Thang Nguyen 555

We exist in space and time, stringing each moment to become a whole, to make a life.

Some moments are more memorable than others, but all count.

The learning years, the earning years and the “burning” years.

This is a moment I throw in the towel. Can’t compete for online attention. We’ve got Twitter and Instagram, shopping sites and gaming sites. All AI-assisted.

Besides, I don’t enjoy seeing my readers got “crammed in” with toe-nail and fungus ads etc.. (unless I pay for Premium package just to have that privilege of working for free).

Me and artificial intelligence don’t get along on this note.

As we approach 2020, I just want to thank friends and co-workers who at one moment or another, put up with my silly feed.

2019 has been a strange year. There were moments worth-remembering (went to Phu Quoc Island alone) or felt existential-lonely while surrounded by my people – then felt the same back States (like now, as we part digitally).

Perhaps the mark on the calendar e.g. year 2020 etc… is for admin (tax) purposes. We. on the other hand, live from one moment to the next, at times, planned, but most of the time, unplanned.

Like a long lost friend, time just went away, only to re-appear deja vu.

I felt like I have seen it all: the rise and fall of XYZ, the rush to judgment and subsequent regrets e.g. 2/3 of veterans now claimed that we shouldn’t have been involved in Iraq.

Some mistakes are more costly and deadly than others; just like some moments are more worth-counting than others.

This morning, it was a bit foggy outside. On my way to the gym, I told myself to watch my speed. Sure enough, at the Interstate intersection, there was an accident.

Moments.

Though minuscule, moments and choices= our life. My early life wasn’t that memorable (first 4 years), except for a succession of housekeepers (can’t keep them). So I learned to tune out and create my internal dialogue: I don’t need you (although the opposite is true). Self-retreat.

Call it survival mechanism. But these early moments shaped my orientation and outlook (not to say, my first 19 years were spent on one street: Ban Co).

Like a concert that has both performer(s) and audience, our lives have us and people. It’s been quite an honor to interact with you digitally. It’s been a long way from Gutenberg Press to WordPress, from “Salvation by faith alone” to post-truth and post-everything world.

I wish you God’s speed in 2020, a year with new promises and surprising moments. As I experiment with other- than- these- silly blogs to communicate, I want to remind you that 16-year-old Greta went from holding a lone poster (on her 1st Friday for Future) to the front page of TIME.

Each moment, each man/woman/child, counts. Together they make for life itself.

So cherish those moments, embrace those children, and be brave like Greta.

The Beach Boys turned it down. So Terry Jacks went ahead and sang it himself. It turned out to be a hit back then.

Sometimes, fate has it for us to experience those “rejects”.

In sales, we all know rejection comes with the job.

Walk the pavement until it’s blue in the face and faint in the heart.

This season of Celebration, we still hear about shooting in Jersey, in Pensacola, and Impeachment proceeding in the Nation’s Capital.

Where is the refrain “We had joy, we had fun, we had seasons in the Sun”?

Greta is TIME’s Person of the Year.

Let’s not get side-tracked. It’s a testimony to someone who sat alone with a sign on “Friday for Future” until someone decided to join her. At her age, she should have stuck with Girl Scout cookies.

Instead, Greta makes sure that future Girl Scouts cookies remain to be sold for years to come.

Greta “saw the system”.

Talking about taking rejection.

About sticking it out (in this case, cause-related mission).

Terry Jacks believed in his piece (which he surely had put his heart and soul into it, with some skin in the game: skinned our hearts and skinned our knees). So innocent, so spontaneous: “pretty girls are everywhere…”

Greta looks angry and apprehensive, for a right reason: her generation and hopefully the generation after that, won’t get to enjoy “seasons in the sun”, if “pollution are everywhere” ..

So she went ahead and did it herself. Like any leader who needs to see things through: roll up your sleeves.

In life, rejections are good. It means you are introducing something new, something out-of-the-ordinary.

