Thang Nguyen 555

One more reason to stay glued to E-commerce to avoid contracting E-bola.

Shop until you drop.

Our team transited via Zürich on our way to Liberia back in summer 1986.

Had it been 2014, our travel might have been banned.

Monrovia then already looked bleak. Then the civil war. And now Ebola.

More ambulances for 4-million people.

and more political appointees for a divided United States.

New crisis is calling for new czar.

Dr Kim (WB) is blaming Dr Chan (WHO) who is equally frustrated.

Where is Dr Chu (E-nergy)?

The CDC figure-head spends more time fielding phone calls from Republican congressmen than actually does the job.

Now that Ebola is here. Banning travel is no longer the first-line defense: it’s already been breached.

Doomsday Scenario, with Brad Pitt in WW Z.

It’s not just Dallas since geography in our post-Columbus world has become quite relative and compressed.

It’s us with the old map, which reinforces our prejudice and intellectual laziness ( Ebola and Ethiopia etc…).

Alibaba and Arabians…Amazon and the E-commerce site.

So our education is now complete: we finally understood that the world is at our doorstep.

And that Nina Pham is not a Mexican American. She is a Vietnamese-American nurse in Dallas.

Numero 2 person who contracts Ebola in America, her home sweet home.

I finally picked up the Happiness Project to see what’s all the fuss about. Was it a clever way for the author to make some money while going through her mid-life crisis?

Or every so often, someone somewhere is bound to ask those loaded epistemological questions: where I am going? Is happiness awaiting for me at home while I go searching for it from East to West and back.

One thing for sure: we need faster and lighter airplanes while at it.

Meanwhile, a 17-year-old Pakistanis has just shared Nobel prize for Peace.

“One book, one teacher, one child… can change the world”.

To her, happiness is to be left alone to ask those questions, and to allow others the same privilege, Gretchen, author of the Happiness Project included.

While catalogue-ing the 12 commandments of Happiness, Gretchen is doing what Malala was trying to do in her own constricted way: searching and arriving at the truth.

One is from NYC, the other, Pakistan. One starts on January 1 and stays with it for one full year. The other, got shot, recovered and continued learning in Great Britain (with an occasional stop at the UN to give a speech).

People do look for happiness in unlikely places: kitchen, golf clubs, strip clubs, casinos, cruise ships, chapels, temples, thrift shops, pet shops and porn shops ( as in Bill Bryson’s discovery of Australia, a combined pet-porn shop under one roof).

One cartoon came to mind (the Simpsons). When the government experiments with a sun-blocking dome over the town, people inside the church run out into the pub next door, and the people in the pub, out and into the church.

Happiness always alludes us. It’s somewhere else, with someone else to be discovered but not continued. By definition, if you already possessed full happiness, you would soon be unhappy (the bell-shape curve).

It’s in searching that you are fulfilled, West or East.

Appreciate it while it lasts.

Happiness however can only be appreciated in looking backward.

Keep searching and launching your own Happiness Project, your own pilgrimage.

And don’t wait until mid-life. Just look at Malala. She started hers at 11, with a blog, then got shot, survived, and went on searching, speaking and is now recognized for having tapped into that universal longing for truth and the pursuit of happiness.

HP is about to be split into enterprise and mass market.

Reminds me of the old Ma Bell break-up ( which took down Bell Labs with it).

Long ago, we bought into the economy of scale, to vertical integration (ITT).

Now, the pendulum swings in the opposite e.g. IBM spinning off its hardware computer to Lenovo.

Agile, flexible and adaptive.

Key words for survival in the new age.

Meet the need.

They got in line to buy I phones.

Doesn’t take brain to see that and infer from it.

When was the last time anyone get in line to buy anything? (Mostly to return a purchase).

Car buying used to be painful.

Now it’s easy with the likes of Auto Nation and Carmax.

In Warren Buffett.

GEICO anyone?

Marketers were supposed to complete that feedback loop to the back room (technology) who tweaks and tunes the product to consumer’s liking.

Now, it’s technology which leads the way.

Slimmer, smaller and smarter.

Black Berry is not good enough.

Netflix has to bend over backward for the money.

And Amazon, now looks more like “the remains of the day” as Wall Street new darling, Alibaba, made its debut.

Paypal also split.

HP split.

The atom split.

Market fragmentation and segmentation.

It’s a plea, for marketers to do their jobs – having taken the backseat since Ad sense and Ad words took over.

We need observing eyes and “boots on the ground”.

