Thang Nguyen 555

I grew up, unfortunately, not seeing a lot of love, in any language. Instead, a lot of fighting: in-fighting within my family,

(whose consequences are still working themselves out) and in-fighting within my country.

With one exception. My sister, strong in personality, has pursued the love of her life all the way til the end.

Her husband of many years have just passed away. I was there from the start (w/ a matchmaker), and again, toward the end, as of three months ago.

I am sure her head is spinning and her world upside down. Who wouldn’t! They happened to be empty-nesters, living in a huge house. Soon there will be a Sale sign out front after a lot of cleaning. But there was love in that house, until the end.

I remember other stories too, from Orhan Pamuk’s Turkish protagonist who fell in love with his cousin, so much that he collected her hair brush and other personal things to make the Museum of Innocence, to Lolita, an aged professor running away with an under-age girl, to Norwegian Wood, whose unforgettable character Watanabe tries to console his roommate’s girl, helping her work through her grief.

Love in other languages.

In war and in peace, in poverty and in prosperity. I have seen one story with my own eyes, from the beginning til the end.

When my brother-in-law passed away yesterday, he took with him the old world. An era. For even if he could manage to drag himself out of bed, and fly back, he wouldn’t find the old streets of Saigon. They are currently cordoned off, for the big Metro dig.

Change is here. The future is now. Long ago, my bro-in-law, once cool, listened to songs like Never on Sunday.

I guess everyone is entitled to his/her definition of  “cool”, from the Beats to the Beatles, from the Hippies to the Yuppies. But is there love in any age group, in any language? Or should I keep searching for it in foreign novels and movies?

I will have to see Norwegian Wood. Or the Museum of Innocence (if there is a movie version). Or see Lolita once again, with Jeremy Irons playing the vulnerable professor on the run. We all play catch up with love, since we all are products of love. Without it, we wouldn’t be around in the first place, Love in other languages, but my own. R.I.P. Mr Tuynh. Maybe someday, I can tell your love story in our own language. But then, your grandchildren will look at it as love in other languages. On second thought, maybe I, memory keeper, should spare them those in-fighting details in and out of the family.

Troubles are everywhere these days:from Ferguson to the Far East, from Western Africa to Western of the US ( from Ebola to earthquake).

So are ideas, actionable or academic. What we need is a good problem, one that is challenging, and must be solved together.

The kind of problem that defines our purpose in life.

A while back, we saw “cause-related marketing” (incidentally, non-profit and charity sectors grew in double digits during recent Recession). Don’t be evil!

Amazon found its problem: how can packages still be delivered on Sundays.

Bill Gates and Melinda Foundation: children vaccination on a global scale.

We need to cut through those distracting noise and voices,  to find those problems.

From then, problems are synonymous with opportunities.

Bring it on! I am a problem-looker, coming to the neighborhood near you.

For what’s it worth, at least you can make use of its nostalgic theme music. Boy coming of age. Coming back to his village. to find its town Cinema, now destroyed for a parking lot.

Same thing is happening downtown Saigon. With the demolition of old buildings for new, memory lane for metro lane.

Prominently displayed in my sister’s living room in Virginia is a B/W picture of her, then young mother, holding hands with her four kids, all laughing and smiling on the side walk of Saigon, where the Tax center is about to come down.

Time has changed and people have moved on.

The old making place for the new.

E-commerce replacing Traditional one.

Convenient stores replacing “inconvenient” ones (where you bargain for a deal).

We are living in a time that even its best comic (Robin Williams) found himself unfit.

His exit says a lot.

Of course, he did not want to make any statement that was so costly about our society.

But. was there any smoke? Stigma against depression and disconnectedness (see Huffington Post piece). 

We anticipate and rush into the future. As if the unseen is  always better than the seen, the virtual better than the real. 

Then we turn around, take stock and find ourselves wanting.

The old neighborhood is a shambles. New comers don’t give a damn. Just loot it.

Flatten it. Make it a parking lot, a bike lot, an empty lot. No more neighborhood cinema (Cao Thang).

No more growing up with memory, history or identity. Feel the ache and feel the pain. Of finding not the things you were once familiar with. Was it here, or over there? Google Map couldn’t even help. Lucy found herself in Times Square.

Of the 21st century then, of the 20th century. But, for us, time moves from left to right in an ever eternal present. No regress and no rest for the weary.

My Cinema Paradiso.

If there were a Dislike button, it would be for Ebola. Give me some Dislikes.

Another Doctor Sans Frontieres has just died, setting back the fight a bit.

People shun you, run away from you and “Like” you not if you got Ebola.

There is no love in and around Western Africa these days, certainly not for the victims.

As to Western Europe and Western US? There hasn’t been love in quite a while.

Our Bi-Centennial Man committed suicide a few days ago. Un-plug me!

Love and laughter, life and lust.

All gone! When you don’t feel connected, you just drift. A social form of suicide.

The allure of success and recognition is not strong enough to sustain R Williams.

Emptiness! How one feels is terribly important. Societies and scientists have studied and discussed about free will. How desperate we need to believe this to keep up social order.

Yes. There was free will in Robin Williams case. Or was there?

