Tag: Good Morning Vietnam

Caught in the thick of rain

It’s not Les Parapluis de Cherbourg , or Catherine DeNeuve with her trench coat.

Just anything over the head to stay, well, less wet.

We got out of the pool, just to be wet all over again.

Tropical summer.

Impeding traffic and time planned.

Here in Vietnam, it takes a lot just to stay cool and dry.

Survivalist and minimalist.

Yet, magician is coming in town for three days of show.

Guy Kawasaki will also be here, to tell his Standford basket ball story.

And the controversial Bob Dylan was also here a while ago.

Jane Fonda started it all (by visiting Hanoi), then Bob Hope and Raquel Welch in the South.

From then, it’s like, you got to make a stop at the once-a-battle-field, to gain street cred.

Bill Gates, Mark Zuckeberg, Robert De Niro, Brad and Angela have all made this stop.

Mind you. It’s not a major airline hub.

But famous people want it incognito (The Pitts visited Con Dao Island, once a French prison).

I am sure these people got hit by the heat, the dust and the rain.

Call it “Roughing it in Vietnam”.

Their own Matterhorn.

To feel the Sorrow of War.

The  sadness of summer.

The frustration of dream unfulfilled.

What made people leave the comfort of their own homes, to come to a God-forsaken place.

Traffic is everywhere, especially at the French Colonial Roundabout.

You can’t even stand it, if it’s in Paris.

Yet people endure and emerge.

Having tried it hard to play catch up since 1985 and after, the country has been on the path of growth.

The trajectory went nicely for about twenty odd years, until recently.

Then, the rest is what is taken place now.

With its own “valley of death”.

Too much growth heats up inflation.

Too slow, the economy might crash.

It takes a village, albeit without the young people who had already migrated to urban centers, to come to term with modernity and progress.

Even with the best malls and fastest fast foods, no one can discount the force of nature.

So it rains, pouring rain.

And everyone dashes in and out of traffic trying to stay dry, to survive.

Nature, and human nature, are both blessing and curse.

Geography aside, human spirit and its resilience is all that’s left and working for this country.

I can’t hear the sound track of “It’s a wonderful world” today as played in Good Morning Vietnam.

I hear the chewing gum commercial of Rhythm of the Rain. And maybe Happy Together, to sell some Heineken, good to drown down one’s sorrow, amidst of misery, man-made or otherwise.

I love

Our own Duc Huy has sung “Toi yeu…nhung loi noi thanh that, toi yeu ly ca-phe buoi sang” (I love sincere comments, .. morning cup of coffee). So do I. Especially when it’s cappuccino prepared with care and passion by our UVT Hospitality students. They even brought it up to my office (perk!).

I love “the dog says Good-night” in Wonderful World by Louis Armstrong.

I love Shubert whom my Dad adored. I love “Ao Dai” my mom used to wear.

I love Good Morning Vietnam with the aerial shot of the chopper leaving the lush-green rice field.

I love little children with innocent eyes, arms wide-spread in front of mom’s Vespa (thinking it’s they who “fly” the vehicles).

I love the man- on the balcony across the alley- who squats and spreads his arms as if he were a Master of ancient martial arts.

I love Au Marche (Cho Hoa Hung) with “le poisson glisse” (fish that glow in the sun ).

I love grandma types who think her savings would make a difference in the clan’s future.

I love Security Guards (in Vietnam, it’s big business) who know everything that happens in the company.

I love back-stage Rockers who can’t wait for their set.

I love Accountants and HR, who feel important and needed when others are hired and fired.

I love people, places and purposes.

Let’s do it.

It’s a wonderful world.

The coffee by the way is cappuccino.

Can you imagine if I had had something else this morning.

TGIF.

Goodbye Saigon

Last night I said goodbye to a good friend. He was going back to California. We sat and listened to Louis Armstrong’s What a Wonderful World (Vietnamese singer but if you closed your eyes you would think the black legend was there in person). I recalled a scene from Good Morning Vietnam whose subjective shot of a chopper take off from the lush paddy field of Vietnam country side.

It’s hard enough to befriend then having to say goodbye.

Today a graduate from our school also had his goodbye at the airport.

Australia-bound. Health-care job. Brain-drain. Foreign currency gain. Such as fate of emerging countries whose citizens went abroad on guest-worker visas (Philippines and Thailand).

When I left the city for the first time – I thought it was for good.

No preparation. No Visa. Just take off.

I managed to stop and say goodbye to my best friend.

But that was it.

Seeing this young man with best friends at Departure Gate stirred up some envy (good emotion) in me.

After all there should be a proper way to bid farewell.

We are built with innate desire to connect.

To be torn apart from the land of birth and tossed into the wild unprepared is akin to suicide.

Yet it happened to the best of us .

