Thang Nguyen 555

I wish. That life out of an alley would shoot forward to target, like an arrow.

Unfortunately, its trajectory has been more like a beeline . A shock absorber with DNA strands and scars. Perhaps it’s better that way (an arrow might miss its target). Like little Red Robin, we can afford to make an unplanned stop here and there, to get in trouble.

The Good Lord knows all this (Omniscient). Been there and done that Himself (Omnipresent and Omnipotent). The truth will set me free, despite path I have taken . Every step (you take, every move you make, I will be watching) even missteps.

Out of the alley, I have passed the analog phase : 8-track music, VHS and Betamax.

Then digital phase with easier surveillance. So prevalent that I afraid am being watched, heard and recorded, anywhere, anytime (certainly at the gym this morning). Citizens of China: rise up! (You’d rather be watched but not lying down).

How could countries keep their citizens under watch is beyond me. Someday, they all escape to not just another country, but another universe: Metaverse.

From Marilyn Chamber to digital chamber (playground, sandbox, etc..).

Control, control, control. Hemmed in. Like randomized-test mice with placebo. Awaiting death inevitable.

Meanwhile, control groups urge us to experience other death precautions (spiritual, social and psychological) like baptismal or other wise for insurance.

Out of the alley, I shot forward in time. Neither straight, nor curve. Just one rung at a time, along the narrow trail. Then it struck me. It’s not the road, but the seasons, not topology but time: Summer and Fall, Winter and Spring. Each with its own charm and allure.

Then exhausted, I just prefer to come home. To rest. To take stock. And to depressurize. The Industrial Revolution (scale) and the Information Revolution (access) push us relentlessly from 24/7 time to virtual time (neither Sun nor Moon regularity).

Just the hum of florescent lights, the tap on the keyboards and the final signature on death certificate. Hands left un-held and memory unrecalled. Life as an arrow? Not so fast. You’ve got to let the morning last.

Milk it out. Make it last . With spare moments as reservoir to reflect. Before coming back in full circle. To an alley where it all started. Analog obviously.

Outer and inner life. The later is more important.

It makes a total person, from cradle to the grave, both context and contour.

At the present, cancer, stroke and dementia remain our top challenges.

Slow decline and certain death. Faded memory. No recall. No joie de vivre.

A long goodbye.

I spoke to my sister, 19 years my senior. She couldn’t recall who I was. I might as well talk to an alien from Mars.

I wanted to remind her of the times she went looking for me who was swept alongside a marching mob, tiki torches and repetitive chants “tung tung tung dzo dzo” for no reasons except for the season of celebrated Children’s Festival on the Lunar Calendar.

Or when she played proxy mom to drop me off on my first day of school (joining a group of hysterical children of similar abandoning fate).

She couldn’t recall our most recent trip to New Orleans, after we had passed vast land of the South.

My sister virtually drift from one nap to another.

Months ago, she fought hard, wanting to pack up and move out to her own place. Self-alluding, she thought she could still manage independent living.

Not now. From the tone of it, friends no longer call. Visitors less frequent.

The candle is dimming out. Only amber and echo of her former life.

When we are no more.

Footprints and fingerprints. Residuals and retirement.

Just mopping up the last vegetated part on borrowed time. As if life were a bowl of soup, sooner or later, we would reach bottom. Scraping what’s left before handing back the empty vessel to nature. Stardust, carbon nano dust. A few dollars’ worth of not-so rare earth.

To me, she still is my sister. The only one I have and look up to. Four adults, busy working and moving about. Often one assumed the others would be watching me. Then it’s she who noticed I had been missing.

In that refugee enclave where Cronkite once visited and concluded “the best scenario is a stalemate”.

Where would an active child, her youngest brother be, if not with the noticeably loud and increasing in number mob which at the time, circulated the neighborhood (other times, it might be home movies projected on the side wall, our version of Cinema Paradiso albeit low-tech and high-risk war times).

She always noticed things. Like on the day before Saigon fell. How desolate she must have looked standing there on the street corner, waiting for her husband. She saw people moving about, violating curfew. How their survival instinct was much stronger than hers. The eerie absence of the American (at the end of the “American War”) pushed her button:” They have abandoned us.”

On the surface, the city remained calm. But inside the walls of the Embassy, of the Airport, things were frantic: dollars burned, babies left behind. Only purses and passports, people staged in batches for chopper lift, often time with maximum occupation.

