Thang Nguyen 555

Among Dumas treasure was Count of Monte Cristo: the betrayal, the incarceration, the transformation and finally the reward/revenge .

All neatly packaged and followed the sequences we wish we had in our own life. But life as it turns out, has its own foreseen conclusion imbedded at birth.

Closure is a psychological concept. It entails forgiveness and forgetfulness, not revenge (for vengeance is mine, said He).

Oh well, tell that to the victims of the Holocaust (or yesterday’s shooting with 9 dead in Germany). Or to the 34 year-old Wuhanese doctor, whose parting poem was so down-to-earth e.g. I have a house, am still making payment, a wife, still pregnant etc… the doc died. No closure, and showed no full face (mask on) and of course, no revenge (his wishes were for the world to stand up to the virus and to tell forth the truth).

In between birth and burial – the journey leads us to more betrayal than closure…perhaps only on the big screen, where Hollywood calculated a sugar boost at the end: the bad guys were sent to jail (or as in Con Air, out of jail, but barely made it home unscathed). In life, they wait for public amnesia then bail them out or shorten the sentences (Cohen not Cristo).

Count Monte Cristo had three things going for him: the treasure (luck), the stamina to escape & to swim (his skill) and his good friends (old prisoner/loyal pirate – his sidekick).

Those elements make for a good story: hero got locked up, hero escaped with help/luck, and hero returned in triumph and fanfare.

In real life, the only two variables we can count on are skills and relationships. Luck comes and goes (as people who won the lottery can attest with their fast happiness curve).

Some of us can only resort to one (our own survival skill). Let me end with a line that struck me from viewing the film – when the Count toasts to his yet-to-be-IDed-as son ” when you face the oncoming storm, head-on, then you know what kind of a man you really are”.

Bring it on. I already know the conclusion to our riddle called life. Closure or not, we have our built-in expiration date (largely constituted by DNA’s + nurture = nutrition). This most relevant question has always gotten swept under the rug, to make room for the trivial and frivolous.

I hope for luck, but I don’t count on them. I have survived thus far on stamina and skills. Now I need to work on the third element: you, my community of friends and good Samaritans. Notice I said “Samaritans”, not those privileged and Pharasaic strata. In the Count’s case, it’s those who were called “friends” that betrayed him in the first place.

In the end, he found friendships in most unlikely places. I guess you may say, he has his closure – on the floor, out of detention, next to an un-used up-scale bed, his.

You wanted to get away from it all. Book a cruise. Turns out, it’s a cruise from Hell. Can’t get back inland. Some tourists contracted the virus. Voila. Cambodia, the Killing Field, would take you in. After all, it’s used to genocide, pesticide and any kind of death and dying.

In my time, I experienced similar imposition: in camps, refugee that is. Assortment of them: Subic Bay, Wake Island, Indiantown Gap, Jubilee and adjacent islands, Bataan (you can’t get me back to the Philippines ever, since both times I was there, it’s all about quarantine and isolation) and finally on-campus (three of them, with 2 grad schools) plus a Baton Rouge flood evacuee makeshift camp.

I am used to that visible and invisible barriers (geography and psychology). Ones which separate you from “rest of world”. When I was 4, I watched the adults of my family fight, then a Chinese-fire drill around our dinner table.

Later, I spend a total of 8 years on campus, in the middle of nowhere. Staff would commute from home, but I stayed on, no dinners on Sundays.

So I know a little bit about us vs them. Us = those who are stuck in confined space, them = the ones who are free to go about as they please.

Back to our Killing Field’s hospitality. I am sure people from the cruise-turned-confinement would once again be quarantined ( in land vs at seas), at least for a few more weeks under every kind of scientific scrutiny and supervision. Life of a lab rat.

The globally connected economy is said to suffer greatly as a result of corona-virus. People are dying by the hour. World in crisis. We fright with no place to flight. Our survival instinct kicks in, collectively, we are like a deer facing on-coming headlights. Those with some beliefs pray (please don’t leverage this and say something like the Lord sends virus to “tame” us, as they once did with AIDS & Africa). Those without pray too.

I am ready for the third and final isolation (1st time: first 4 years, all alone, 2nd time, on-campus and in camps, and 3rd time, in crematory oven).