Marketers were supposed to get in line with Apple fans, to feel the thrill of I-phone 6 anticipation and passion.

The were supposed to ride in the van up and down the coast (the way Bell Labs team used to test cellular signals, and Lexus team used to test the Toyota soccer-mom van).

The problem is, big corporations like HP have gotten their priorities wrong. They put low emphasis on marketing efforts, almost like an afterthought.

Hence, suffer the decline. At the tune of 50,000 lay-offs, than sliding in another 5,000 while at it. It’s the HP way to hide its mistakes: a technology company in the age of hyper-marketing.

The trend was there (smaller, more nimble, software and service driven). IBM got it. HP did not. Until now. Until it’s too late, at least for 55,000 dedicated workers soon with the pink slips.

Between Last Days of Vietnam and Too Big To Fail, documentary films all of a sudden get serious attention.

I was reading up on the latter story, while being a part of the former.

In fact, a few days that led up to “the last days” of the US Embassy, I had invited a friend to join me in line for a visa application.

We never got to ask our questions or get a blank form.

I still have one of the forms, filled out by my sister, but unprocessed.

Despite the 24-hour curfew, everything that moves, moved: feet, bikes, cars, buses, barges and helicopters – as shown in the documentary.

Then the pushing of people at the gate and the shoving of choppers off the deck.

Guns were tossed to the side before owners were allowed aboard the Kirk, or Midway, or  others of the full-alert 7th fleet.

Glistening bars of gold inside a half-opened Samsonite brief case was the sole belonging of the passenger ahead of me.

Or duffel bags filled with by-then-illegitimate currencies were tossed to the deep blue, stacks of them at a time, hovering over the Pacific like spirit money commemorating the death of South Vietnam.

My neighbor asked if I had a spare set of clothes. He just got off his shift and helped push to sea the very chopper he had worked on just days earlier.

He did not have to wait long: in another three days, upon arrival at Subic Bay, he would then receive his blue jeans and white T-shirt along with a coke and a sandwich.

I read in Goodbye Saigon, that the Embassy gardener roped up his twenty-strong family for fear of getting separated.

When forced to choose only a few, the marine guard simply said, ‘I could not’. They unfortunately suffered the same fate with those already in the compound (the Korean consulate folks even got drunk on what’s left at the Embassy bar, hence did not get on the last chopper – reserved strictly for Ambassador Martin and the folded American flag) .

I spent four fitful-sleep days, subsisting on a few oranges, inside the belly of the fish. Unlike my air-force neighbor, I only got a coke and a sandwich – without the jeans and T-shirt.

Talking about class service.

As to TOO BIG TO FAIL. By now, the SOBs of Wall Street have gotten back their entitlement attitude no matter how many Occupy movements have arisen since.

We all took it sitting down, our strength sapped before the fight: Too big to fight.

I did not realize then (75) and even later (09) , that the US would walk away from whatever it could, and wouldn’t when it couldn’t.

It by default did rope in a few hundred thousands of us, just to later see a hundred times more American out of work , permanently (automation, offshoring, increased productivity, aging America, the rise and reign of software).

Then I realize what a price to pay for those blue jeans, T-shirts, cokes and sandwiches.

Some non-fiction stories are worth retelling since they are way better than fiction. Just make sure you don’t find yourself on the wrong side of history – twice.

In The Idea Factory, we find a chronicle of great men, among them Claude Shannon, who dedicated themselves to solving big problems.

The transistors, capacitors, semi-conductors and the silicon chip (later became the magical wafer of Intel and the Valley industry).

Even an unheard-of technology of the time – cellular transmission – was shelved, since it was deemed unfeasible (ATT was still sore from its failed Picture Phone attempt).

We need brave and sustained efforts to get our voice heard in the wilderness.  Right now, it’s climate change, Ebola and the threat of sectarian conflicts.

We got F22.

But we actually need Ebola vaccines.

We need Claude Shannon, who among other things, juggled the balls just to think.

Pulse code modulation.

On and off.

Beautiful!

Just like its predecessor Morse code.

Tit tit tit, tat tat tat.

I got your message. I hear you loud and clear.

We are in this together i.e. suffer our common human fate in the face of change.

We see not the future.

But it’s coming whether we like it or not.

Fast approaching, with chip speed doubled every year and a half or so.

Hence, Moore’s Law.

The Great Men projects, funded by phone users’ revenue, tackled communications problems e.g. fidelity (Can you hear me now).