In a hurry, her brain cells came alive. Connecting the dots, she summoned her mate, rnaternal instincts (four kids) and rounded up us from routine siesta.

It’s my sister, born in the year of the Buffalo, that pulled forward by the seat of the pants. Even the plot next to her husband’s was reserved – under her name, spelled correctly (I am sure she double checked like a CPA she was). She anticipated failure of memory. Just in case. Like now.

When one secured a permanent resting place (in the Serenity section of the Memorial Park), one welcomes dementia. Go ahead, hit me. Got nothing to lose. Fearless leader that put men of war to shame.

Moss and memory. Slow build-up to Appendix section of a narrative with beginning, middle and – blank – ending.

May I have the soundtrack of Torna a Surriento please. That piece helps me circle back to our house in an alley where my siblings and I – with much anticipation, upgraded it a new coat of paint in the days leading to Tet. We covered the moss and put a fresh layer on memory. Although filling out only the missing spots at the bottom, I was glad to be part of a team, who together, made a humble life for ourselves in that tight and noisy alley. Saigon District 3 my home.

In the scheme of things, we shouldn’t be bothered with big problems e.g. climate change, gun control, homelessness, immigration etc… Yet the fall-outs from these issues are in our faces daily.

Outside the gym, early AM, I saw a person looking for breakfast in waste bins. 21st-century scavenger. We want to survive, to see another day. To progress up the Maslow Scale, “be all we can be” (self-actualizing).

Only to see our fellowman lingered on at the bottom. Not everyone can turn down a million dollars like Rod Stewart ( I can see in your eyes, that you’ve been crying for-ever).

Why bother to look, to think, to ponder and reflect. Just do it. Buy a pair of Nike.. Hit the gym. Then fast-food joints, then winery. Call it a day, any day, to get to final day.

The measures of a man. His identity, status, and of course money. A man in full. Lots of “stuff” crowding his mansion. His mates, his mats and his mobiles.

Being visible is all that matters. Being invisible is very undesirable.

Why bother?

We progress and regress. Keep jumping the curves, riding the waves. On top of the conversation and being on people’s top mind.

Tell all. Show all. Reveal all. As long as it pays. But looking into garbage for breakfast? uncool. No sparks of divinity there. No Imago Dei there. That’s a different order of magnitude. We can’t comprehend nor can we solve big problems. Like Climate Change, Immigration, gun control, homelessness and Alzheimer.

To live is to be bothered. Why bother? because we want to live forever, at least, to wring out of Life, all of its gusto, grace and grandeur. Not everyone is a Bill Gates or Rod Stewart. But it has been done once, via a slim and slandered hands of a Belgium nun in Calcutta. You know who I am talking about. Why did she even bother! Of course, we can always offer a lot of “thoughts and prayers”, or even use hand-sanitizer while the gun man took down children in Uvalde.

Why bother!

Once 18 years living inside the Terminal, he has died as of yesterday.

My daughter and I never forget the scene where he (played by Tom Hanks) prepared his cracker (singular) as if ready for holy communion ( only to be bumped by a hurried passer-by.). Cracker meal, on the floor.

Our transient life viewed via another person’s, a passenger passing through. Earth our terminal.

Iranian revolution in 1979. Iranian revolution this past month. Theocracy or Autocracy. All cried out: set me free. Feed me. See me. Feel me ( The Who ).

I was looking at the chart, how much each performer at Woodstock got paid e.g. Jimmy Hendrix got top dollars (not bad for left-handed soloist. Near the bottom, we saw Santana. Yet the latter has staying power, even after a heat stroke last year.)

Time and terminal. Eternity in the present. Our communion outside of Church in pure unadulterated Ec·cle·si·as·ti·cal sense. Every generation or so, people forget. Then con men, con artists, fixers, false prophets, predictors and profiters would recycle old scripts. Keep blasting it. SEO. Ad sense and Ad words. The age of machine learning and preaching. Us? the choir. Repetition, brain-washing, herd then conformity.

So our Terminal man keeps looking at the Departure board, wishful thinking it into reality. That his eventual turn would be up.

All aboard. Carry-on and Crackers only. Dreams packed in a suitcase. Destination pre-set. You’re the chosen. For this journey.

