Thang Nguyen 555

Cultures on Collision Course

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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: New Year

  • Contagious innovation

    Last week, I installed a new Search engine (w/ a slash). Today, there is a whole new browser altogether. Rockmelt. It does improve Facebook quite a bit. Steven Johnson calls this phenomenon (of one bright idea led to another), the adjacent possible. It’s like my New Year resolution of hanging out with positive people to…

  • summer breeze

    Rolling black-outs in the city occur here quite often. So it’s refreshing to ride through District 1, where the Saigon River occasionally delivers some wind-tunnel effect. Lightings are up to prepare for the upcoming holidays. Bakeries are setting up kiosks everywhere in town, pushing their Moon cakes. We got Givral joining the confectionary space traditionally belongs to…

  • strong as an ox

    I am back to the land where people work animals into daily speech: – strong as an ox – wrinkle as a monkey – dumb as a cow. Everything gets used more than once (recycled): plastic bags, banana leaves. In Understanding Vietnam ( through literature) published by Berkeley Press, the author, after surveying many well-known pieces, came to see that…

  • Traditions: collide and compromise

    East meets West. New Year and Valentine’s. Families vs lovers. In Vietnam, with a strong Confucian foundation, filial quality stands above all else. So on that first day of this year of the Tiger, sons and daughters are expected to show up first thing at the parents’ door steps. Then, in the evening, this year…

  • Amuse ourselves to the next level

    Neil Postman didn’t see the rise of game online when he penned “Amuse ourselves to death”. But he was on to something worth discussing: we are heading toward becoming a couch-potato nation or in China, Internet-addict camp. When Chinese kids get sent to these internet addict camps, we witness another unintended consequence of our high-tech…

  • 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…