Thang Nguyen 555

Cultures on Collision Course

recent posts

about

With some short-term relief work in Asia/Africa and long stint in Telecom, Thang also earned a B.A. at Pennsylvania State University. M.A. in Communication at Wheaton Graduate School, M.A. in Cross-Cultural Communication at Gordon-Conwell Seminary, Boston. In addition, he earned a CELTA – classes taken in Hanoi for cultural re-immersion.

Tag: Asia

  • On being a foreigner

    Train, plane or automobile, we all try to get somewhere, point A to point B. Far enough to be looked at as “foreigner”. The Economist has a piece on this subject to highlight the decade of globalization. http://www.economist.com/world/international/displayStory.cfm?story_id=15108690&source=hptextfeature I was surprised to find Vietnam, especially in HCMC and Hanoi, to be very cosmopolitan i.e. a…

  • California Dreaming

    TIME spotlights California on its cover this week. As a country, California would be with the G8 ( between Italy and Brazil, thus displacing BRIC with CRIC  i.e. California, Russia, India and China). Yet it has no world-class soccer team (despite having in-shored Beckham) just yet. That’s said, it is one of the brownest States…

  • Kaizen

    In the 80’s, we saw many books about Japan e.g. Rising Sun, The Japan That Can Say NO. Now, the Most Admired Country list seems to say NO to Japan, and places it at number 5. Versace closed its door there after having sold to all the old people of the laggard group. http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/e5e6a886-b325-11de-ac13-00144feab49a.html (in…

  • Red lanterns

    There is a story on BBC news about an Indian engineer who complains that he only married thrice: “why would the Muslims have all the wives, and me, a Hindu, cannot have multiple marriages” he vented his apparent frustration. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/8224746.stm Truth be told, he was confirmed to have been married at least six times, concurrently.…

  • It’s a good IKEA

    A billion+  prospects. Wow! http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-china-ikea25-2009aug25,0,3900096,full.story IKEA in China. More  a  theme park then a show room. They try, they buy. Today it’s the A/C and ambience. Tomorrow, it will be CHIKEA everywhere (not only the font, but spelling change as well!). One thing China does well is to mass-produce these household items on the scale…

  • Fat pipe, fast food

    FIOS in Triple Play, for $79.00 for the first six months. The last time I looked, it was $100 for the Triple Play package: phone, TV and broadband. In China, kids played until they dropped dead (unwilling to lose their seats at the Internet cafe and online, where supposedly, they were up against competitors from…

  • Asian drivers

    It’s been a long way since Sixteen Candles. In it, we found Long Duk Dong, the male Asian actor, portrayed a Japanese exchange student who wrecked the host family car on a night out “what auto-mobile?” he asked laying on the front lawn at mid morning the next day. Fast forward to today and the…