Thang Nguyen 555

Cultures on Collision Course

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With relief work in Asia/Africa in and after graduate school, Thang’s 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 has been certified with a CELTA – classes taken in Hanoi for cultural re-immersion.

Tag: China

  • Saigon Tech Talent

    It could have been a waiting scene at Acoustics, Saigon Rock Alley. Except for the instruments and the bands. They were CEO’, CTO and Venture Capitalist. Not Bar Camp, nor Web Wednesday. It’s Mobile Monday, held on Thursday night. The cool, the calm and the co-ed. They were all there. Web to Mobile and back…

  • Celebrating Love in Saigon

    Consumer confidence is up. Spending is up. Cards, chocolate and crocodile (over beer). I thought it must be Christmas or Tet all over again. Hunting down a ticket for A House in the Alley took me to two theaters, with the only available seats at 11:20PM. Way pass my bedtime. Oh well, I tried. Supporting Vietnamese…

  • Slippery Saigon

    Someone told me that the rainy season here would end soon. Yet it is raining still. Outdoor activities like kung-fu class, xe-om, beer stalls all ceased. I seeked shelters . The trick to walk safely here is to step firmly with one foot into the sidewalk, not at its edge (which slopes down to facilitate…

  • Crossed markets

    Forbes kept praising the success of luxury brands in China while web sites in Vietnam and China mentioned “Pepper Spray on Black Friday”. Chinese-made goods, sold as lost leaders, to the first 100-early-bird shoppers. Planned scarcity. Hype-creation. Sensational, sizzling headline-grabbing video op for YouTube. We need attention. The media need it even more. (For some counter-intuitive…

  • ICT talent in a flat world –

    re-post from 2011. This past year, things are getting heated up with “friend-shoring” chip manufacturing with Biden’s visit. ________________________________________________________________________________ If it hadn’t been for the slightly warm temperature, the water bottle that bore “QTSP” (Quang Trung Software Park) and the simulcast headsets, I would have thought I was back in 2005 at  a similar conference in…

  • Vietnam, next Hong Kong?

    On my first trip to Hong Kong summer 1981, I was taken in by the energy and entrepreneurial spirit there. A camera shop (pre-Iphone era) next to a watch shop (again, pre-Ipad era) next to an electronics store.  Shoppers from India, Europe, Australia were all there, bustling about. Double-deck buses (still under British colonial rule) moved…

  • Micro Trend, Macro World

    Economy of scale, strength in numbers, linear growth. Out of the 7 Billion of us, almost half live in the cities (hints: pollution, traffic congestion, high crime rate, time crunch, shrinking quality of life, more opportunities but unsustainable). I read about China’s sewer cooking oil, crocodiles roaming the streets of Bangkok, and tent city on Wall…

  • Let them visit

    In “Imagined in America“, Friedman reminded us that 30 years ago, Hong Kong used to be a manufacturing colony. Today its economy consists of 97-percent service, with a booming tourism industry (mostly visited by Mainland Chinese). The second point was, America too can become a tourist Mecca that lures 300 million cash-hording middle-class Chinese. Already we saw the influx…

  • Inching back to life

    When we face a critical juncture on the road, we need to be decisive. A liberal arts training doesn’t hurt either. Even when two people arrived at the same conclusion, liberal art thinkers insist that between A and B, a straight line might not be the best alternative. Just the shortest. As nature would agree, it favors…

  • In the mirror

    Among Dylan’s many memorable lines is “you don’t need the weatherman to tell you which way the wind is blow-in”. Even without the weatherman, we can feel that things are at a boiling point. Like in the movie “the Network”, people start to open their windows and bell out “I am mad like Hell, and…