 Billion when I was in school, graphed in hockey-stick).

Just the facts Mam.

Our neighbor’s and co-workers P.J. or J.B. Faster that way at a Starbucks.

Or Lady Ruby, when giving a J6 commission testimony. Go girl!

May your brand endure and your only daughter go on to bigger and better things. After all she survived threat and harassment.

America always bought in one version of dream (mostly Ponzi and cultic)e.g. J.P. Morgan and other “too big to fail” names.

Those small and beautiful folks who came (of course from somewhere else) later?

“Too small to count!” (until it’s time for them to think “white” like Clarence Thomas and cohorts).

Bottom of the totem pole, opioid and vape addict, “rummies” and roaming, with sign-up bonus during Covid as “essential” worker shift, while “knowledge workers” work remote next to sanitizer bottle. They don’t sit around vaping

That is, if AI doesn’t take work away from both.

Bezos, Musk and Gates anticipated all that. What do you think? Let’s deFAANG (facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix and Google).

Divorce costs more when you are a Tech Titan. Be careful with self-reinvention. You might get what you wished for.

Meanwhile, not only personal history but History itself got rewritten e.g. Roe put on a new robe last week. Poor young black LA women. Where are they gonna go? New Orleans back alleys?

History’s detour intertwined with our personal contour. All graveyards only represent the tip of the iceberg, more unknown than known given humanity long arc of history.

Each given a set of alterable and unalterable (I wished they had gene sequencing and editing to preempt biographical revisionism).

Do no harm (or like Google’s Do No Evil). Earn that marker’s byline: “Here lays a good and grateful man.” (I once walked around a park, on a bench inscribed ” so and so, lover of Guinness). Drink that beer once in a while.

My parents, my mom in particular, had never been much into alcohol. Neither did they know much about self-branding, un-branding and rebranding. They were brought up in want, not in plenty (the age of Colonialism, not Consumerism).

All they did was trying to survive hand-to-mouth in an upside-down world, itself in the process of re-drawing – reinventing its Coco China map. My mom once had to cross a forest at night on her way back from getting her monthly teacher’s salary. Per my brother’s account, they sought shelter with strangers. Luckily, survived the night and not robbed.

R.I.P. dear Mom and Dad. Given my “unalterable” i.e. potential 90+ living, I do have some time learning from all those masters of self-reinvention in the biography aisle, from Baker to Bush, Kushner to Kamala.

First nobody, then somebody, then only Me who knows. There is a name that preceded all that. His name was Narcissus.