From Marconi to Moore, they gave us wireless and wire line, fast chips and Facebook.

All of a sudden, the message is delivered in the bottle. Small bottles, called bits – strings of 1’s and 0’s.

Bam! the Gigabit economy is here, offering and enticing us with more bandwidth,  more in the Cloud.

No time for contemplation or reflection. The more “friends”, the more feeds, the more frivolity. We once were blind, but now we see, once information-starved, but now stuffed.

“I am mad like Hell, I won’t take this anymore”, says the rogue anchor on NETWORK (the movie). If he has to update his protest, it would be “Feed me no more of those lies. I want the truth, even if I can’t handle it.”

What we need is the Ebola vaccine. Instead, we’ve got sci-fi and wi-fi.

Instead of connecting the dots, they gave us dots, by the trillions.

Google not only “organizes the world information”, it also seeks to replace our memory, de facto. Our only job as consumers of ready-served apps is to “amuse ourselves to death” in this information deluge.

Where are those Great Men of the Bell Labs Age? Aren’t we faced with a dangerous and uncertain future as men of the last century? Or is this our last?

We might inadvertently have done it to ourselves as we go about ignoring big problems. A classic case of bystander apathy, of kicking the can further down the road.

Dead men walking, walk on by. Ignore the can at your own peril.

For my Aimy, who is a recent college grad, September won’t ever be the same: she is not back to school as in years previous.

She is entering the world of work. That world is very different from the time I entered it.

She is expected to try her hands at multiple jobs, by sheer default.

Aimy got a media degree, has finished her stint of hip-hop (her team got the US championship title).

She should be able to handle whatever life throws at her.

She grew up watching LA speed chase, LA riot, LA earthquake.

At the time, she couldn’t comprehend the enormity and magnitude of 9/11.

I hope she does now.

She grows smarter by the day, just by watching me try my hand at various things and failed.

Your mistakes, my lessons – she said.

After all, I wouldn’t like to have a Dad who sits around and tries nothing.

That which doesn’t kill you makes you strong.

Sounds good.

We all know the elephant is in the room.

Some of us tries to feel it. Others make comments, or “Like” it.

But it’s there and won’t go away.

By “elephant”, I mean changes.

Take Bob Dylan for instance (or Jane Fonda for that matter).

the times, they are a’changin, he espoused.

Time waits for no one, including the one who announces it.

It just moves on, by nature.

My mistakes, Aimy’s lessons.

My world, Aimy’s heritage.

What do I have to leave behind for her?

That the job picture still hasn’t improved?

That those books I wished she would read will soon find themselves in Good Will stores?

Besides the obvious DNA’s, I wish to leave Aimy with a sense of stewardship. Aimy likes the beach.

I wish for her cleaner beaches. Aimy likes hip-hop. I hope for the US to continue its lead in creativity and innovation.

Free your mind from all constraints. The only way to come up with something new, unburdened by the past.

Time waits for no one. Worry not what others thought of you or your invention. All pioneers got ridiculed. Until it works.

“Mr Watson, come here”. then the trans-Atlantic cable. Then the I-watch. Yes, I have tried and failed, but never failed to try.

My legacy for Aimy. My modus operandi. Born to try. After all, the times they are a changin.

Even for those who sing about it. Even for Bob Dylan. My contemporaries, who stopped trying, don’t look like me. They look much older.

Their choices. I’ll never forget my first time at eye-brow waxing. It was fun. Daddy-daughter bonding.

You should try something silly with your kids sometimes. They have  a thing or two to teach you. At the very least, it gets you out of your shells.

We, creatures of comfort, tend to follow the path of least resistance. With an Alibaba-led world of work, change is our only constant.

Good luck Aimy as you find yourself in uncharted waters, with a different schedule, and a new identity. That of a wage-earning worker.

Eyes glued to the set. All eyes!

How can this be!

Smoke gets in your eyes.

Falling men.

Rushing in and about.

End of the world (why does the sun go on shinning…..amidst all the smoke).

Did we bring it on ourselves? Why was there so much hatred?

What were the causes? US “occupation” as perceived by Bin Laden?

Why punished the innocent for strategic calculation? (not successful there on the fields of Pennsylvania).

3 out of 4 planes, still drilled a big hole (knocking down New York’s two front teeth – to quote Tom Wolfe).

I wanted to withdraw. To sleep and sing “wake me up when September ends”.

On Ground Zero, a new building has been erected. Dust swept clean. Scrap steel refined to build ships.