You are on the cusp of change. It would be stagnating if not for all the revolutions in computing and medicine which helped us arrive at today.

Church hymnals can be stacked behind the pew for next Sunday. But something cannot wait, like Fridays for Future, like Seasons in the Sun.

Gotta get out there, look around and take a deep breath before making that sales call, launching a product (anticipating rejections) and bringing about change.

If the Beach Boys of the world reject your offer, go ahead and do it yourself.

To join a chorus of “best books of the year”, I want to reflect on my reading life, on what struck me in particular and who left long-lasting legacy in shaping my thoughts

• The Remains of the Day – told from a “downstairs” perspective
• Never Let Me Go – how humanity, esp love, somehow cross-over to robotic life
• The Invisible Man – helps me get “inside” people unseen by society at large
• The Sympathizer – articulates what’s like to play on both sides of the fence
• Munich – there are good people on both sides of any conflict, WWII in this case
• The Veteran – love that transcends race and time. Great writing and twists
• Think-Make-Imagine – we are but a ring in the chain of human evolution and invention, which makes me wonder why some people go off on self-aggrandizing instead of self-effacing
• AIQ + Big Nine = we will need to leapfrog quickly to work machine into our daily lives (think email and Prodigy back 25 years ago).
• The Art of Leadership – just to show that some gets it, while others don’t. Not off-the-shelves kind of skill-set. Acquirable? yes, but mastering? not likely.
• 8-minute organizer – goes well with McChrystal’s theme about start with making your bed right at the start of your day
• A man in full – shows us what’s it like to have and have too much
• Small is beautiful – less is more
• Markings – reflections by someone who hovered over the world and died an accidental death while trying to serve it
• Count of Monte Cristo – in death we find life abundant with a bit of poetic justice sprinkled on it.

In college, there were many required reading. But in life, it’s us who are lonely and lost, and need to “read so I won’t be alone”.

Required reading that have helped me most (that I can distill) are:

• Group communication
• Drucker’s Management series
• Kotler’s Marketing latest
• Cross-cultural ethnography
• Shadow of the Almighty – Jim Elliot biography “He is no fool to lose that which he cannot keep to gain that which he cannot lose”.

In my end, my beginning. Never stop your inquiring mind. Fiercely approach each day like a child, eager to be at the playground. It’s a Wonderful Life. Happiness is within you, not out there or on-line.

Oh, there is also an “out-of-the-box” reportage, ironically, from inside “the Sanctuary of the Outcasts” located near Baton Rouge, LA; about finding humanity in least likely place.

We will hear a lot of these pre-announcements of upcoming sales etc…. The shopping spree season is well underway.

Materials over morals, stuffs over senses. We need to fill up the empty space. Cosco knows this. It provides shoppers with huge shopping carts.

Buying in bulk, buying at convenient stores, buying at drive-ins.

Buying online, off line, on credits, by cash. Just go ahead and buy. Shop until you drop.

Attention shoppers! That bag is on sale. Those pairs of shoes are not. Gym outfits remain an exclusive deal and domain; no discount (you already paid for the membership, might as well show up – but please, not in ugly outfit).

Air fares jump through the roof (elastic pricing)..all kinds of fares jump over the normal distribution curve (hey, gotta to pay the price to earn those un-depreciated memories).

If staying hom, you will end up with paying more for new phones (and indirectly experience someone else’s travel experience), new transmission capabilities (5G) with new pricing.

It’s been a long drought ( due to climate change and someone up high trying to “drain the swamp”) so we need to shop before we drop. It makes one feel better to transact and to carry stuff home (hunter and gatherer instinct).

Can’t help it. We were made to be bi-pedalist, just to end up with using the right foot for both gas and brake pedals (what’s the use of the left foot anyway?) to fight for parking space at the Mall.

