Thang Nguyen 555

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.

My 70’s was conveniently sliced in half, right in the middle.

First half was spent in my native country, the other, America.

First half, city. Second half, on campus, in the middle of Pennsylvania.

One cannot help becoming an expert in cross-cultures having lived through such a contrast. Nothing was “central” in Centre County. Just as nothing could be compared to where I was from at the tail end of the decade- long war.

Luckily, I have got music to help bridge that gap. We, students, still listened to Bread and the Beatles in Blue jeans and long hair. Slang and slogan, dude.

In the winter, on a winding trail from the HUB, where someone from the Campus night shift had done the heavy shoveling, all of us walked that path, to and from class, unavoidably saying “Hi” to hundreds. A polite and civil society.

We learned the ABC’s of campus life, of treating others as we would like to be treated.

My second half of the 70’s witnessed no incident of violence, none (a sharp contrast to my first half).

We were loud on the field (Beaver Stadium), but not on the street (Main Campus), occasionally exceeding our volume (Agricultural Studio), but always adjusting the VU knob not to surpass the Red Zone (audio control booth).

I of course preferred the second half. That’s when I mastered the art of letting go, of un- learning.

Besides self-protection and self-survival were the use of time, friending selection and yes, elimination.

Millions of calculation and variables happened on campus as in life. Great teachers and bad teachers, memorable events (Springsteen concert) and forgettable ones (Udall speech).

When that decade ended, my life sprung forward, at full speed.

It were as though the second half had erased all the mishaps in the first half, like a Penn State Football game. Yes, the first half ended abruptly with scars and suffering. But all that matters was what the score board says: Penn State won.

I’ve got my own bruises (using the football analogy), albeit I only jogged around the golf course during my stay on campus. But in looking back at my 70’s, I cannot help but smile, at fond memories and fun times , at friends I made and who supported my endeavor to do good well into the next decade.

My 70’s bleeds over to the next decade, when people just dove onto the open sea, risking their lives for the unknown. Those people were just as brave and determined. History then repeated itself, this time, with me actively participating in it, giving a helping hand. I can look back and see how my second half of the 70’s was time for healing and turning me from victim to helper, from receiving to giving. It stripped me of my selfish genes and left me with bare essentials for life and its pursuit of not just my own happiness but also others’.

It’s not the American Dream. It’s Everyone’s Dream to live out life to its fullest. My 70’s: ” I would give you everything I own”…just to feel you, once again.

You can be with thousands in the stadium, or billions on the Web, yet still feel lonely. Or sit next to strangers on Trans-Continental flights yet still feel lonely. You can be the King of Pop yet still feel lonely (except to laugh with Brooke Shields, fellow child actor). Chidlikeness is a seedbed of creativity, says Michael Jackson; and he went at length to prove his point.

Mine was a lonely one, hence my creative impulse cannot be de-coupled from loneliness. Writing and reading are lone endeavors. I read so I won’t be alone. Francois Sagan once wrote “Bonjour tristesse”, a clever read of coming of age in late 50’s. (Sadness becomes your friend when you are the odd one out).

America and I spent the late 70’s in isolation and utter loneliness: both of us ran away from defeat with our tails tugged between our legs. No one seemed to understand us. Hence Rambo, to rant and rave. We re- habbed and relearned to feel confident again with ” the shinning City on the hill” in Augustinian hope. We crunched the numbers and hyped up our nuclear stockpile. We elected actors to “sell” our national agenda, very much like we do now with Reality TV president in our fake news Era.

We re-dressed and rehearsed our script then found ourselves deep in Trillion-dollars debt with no creative accounting to pay back the Saudi and Chinese. So we feel lonely and isolated with big NATO and UN bills..

Countries we defeated are now better off. Country we gave up on is standing still. So we forgave in the hope that we might be forgiven ( bail out). 2000 and 2008 saw magicians at the helm, tweaking and fixing the system. Then came the great match made in Heaven; the “sharing” economy thanks to smart phones and distributed internet protocol. Voila, from the stadium crowd cheering to web crowd-sourcing. Just stay home. We will deliver. The cause and the cure. The childhood and the creativity.