Be careful who you talk to. Don’t befriend strangers or offer to help with their luggage. No kindness of strangers when traveling.

Born to be man, not mule.

Please allow ample time for unexpected delays or changes in schedule.

The travelers and the terminal. Converged at one moment in time. At times, it makes for history. Any place that allows for loading and unloading of passengers. A train station. An airport, or a cruise-ship yard. Leave your heart and loved ones behind. Only in memory they live on. Memories that creep up without warning. To realign our priorities and prefill our lives with context and continuity.

We are the sum of our memories. Of trips taken. And by extension, of terminals where we stop, just to have a snack, a cracker even.

Occasionally, we bump into someone we recognize. And in that instance, the spatial and contextual history became alive and we feel young (going back in time) and hopefully be whole again by unedited past. What should have been transient at an airport in France, has become dead permanent for a real-life Iranian played by Tom Hanks, whose action and empathy made such an impression and imprint that when I saw the news about his final “departure”, I just want to say: “Have a nice trip.”

The things they carried….to Matterhorn…to the last chopper. While bridge left undefended per Big Minh order (Stand down, drop your weapons, go home). Boots off on retreat to town.

My friend, whom I said Goodbye just the day before, mustered up all the flip flops he could find (as you walk down the main bridge, turn first left after the roundabout you’ll pass his house) for those barefooted soldiers-turned-veterans who walked on by. No one knows who took off uniforms and just let them drop in front of VAA (Vietnamese-American Association language school). But scattered herd followed suit. Rough road ahead. Re-education camps, ration, escape attempts and eventual deaths.

From 1965 to 1975, “boots” landed in Da Nang to boots littered the streets of Saigon, shoe-shine boys were hard at work, often invisibly under the coffee tables. Aviation glasses, zippo and Lucky Strike . Dog tags, handguns and bayonets. The things they carried. Easy to ID. Just in case. In most cases.

Always with fatigue rolled-up. Always scanning immediate surrounding (situation awareness). Be vigilant To survive. To go home in one piece. Shame or honor, to be sorted out. Per Robert Stone in Dog Soldiers 74 “ we didn’t know who we were until we got here. We thought we were something else”.

For now, it’s an order. The world was watching. From the White House (where Kissinger still in tux and tie – his night out to Kennedy Center like Bond in Casino Royale) to the whore house in Vietnam.

Everybody was watching. The Associate Press, the United Press International and the Agence France Presse. Even far-flung press and places like New Zealand (who had some skin in the game), the Philippines, Poland, South Korea, Australia and of course, the American.

Everybody was watching, waiting. Especially Big Minh, eager to get back to his games of back-and-forth tennis. An All-white Elite, called to “serve” his country. A country in dire need of keys and gate keepers “I have been waiting for you since early this morning”.

My friend , with his brother to the side, was also watching through the steel gates. Here, it’s all we’ve got, flip flops for your feet. It would be a long winding road. He is my brother. He ain’t heavy.

The things they carried. Things they left behind: shattered dreams Of fighting for the right cause yet evidently landing on the wrong side of History.

Choppers, once a symbol of rescue of last resort, themselves, got pushed to the side to make rooms for yet another . “Premier Ky, may we have your John-Wayne gifted gun”. It’s a rule on war ships. No guns on board. God rest everyone’s soul on this Veteran Day of 11/11/22.

My heart goes out to my medic brother, my ex-Army Dad, my brother in law, cousins, and friends/neighbors. Never forget ăn Air Force neighbor who, to blend in, asked me for civilian clothes in chance encounter on board an USS war ship. If I ever had a chance now to offer him my closet full. Back then, as in my friend’s situation, we didn’t carry much fleeing in a hurry.

Those flip flops however say a lot about my friend and his brother. They weren’t mere watchers of unfolding history. They made someone else’s life a bit easier. We once thought we were something else. Then. Those abandoned boots littered the ground. In front of that English school: put on, take off; get on, get off. Start-finish. Give back to Caesar what belongs to Caesar.

Darkness will enfold. Yet they don’t feel cold.

The dead. In my memory. People I grew up with and looked up to. Towering figures (from my vantage point as a child e.g. glad to give Dad a siesta back rub or to shine his shoes as he kept knocking on doors).

Those boots on the ground, American and Vietnamese. Some Australian, Korean and New Zealanders shined and stepped off Army-issued Jeeps. Engines still running. Curb-side parking. At the ready.