Homo Erectus, Homo distractus… Christmas trees & decorations, jingle bells and carols, all serve to evoke the feelings of nostalgia for loved ones (some might have passed away). What do you do this year that is different from years previous?

Spreading the Gospel of consumption is one thing. Believing in it with all your heart and soul is another. Do we really believe deep down inside that we can take all these “merchandise” with us when we leave this world?

To reflect on this will somehow make us feel hollow and empty. The soul could never be fulfilled until it finds rest in Thee, St Augustine once expounded. OK, how about mixing the spiritual with the material as a compromise? Technology and Religion? Arts and Sciences?

Go ahead and find out for yourself. The screen will capture your attention, or whatever is left after your shopping spree season. Attention shoppers! We have a good deal on your screen. Right about …..NOW (scarcity is the mother of action: if we don’t get it, someone else will). So we succumb to the temptation, rationalizing it away later, and once in a while, returning the merchandise out of (buyer’s) remorse, having satisfied our primal urge to “hunt and gather”.

In modern parlance, it’s called hoarding. It has no cure, and is only more infectious, when we hang out with like-minded people: ” look, I got this on sale”…..Like sorority sisters, we blame this on peer-pressures, on one-up-manship …..But we know veneer from values, from what is inside, at times eroded and ugly, full of pain and empty space, which materials alone cannot fill.

How can we teach kids “less is more”, when our attention veers toward “more is it”!

America’s favorite pastime back in the early 60’s was a Sunday drive; mine in Vietnam was a Sunday stroll with my Dad. Sunday was his only time to spare for me. We would breakfast in District 1 (beef stew) or District 5 (Pho Tau Bay). To work off those heavy beef-base meals, we would stroll along the sidewalks in front of Nam Quang theatre, our version of swap meet.

Saigon was built for street walkers, for horse carriages, tri-cycles and bicycles.

The French ladies who accompanied their husbands on their tour-of-duty could still be captured by black-and-white photographs, smoking and reading their newspaper for news back home (later, it would be Stars and Stripes when the GI’s set boots on the ground per Kennedy’s surge) while riding our cyclos.

I grew up hearing horse’s galloping leisurely on asphalt streets, very much like NYC back in 1910. Rarely did we find gasoline stations in the city. People just used their own muscles to save and make money. Environment – actually was a later concept when plastics started their invasion.

Old folks and young kids made for a distribute demographic albeit more women than men (since men were out to the front and died of attrition).

I myself accompanied my grandma each month on her trip to receive her pension (from my grandpa’s years in public service).

We had no concept of nursing homes, funeral homes or child-care facilities.

Neighborhood watch was our “child care”: self-policing and self-supporting. Funerals were conducted in: neighbors would tolerate three days of mourning. It’s a community inside a city.

Even the “round-about” were built so that all roads lead to “Rome”. We were never “separated but equal”. We were equal and never separated.

Everyone knew we were born, “served time” and got buried not too far from the “tree”, living in Bushmen’s time like the Lion King, to someday become a man, to replace our dads in a circular and endless world. To fight injustice, like the Three Amigos, to punch and get punched at, to have a temper and get stressed out from a life that did not deserve us, a war unfair and an aftermath uncalled for.

My Dad signed our house over to the State so he could join us in the US after a decade-long separation. Our strolls to Krispy Kreme, our new pastime, were never the same. Not like when I was kid, trying to catch up with his giant steps. To me, he represented a Vietnam (both time and place) that could never be re-captured: its former China-Franco-US-VN glory, of the Quiet American’s, and the British Invasion’s Reflections of My Life, of Suzie Q and Long Winding Road (of course, a lot of PX’s black-market Pall Mall and peanut butter).

Those used books and “classic Rock songs” now reside in my head, in my past, along with the jingle sound of horse galloping on Saigon post-colonial paved streets. My past, my present and my future, all merge into one endless loop, the tape.

