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

  • Haunted

    Whether the incident was personal or professional, the past – our past – will show up to haunt us. One mistake is all it takes. In 8th grade, I took up Hapkido ( a cross-over from Aikido and Tai Kwan Do): a lot of arm twisting and jumping/kicking. I was just following a trend which…

  • 68

    History sometimes comes in full circle. 1968 gave us the battle at Hue, but also at the picket line in Chicago. It’s been 50 years and it might as well be yesterday. My class 68 marked a rough and interrupted start – hell, the US Embassy in Saigon couldn’t even get themselves together for a…

  • Rest

    Happy Labor Day. Let the machine do the work. Just rest. Self-parked cars take jobs away from short-wearing valets. I-robot does the vacuuming. And washing machine cleans the dishes. Algorithms target ads at us, while those auto-dialing calls (spam likely) displace the Indian telemarketers. We are to engage full-time in Shadow work (self check-out) and…

  • Collective or collaborative

    Collective or collaborative

    Last week, Facebook lost a lot of money. Yet, none of us has lost any friend.  Well, except  here and there a friend from high school passed away. Yet while alive, we seek scapegoat: if only they hadn’t been here, we would have had more jobs, better paying jobs etc… Baby boomers experimented with collectivism,…

  • Conscience and compassion

    I must be crazy and you crazier to touch on these subjects in today’s environment. In today’s environment, one must talk apps, talk data, talk of the town: anti-aging not anti-war, and anti-immigrant not anti-growth. Charlie Wilson of GM once answered a congressional inquiry this way, ” what good for GM is good for the…

  • Those unaccompanied minors

    Those unaccompanied minors

    Summer 1975. Double-digit inflation. Unemployment at 17%. Pennsylvania was just getting out of the Arab embargo, and America out of Vietnam. Imagine people tossing babies over barbed wires at the US embassy, or the chaos that ensued when thousands of people scrambling on those river barges or helicopters. The airport was rendered useless, hence Operation…

  • Together>separated

    This morning, I learned that five more had died in a chase at the would-be Trump wall. The other day, in 100-degrees heat, I saw a homeless lady standing under a tree wearing everything she had on her. They could all be my mother back in 1975, when she was left behind in a PA…

  • Outlive our bully

    For my Father “when you got nothing, you got nothing to lose” Bob Dylan I was 9 i.e. first bike and first romance.Not everything was rosy now that I look back to that time. The neighborhood bully destroyed my innocence if not for my father’s swift intervention. We called him “Cu Lon” (to this day,…

  • Just a blip!

    It depends on how far you want to zoom out in space and time: men will look like ants (Apollo’s first photo of the Earth) and the rise of the Nazis , according to a far-right-party guy – will be viewed as a footnote in German history (his clothes were stolen while he was swimming…

  • The girl and the guitar

    Young folks always assert themselves:  in the Graduate, plastics, in Santa Fe, TX,  the gun, and in Hanoi, the guitar ( Mai Khoi awarded recent International Prize in Oslo). It’s an unfair comparison to when I was growing up: a refugee kid repeating his parents’ script. But I know one thing – to use George…