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

  • The grains of time

    By now the transition from analog to digital has almost been completed. Movies, music, photos and books. The old movies are easy to spot: actors using huge phones and driving old cars. Vinyl albums made those hissy noise when touched by the needle. And books, like the one I am reading, War and Peace, are so…

  • Le Da – Tales of sorrow told by a Rock

    My birth certificate shows my parents in their early 40’s. No wonder my Dad’s taste for music was a bit off. One of his favorites however stood the test of time: Le Da. After all, it has something to do with the rock of ages. It’s very sentimental (Rock solid yet soft when it comes…

  • Self-decoding

    Our gene distribution and mutation have a lot in common (survival instinct, reproduction, empathy etc…). But from there, each of us is different and unique: some poets, others warriors or both. Haruki Murakami is both a writer and a runner (100 km race).  Richard Blanco, who will recite at Obama’s Inauguration, is both an engineer and…

  • Fast foods invasion

    It’s kind of redundancy. Fast foods in Saigon? The place has already been fast. I don’t know if fast foods will help. At Saigon Central (train depot), I was told to take a number and wait (the way Carl Jr would do in the US) for my fries. Saigon is not used to mono-chronistic tempo…

  • An American Invention

    Dr Lloyd Tran never stops and hardly sleeps. For a right reason. He is an inventor at heart. He started out as a chemist. Then worked for huge corporations such as Monsanto. Then he invented and manufactured his own drug release device in Irvine, CA (right at the time companies started to look elsewhere to outsource…

  • Secret sauce

    I met a pianist last Sunday. When he told me he was 65, I almost flipped. He happened to be a Judo trainer as well. Wow! He looked 45. Another friend of mine, Jazz musician and software expert, also looks young for his age. What’s the secret sauce? Shirley MacLaine doesn’t look 78. You might…

  • Slippery Saigon

    I went out for my morning jog in slippery Saigon.  I was hoping for cooler weather. Now that my wish was granted, I begin to have second thought: if it’s cool here, it means somewhere up North, people are freezing, or boats and houses destroyed. We live in a connected world and leave behind carbon footprints.…

  • The things they still carry

    The war novel with similar title was surprisingly good. I have known about it for a while, but couldn’t get myself to “carry” it home. Until now. Until it’s translated into Vietnamese. It’s the opposite of reading Bao Ninh‘s The Sorrows of War in English. Both novels had the same setting, same period, same conflict, same ending…

  • Twitter and Tolstoy

    My new-year resolution is to get through Tolstoy‘s monumental “War and Peace.” The characters and ethos were deliberate and elaborating (everyone wants a piece of the inheritance while the man was dying etc….). Visitors were announced at the gate (no intercom), received at party etc…. Tolstoy’s imperialistic people have time on their hands. We don’t. We tweet,…

  • Above and Below

    I live next door to a convent and behind a restaurant/bar. The differences are quite obvious: Above and Below. One life style is to focus on the afterlife, the other , this life. For the weeks leading to Christmas, I heard rehearsals and refrains on one end, toasts and talks on the other. Both found an…