Gooooooood Bye Vietnam!

From childhood loneliness to robotic loneliness, a hundred years of solitude.

Tie me up and tie me down. Under a tree and under the sun.

Abandon me not, especially in the time of Ebola.

It’s just an overt excuse. In West Africa or in Western Europe.

No cure for the disease and no cure for the response.

More doctors and more patients will have died by the time we found the vaccine.

But then, will there be love in the time of post-Ebola?

Hundred years of pain. The suffering and superficiality have gone on long enough.

Ebola and Ebony. Cholera and L’Oreal. We move on, smiling for the selfies. And like Narcissus, we press our own Like button, before anyone else gets a chance.

Love in the time of Ebola. Love in the time of virtuality. Still better than its absence .

August is muggy. Full blast indoor A/C or a vacation near the beach.

On the East coast, it’s time for snow birds to arrive back in to town (NY).

For the French to bare it all on the beach.

It got so hot, we even had an earthquake in China.

Disasters spare no one: Haitian or Hawaiian, California Chinese or China Chinese.

Sadness piling up on top of sadness, Malaysian flight on top of another Malaysian flight.

I am an August child whose birthday is often celebrated indoors.

Even when it’s my birthday month, August often ushers in this existential loneliness.

Of summer end. Of separation and sadness.

Might as well get used to it, sadness that is. Bonjour Tristesse!

If one continues in this line of thinking, one would eventually is right i.e. everything shall pass, Summer or Spring, Seasons in the Sun or in the Shade.

A friend is taking up surfing, to make up for lost times.

Bravo!

Meanwhile, I can barely take up reading, to make up for my lost times.

All those lost times of reading the wrong books, meeting the wrong folks (whose life could be read like a book) and doing the wrong things.

You can call it, learning the hard way.

Summer time.

1942. 1968. 1975. First one is about a movie, coming of age. Second, counter-culture movement in SF. And the last one, my first August birthday in Pennsylvania.

All bear significance. All are resonating. Of a time passing. Never to be regained, except for some warm memories they registered in my deepest recess.

Pleasant or unpleasant, these time posts are to be looked back in awe and even anxiety. Will this muggy August make sense when looked back from a future date? Summer sense.

Naively, for my high-school English-speech contest, I submitted “I want to grow up becoming a lawyer”.

My residual statement at the time was “I want to give voice to those who are voiceless…”. In short,  becoming an advocate.

A lot of waters under the bridge since .  Even when God doesn’t smile on my speech theme, I have managed to carry out some of that: helping others to speak up (in refugee transit camps), to learn a second language or how to sell something.

This past week, I noticed how other people practice law:

– Congress is suing the President

– The final verdict was in for the Kim Pham case in Santa Ana.

We have the rule of law written all over our faces, representatives’ or refugees’.

Actually, Kim Pham was a second generation Vietnamese American, born of a refugee family.

She got kicked in the head and died. Her two assailants each gets multi-year Orange County jail sentence.

Lawyers on both sides did give “voices to the voiceless”, or to be more correct, “voice to the dead”.

Since it was a high-profile case, everyone tried hard to stir clear of the race-class mine fields.

As if it had been possible to just have a women-inhuman-to-woman case.

Meanwhile, we have a higher profile case in which the President himself is being sued.

Yes I can.

It is to show that no one is above the law (and as former Harvard Law Review Editor,  President Obama would be the first to know this).

The Three Branches of the Government , constitutionally speaking, in checks and balances.

Bring it on! Politics and Constitutional Law, Pennsylvania Avenue and K Street.

We go through life, oblivious to law and its enforcement (except for the airport security lines).

Until everything all of a sudden looks as if covered with law (not chocolate), from constitutional to civic, court room to board room. We exploit corporate tax loop holes, putting our HQs somewhere else outside of the country, outsourcing work somewhere else outside of the country,yet calling ourselves a Made-in-the- USA company.

It’s August. And Congress will take its summer vacation. Lawyers and paper pushers will be shoring up somewhere in the Hampton or Long Island beaches.

And a lot of “off the cuff” remarks on the summer days, will perhaps be “let’s stick it up to him” instead of “we had joy, we had fun, we had seasons in the sun”.

A grown-up version of  law, justice and equality for all, turns out so different, with shades of grey. than my high-school one.  “Goodbye to you my trusted friends”.

This summer, the worst part for me, is to have already grown up. “When I as a child, I thought like a child…” e.g. “I want to give voice to the voiceless”. Yes, I still can. But …not as a lawyer.

Where is that song now? With 3 avionics accidents (ML17, Taiwanese and Algerian)  in one week.

Glad to have such thing called selective memory. We will soon forget, out of necessity and convenience.

(Last week, people still rushed to the front to board my return flight, completely unaffected by those bad news).

It’s been a long way, century-long, to have experienced experimental crashes (Wright brothers) to accidental crashes (Malaysian and Algerian).

Vital and fatal statistics.

It’s only a matter of when your numbers are up.

Like anything else in life e.g. train, plane or automobile.

Failure teaches us more than victory.

It forces us to re-examine the cause of why we failed.