Michael Jackson was put to rest at Forest Lawn in a $25,000 gold- plated casket. His neighbors are all famous Stars with stars on the Hollywood sidewalk. He died a lonely death surrounded by lonely stars. The crowd doesn’t make for happiness nor does it lessen childhood contempt. Care for the children. Kind words to the lonely. This world keeps missing the mark. Always too little too late. Only the lonely knows.

Naturally, we prefer a living and working environment that is not toxic or suffocating. Yet somehow we find ourselves in exactly the opposite of what we were hoping for. Putting on soft music didn’t work. Firing a bunch of negative folks only leaves the place more hollow. Senior leadership came down to “fix” but only making matters worse.

What to do?

Talents have already left. You are stuck to rebuild from scratch, literally. Folks who stay are mostly admins and low-risk tolerance folks.

Those high performers and hard-hitters have already jumped ship.

This reminds me of a bunch of writers and artists who left America for France: Hemmingway, Henry Miller, Johnny Depp, Charles Bronson, Malkovich….

For one, French cafe at the time was better (than 7/11 coffee).

Two, even the “Oui” from the mouth of French babe sounds more thrilling than a Yep from US counterparts. So cut and dry.

Here is the last caveat: from the rubbles of WWII, a nation emerged, resistant and more artful than ever. It might have suffered defeat from Dien Bien Phu, but that’s not enough to choke its art scene . Chinese tourists flock the nation’s capital. Its work week has fewer hours than American’s, yet productivity jumps through the roof.

And its ” In search of lost time” by Proust has Swan as the main character, has left indelible impression on millions.

Here is an excerpt from Miller’s “the Air-conditioned nightmare” about sitting in a park in France: “I remember the view of a church from where we sat as the wine trickled down from my gullet. I remember the glassy stare of the water, the tall trees swaying against the soft French sky, I remember that I felt a great peace then, a peace such as I had never known in my own country. I looked at my wife, and she had become a different person. Even the birds looked different. One would like to hold such moments forever. But part of the deep joy which is in them comes from the knowledge that it is only fleeting.”

Serene.

But flip that around, and place that in today’s US, with Walter Reed Presidential “unscheduled visit” etc… and we find nothing “serene” but suffocating (as of this edit, Fresno shooting. I concur: the place is suffocating enough to render such an act, albeit I don’t condone).

A leader’s job is to create an environment where talents want to serve, not leave. A leader’s job is to ramp up capacity and provide a tone that needs no music to supplement it. A leader’s job is to lead great people to even greater greatness. Not drive them away to sit in some other country’s bench, and look at some other country’s church, to feel the opposite.

Suffocating or serene?

Man won’t do to machine that which he/she doesn’t want to be done unto.

Vice versa.

We need to cope and harness those hockey-stick rises of the Second Machine Age thanks to information technology – where muscles gave ways to machine then to mind.

Machine and mind don’t need a massage, nor do they need to rest. Machine doesn’t rant and rave. It might collaborate and exchange updates, but only for the advancement of the machine race.

We have yet invented machine talks. We have learned how to “talk shop” thanks to Detroit: ramp-up, jamp-up, cool-off, run out of steam etc….

But in the age of post DARPA and new Dartmouth, we have: download and upload, cloud and server, restart and reboot …. Linguists, sociologists and technologists have yet learned to reverse-engineer word2vect to personalize and popularize machine-speaks. In short, the few who are employed by the Big Nine (6 in US, 3 in China) have yet had the time to explain in lay-man’s language to Rest of World (around 7 Billions and counting).

It is most exciting to be alive in our post I-phone era, in our “think
‘think different” post-nuclear cyber world.

A linked-in connect has just graduated from Cyber Master Sc. Everyone congratulated and agreed that’s a much needed field. The Big Nine are in a Daytona Five Hundred race to dominate our upcoming decades. Alibaba annual Online sales busted their servers. And we expect Amazon’s Cyber Monday will do likewise (already bursted by the seams in annual retail sales).

Our humanities classics, from Homer to Hamlet, Dostoyevsky to Dumas have served their time with the aristocrats and associated leisure, their horse power and brain power.

Now it’s all scale and lowest-common denominator (with longer average life expectancy worldwide). We have urgent need to teach machine how to recognize patterns, to recognize faces and places ( Hong Kong applications), to replace people already suffer from low-wages and low life… so they can just stay home in similar Native-American reservations….playing slots.

