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: Paul McCartney

  • Music was saved

    When Steve Jobs came up with his 99-cent song idea, he saved musicians from the curse of piracy. It’s all in the ether. But musicians get paid, however long the tail. Better than nothing at all. More people get to hear those beautifully written pieces. I walked by a coffee shop yesterday. On its walls…

  • Long Winding Road

    To your door…… I woke up to a Friday. Not any Friday. But a birthday Friday. Long and winding road. Like a graph, your life can be “manipulated” to make it a more positive-trending (not Bell-shaped). Depends on how you look at it. People have said that President Obama looks older than when he first…

  • Play element

    We seem to have lost touch with the play aspect in life and work. I am thinking of John Lennon and Steve Jobs at the moment. Both pursued their passion, and both were dead. One married interracially, the other just loved all things simple (even foods). They were famous, and still are, although they could not…

  • Strange sounds, familiar shores

    Instead of “I woke up to the sound of music, Mother Mary comes to me…” like Paul McCartney, I woke up to strange sounds these days: peddlers who use “low tech” au parleur (bull horn) mounted on bicycles or tri-cycles (selling boot-legged CD‘s). In fact, it was my first time got chased by pleasant sound from…

  • Faith in humanity

    A graduate of Penn State, I related well to the scenes from the Deer Hunter, set in an industrial town of Pennsylvanian. Smokestacks on the slope, familiar faces and friends and the “Welcome Home” sign for returning soldiers from a distant war. But unlike other wars before and since, this one was controversial.  It showed when the main character,…

  • Choppers that chop the seas

    The news of Premier Nguyen Cao Ky passed away brought back a long time passing. In my youth, the sound of hovering helicopters was as common as street vendors’ chants. On the war’s last day, ambassador, flag, ground-keepers, pilots and anything that moved, tried to get out to International Waters . Buses, barges and yes, choppers. Lone…

  • Imagine, again

    By now, we all have seen the picture of Congresswoman Giffords, in glasses, recovering from a near fatal shooting. Let’s rewind to 1980, and imagine John Lennon with that same  “luck”. I can only see Lennon as the nemesis during the 80’s, if not again during the Iraq war. We would have been stronger, not…

  • the Me in a changing We

    NYT columnist sums it up and I have nothing to add to it, maybe except the cross-cultural angle about change or perish. I hear Yesterday’s lyric ” I am half a man I used to be”. .. Technological leap forward (surround sound, anyone?). Star Wars itself has to keep up with its own 3-D version.…