Mechanical or procedural? Human errors or weather-related?

I remembered those first VoIp calls. Lots of noise, drop calls, fade in and out.

Now we take for granted those voice calls over the internet and its “free of charge” feature.

Google translation is going through those betas. And a host of other apps, games in particular.

Now, that’s an area where a kid can once again sing “I believe I can fly”.

I also notice a large chunk of summer blockbusters, all special-effects.

Ninja Turtles, Transformers. Perhaps the only man who can’t fly this summer is, “The Most Wanted Man” ( main actor: Philip Seymour Hoffman died last year).

We are to let our imagination take us, high up. Above and beyond the three screens: TV, computer and phone .

(in one of the sci-fi movies this summer, I saw a helicopter in the background, carrying large-screen banner, not unlike beach airplane ad banners).

That will be our fourth screen.

Innovation, imagination and insights. Let’s go forward in face of set-backs.

Fight or flight? Let’s stay and fight. May our last battle and battalion advance human cause along the evolutionary chain.

Why I stay with Facebook? (just trying to be counter-view the other opportunist who wrote “Why I leave Facebook”).

It shows me so many new faces everyday. All those flashy selfies, exotic locales and landscapes which one can only dream of.

And that is just from people who know the people I know (not very many).

We are living in a virtual world, playing virtual games (like a grown-up version of  “Barbie World”).

The unreal has become more relevant than the real.

Social and Mobile now commend a large chunk of ad change.

The Big Shift.

We all “think different” as Steve Jobs.

It just that we “flash” more than “think”.

All the once introverted people are showing up for the virtual party on Face.

First, here is my cat.

Then, my chateau.

But people refuse to show the most intimate partner, for fear that in the future, he/she will turn to be his/her x-partner.

That wouldn’t be cool on one’s Social Graph.

Not to mention that your grandchildren might take a peek at your past.

Yet, I still enjoy clicking on a new piece of music by my new friend, Dat, the pianist.

He is a blind musician, yet still posts his composition online every so often.

Now, that’s the kind of Facebook’s flash I applaud.

Go Dat, go Dat.

Thanks for the audio feast on Face.

Saw an ad the other day. Not Leaders Wanted.

Just more assemblers needed, ad put out by I-phone 6 sub-contractors.

A few months ago, the Australian spoke person took some leadership to coordinate the search for the missing flight.

And this week, leadership is again emerged on world stage, to bring about justice and make sense of a senseless, if not, barbarian act, of shooting down a civilian flight.

When no one cares anymore, then it’s the kind of world no one should care to live in.

Precisely because of the weight of crisis that leadership is needed.

If everything is on auto-pilot, why do we even need leaders?

However we chose to view the event of flight ML17, one thing is for sure: innocent blood demands equal justice.

It’s been that way since time beginning.

People went to war (WWI) for much less.

Just watch for two things: bystander apathy and compassion fatigue.

We will assume that leadership is in someone else’s hands, and that even when we care, we experience psychological overload.

Who are we to take on that big an issue? What is it really?

Rogue army? Black-market stockpile of nuclear weaponry?

Cold War reheated?

For citizens, it’s very simple: we need to be fed, clothed and loved. Well, maybe not the last one.

For governments: to protect their people. Elected officials officiate over state funerals such as that of 298 bodies,

should look themselves in the mirror, and ask ” what the hell am I standing here for”?

Day after day, dragging yourselves out of bed and put on those ceremonial suits and ties?

Another round of talks that go no where. Waiting for pension and perks, for peace and prosperity brought about by sheer wishful thinking.

Soft powers still require hard leadership especially in times of complexity and uncertainty. In times like these times. Like NOW. Leaders Wanted!

Everything looks like nails. Every jetliner looks like combat. Those satellite images similar to the ones that were supposed to locate the missing Malaysian flight a while ago, now used to shoot down a 777 of the same fleet.

I am flying tonight. Not sure how safe it is going to be (a few folks, either had missed flight ML17, or couldn’t get on, felt quite fortunate).

If only we can afford to stay put in one place. Louis L’Amour once said that the problem with human being was that he could not stay in one place.

Wanderers we are.

Looking for opportunities and troubles.

For love and safety, ironically, out there in the wild?

Cold war reasserts itself, civilian casualties are the results.

Just as CNN starts to show Cold War series (as if it were History Channel), that relics of that same Cold War reincarnate albeit with a death toll of 298, 80 children and infants included.

A Vietnamese mother and her 2 children were on that fateful flight as well. No more “Tiger Mom”, “minority models” etc…

Just ashes back to ashes.

You may think that this is out there  and doesn’t apply to you and me.

But it is very real to families of those 298.

They were AIDS researchers and writer, lovers and debtors. They maybe very much like you and me, longing to be reunited to loved ones on the other end of the flight.

This makes flight delays all the more bearable.

In the coming days, we will see a Lockerbie-type of tribunal court. Someone somewhere will be the sacrificial lamb. And we will all put it behind. Trying to forget. Until another group, with hammer in hand.

Boys with toys, trigger-happy. Let automation take over and “seek to destroy”. God damn “intelligent” machine, made and used by dumb men.