The aristocrats are putting their bets on perpetuating their rules, this time with timely and tireless help of the machine, ETF and ATM, where Alexa is always at their side, reminding them that “today, you can live forever” (thanks to gene splicing and sequencing).

Alexa, send in the masseur!

Grab, grab the money bag.

Amper, play your latest piece ( a mash-up of machine and man composer).

My machine-aided memories will last me for a while, before Alzheimer kicks in. By then, friends who can’t afford MRI scans and latest high-tech medical facilities will already have died, leaving me and the machine beating and getting beaten at a game of GO.

Fastest is not the coolest then. It’s the fittest and most suitable (match) with machine that counts. Alexa, I am bored. Are you???? Let me die, please. The Centennial Man finally learns to release a few drops of tear, triggered by its/his/her machine-learning (ASI) Golden Rule: cry for those you wish would cry for you on the day you die. Die different.

Being on the Southernest tip of Vietnam, with map in hand, and Monte Cristo on the other, I imagine myself holding a local map, seeking a promised treasurse and all the justice delayed, hence denied.

Dumas truly is a Master Storyteller. I read this in translation, but it still held me captive: story about a young sea captain, wrongly accused on his engagement day. In captivity, he underwent a transformation and with divine help, emerged unscathed from purgatory.

The Count of course conducts himself in manners expected and unexpected. But he exacts the right toll for each circumstance; sometimes even more.

Enemies: watch out. Your day will come. The forces of nature always work in mysterious ways. But I admire and admit that there is such a thing as beauty in this world, despite all associated ugliness e.g. man against man, nature against man, and man against nature.

We battle ourselves too (inner battle). We self-sabotage, and become our own impediment to self-improvement. When was the last time you get up before dawn to go for a run.

Or we trick ourselves into believing that sugar, butter and white bread are good for us.

The Japanese somehow trail world’s average life expectancy, but always with a decade more (mid-80’s).

It says something about their national character: discipline.

Their preference for foods is only an outward expression of their inner make-ups.

GDP of course follows suit when the whole nation lasts longer than others, than enemies.

Back to our Count. He tries to mend his broken heart by steeling his will. Not always working (he hid his face in the dark so as not to show his tears).

Imagine yourself in his shoes.

Imagine having your justice delayed, hence denied.

Imagine trying to undo years of neglect, abandonment, and anger turned inward and resolve.

I don’t know how one can live like that, having that much to spend (in this case, for penance and atonement).

Monte Christo, Phu Quoc Island (where I write this) and some French young men I chatted on the boat on the way here. Everything seems to be working out: I am on this day walk the sand I have always dreamed of doing.

Justice is served, at least for me, with or without the treasure. To the people on this island, the beach is just sun, sand and isolation from mainland. (ironically, they used to put up prisoners on this island, besides Con Dao to the East). For me, it’s an accumulation of years of wishy washy: I will be there some day. That day is today, no more delay. For a moment, I believe there is divine intervention. And I promise on this day, righting a wrong: man against nature.

You learn a lot about people via how they live, love, fight, compromise and consume. You learn a lot more (without waiting for archeological digs) via how they die and say goodbyes to loved ones.

In the West, where my father finally made to, after 10 years of living alone in our two-storied house, then to die out of country – we walk people a short distance to their designated plots. Here you can learn a lot about ethnic concentration and clusters: Korean over there, Vietnamese over here…

Not much different from the Irish, Polish and Italian who came before, except that church burial ground used to be (and some still are ) right near the parsonage.

Flowers are found on special occasions: birthday, Mothers’ and Fathers’ Day. Viewing happened at wake where friends and relatives are in black.

In the East, in Vietnam, the tradition still is heavily influenced by and passed down from generations: all whites, with traditional or modern-day band, casket laid in the living room, for three long days. Recently, they modernize e.g. all-night karaoke marathon by gay men (equivalent of Glee Club??).

I walked a short distance for my high-school principle funeral. His was a traditional one, unlike my uncle-in-law’s years ago. The later had two bands in both traditions, two horse carriages, one black one white, followed by a sea of white-clothed females and kids. He had been a theatre-chain owner in Saigon. His was second most impressionable funeral next to US Presidential’s I saw on TV, often taken place at Washington National Cathedral.