Defiant, undefeated. Simon (without Garfunkel) performed there at the dedication of Ground Zero. Sound of silence. Sound of suffering and suffocation. No time to weep, no time to cry, no time for comment (facebook wasn’t around back then).

13 years of disbelief. Of living down that fateful day. Heads rolled. Drones deployed. Throats slit in reply.

Tit for tat. Vengeance is mine, says the Lord. We have reconstructed both our inner (financial) and outer infrastructure (building). Now, we need to reexamine what, on our parts, have brought it on and contributed to the never-ending cycle of violence.

Wake me up when September ends. From 9/11 to 9/30, I count 19 days, of sleeping and pain-avoidance. Those 19 days have turned to be 13 years, and counting.

I have always known about the book, but I dared not opening it for fear that it would change me.

Today, my fear has just caught up with me: I could not finish my bread without thinking, what if I had been in that concentration camp, with other prisoners around me. Would they let me finish my breakfast unharmed? How did we turn to be that way? Who allowed it to happen? Why did it take that long for good men to come to the rescue? Will humanity be able to look at itself in the mirror? Every act that we now consider indecent is pale in comparison.

It’s not that I was naive about our human condition. I saw it first hand when volunteering as a relief worker in the South China Sea. I sat next to victims of piracy. Cannibalism not by choice but by default. Rape victim. Ship captain turned captive.

In short, an upside-down social order, all co-located in a very tight quarter of then heavily populated Hong Kong Peninsula.

This was 6 years after I had lived through similar condition, sleeping in barracks, “last night in Subic Bay”, “last night in Wake Island”, “last night in Indiantown Gap” etc… Like Elie, I understood and looked at Darkness via my innocent eyes.

He was 15 then. I was 19.

Don’t tell me kids look so “angelic”, “adorable” etc… Keep dreaming.

Don’t tell me some priests, the Pope, and the President are saints. Keep on dreaming.

Don’t tell me football coach – defensive that was – tried to do good to juveniles he took into the Beaver Stadium lockers.

And don’t tell me the banks are safe, that flights are a sure thing. That Ivy League schools open the heavenly gate.

That mortgage debts are Triple A’s rated. That Richard Nixon did not curse, or Howard Hughes did not screw call girls.

Don’t tell me TIME magazine reporter during war-time was working for just one side.

And that the American Dream is more real than the Chinese Dream.

We might have evolved to a higher state over the last 200,000 years, inventing the wheel and the watch (Swiss to Apple), but we are still the same dormant and dual nature.

Yes. I am capable of both. So are you.

From morning til “Night”, we are forced to put on those make-ups and masks.

We tolerate one another. We collaborate and compete, strengthen our alliances and weaken our enemies (by slitting their spies’ throats) etc…

We kidnapped school girls, forcing them to be our concubines.

We invented the A  bomb and the beta semiconductor.

We distract ourselves with the things of our own making, among them, our own images.

We have stepped into that self-invented role, with new twists to the script.

Had that script been set in Auschwitz and Buchenwald in 1944–1945, are we sure we can live to tell the truth about ourselves, are we sure we can still look at ourselves in the mirror?

I know quite a few South Vietnamese who fled at the end of the war with their unsubstantiated claims of heroism (while the SS perpetrators went underground in Venezuela shores somewhere in complete anonymity).

We look at our shadow in the cave, and become content with our own edited version.

Then, when “night” came, our last night at such and such place, we no longer recognize where we are, or who we are, for that matter.

I have always been afraid of touching that book, for fear of what I would find out about myself. Now it’s your turn. Your night!

Watching the Dragon dancers go about their Moon Festival celebration, I can’t help remember my Moon Festival with lantern and moon cakes. You just put a candle in the middle of that lantern, and the heat would turn those cardboard merry-go-round to your amusement.

My Moon Festival pre-dated television and internet. In fact, all of my childhood games were self-invented before the arrival of those Chinese plastic toys. We made our own kites ( from old newspaper), telephones (tin cans), soccer ball (coke can) and facebook chat (tossing my love lines scribbling on a piece of crumbling paper).

Moon cakes were wicked sweet: they must be shared to spread the sugary ration evenly (quite a few Vietnamese now get Diabetes). When Neil Armstrong and his crew got to and came back from the Moon, it did not demystify those Moon tales for me. We Children just wanted to have fun. And Moon Festival Celebration was ours, forever.

Nowadays, people have co-opted it and made it into a socially gifted occasion in and outside of work.

