Thang Nguyen 555
Cultures on Collision Course
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Author: Thang Nguyen 555
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Lobo was hot in Vietnam during the 70’s. Decades later, on an American stage, his Vietnamese fans even invited him to perform live for music video. Just a simple man. “I love you too much to ever start liking you, so let’s just let the story kind an end…” The contradiction and dialectic – friend and…
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Forbes kept praising the success of luxury brands in China while web sites in Vietnam and China mentioned “Pepper Spray on Black Friday”. Chinese-made goods, sold as lost leaders, to the first 100-early-bird shoppers. Planned scarcity. Hype-creation. Sensational, sizzling headline-grabbing video op for YouTube. We need attention. The media need it even more. (For some counter-intuitive…
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re-post from 2011. This past year, things are getting heated up with “friend-shoring” chip manufacturing with Biden’s visit. ________________________________________________________________________________ If it hadn’t been for the slightly warm temperature, the water bottle that bore “QTSP” (Quang Trung Software Park) and the simulcast headsets, I would have thought I was back in 2005 at a similar conference in…
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Crunch time in Ho chi Minh City. A nuisance for many yet a photo-op for tourists. Millions in ponchos, helmets, dust masks, sunglasses fighting for every inch (centimeter here) to get home in the pouring rain, while tourists leisurely strolled the colonial side walks in shorts, sandals and Sony cameras trying to record their trips.…
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Both have tunnels, but Thu Thiem‘s has just been built and visited mostly by Viet natives. Cu Chi tunnels however is a backpackers’ must-see. Going through Thu Thiem Tunnel, you feel like you were in Louisiana or Baltimore. It unveils the future of Vietnam, where ferry workers now work as toll booth collectors. District 2 is…
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On my first trip to Hong Kong summer 1981, I was taken in by the energy and entrepreneurial spirit there. A camera shop (pre-Iphone era) next to a watch shop (again, pre-Ipad era) next to an electronics store. Shoppers from India, Europe, Australia were all there, bustling about. Double-deck buses (still under British colonial rule) moved…
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While almost everyone in the US gathers around the traditional meal, here in Vietnam, some people come up with a way to marry tradition with technology: ancestor worship online. Its highway to eternity has 10,000 plots, already booked for burial and continued ceremonial service online (to accommodate overseas relatives and those who have resettled to urban…
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A “xe om” (scooter taxi) guy mentioned a city (Lai Thieu?) where one can find all the abandoned carriages (horse or cow). Hearing that, I flashed back to those early days when I accompanied my grandmother on her monthly trip to receive pension. We took a bus, and Lambretta . I always got treated to a good lunch, a special…
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When I witnessed the monk set fire on himself some forty years ago, the streets of Saigon had less traffic than it does now. An American photographer got words that there might be something happening’. By day’s end, morning in Washington, his shot sent shock waves over the wire, as flammable as the content it…
Thang Nguyen 555 