Everything was fast. Like the flip of a Zippo. Inhale. Exhale. Last breath, last rite. Salary unspent. R&R not taken. Sometimes dead on arrival.

The injured and invalid dragged on seeing the world via a clean bandage. Sorrow of war. Smoke of war. No time for “social”. A thousand-yard stare.

Once upon a time. We gathered to remember our dead per custom. Then those present in turn joined the dead they had once commemorated. Bombs might have missed but Time never.

Like a flip of a Zippo. Tic tac. Lucky strike.

English was simpler then. Ok Salem. mostly non-verbal, lots of gesture, few words.

The eyes say it all: we need to eat. To finish this thing called life. This thing called war we did not start or have a say e.g. from Geneva Accord to Paris Accord : bombing (agent Orange), burning (napalm) and “barbecuing” (monk).

Now my loved ones live on in my memory. Once upon a time. We strolled the street on Sundays. Pretended and prayed that soon peace would be at hand. Thunder and bombing came at night and at a distance . The less fortunate got hit. Not us. We’re well protected except the Presidential palace got bombed, twice.

The nightclub got bombed during weekday matinee show. Pagodas raided. School shut down. refugee shelters opened up. Kid’s toilets catered to homeless adults. Nothing to write home about.

Then those same shiny boots left, leaving behind babies. For two years, they lived on charity in orphanages, in temporary shelters. Until compassion and mercy flights One of which crashed on the tarmac. A survivor – in the photo – held in the arms of then President Ford (compassionate conservatism).

Bomb the hell out of them. Then peace at hand. Peace with honor. Honorable exit.

Decent intervals. Slow descent into Hell. A nation without mooring. Ships docked instead of sailing. waiting for clearer instructions: are we down to the Southern- most island to pick the remnants up or not? Where the Hell do we find enough flags for the fleet (to be admitted to Subic Bay?)

Can we afford to be true to our principles and our ideal selves?

Once upon a time. I lived with four hard-working adults who had left everything to start anew in Democratic South. They got their bearings back, secure enough on a creaky floor one night to have me. My default assignment ? eye-witness and memory keeper. To a crime, war-time crime of abandoning and being abandoned in turn.

It’s all inter-related. One action invokes a reaction. A force, then an opposite force. All the bombs (both World Wars put together) created craters. Many unexploded. Just lay still Waiting their turn . Aren’t we all, with our undying memory and buried angst. Peace time could be just as dangerous as war time. Only on the surface. Until unexploded ordinances found their way out to do what they do best. Then darkness will enfold.

Once upon a time. There was peace in war times and now warring in peace times.

Text and drive. Walk and chew gum. Work out and scroll up.

Occupy leg-extension machines. Occupy traffic lights. Occupy public space (for private use.)

At least we no longer spread our newspapers on public transport (I found myself the only hard-back book reader on the plane).

Public space used to lord over private space (build the highway right through an ethnic neighborhood). Now it’s the other way around i.e. unintended use of the common for Uber, Amazon (public road, post office etc..).

No eye contacts. No “hellos”. The gym’s front-desk guy was into his phone. Self-serve check-in. Me + machine.

The less engaged we are with others, the more self-absorbed. The less compassion: Uvalde, Pelosi attack, Sandy Hook, Seoul crowd surge, Ian and Central Florida.

We can’t blame all on compassion fatigue (there were none to begin with). We skip hard news for trivial comments, or post impressions. As in Six pence none the richer ” Don’t dream it’s over”: “in the paper today, tales of war and of waste but you turn right over to the TV page…”

Science helps us live longer. Tech in turn diminishes its quality. Hence, more in quantity less in quality.

Long ago, people retired early ( shorter life span e.g. Montaigne at 32) to travel and to unleash inner creativity. In short, to make life’s last leg a quality one.

U2 Bono was big on this point as showed in his latest “Surrender” memoir.

With so much information out there, we still bury our heads in the sand, suffocated and submerged in data deluge. Bandwidth at full capacity. Unable to choose, we might as well rely on our pre-conception.

Safter, easier to follow the path of least resistance.

Decades ago I went through a traumatic event. Post-traumatic stress disorder, self-recriminating and survivor’s guilt. Recovery was slow, emotion numbed. Memory like a blur.