But in its pure and true forms, Mid-Autumn Festival was for children and the feminine Moon figure (as opposed to the harsh Sun).

The Eastern calendar is still based on Moon cycles.

I would join kids in the neighborhood in a lantern parade (quite a few got burned down).

I even got lost in the moving crowd once (my sister and her search party eventually found me swept away in a march).

Later, when I ran some events for MCI, I even put on costume and make-ups to become a clown for Moon Festival (even my daughter couldn’t recognize me then).

Moon Festival is here to stay, despite warp attempts by confectionery companies to push sugar and flour.

The festival is not just about the cakes. It is the spirit of innocence, of appreciation for the unknown or unknowable out there.

It represents cycles (crescent then full then crescent again). It advocates harmony, not chaos, peace not war.

I thought of John Lennon and his Christmas song (with the backup singing voice of children).

Or the Halloween festival with pumpkin pie and silly costumes. We were once children. Let’s not forget how we once thought of our neighbors and our neighborhood. We don’t go about slitting people’s throats for visual and terror effects. We don’t promise outrageous returns on investment to eat new comers alive (in a Ponzi scheme). We don’t throw children into the gas chamber. Yet in the real versions of our adult world, all this has happened. And good men just stood by, immobile while holding his mobile phones.

Don’t Dream It’s Over (there are tales of war and of waste, but we turned right over to the TV page) by Crowded House.

I couldn’t tell you when exactly did I lose my innocence. I can only recall fragments of the past, which Moon Festival played a big part. I knew then as I know now, I was part of a big community who shares the same view of the world, or the Moon, at least. That it is there at night, every night, watching and witnessing humanity and all its frailty.

Let the Dragon dance team do its kung-fu moves. They deserve those tips. After all, it takes a lot of practice to master the art and skills of climbing on top of one another in those silly and hot costumes. My Moon Festival. Too bad I can’t pass them on to my children via facebook. Or light those candles in the dark once again. Thank Goodness, we got our sister Moon to brighten up our nights, twice a month, on the dot.

When I first heard that Vietnamese touring Thailand and Singapore had come across signs like “Beware of Vietnamese pickpockets!”, my initial reaction was that of denial “you must be kidding me!”.

Then it dawns on me: we must have done it to ourselves,somehow.

There have been a steady few (among the 200,000 who arrived as the first wave in 1975 to the US) who has vaulted to the upper echelon e.g. NASA, Silicon Valley and even Congress.

The majority, however, exported themselves ( riding on Singapore and Thailand’s economic miracles) to neighboring ASEAN countries, either as mail-order brides or unwanted elements in foreign environment (where nobody knows your name, unlike in Cheers).

To Vietnam young, tt’s been a pressure cooker since the early 90’s (incidentally about the same time as the rise of the Internet).

GDP per capita is reaching $1,900 where the Philippines was back in 2,010.

Vietnam is reaping its first fruit i.e. the state of  a frog-in-slow-boiled-water. It has yet recognized the trap, middle-income that is. More than half  – roughly 50 millions were born after the war, full of aspiration and frustration.

This tension between break out and instant gratification spills over across the borders.

In one-on-one comparison, a high-school kid can match a googler in math test.

But everything else, except for beer consumption, is to be desired.

Other emerging and frontier nations know their comparative advantage. Vietnam, however,  albeit with natural resources, strategic location etc.. has not found its focus (Swiss chocolate, French wine). A few years back, it placed an ad on CNN, touting itself as a great tourist destination. After tourism comes IT. Now, it’s playing catch-up with urban sprawl. The flow of FDI has been steady, but not without strings attached (metro rail, pork-barrel highway projects). Post-surgical patients were seen exposed to torrential rain, waiting their turns at Viet Duc Hospital, Hanoi (incidentally, China has realized its need to open up its medical sector to foreign experts and entrepreneurs).

To see the slow-boiled effect consuming the post-war generation without raising an alarm, is to silently agree with those signage in Thai and Singaporean touring districts. Those signs should have said “Beware, Vietnamese are catching up from behind”. Objects in those rear-view mirrors often appear larger than they actually are. So are the fear and put down on a nation of young people whose potential and pride will distinguish themselves in the 9.6-billion- world in 2050. The 2 billion folks who have yet joined us (India and Africa) will need food, clothing, shelters, education, technology and sustainability… stuffs that the Vietnamese now know as intimately as the back of their hands. “Beware of reluctant heroes – not pickpockets – right behind you”.