Strange land (wheat vs rice) strange custom (football vs soccer), culture (fast food vs slow cooking) strange measurement (british vs metric) and strange socialization (the wave).

People might be overly friendly. But that was just customary. Beneath the facade lies an iron core: don’t get near me – stay away from me.

The loneliness of being a stranger in a strange land, of leaving the familiar (identity) for the unfamiliar (a Social Security number).

The rejection one gets when trying so hard to bend the new surrounding after one’s own image.

The abandonment after years of trying to integrate oneself into the mainstream (anglicized names, or first name first in reverse order of the old).

It could be exhausting. No wonder tourists found themselves on Saigon‘s Main Street (Dong Khoi) whose shops conveniently catered to their taste: beer – beef- and R&B (I even overheard California Dreaming last night at Bier Garden).

One cannot appreciate a place or a person until one experienced total loss. No one misses the well until it is dry up.

I love My Saigon on the double because I thought I had lost it.

Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained.

Despite the dust and noise I have experienced during my re-entry.

No lush green  field like in Good Morning Vietnam.

But I love it. For I had once thought I would never get to see it again.

Now I cherish the pavement and the monument.

Someday I hope to convey this lost/found sentiment to a wider audience.

But for now …I think to myself ……What a Wonderful World.

Flowers on concrete

It’s time to celebrate. Harvest time.

City folks here in Vietnam go home where beer and Banh Chung (Bean Cake) are waiting, while country folks truck in their flowers and fruits in the opposite direction to sell in the city.

This year, we don’t see the return of H5N1. So eat on. Chicken and ducks.

A friend of mine has an orchid farm in Da Lat. He could hardly come down for a visit . Too busy.

I am glad for him. Harvest time. The dead even got their joss paper money burned by the living as Holiday spending spree.

We chatted about cemetery in the States vs here in Vietnam. People did not know that in New Orleans, LA ; people were buried in stack-up tombs (below sea level, which occasionally broke the dyke as happened during Katrina).

The French left their architectural signatures both here in Vietnam and elsewhere like in New Orleans, Montreal and Cote d’Ivoire.

In Paris, they managed to keep traffic out of the city.

Here in Saigon, people  build out which means more congestion even when commercial trucks are restricted to off-peak hours).

Young students are eager to go home. This will ease traffic for a few weeks.

Perhaps there will be enough space for flowers to be sold on concrete sidewalks.

Flowers remind city folks of “Green Field”, lush country as seen in “Good Morning Vietnam” (soundtrack by  Louis Armstrong’s What a Wonderful World). Those green fields got sprayed years ago with Agent Orange, whose long-term destructive consequences are still being sorted out.

Yet, lovers still “parking” in the parks, vendors still selling bouquets (for households to decorate their shrines).

A Vietnamese New Year song aptly says it all “Wishing the farmers with great harvest and young lovers their love nests. So let’s toast” (notice the imagery : harvest and nest etc..). Tet is inclusive, not just for city folks, or just the living. It’s democratized to include the afterlife population.

With the dead and undead join in, concrete or chemical can’t stop the sprouting of flowers on concrete.

Tales of a Recession

Two men were caught on surveillance camera for stealing $2000 worth of Victoria Secret panties.

http://www.wpbf.com/news/22568081/detail.html

73-year-old Tampa man was arrested last week for robbing a bank to pay his mortgage.

In California, a unionized plumber got laid off, now sleeps in his truck.

When the city of Tustin laid off people, an employee, a Vietnamese man, jumped from the municipal building to his death.

Meanwhile, Congress is doing business as usual (filibustering), among other things, a compromised job bill.

As of this edit, it is shut down (first in 17 years).

A bunch of people are selling their memoirs (“On the Brink”, “Too Big To Fail“, “the Quants“) for fear that a recovery will mean a faded public memory of the fiasco.

At least, there has been a face and a name that went down in history with this uncertain time: Madoff.

Every civilization manages to “crucify” someone for the collective sin we all committed.

With that behind us (Ash Wed is coming up, so it’s fitting to contemplate this morbid human tendency to scapegoat), we can go on pretending life is beautiful.

I could not let news like “students in Central Vietnam got scarred when long-buried bomb exploded” slip by without reflecting on what has been done to that country.

In “Good Morning Vietnam“, we were shown a lush-green rice field shot from a moving helicopter, and the voice track was “It’s a wonderful world” just to underline it with a sense of irony.

I guess during this Recession, a lot of us (1 million Telecom veterans) will never find a job in our field (which no longer exists in the traditional sense- unless we acted young and zany, with a frequent commute between “campuses” by bike like googlers”), job bill or not.

Maybe we should start thinking out-of-the-box. Some men in Florida did. The older one got caught. The other two got away. I bet their adrenaline level was pumping high when finally safe inside their get-away vehicle. Try to recover those V-Secrets loot as “untainted” evidence of a crime.