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: Paris

  • Softer side of Soft Power

    In the end of A Christmas Holiday, our Somerset Maugham‘s character went back to his middle-class comfort zone but quite aware of his “plastic” existence. This was right after he had spent a week in Paris, meeting Lydia, a Russian gypsy whose suffering life was nothing Charlie had ever imagined. I couldn’t help think of…

  • No Spring attached

    Having lived in coastal cities for quite some time, I forgot what’s like to wait for Spring. We need Winter as a set up for Spring.  Winter-Spring contrast is more striking than that of Summer-Fall. We also anticipated Spring more than Fall (some even wish for endless summers). Vietnamese literature and lyrics (Gold music) nevertheless, serenade Fall and…

  • the Bi-Lingual Mind

    Those of us who move back and forth in between two worlds can relate to this. Every time we pick a language to speak or write (E or V in my case), we subscribe to a whole new context e.g. away from tutoyer to address someone as big bro, younger sis  as practiced in the…

  • World on wheels

    You want to see wheels at work, you come to Saigon. (Baby) strollers, scooters, (food) stalls, all on wheels. But instead of having you walk up to a vending machine, here the merchandise come to you. Ladies in cone hats would walk about with all sorts of knickknacks on their shoulders: toe clippers, wallets, key…

  • How do they know?

    Have you ever wondered how some songs deliver just the right emotion? How do they know what’s relevant and resonating? Chicago‘s If You Leave Me Now, for instance. On these blogs, we often mentioned the eccentric, the peculiar and oddities. Rarely do we put much effort articulating those feelings and God forbid, meltdown or breakdown (Newtown,…

  • Madonna and child

    Not the Seine in Paris. But Rach Nhieu Loc in Saigon. She wore a cone hat. Baby tanning in the morning sun, resting in her bosom. The other hand, she checked her messages from a mobile phone. It’s  Thanksgiving in Vietnam. People  have a lot to be thankful for. It’s now ranked second on Happy Country…

  • Humble dreams

    Here at UVT, students wear chef uniforms to school. Dressed up for the part. They are to finish their last leg in Hospitality and Tourism at one of the Australian Universities. Humble dreams, yet tangible outcomes. I respect young people who knew what they want to be when they grow up/old. At their age, my family…

  • Teen boys’ dreams

    It’s all there on my friend’s web site: the seating lay-out in the classroom (three jr-high students to a table) I drew up 40 years ago. When you click on a name, it pops up a few byline and that friend’s mushy words about “summer time” or “we will never be this good as a…

  • Load-lightening with clouds

    Load balancing, redundancy, follow-the-sun operation centers etc.. to be topped up by cloud. We did that with business phones (Centrex), and mainframes. More than a third of North American phones are now smart phones, with computational power not unlike earlier version of our desktops. When Turing and Shannon conceived a  “thinking machine”, they were just happy if…

  • Growing old in post 9/11 era

    Younger generations are growing up digital. I grow old in post 9/11. We were bumping along, thinking the dot.com burst was the story of the Century. Then, the unthinkable happened. Brave were the men on United Flight 93. Our lives have never been the same since (collective survivor’s guilt).  An act of outright violence needed to…