Do You know Where You’re going to…do you like the things that life is showing you. …No I do not like them. I want my grandma. My life, my home ..my friends back. I did not ask for all this. No wonder Michael Jackson asked Diana Ross to be his friend, someone with empathy, to share those lonely and lost times (he even went on to build his own Fairy-Tale Amusement Park).

Those strolls are forever, easy like Sunday morning. I would trade anything just to have it once again. I know I know, un temp perdu, (ask Proust). Just like I no longer am a kid. I am a Daddy now, who makes sure his Daughter’s Sunday Strolls are just as memorable, passing-on worthy.

Passing it on is all I can do, as a node on our gene chain and mesh network. My past, your past, their past, all make sense when zooming out and out to reveal a moral universe which waits patiently to be discovered.

I have just flown back from Vietnam. A short trip. Un-productive but not wasted. Then I am back to this bubble, with an elephant in the room: “do you hate him?”.

Vietnam has its own elephant. But its winter of discontent is milder than the one I am about to experience here in the US.

Here, there are barren branches everywhere, symbolically and literally.

Look at the BoA/Meryl Lynch predictions for the upcoming decade: more grandparents than grandchildren (we know that), China>US in AI (we know that), the rise of IoT and automation (Amazon knew that), Fed will be ineffective in regulating financial health (we knew that back in 2009).

I must give it to the Founding Fathers, and the contract (Constitution) they wrote, to ensure the Republic be preserved for years to come.

A few weeks away helps me see that:

• we are too materialistic still, albeit all the movement in the opposite direction
• Cyber Monday>Giving Tuesday, the former got Amazon backing
• world leadership now doesn’t seem to “include” the US as its center
• China is a different world into itself, with satellite and proxy actors
• China is neither revered nor respected on world’s stage = Russia
• So the big Three seem to have problems of their own; France is up?

While everyone is working on digital transition, Vietnam itself has barely caught up with books and reading. You may say they can leapfrog onto Kindle and the likes. But I doubt it. Once you are in front of the screen, and not used to reading anything besides the Sports section, you are more likely to cut through the chase right to the juicy part.

While time seemed to be frozen there across the pond, morality is standing still on this side. If I have to choose one versus the other, I will have to pick where I can contribute the most, where I can be of greatest values to. I have seen the faces of need, of wants, of envy. All because I represent a dream not a diaspora. All because the basics of life are not met there, or at a slow pace, while the pursuit of happiness is raging on on this side, from Black Friday to January 1st (designated shopping dates).

In Costco, we stocked up our toilet supplies. On the street of Saigon, peddlers and homeless folks used leaves from city trees for the same purpose.

Perhaps we have chased the dream in the wrong direction, in the direction of the Mall and material things. Even our 80’s Material Girl is now having second thought while the Art of the Deal needs new revisions, especially when the Elephant is in the room, staring at everyone throughout this long Winter of Discontent.

Albert Schweitzer once said that the greatest tragedy in life was wasted talent. We do fade out before fully exploiting our brain power.

I have tried not to fall into this trap hence tragedy; but so far kept failing. The brain itself consumes a lot of energy, and we all have to burn energy to first survive as homo Erectus (bi-pedalist) before pumping the excess energy “upstairs”, to be creative, to crack a certain code.

Increasingly, our world is using bio-metrics (finger prints for one) to I.D. someone. The bio and AI worlds are working doubly hard to someday become one (The Age of Living Machines).

With brain scan, perhaps we can find out how much is unused, and what portion of our brain can be uberized and monetized. Before that, it would be nice if we are not brain-dead or sick in the head first.

Dr Schweitzer would be amazed to see the outcome of latest studies on gene sequencing and genomics. He would be equally amazed to see advanced studies in emotional intelligence and artificial intelligence.

We interact and integrate with machine – the ATMs always say Thank You instead of You’re Welcome – we are the ones who get the service from them, without thanking them.

Someday, we are left with one comforting feature: empathy. We shall wipe away tears from the children’s eyes, ache for the sick and dying, and overjoy seeing people getting married.