Under proverbial “witness protection program”, I assumed a new id, a new A number (Alien) in a new environment. Reborn. Lucky I was still young and college campus was relatively non-threatening i.e. homogeneity (academically conducive).

Work was flexible, wrapped around class schedule.

That institutional town was courteous: “Hi”, “Hello”, “Hi” “Hello” (on a few snow clearing paths). We unavoidably bumped into one another. That structured and predictable environment helps put my recovery on a fast track.

With internet, we’re facing a different ball game. Everything under the sun is out there, in your face (algorithms). Suit yourself. All smokes and mirror. More knowledge less wisdom.

Our uncharted minds are fed with more information than any previous generation. More data and more years to live. But not all data are equal. Multi-task could only help us consume more X’s but not Y’s. Our preferences, pre-sorting and prejudice were already set at an early age.

Eventually, we end up with skipping “right to the TV page”. We’re all at our worst inflated selves with more of the same day in and day out, serving as predictable “filters” of what’s floating and flowing in cyberspace. Data on steroid. Data on the move, with us followers of its every step of the way.

Walk and chew gum. Leg extension machines for I-phone scrolling. Skip to the Red-alert ping. Stimuli/Response. Occupy ourselves. Public space = private space. Cyberspace is neuro space . Where there is a phone, there’s home.

Per Bloom who taught at Yale, there were about 1200 religions in the US (United Faiths). More splintered groups, cults and conspiracies (Qanon Shaman got 41 months in jail for J6).

Who to believe? Too many moons (Son of Moon took over the franchise. Franklin Graham his Dad’s , so did the Lynchburg guy who recently resigned – rightly so- not to mention Don Jr in partner with the pillow guy).

Eternity and immortality. prolong pleasure while avoiding pain. Our universal longing. Yet, our time and timing always suck.

Delayed gratification…until when? Immediate gratification (started with sucking mom’s nipple) always trumps delaying. Wired that way. A sideways glance (at Woodstock) finds nude people back to nature.

Or when we unfold a newspapers on commute to the city, as in Revolutionary Road ( today’s equivalent of engrossing with the screen).

Conformity does provide security. Just another boxed-in commuter: hat, tie, watch, pen, handkerchief, New York Times (above the fold) and to their unknown regrets, no I-phone in the 50’s.

Commuting today means sweats and shirt on Zoom. A while ago, in Silicon Valley, a billboard featuring a man working from home…facing the screen, his back to drivers on a California freeway, completely naked. Quite prescient!

Still, the need to engage and interact with others lays dormant. David Brooks had a piece last Thursday about sadness that has grown globally. pandemic? Yes. But also, because the bottom 20 percent are squeezed to bare subsistence.

A recipe for disaster. Not direct link, nor causality, but in co-relationship with the rise of strongman states. The return of Three Kingdoms, or something like it: Putin-Xi and ROW. The return of Yalta and Potsdam, when the fate of the world is at stake.

Strangely, with more I-phones, we still end up with less friends. Not Facebook recommended friends. But true friends.

Two days ago, I was privy to attend a webinar, whose main speaker was a successful engineer/entrepreneur. He helped develop Satellite-to-satellite communication. Then went on to develop optical connections for Cloud and Data centers. With all the fibers underground, Musk’s and Google satellites and optical links at AWS still the news about sadness in the world. No wonder young searchers flock to Hari Krishna at the airport, to Moonies at Mass weddings, to Hubbard in Hollywood.

When people trade in their individuality/independence for group and goal larger than themselves, we see troubles (as of this edit, S Korea’s Halloween has gone hollow w/ death tolls rising even as the sun has yet come up).

The lonely crowd, per Reisman. Or ask the Shaman. currently a few months into his prison term. Are you lonesome tonight. Join the Moonies. Get married on its next Mass Wedding (if not, join mourners in Mass funerals in S Korea next week ).

We will never know how and when our story ends. Nor do we wish to know. Dust we must. It’s a blessing in disguise to live with unknowns, one of which, so obvious to others, but not to us: we can’t even see ourselves. Only its reflection (or self-projection).

The best we can is to invent one and believe in it, almost an exercise in self-hypnosis (repetition). Might as well go for a fabulous Alt-self, not a “s***hole” one.

Using Sharpie, we wand and wish unpleasantness away: the weather, the stocks and the tri-demic charts.

