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

  • Predictors of things to come

    Originally posted on Thang Nguyen 555: People in Northern Vietnam scrambled  inside a purportedly sacred Temple after Lunar New Year to seek favor from the gods. Last year, in Cambodia, a similar occasion resulted in stampede and hundreds of deaths on the bridge. In seeking grace, they found their graves. Our bio-tech century offers different…

  • Companies as Curators

    Originally posted on Thang Nguyen 555: Future companies will exist for only one reason: to be curators of all that is out there and to let their fan base know about them (Amazon). To be selective is to prejudge, a priori. And to prejudge, as social animals, we rely on our subconscious. As David Brooks puts…

  • Never let go

    Originally posted on Thang Nguyen 555: 14 Vietnamese women were found and freed from Baby101, a Taiwanese outfit operated outside of the law in Thailand. They were paid to be surrogate mothers (artificial insemination or otherwise), whose future babies would be put up for adoption. Baby, never let me go. Newsweek has a piece about anonymousUS.org,…

  • the dot connector

    Originally posted on Thang Nguyen 555: I am referring to Dr Rustum Roy of Penn State whom I met almost 4 decades ago. I knew then just as I know now that he was ahead of his time. He pushed for integrated studies in Science, Technology and Society. He showed up at a demo of …

  • Any distance

    Originally posted on Thang Nguyen 555: Vietnamese has a saying “Tha Phuong Cau Thuc” which means, go any distance for a job. I did that a few years back, with English Teaching certification in Hanoi, and real classroom hours in the South. On the way back to the US, I ran into some young Vietnamese in transit…

  • Culture shock, future shock, aftershock

    Originally posted on Thang Nguyen 555: We just saw an aftershock in Japan at magnitude 7.0. In and of itself, it’s a major earthquake. But, since it had been preceded by the big one (9.0), it is pale in comparison. As to culture shock, a man from the Amazon who got transported to Seattle, WA will only…

  • Prosperity and austerity

    Originally posted on Thang Nguyen 555: We are all into wealth creation. Until the voice of reason calls for cuts. What happened to “you have to spend money to make money?” or mental (muscle) memory (once you reached a certain peak, you tend to recreate the experience to get the same “rush” e.g. venture capitalists in search of…

  • Encoded memories

    Originally posted on Thang Nguyen 555: In a fictional tale of modern madness, the author of “the Remains of the Day” brought to us “Never let Me Go”. A famous quote from the school principal (where students were raised and taught to become “donors” since they were genetic copies made from real people to someday called…

  • My Japanese tutors

    Originally posted on Thang Nguyen 555: Ishiguro, Fukuyama, Kawasaki and Murakami. I read Ishiguro in bed, watched Fukuyama on Charlie Rose, watch Kawasaki interview on his latest book Enchantment and dream on with characters in Murukami’s novels. Multi-media tutors. They might look Asian, but speak and write perfect English. Best of both worlds. Like Singapore or Hongkong. Ishiguro…

  • The extraordinary of daily life

    Originally posted on Thang Nguyen 555: If you look hard enough, you will find them: a Queen wearing Green, a show host wearing “color purple”, bidding farewell to a dream career a black, single mom couldn’t have imagined 50 years ago, or a fairy tale went awry with California Dreamer, bodybuilder that pumped more tragedy to the…