Those human moments will keep us sharp and sensitive. We will at some point, besting our best. Those wasted talent and brain power are just payload, for us to exist and to afford those human moments: of sharing and being selfish, of giving and receiving. In that perspective, those are not wasted energy but parts and parcels, payload and price for greater greatness.

Greatness awaits each one of us, but it doesn’t force its way into our lives. We must want and will it, lay down our past heights to achieve greater measures. Or else, we default to joining the rest of humanity, getting by and leaving behind footprints of our sad and superfluous existence.

I passed by the old neighborhood where my mom taught for 30 years. The hospital for common folks was nearby. A flood of memories rushed back. Once, my small foot got caught in the scooter’s rear wheel (and the emergency staff there were extremely helpful and considerate). Or toward the end of my first month Hapkido, I broke my left arm. Guess where I ended up? Same hospital. Long summer in cast!

One cannot help being philosophical: why me? what did I do to deserve being sequestered? Fast forward that another decade or so. You would find me helping out foster kids to find adoptive homes, refugee kid(s) to have cash before embarking on their long flights to strange shores.

I am thankful that by receiving and giving, I have served as a node, a steward of goodness in my lifetime. I am grateful to have landed on this side of the Internet. Grateful that I still possess a strong memory, inherit graceful genes from my mom. Who wouldn’t turn out for the better with moms like mine.

In spite of my lonely childhood as a teacher’s kid, I am now grateful for the housekeepers, a succession of them, so I wasn’t left alone. Yes, there was flooding as it still now is. Yes, there had thieves in the night, just as it still now has. Yes, there were bullies and fist-fights just as it still now exists.

But I am grateful. In war, I appreciate life. In peace, I am thankful for a chance to do good. For connecting and collaborating, for reading and sharing blogs. It’s been an honor to run my fingers on the keyboards, and allow my free flow of thoughts and feelings on these pages. I am thankful for your spending the time, tolerating mistakes (grammatical) and foolishness. Above all, I am thankful for tragedies in my life, for displacement and resettlement. Without hard times, I wouldn’t have enjoyed happy times for the better. So thanks. Mom, friends, x-spouses too. For holding up mirrors.

I was forced into taking siestas when I grew up. It’s always hot at mid-day, and the whole country would “lay low” (even 9-5 folks ended up taking a nap at home, hours to be made up on Saturday morning).

The song that started our 70’s soft-rock radio program was “Your Song”. I have just finished listening to it once again: same context (hot, laying low etc….) pretending I could travel back in time (it would be 48 odd years in between since).

I never noticed Sir Elton’s “and you can tell EverybodAy”…until now. From this, I assure you there were something else I might have missed out while growing up. I was told that even after the Deer Hunter, Robert De Niro still visited Vietnam, walked around and stopped by Apocalypse Now (the bar). Not the tiger cage he was in in the film.

He apparently picked up on something he might have missed even after his pre-production scouting tour. Or he might have identified with his deer hunting role to the point of having mild PTSD. Looping back just to make sure.

In circling back and listening to the same song, same setting, I realized I have moved on and have outgrown the original place and my early self: same geography (French colonial city) yet exists for 21st-century demand.

I do this to ascertain my future self. I want to have a sneak-peak, to be pro-active and to be pre-pared.

When someone starts to get some interests in history etc… as the saying goes, he is getting old. More past than future, more nostalgia than forward-looking.

In Lucy, the movie, Scarlett Johansson would swipe the (mobile) screen so fast (5G?) that NYC time-lapsed back to black&white days with horse carriages and gentlemen in hats.

Same song evokes same feeling: of drift, of loss and of change. I knew deep down then that my song, your song, would change its tune very soon. The sound of far-away gun shots, of exploded bombs, of “napalm girl”and “street execution”, of “burning Monk” and “last chopper”. Those were my Lucy’s swipe.