Most viable alt-self for alt-reality.

This person comments this, that person says that – on mostly inflated and edited accomplishment.

Before internet, we cared about what our neighbours say. Now, miles away, ocean apart yet a new neighbourhood exists (Marshall McLuhan’s Global Village, except it’s two-way: up and download, narrow cast, not broadcast). Mr. Rogers, a native of PA, will need his own alt-self as an Internationalist: part Chinese, part Muslim and part A.I. constructed. While it’s hard for us human to stay relevant, it’s easy with A.I.

We both benefit and drained out from online world (without fb’s thanks). World-wide adult-sitting site.

The plus side? We can sprinkle our loneliness in both worlds e.g., sitting in a parked car eyes glued to the phone, as in transcendental meditation.

I did that every morning. My daily mental gymnastics. My fear of missing out. Who is the new PM of Britain? Who is in charge of Haiti? and Why was that China’s number 2 was removed physically from the set?

Meanwhile, what happened to me? I inherited my parents’ genes. By default and design, I am their replacement. A hybrid of justice and mercy. Then I too will be gone. Leaving behind my biological imprints. My daughters then take up after me: hip hop and rock and their turn to wonder “Is this it?”. They just want to survive road rage, mass shootings and to finish a door-dash shift, unharmed. All I can provide are Sharpies, to sketch their Alt-life, like many before me who sent off a proverbial small-town girl on a bus to NYC. Big Apple big dream.

Life is beautiful. I was told, so I am telling them. What war, famine, pandemic and man-inhuman-to-man?.

It’s all rosy. Just wait! @Next mile-marker. Next milestone. See, it’s coming (the old master showed the diamond on his returning student’s crown – a Nobel-prize winner in contemporary society – who thanks him for all those years of instruction, and asked where the diamond was – for the umpteenth time, he was told he would find it at the bottom of the ink vase “keep burning the midnight oil”).

Not the destination but the journey that is the reward. Who to believe? Results or process? The middle class who get squeezed no longer believe in classic theories e.g. trickle down or revolution.

No more La Dolce Vita. Rome is burning. Rome is back. This time, a strongman ( strongwoman) State.

No more subsidising for “s***hole” countries. Best defence is offence. Of course, build the wall, install the cameras and unleash the dogs.

Meanwhile, with pre-conditions and pre-existing DNAs, we are nodes to transmit genetic codes. Do not forget our biological mission, while self-reinventing: modern man for modern age.

I know an Alt-self is an exercise in futility. I’d rather face my limitations, let’s say at a reunion with my younger self. A form of self-audit (as opposed to “meet w/ Jesus).

Seek not thy Alt-self, but in all your ways be of optimally calibrated. The world needs exactly it. As evolved species, we invented a caste system, a social construct, to condition mass-society for consumer products (pre-digital era) – to be status seekers. Now, with social media, it’s viral-ization.

Like a double agent whose presentation of the self in everyday life is twice demanding, we too face competition as self-advertisement faces diminishing attention span.

The Alt-self construct is for us to buy time. Like a sharpie that redraws life path on an imaginary easel. Before long narcissists can no longer recognize their true selves even when face to face with it: “the first time, I ever saw my face”; not a reflection nor self-projection. But see as been seen. When the unknown becomes known.

In high school, I worked hard and modeled myself after fame, fortune, and future-forward leaders. Aren’t we all?

Yet, this quest was more challenging given war throughout my youth. We learned about the Grandeur of France, Belle du Jour, and Breathless (smoking). We learned about WWII atrocities (famine which killed 2 million in the North of VN while 6 million dead in European theater). And we experienced betrayal by our Allies, whose leaders, most time, crouched behind the walls of the Embassy – and ours as well, during the Tet Offensive or the last days of Vietnam.

In fact, I found snippets about so and so, inside the Independence Palace, making some deals over tea and cigarettes (in the case of Mr. Nhu- our Robert Kennedy – it’s opium).

By the time VP Ky came to power, an alumnus of our high school, we read about his flamboyant courting of his then-girlfriend, Air Stewardess. Music from the Ministry of War Propaganda always underlined that now-or-never fear – soldiers away to the front, yet it’s their girls who died at home per sentimental “old sad song” Purple flower hill.

