Tag: Carl Jr

My edu-tour to Vietnam

When you are on a tourist visa, you have to keep renewing it every three months.

Each stamp was like a certificate of completion of my self-education. I learned that:

– my friend’s music students, blind or bright, respected and adored their dead teacher

– dead people, in casket, still get his/her last chance to bow and say goodbye to the alley

– everybody is in motion, rain or shine. Those who work in A/C environment also pound at the keyboards, hence fingers in motion

– individualism will have a hard time here

– living and working in Vietnam equals to living and working inside a fish bowl

– one force gets multiple counter-forces, in all directions, hence, defies physics as we know it

– people lock their doors so carefully that it seems as if they locked themselves in more than lock someone out

– music and movies somehow freezeframed as if the Americans had never left (Woman in Love,  I’d love you to want me…)

– peddlers would ride their three-wheeled stalls down the street while on a mobile phone: double-mobility

– you lose a lot of weight while here (sweat and luckily, not tears)

– you will be approached half a dozen times a day by lottery ticket sellers or xe-om

– Carl Jr and Burger King are here but not Mc Donalds (and not because Vietnam is more anti-MacDonalisation than the French).

– people ask why you live and eat alone. My loneliest meal was having a steak and fries just because my appointment screwed up

– consumerism has not saturated the place with high-margin products and services: spa, sweets and sporting goods

– unless you are an established brand name, forget trying to get in now. Amway all the way.

– you can get live entertainment every night : singers on scooters would bar-hop, while in-house musicians play for time

– another generation of kids are growing up watching flat-screen TV‘s and I-pads touch screens. In twenty years, with full effect of global osmosis in tech and commerce, you will not learn as much from your six months here as I have about the old and the new.

24/7 world. Outsource that software testing project. Fly here to check the lab out. Do what you have to, while it’s still fertile. While the water is still lukewarm. Once things are set, you will be just another globe trotter looking for a trophy to bring home. After a stop at a burger joint, of course. Please don’t eat alone. Still not acceptable then as it is now.

The Vietnam that could and will

You can feel it. The energy, aspiration and action.

I haven’t seen an idle person here in Saigon. Even people with great disabilities crawl on their hands and knees, through rough and uneven gutters to sell lottery tickets or variety of snacks.

Everybody is proud of their native son: Ngo Bao Chau, math genius.

The country is rooted firmly in the past, yet yearning to be integrated and connected to rest of world (hip hop, fashion).

Garment has been upgraded and sold at Macy’s. Now, it is its turn for playing the “bad guy” (after Bangladesh and S American countries, whose “low labor” have supplied over-weight Western clothing excess before Vietnam even got there).

But here in Vietnam, it’s all small businesses, low-skill : coffee shops, then pure-bean coffee shops. I sat at Rain, and saw tables turn over quickly. High Margin.

Just pour your heart into it.

The music is ear-deafening. Louder than the disco near by where servers would come, one by one, to cheer you up and to toast.

Before the night is out, you are so beat, so broke (since there were so many people pouring your drinks, all deserved a tip). Not unlike Vegas, you admitted to having a good time.: what happened here stayed here.

I am not the only Viet Kieu often discovered this secret irony: the very place that we ran away from, is the scene we yearn to come back to.

Like Jewel, who was once sleeping in car in San Diego, now wants to set up residence near the Mexico border.

We are creatures of habits who tend to follow the path of least resistance (the only way to test this out is for me to travel to Havana some day, and see if I like it there more than Saigon).

Cuban Americans in Miami are probably going home en mass these days.

I have seen them shop at Outlets such as Sawgrass Mills and Dolphin Mall.

Back to RAIN. The owner or manager was young, hip and alert. He made sure guests got situated, servers take orders and tables cleaned very quickly. Every one dressed up as hip as could be. Just to sit at a trendy cafe. Reminded me so much of my high-school days, when we tried various clothing styles and any cool English phrases.

The high school I went to, once renamed something else, now has got its original name back. The round-about near my school never got repainted as neatly the Catholic church nearby. But I understood for the first time the significance of statues and memorials: they stood the test of time. Bookends in the sand of time.

I took that path home for four years. Sometimes just walking, biking or hitching ride. We lived life selflessly. Listened to Steely Dan‘s Do It Again or Carly SImon’s You’re So Vain.

Now we are scattered to the seven seas. Many went abroad on labor contracts, Others scholarships. But when they do come back, unlike my visitor’s status, they will stay to build a Vietnam we have yet to experience. (As of this edit, I look forward to our min-reunion this afternoon at of all places, another cafe).

Best days are ahead.

Imagine the possibilities. Imagine solving the kind of math Ngo Bao Chau did. The ingenuity is there. Just give it time.

Just harness the energy, and focus on the goal of not falling off the competitiveness chart. Carl Jr, Starbucks and soon MacDonald are all here. And according to Friedman of The World is Flat, once two nations are fully MacDonalized, they are unlikely to be at war.  The last chopper left Saigon 38 years ago. Still, everyone rushes about as if it were their last scooter that is leaving Vietnam.