I only have a mild PTSD, but I know how to process it, to use it.

I am not so sure about others. Are they handling it well? thriving? set-back?

Friends of my generation are still posting photos of all-female school girls ( segregated schools back in my time) in uniform (Ao Dai). Today, I heard they still wear them on Monday mornings for the Pledge of allegiance. While we might be frozen in time, the youngsters are sprouting up and “occupy” our space, our parks and our domain.

I am sure at that age, they comply, but have not quite internalized patriotism, social responsibilities and global ethics. They have seen more talks than action, more flooding than fun. I hope for them the best, in the time of Youtube and Facebook, of live mobile video and live concerts. I just hope they would not be taking for granted their privileged position, being born on this side of the Internet. So available where wi-fi are, but so unwilling to listen to a “quite simple, but .. I hope you don’t mind, I hope you don’t mind, I wrote down this song….” Your song, my song.

While the song lasts, I was hoping to prove the Greek philosopher wrong, that “one cannot swim in the same river twice”. Thinking this over, I wasn’t quite so sure who I was up against, since the river of time has proven him right, many times over.

I was reading Homo Deus, when I had to pack and leave for Vietnam. Luggage too full for the half-finished book. Last Sunday, I ended up buying another copy of the same. Hate half-read books, hate half-baked ideas, and for that matter, hate lukewarm lives.

Harari was getting to Humanism (leaving behind the Middle Ages and its Top-Down answers to all spheres of life). If God and Kings are answers to all life problems, sounded to me, they were partly blamed for also “causing” them. What have God wrought!!! From A-Bombs to AI, God made human, let’s say. Human cause problems (sin or suffering). So God in His infinite wisdom, should have foreseen (or back-seen) those indirect and unintended consequences.

I respected philosophers and men/women of wisdom in the past: they had to master inter-disciplinary subjects: “Absolute powers corrupt absolutely”. “All men are mortal”.

How did they come up with so simple but ageless a principle!

Not to mention the Golden Rule….love your “neighbor”. The age of humanism robbed us of our sacred music and sacred mountains (the latter is now viewed as rare Earth to be extracted and exploited to make I phones and all things electronics and entertaining). Amuse ourselves to death, as Neil Postman once titled his Television Social History book.

Humanism breaks the human body down to its nano particles (cubism and cupboard – full of Campbell Soup cans in the eyes of Andy Warhol) and pushes the boundaries of meaning and aspiration. If we can achieve whatever technological feats – last frontier- then we shall become gods (singularity).

Science shoots for the Moon. Technology sells soup cans and assembly line.

Science takes us to far-away galaxy, in the realm of speculation, while technology is useful enough for society and scale.

I might finish the book wondering what lessons I shall draw from. Shall I stop believing, or should I believe more. Putting my faith in what, who and how much longer.

The unseen is more real than the seen. One day, I shall see “face to face”.

Meanwhile, who is going to wipe away those tears in the children’s eyes? Monte Cristo? Robin Hood? or Boyz-in-the-hood (who push drug and lately get taxed).

The book I am reading shouldn’t be giving me easy answers, half-finished or half-baked. Because the story of human kind and associated kindness has only been written for some years, compared to our infinite universe. The middle and the ending have yet been fully experienced – very much like a Disney feature.

I know there is no rush when it comes to the Internet and machine-learning. I just am fear that I don’t live long enough to see human folly force-taken-over (or over-ridden) by machine (the way they drive/ride these days in Vietnam). One thing for sure, the smarter the machine the more broad-based human knowledge , the fewer Renaissance-men/women of wisdom we will find. When life span is longer and attention span shorter, our Warhol’s “in the future, everyone will get his/her 15 minutes of fame “- like a Campbell can – might be so miniaturized and infinitesimal- like a cosmic zoom-out to tell the stories of billions of unfinished lives.

Gotta get back to finishing the said book.