Tag: Nguyen

Wrong Track

I came across a brief piece about the suicide of an Orange County man. At Orange Metrolink station. Nguyen was his name.

The report said he calmly stood facing the oncoming train and seconds later, got run over. No fuss, no self-preservation.

I also came across that piece about victims of Temple shooting in Wisconsin. One of those people, an old lady, used to work 60-hr week and came there to pray all the time. A regular. A faithful.

Random lives. Random deaths. No grand legacy or leaflets to leave behind.  No “closure” of any kind.

They did not even die for a cause. Just gone, in 6 seconds. That window, between life and death. Close out!

Dream and doubt swallowed in death.

Both deaths were noisy (oncoming train and oncoming bullets).

Suburban deaths. Incomprehensible. Wonder if there were any relatives and loved ones who cared when Nguyen committed suicide that day. Poor train crew. They were trying to stay on schedule. Now with the investigation, and all.

I also read that the PhD student who shot people at the mid-night showing in the movie theater in Aurora, got glowing recommendation from faculty (mature judgment?).

He must have sent them on the wrong track. He must have kept his hair straight, his face composed (unlike the night before, when he went out and had his hair dye bright red).

Train track, academic track and religious track, all on the wrong track.

All happened within a span of a few weeks here in America, the Beautiful.

At least in the case of Nguyen, he did the job himself. He was not a victim of hate crime or anything. Just “calmly and deliberately stepped in front of an oncoming train”. Must have looked at the schedule, and was familiar with the track.

The wrong track that led to death.

I feel sorry for the lady. The laborer (60 hours a week) which wound up with nothing. By the sweat of your eyebrow shall you receive food on the table. She certainly put in more than enough for her shares. And all the hours of faithful prayers.

I hope she RIP. I hope the gentleman who stepped out in front of an Orange County train also RIP. I  hope the shooter get the justice he deserved, since he came highly recommended as “mature”. Now, his lawyer is trying to argue otherwise.

Wrong track!

FOB, forced off the boat

The LA Times, August 15th issue, ran a story about a Vietnamese fisherman in New Orleans. He has faced enough trial and tribulation a man can afford in one life time: boat people, legal immigrant life, Katrina, and now Gulf oil disaster.

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-0731-viet-fisherman-01.jpg-20100816,0,4824071.photo

Captain Nguyen is no ordinary captain. His boat has seen no Treasure Island.

And he wears no eye patch.  From the accompanied photo, I can tell he is a chain smoker whose worry is to take care of his clan.  God and country kind of guy.

Twice displaced hence not qualified for any kind of formal assistance.

“Keep filing out forms” they told him (from the BP make-shift town hall meetings).

I saw one of those make-shift operations during Katrina. Vietnamese “villagers” in New Orleans fled to Hong Kong mall in Houston to seek temporary shelters.  We took care of our own type of spontaneous relief.

Captain Nguyen could very well be among those seeking help back in 2005.

The irony of the story is he is now back in line, once again (third time in his life).

Once “fresh of the boat”, now “forced off his own boat”.

I live in W Palm Beach.  Owning a boat there is a sign of prestige.

In mister Nguyen’s case, the same act of AmericanGod-given right became a liability.  Might as well have it repo.

Options? Not much. Opportunities? Ask the other millions of English-speaking American. (Mr Nguyen is so independent, has been in his own world, that even if offered a regular job, he certainly doesn’t know where to start).

So, he has time to talk to a reporter. Or, “can’t wait for the grass to grow” so he can keep busy.

In his spare time, I bet he ponders ” an unexamined life is a life not worth living”.

And that the boat itself is just a floating timber. It gets you from point A to point B. A vessel. And that vessel when docked doesn’t need navigation.

It’s the passenger that needs direction and destination.

In Mr Nguyen’s case, he doesn’t want to get off his boat. He was forced off.

I hear CCRs “on the Bayou” fading in, husky and strong like people living down there in tornado-zones. And I know, they will survive somehow.  Just like those songs, if played again, still evoke in you and me that “deja vu” of a time when we thought we were invincible. BP and the boat people (bp).

 

the Nguyen

In college, I could just tell when teachers got to my name: they couldn’t pronounce it. To save time, I just said “here”.

This was Penn State, late 70’s, when a name like Carter from Georgia could barely register in Washington Belt Way.

