Thang Nguyen 555

Cultures on Collision Course

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With some short-term relief work in Asia/Africa and long stint in Telecom, Thang also earned a B.A. at Pennsylvania State University. M.A. in Communication at Wheaton Graduate School, M.A. in Cross-Cultural Communication at Gordon-Conwell Seminary, Boston. In addition, he earned a CELTA – classes taken in Hanoi for cultural re-immersion.

Author: Thang Nguyen 555

  • IP meets ICP

    ICP, inter-cultural protocol. Don’t kiss a Japanese man on the cheeks, especially if you have a mustache. Back in college, I got a lot of hugs from fellow students. Enough to last me through corporate years, where they don’t do hugs (at MCI, we do Tequila shots instead). But Fortune 500 taught me one important…

  • Internet intersects culture

    In China,, teacher Ma was on trial for using the internet to recruit partner-swapping. In Pakistan, they banned Facebook and then YouTube. And in Iran, right after the election, they did not like Twitter. Fast-pace technology collides slow-changing tradition. As of this edit, Kenneth Cole (shoes-man) tweeted about “boots on the ground” as referring to…

  • Just glitches?

    Systemic or sustainable? Thai shopping district burned down. Wall Street typo error. Greek tragedy. Chinese Western-style kindergarten rampage . And the rise of dollar shopping in the US (who cares if seafood price go up due to oil spill. We are buying smaller packs of chewing gum here). Latest consumer report even attributed small increase…

  • Buggier buggies

    Another recall today for Lexus. And the Economist writer mentioned Three-Mile-Island incident (runaway technology) in his piece about automobile software bugs. http://www.economist.com/blogs/babbage/2010/05/techview_cars_and_software_bugs Acceptable loss? Should have mentioned Amtrak while at it. When we rolled out VoIP back in 2000, we experienced frequent dropped calls (Beta). The land line analog had enjoyed 99.999 reliability. Multiplexing and…

  • Things we wish we could take with us

    When at Indian Town Gap in 1975, I was busy helping out at the Bureau of Child Welfare so time passed rather quickly. But not for my fellow countrymen. Many sat there worried: how were they going to make it in America, that winter was coming. Many hurried weddings took place at the camp chapel. …

  • Tower rebuilt

    The thousand tribes have been scattered after Babel. Now E-gathered. On Twitter. Discussing “American Gods”. http://www.csmonitor.com/Books/chapter-and-verse/2010/0517/One-Book-One-Twitter-the-world-s-largest-book-club Brief comments only, please. Too much data burst. In playing a Blondie secretary in Working Girl,  Melanie Griffin utters ” every time I think, it gives me a headache”. 140 characters should do the job. Do you like the…

  • Show all you can show

    It now commands twice the audience of the three big networks combined. I saw the emergence of CNN back in 1980. And now YouTube, barely five years old. CNN delivers the news 24/7. YouTube, show all you can show (two-way video traffic). And the site seems to be neutral and quite democratized. At the speed…

  • Kagan and Miss USA

    The latest WSJ article features Kagan and the not-so-sudden disappearance of the old elite structure (old money and family connections), primarily WASP. And this morning, world press has its day: Miss USA is originally from Lebanon  (may I see your birth certificate, please). http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704414504575244622954114574.html?mod=WSJ_hp_mostpop_read If you flip to the back cover of Profiles in Courage,…

  • Vietnamese love for French

    When traveling in Vietnam, you can still hear French embedded in every-day culture: fork (fut-xet) , suit (com-plet) and tie (ca-ra-vat). Apparently, they just use the phoneticized versions for lack of dynamic equivalents and use literal translation, such as “Hop Dem” (Boite de Nuit) as last resort. Some old hands can still carry a tune…

  • 21st-Century Displacement

    By now, we have read about an iconic Jacksonville admin, who wished she had been an inmate (she types 120 wpm, retrained herself as a Medical Assistant, and still couldn’t break the vicious cycle of not having experience, hence no first job). And I hate to break it to her: it’s graduation season, with new…