Tag: History

Heterogeneous country, homogeneous thought

Google CEO blurted out what we all know (that tech moves at 3 times faster than other business sectors, who in turn, are 3X than the government). We are analog-built e.g. eating,  buying and thinking habits, while techies thought processing power is on a different plane e.g. Cold-War B53 bomb in TX is finally being disassembled and junked.

A Swedish public health expert gave a TEDx talk some years ago. He put up some slides which span 200 years just to show how entrenched we are in yesterday’s thinking (e.g. that women in emerging nations have a lot of children while the opposite is now true). In short, formative years continue to cloud our lenses (or our teachers’ who got their data from post- War textbooks). Another stat: more deaths from suicide in the US (mostly men in their mid-50’s) than from automobile accidents. Or more Christian in China, than the membership of the Communist Party.

Or  thanks to rural broadband, the creative class in the US can finally afford housing and pursuit their passion, let’s say in software programming, in 2nd-tier cities like Seattle, Austin (as opposed to New York and San Francisco).

One more thing. Back in the days when America found it hard to accept a President who was Catholic

and the only “Muslim” brother who left his last name blank (X). The Big Three in Detroit, Big Three in Broadcasting, and a healthy middle class, with Union wages. Now, things get splintered of, with MNC’s paying zero domestic tax (GE), and CDO peddlers paying no COD (it’s still a mystery that Madoff was the only fall guy – whose rehearsed bio was …”I was an underdog when I started in brokerage, so I got to have my revenge at ‘them'” ” we contemplated suicide but it’s our son that followed it through). The same tax codes hasn’t been 21st-century compliant enough to catch clever white-collar looters.

Meanwhile, across the pond, it will take another three decades for China’s branding to rise (The Chinese Dream) just as it has taken them 3 decades to ramp up manufacturing and exports. Reverse engineering will be followed by reverse branding. Their state machinery will be hard at work to take apart every element that make Cola and IBM global brands.

(try to top Steve Jobs, the marketer who still got marketed in his death: simple and elegant cover featuring his signature stare).

First wave will be tourists. Second wave, engineering students . Third wave, marketing catalysts, Huawei and Haier, try to pry open the US-EU domestic markets (foreign in their perspective). At today’s speed, even Toyota with its continuous improvement still can’t compete with revived brands like VW.  It seems that John Le Carre is not the only one whose career and mindset are stuck in Cold War era. Cuba still has 1950’s automobiles crowding the streets. At least, we must admit they don’t make things like that any more. Should have kept jobs in Indiana, and not India.

Things were moving quite rapidly at the bottom line, and slow at topline.

Juxtaposing

It just so happens that I am reading Matterhorn and Love Like Hate one after another. The former depicts the Vietnam War from a GI‘s perspective, the later from a Vietnamese viewpoint.

Coincidentally, people depicted in both novels came across as victims of an uncalled-for conflict and whose lives were disrupted and devastated. I found glimpses of truth in these novels: camaraderie, self-transformation and shifting policies (Matterhorn crew depended on choppers for medivac and ration drops, Viet Kieu in Love Like Hate depends on Boeing for home visit).

One can’t wait to get home,  state side (after the drafted tour of duty), the other, can’t wait to save up for the next visit (to show off).

Long ago, I had an idea for a movie script. I called it “OK Salem”, after wartime  popular street greet (it’s either Pall Mall or Salem).

The two central characters in my imaginative “OK Salem” are a lieutenant like Mellas and a shoe-shine boy (like the sidekick kid in Raiders of the Lost Ark). The two befriended and bonded (communicated mostly in numbers e.g. number 1, number 10).

Later, the street kid drifted to America and made it through college. The veteran, meanwhile, turned homeless. A chance encounter brought the two together, albeit with a role reversal. Now, moving on to the other side of the Pacific for a mis-en-scene, each serves as a mirror for the other’s former self.

I could never finish my script, since it is a work in progress (struggling writers all say that). But I know many are still living in the shadow of America’s lost war.

Matterhorn was said to be an epic novel, thirty years in the works. In the novel, there were occasional race and class in-fightings. I felt the exhaustion just trying to imagine what’s like to follow these Marines deep into the jungle of futility.

And ironically, in Love Like Hate, I found sub-texts of in-group discrimination 

(Viet Kieu against the native and vice versa).

To enjoy both novels which cover same region and same time span helps put the war in perspectives (Apocalypse Now 2.0). To read these two novels side by side, is analogous to see “OK Salem” on my desk (unlikely coupling brought together in war).

I know many of us are sore losers (and sore winners) frozen in time (with occasional relapses). I have walked pass many campaign signage in Little Saigon, whose sidewalks have been used as platforms for frequent war rematch.

I am not sure there will ever be real winners in war. But it sure looks like Matterhorn will endure as a safe repository of memories of a place and time far away, yet whose vested emotions remain so close to the heart.

Even mine.

seeing daughter

My father often went off to see his daughter, my half-sister. My brother tried to see his son from a previous marriage every few years or so (coast to coast).

Now I found myself in the same situation: seeing my little girl whom I took back from the hospital 19 years ago. I am sure she is just as excited as I am.

We won’t miss a beat. Those DNA resemblance.

But the social setting is going to be different. It’s going to be a third place, neither home nor work place.

So I chose Ben and Jerry. At least, that’s where I used to take her. Small vanilla, in the cup.

I won’t feel awkward. I will feel like I am in touch with my old self.

We anchor ourselves in people and places, even as time moved on. In hard times, we got demoted to the lowest level of Maslow hierarchy of need: survival.

I know I live on through my daughters. They love life, and laugh with friends. Both of them show my outlook on life i.e. no matter what happens, don’t let the world rob you of your smile.

Face tomorrow with optimism and not self-sabotage.

Appreciate the past for what it is, but not letting legacy dictate the terms.

Never get yourself into a box (eventually, one might have to, but still with the option of having one’s ash scattered into the seven seas).

I don’t know what I will say to her today. Most of my lessons, she already learned. I cannot help her prevent heart-break or headache. Time and Tylenol will do.

I can only be there, surviving on my term and timetable. And I know, like her, I need a father who will mark the passage of time, by his unique reaction to stimuli. Some fathers reacted worse than others. Most try their best to live up to this parental role.

I am proud to say I have tried my best. I hope I have earned my stripes.

The rest, I leave to chance. After all, I was on my own at her age, facing extreme uncertainties and ill-fated future . I made it OK. And I know, I know, hers won’t be the same. It certainly is going to be better.

So, my meeting will punctuate not with a goodbye or good luck, but with congratulations for her sure and certain victories. I see them even before she comes to realize it. That’s what father is for (to mark historical context).

I bet my life that she will do me proud.

P.S. As of this edit, I see the younger one over Fourth of July. Same DNA. Same tempo.

She likes corn and peaches. We went to Water Park. Got sun burned but a warming heart.

Time will destroy yet heal at the same time. My mistakes, your lessons. I took her to visit my old house, old school and old neighborhood. I was at that age, at that tumultuous time. Presidents were assassinated, upheaval everywhere.

I was growing up real fast. Got a good dose of cold reality in my face and the future seemed less certain with each day.

How can you explain the Vietnam War to a ten-year-old? The past can only be understood from the future. At the present time, even with Presidential archives and declassified materials (on top of leaked Pentagon Papers), scholars still debate and dialogue.

Oh well. All eyes and ears are on the Egyptian scene and streets. The urge to splurge has moved somewhere else.

As long as ammunition is spent, and human lives wasted. Such is the affair of our world, our post Cold-War world.