So much for the quest (meanwhile, Generals toppled one another, wives selling PX goods in black market, and Chinese Vietnamese in Cho Lon would price-gauge rice staples to manipulate and anticipate sudden turn of events, seemingly daily. Think Lebanon today. Think Ukraine today. Or Palestine or Iran.

Actually, not a day away, but a breath away we lived. We milked our pastime (not much): every ballroom dance, each slow dance, we made them last. Vietnam was America’s first Television war. US Correspondents attended Five o Clock Follies in Rex Hotel and filed their reports – filmed from Hotel Caravelle rooftop, to be over night-ed via third country e.g., Hong Kong or Bangkok (later, via expensive satellite uplink). It’s a race for ratings, of which NBC, number 2, was slipping (the first network to show Nat Cole – a person of color).

Guess who is coming to (TV) dinner? Kim Phuc, in her horror and “born this way” (without clothes).

Many reporters went on to prominence e.g., Dan Rather, Malcolm Browne and Peter Jennings from that era of Brave and Bravest. Meanwhile, female journalists e.g. Jessica Savitch (tragic death) Barbara Walters (just deceased), and Judy Woodruff (recently resigned) were rare species (No place for you here?

Those talking heads have journalistic integrity, as personified by the Most-trusted man in America (Cronkite). Then their ratings slipped. Then trust in institutions eroded. Top of mistrust list: used car sales, lawyers, politicians then the Press. From Television networks, we ended with Twitter, from medium shot we’ve got selfies.

Currently, Congress got a trust issue. Then the election process itself was brought into question.

Court was stacked. Judges are appointed in a hurry and out of political favor.

In full circle and 2 additional million deaths behind, I had my late-start. On an American campus, college kids were still believing in human goodness and simplicity e.g. 4-H (heart, hand, etc.) in rural Pennsylvania with its neighboring Amish community, the Italian Little Italy, and the Jewish congregation in Pittsburgh (Annie Dillard, an American childhood).

Our second migration found a bunch of “kim phuc’s” in S. California and Houston Vietnamese American clique and cluster. Still, with our VP Ky, and daughter who went on to MC an entertainment show, ironically, Paris By Night (we’ve got some issues with our own post-colonial identity e.g. beignet and beret. After all, on TV, the image of Vietnamese was a VC shot at gunpoint, a monk self-burned by kerosene, and most famously, a naked napalm girl (mirror image of that Wall Street brave girl).

Vietnam is equated with War. Hot war on cool medium (WWII, was the opposite: cool war on hot medium – radio, hence the notoriety of Edward Murrow.)

When I got to Penn State, I auditioned for the Penn State choir. I sang in black-tie at Heinz Hall in Pittsburgh conducted by Andre Previn. But deep down, I long for role models. Neither Vincent Chin nor Jackie Chan (albeit very disarming and iconic).

In Tech and Business, we barely got an NYC hotel owner (who purportedly turned blind eyes to tenants’ drug use) and another millionaire Hoang Kieu (plasma business) who donated a substantial fund to Katrina relief. That’s about it. Oh, of late, Ocean Vuong of The Emperor of Gladness.

My brother and his classmates got by, being Pharmacist, MD, and Dentist. But in the field of humanity, we’ve fallen short (John Yang at PBS and Andrew Yang, the presidential candidate).

Most Asian American or Asian authors commanded a tiny slice: Ishiguro (Nobel Prize winner), Steven Chu – Energy Secretary, and Elaine Chao, married to Mitch McConnell – stood still and did not roll her eyes right next to racist rant rhetoric.

Be the Change you would like to see. Greta and Malala, for instance.

Be the outlier, exceptional and over-performed in every way. Waste not each moment. Just a breath away, remember. Pride, not shame. Head high, not stoop low. Eye in contact and hand extended (View my previous blog on High Context). No more Oui Oui Monsieur.

Savitch was once viewed as breaking the Broadcast gender ceiling – higher ranked in social trust as compared to peers at NBC and CBS. Then her descend was quick… to the two-minute Digest segment, her last gig (before last seen dead in the ditch, literally).

With opportunity, there are always danger e.g. the nail that sticks up etc…you can finish this.

Still, I am on the quest for leadership role models. Per David Gergen, in Hearts Touched by Fire (re: leadership vacuum in the next generation), my search is in the Present Continuous tense. Last Day of Saigon, First Day outside of it, still searching, searching….even with Google, up until now.