Thang Nguyen 555

Cultures on Collision Course

recent posts

about

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 build-up

    It’s like a can of worms, once opened, can never be put back. Yet, that’s what makes us human: from A to B, we insist that a straight line is not the shortest. We have to factor in free will. Even God respects that (by not forcing us to move quickly through Foxconn-like assembly line). Our…

  • Signs and signals

    Jackie Chan delivered again in Chinese Zodiac. The 12 Animals. The East learn to tell fortune from symbols. The West teach others to “read” people. Animals or People. We all want the advantage of foresight the next outcome. People commit to New-Year resolutions: lose weight, take up lessons in this and that, get off a…

  • Unfinished business

    Program lingers on linearly while project has its own bell-shaped form. Beginning and ending. Life is constituted of both programs and projects. Child-rearing is not a project. Schooling them is (until they come back and take over the couch). Warring is a project.  At least when we could get out and not sink deeper into…

  • 2012 Bookmarking

    I used to rely on researchers like the Tofflers (Future Shock) to “see” into the future. For instance, the pro-sumer trend, the mismatching speeds among various sectors ( IT, Financial, Educational, Governmental…in that order). Lately, all I came across in Futurism was 2012 prophecy . Like it or not, this year will have come down as a…

  • Winner takes all

    We will hear a lot of ABBA‘s Happy New Year this week. But “the Winner Takes It All” speaks directly to our zeo-sum society. You lose, I win. There are only limited “chips” on the table. Scarcity causes rising values. Hot air also rises. Like New Year’s champagne bubbles. It’s time for a 2012 wrap up.…

  • World on wheels

    You want to see wheels at work, you come to Saigon. (Baby) strollers, scooters, (food) stalls, all on wheels. But instead of having you walk up to a vending machine, here the merchandise come to you. Ladies in cone hats would walk about with all sorts of knickknacks on their shoulders: toe clippers, wallets, key…

  • Reading People

    I was approached by a guy wearing an FBI cap, asking me to buy lottery tickets. It’s hot in Vietnam this time of the year. Almost everyone wears some sorts of caps with USA on them,  helmets with the Nike vectors or a hybrid version: helmets shaped like caps. From top to toe, we send out signals…

  • Life as Unfinished Book

    I brave heavy traffic to get to the book store on Nguyen Hue again. Just to find out if Murukami’s 1Q84 part II in Vietnamese was available. It hadn’t. Back and forth for nothing. But the two interwoven stories must have that crisscrossing point, a happy ending. Can’t wait to find out. And that was…

  • Fool’s errand?

    On NYT‘s Op-Ed‘s Pages, I found a piece “Asians are too smart for their own good”. The author brought up a historical parallel between Jews’s admission at Ivy League schools back then, and Asian‘s now. She neglected another important parallel: Japanese-American got put in internment camps not too long ago. With BRIC‘s second generation, growing up in America,…

  • Omega

    Since her debut, Skeeter Davis with her hit “The End of the World” has etched in our collective memory. Since then, we have gone through a series of doomsday threats: ICBM‘s, fate of the Earth, hot and Cold War, now Doomsday 2012). In Murakami’s latest 1Q84, our principal female character, who once was a Personal Trainer,…