Now a random walk on the web tells me the Nguyen have finally gained some noteriety (not as popular as the Smith or Cosby but familiarity bred comfort).

If you were to google “Nguyen”, you would get Dat Nguyen (used to play the NFL for the Cowboys), Tila (Nguyen) Tequila (every other pictures) and Betty Nguyen (weekend anchor of CNN).  But you will also get Scotty Nguyen (poker face) and one-eye Nguyen (Agent Orange piece disguised under Nguyen),

Lee Nguyen (guitar player) and Colonel Loan’s war-cruelty photo.

The Nguyen dynasty has scattered to the four corners of the earth, evolving and adapting to opportunities and obstacles, not unlike Venture Capitalists, whose few bets made it while many didn’t.

Being in communication, I try to  ” see ourselves as others see us” .  And the best place to start is to Google for this sort of thing. Let’s take Tila to start our “beer summit”.

She was getting into fights while in school. Got put in “Buddhist shut-in” and from there (Texas) went to Hollywood (hopefully not on a Greyhound bus) to realize her American dream.  MTV gave her a contract, and the rest was history. She was quoted at one point saying she would want to be the US ambassador to Vietnam.

Vietnam watch out! Tila is coming (if history repeats itself, this is not the first time a well-known Hollywood actress wanted to grace Hanoi playground. Jane Fonda beat her to the punch). Or in Second Life, Tila will actually become the virtual ambassador if e-citizens elected her using their tokens.

VP Nguyen Cao Ky once said that he wanted to keep his last name so he could come back to Vietnam without sounding like a foreigner. Well, he did.

His daughter took that to the next level: keeping her father’s name in its entirety, while adding and ending it with her  first name (Nguyen Cao Ky + Duyen). She made it as a co-host of Paris By Night video series (celeb life style: got to change who you hang out with, and while at it, reinvent yourself). If history repeats itself, Brad and Angelina beat her to the punch as well (they rode in a scooter before the helmet law came into effect a while back).

So back to our Google search for the Nguyen. Back then, our ancestors weren’t originally Nguyen. The sad truth was, we adapted to the King’s demand and command (conformity and allegiance).  Nguyen has morphed into a generic code,

with mixed connotations: part Chinese, part French, part US, and now the Seven Seas.

The Nguyen are now inter-marrying (as in my families), and the third generation of Nguyen might still bear the name, but the gene mutation has morphed beyond recognition (unless kids wear “ao dai”  during Tet). My nephew and niece inter-married

and produced offerings of mixed heritage. Our Thanksgiving at times, looks like a UN Security Council, deciding on the fate

of Syrian Chemical Weapon Disposal.

Maybe someday, they will put a Nguyen in the White House. One term would be fine. Let’s see if he/she can do better than his/her predecessors.

Or the system (which according to the latest CNN poll, 86% said the government is broken) itself not only helps this future Nguyen look Presidential, but also renders him/her ineffectual. I broke my arm on my first month learning Kung-Fu. It hurt like hell. Took a long time to heal. Perhaps something broken can be healed. First: recognition of the pain. Second: be patient. Third: put on a cast to speed up recovery. In my case, it was a long summer staying indoors.

We won’t hear much about  US might or Exceptionalism in near term.

Friedman (of the Flat World) beat me to it in his op-ed “fat years, lean years”. Or like Chairman of HSBC is coming out with “Good values”, a call for reflections. It would be interesting to see the turn-out in Las Vegas Caesars (Coliseum  built for Celine Dion, whose Roman original motif was blood sports) to hear Former President Bill Clinton (who charged for a talk about “global interdependence” themes).

That broken arm the summer of my Junior High (while “tous les garcons et les filles de mon age, …se promene dans la rue) set me on a different course ever since: pause to think and be reflective . The US and the Nguyen got something in common: we both had been very ambitious to the point of having an illusion of grandeur until the crash. I and many other Nguyen knew it well: even in and through a worst-case scenario, we have managed to get PhD’s, started companies, invented products and run for office.

I still know when that slight pause came during roll call. But these days, it just my first name that they had trouble pronouncing. If only they knew that it meant “win”, as in win-win solution. At least, we got pass the Nguyen part. Just Google them, and find out for yourselves. It’s the same story you would find in NYT today about a Hasidic matriarch who came and had 2000 descendants. It’s the story that repeats itself time and time again here in America. It’s your story. It’s our story.