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I used to rely on researchers like the Tofflers (Future Shock) to “see” into the future. For instance, the pro-sumer trend, the mismatching speeds among various sectors ( IT, Financial, Educational, Governmental…in that order). Lately, all I came across in Futurism was 2012 prophecy . Like it or not, this year will have come down as a…
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We will hear a lot of ABBA‘s Happy New Year this week. But “the Winner Takes It All” speaks directly to our zeo-sum society. You lose, I win. There are only limited “chips” on the table. Scarcity causes rising values. Hot air also rises. Like New Year’s champagne bubbles. It’s time for a 2012 wrap up.…
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You want to see wheels at work, you come to Saigon. (Baby) strollers, scooters, (food) stalls, all on wheels. But instead of having you walk up to a vending machine, here the merchandise come to you. Ladies in cone hats would walk about with all sorts of knickknacks on their shoulders: toe clippers, wallets, key…
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I brave heavy traffic to get to the book store on Nguyen Hue again. Just to find out if Murukami’s 1Q84 part II in Vietnamese was available. It hadn’t. Back and forth for nothing. But the two interwoven stories must have that crisscrossing point, a happy ending. Can’t wait to find out. And that was…
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On NYT‘s Op-Ed‘s Pages, I found a piece “Asians are too smart for their own good”. The author brought up a historical parallel between Jews’s admission at Ivy League schools back then, and Asian‘s now. She neglected another important parallel: Japanese-American got put in internment camps not too long ago. With BRIC‘s second generation, growing up in America,…
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Since her debut, Skeeter Davis with her hit “The End of the World” has etched in our collective memory. Since then, we have gone through a series of doomsday threats: ICBM‘s, fate of the Earth, hot and Cold War, now Doomsday 2012). In Murakami’s latest 1Q84, our principal female character, who once was a Personal Trainer,…
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Tragedy and triumph seem to go hand in hand. Past pain could be paralysing yet addictive. Those who couldn’t get over it end up going back to it. Not for the broken experience but for the context where pain first occurred. When shattered, we threw the baby out with the bath water. In coming back, with time…
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Unlike America where suffering is well hidden behind locked doors, here in Vietnam, it is in your face: lottery ticket sellers. They could be an under-age child, a blind man, or the worst case, a young man who dragged himself (both feet paralyzed) along an extremely crowded street peddling tickets. Even the Cu Chi tunnel,…
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I walked by a shop today and I saw a girl holding a knife, crying. She was peeling onion for the restaurant. Artificially induced tears. Not triggered by sad emotion. Real, nevertheless. It made me appreciate behind-the-scene people (since I happened to have breakfast with real onion, the same kind this girl was peeling). Nickel-and-dime…
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Thang Nguyen 555 