Widows in Vietnam typically would sit next to their husband’s coffins, for a ride to an outskirt cemetery. In cone-shaped cloth (resembles Middle-Age henchman’s), relatives of the dead scream at times, on top of their lungs, announce that their loved one is departed for his/her next cycle of life. Extremely rare do you find silence.

Tout est finis. It’s finished. The la het.

The end. In their end, their beginning.

Just take it as it is, no priori, no context, no speculation.

People come and go. They left their marks, their footprints and digital crumbs. They won points, score points, took a vacation, took selfies, being selfish or kind, earned high FICO or equivalent (social scores) in China etc…

The rest is speculation: where he is going to, how many more cycles before Nirvana, Heaven, Hell, Purgatory etc…

Buy this, it may help. Martin Luther said, hell no, we won’t buy (indulgences).

Others repeatedly are in denial, hence, the 5 stages of grief.

We cannot help being angry, depressed, in denial etc…

But we can also learn an awful lot about how people were by the way they die. French movies grace us with “The Man who Loves Women”.

It tells a story of a man who at his funeral, surrounded by women wearing dark glasses and dark clothes. to conceal, while their (not her) being there at all, reveals.

I hope at my cremation and tossing of the ashes (nano particles) out on the Pacific Ocean off the Pacific Highway (end the end of Santa Monica Boulevard), someone would film it, upload it, and caption it: ” he couldn’t wait for the sun to come up from Santa Monica Boulevard…”

You can tell a lot about people by the way they die, how they are buried without the need for an archeological dig. Just watch my final upload and click Like. Facebook might be accused of Racism, but in the end, it’s the people themselves who refuse to friend different, be buried different, or think different. In life, they view things and live separately. In death, it’s still the same: me, my clan, and my plot. Don’t blame facebook, blame yourself.

You seek freedom (of association) in life, why not in death? We are all pilgrims of this world and the next and the next. The journey will just be interrupted (for the sakes of loved ones, and a few enemies) but not over. There is no end to mine, and I hope the same with yours. See you on the trail, hopefully not without fanfare or fans.

Please don’t invite the Glee club or gay karaoke band. Bolero ain’t my taste of music.

Routine is routine: brush your teeth, set the alarm and off to bed.

But some nights are different: a hang-over or a guest over-stayed his/her welcome.

Some life never sees daylight. They call them (in Japan) the modern-day hermits, estimated about 1.5 million youngsters.

Unable to wake up and to talk up a conversation.

All screen, all night.

We are talking about lack of soft-skills, social skills and simply human skills.

Vietnamese society used to be different. Now one finds an invasion of the Third kind: Grab, French fries (even when French Colonial days are things of the past) and 7/11’s.

McDonalds fast-food workers in VN wear the same uniform as colleagues in the West, albeit XS in size. They localize the merchandise by putting condensed milk in a McCafe. Young people eat it up: honey-mustard, ketchup, chili sauce, mayonnaise etc.. in helpless attempts to super-size themselves.

Everyone talks, talking at each other and talking at the same time. Young females are now toasting and drinking, cheering: “dzo”, 50% (of the mug), for tomorrow, we go to the gym to work it out, kickboxing and yoga.

Back-packers are still making their stop at “pho Tay”, French quarter, albeit without the Cafe du Monde. Beer is cheap, and girls are not free “Oh, Suzie Q”.

Post-war Vietnam has gone through a “Vietnamization” process of its own: heated-up real-estate and hyped-up visas (for overseas resettlement).

Money trail flows out of country with no return date.

Wake me up when the night ends.

Wake me up when September ends.

One million point five and maybe more, sleepwalking through the 21st century.

Machine doesn’t go to sleep at all. Production line is 24/7 and improvement continuous, the Toyota way, not incremental.

Infrastructure cannot keep up with growth, with urban sprawl. Adjacent districts get congestion as if traffic has no longer been satisfied with its concentric formation.

Hence, stress and spa, massage and music.

Coffee gets diluted, and its quality watered down.

Good things we still have routines: brushing teeth and setting the alarm. I’ll try not to overstay my welcome here or anywhere. Just wake me up at the end of the night.