I learn to let go: my own expectations ( over and beyond other’s expectations of me) and am ready for the final “killing field”. But it will not be the cruise ship, much less a cruise from Hell. If isolated, it would be a self-imposed one. That way, I can trick my mind – however self-delusional – as having some control, like Papillon, after his failed escape attempts: born, live and die free.

Before “dust come to dust” i.e. my cremation, I just want you all to sit down and enjoy the show. A multi-media, multi-lingual slide show, interjected with live comments from friends who pass the mike around if they feel like saying something (stirring and settling ). No need to pay for the podium.

We can also have intermission, so people can go pee and check their phones.

Who says at my funeral, I have to follow your rules, written and unwritten.

We pre-paid the funeral home, so the place is ours to do whatever we want.

I want to die free, if haven’t in life.

I would not invite any religious representatives to my celebration of life (enough sermonizing that lasts for a life-time while state of the world is getting worse).

A life lived like a pinball, bouncing but rigged from the start by the tilted machine. It made a lot of noise ( The Who, pinball machine) while balls trying to defy gravity.

I remember pulling out whatever I had in cash to give to a shirtless 7-year-old stuttering kid from Cho Lon. He had arrived at Jubilee refugee camp with just a pair of shorts, tattered and un-washed after floating on a straw boat, the kind I later cruised past en route to Ha-long Bay.

The camp guards (more used to prisoners like in Green Mile, the movie) stopped him and confiscated his cash in his possession. Oh well, since it’s small and confined a place, I soon heard about it. Long story short, I ended bailing him out before sending him on his way to England (say “Hi” to the Queen). This must be subliminal but years later, I visited England and wandered around London’s Chinatown.

Back to my funeral. I would power-project an image of me, a little boy, shirt on, but not too different from said Jubilee boy.

Then the D.J. would play “the Whiter Shade of Pale” whose lyrics to this day, escaped me.

Oh, talking about music and lyrics. Let’s not forget to play McLean ‘s “American Pie”. I heard it over the ceiling speakers at Rex cinema, during inter-mission when a vendor lady in black solicit for our business (Chiclets or chocolates…).

When friends and families. having over the initial shock of attending a “weird” funeral, I would switch and surprise them with Vietnamese songs, from Ben Cau Bien Gioi to Toi Di Giua Hoang Hon.

Toward the end of this music/memorial program, it would be Reflections of my life (the prelude to ceremony/concert would be Catavina – theme from the Deer Hunter).

This Saturday, I will be attending a classmate’s funeral. My “Big Chill”. It would involve monk chanting, people weeping (me too).

But for now, to distract myself and delay grief, I want to play with my imagination: my parting event would be event-fun and free admission.

A life lived unlike any other (as should be): lonely early life and eventful closure, surrounded by “audience” who might or might not appreciate my style and selection – nowhere near being in flame like the burning monk I saw when a kid.

At least I am neither a burden nor a blessing, not to the eco-system which sustained me (past tense). I will miss validation from valued friends and families, the kindness of strangers and the kindness I extended to strangers, like the kid in Jubilee camp, who I had just remembered all of a sudden.

Life , once well-lived, is good. I had one regret: I did not love myself enough, times when I did not pay full attention to my kids or live up to my full potential.

Dust come to dust. Sweet home Alabama, Alamo, Alaska….all the way to Z, Tu Zu? To live and die and come in full circle to the intersection of Hong Thap Tu and Cao Thang Street. To forever be that child, wide-eyed, always curious and taking it all in: nature and human nature, how people can change in a flash, from loving each other, to hurting each other. From Ecole L’Aurore(sunrise) to walking the eternal sunset.

Then my eyes will glance at the fragmented mirror, see my fragmented self, kick myself for not having exhausted and exploited all variables and options. Races run, passion spent. May you all forgive me just as I forgive myself.

After my funeral, please put on a smile… please. Say “cheezzzzzzzze”. That’s my last gift to you: endorphin. But you gotta help me out (already dead). Of course, Reflections of My Life, by then, faded out. Unplugged. Ended as scheduled. (the A/V guy was pre-paid, but might accept tips).

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.