Tag: Pennsylvania State University

Closure

Fact 1: I went to Penn State.

Fact 2: I felt ashamed and defensive (no punt intended) at the same time

Fact 3: I am not alone in this.

There are more stuff to be worried about these days: immediate and long-term future.

Already a book was out (at 50% off) about Penn State and the culture of silence.

Collective amnesia.

Just like Vietnam War aftermath.

Or Watergate aftermath.

We move on. Have to.

It takes time discounting some relapses.

We are not therapists, much less self-therapists.

And we men don’t talk it out over coffee. Ain’t cool.

Let’s hit the gym.

Put some more weight on the bench press. Could you spot me!

Let pain reign.

It ain’t hurt.

Psycho-somatic syndrome.

What’s outside should not be let in, to infect and destroy what’s inside.

We last longer than the storm.

We survive disaster after disaster.

Only to get to the best part: closure.

By then, we have turned semi-experts on the subject of recovery.

Survivors and strivers. Long-distance runners and deep thinkers.

Conversation with myself while running, for instance.

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle maintenance.

Each generation is tossed a curved ball. Up to us to catch it, spin it and develop new coping strategies.

Ours faces threats that we have never seen before.

Sometimes, from within. From the defense line. From the top whom we respect.

The day the music dies. Sometimes, I think it’s best for the candle to go out at peak.

Like James Dean, M. Monroe, J. Lennon and M. Jackson. At least, they are icons frozen in time.

A sense of permanence and immortality. For now, being human, I got to deal with stages of grief. I got to get to closure, to acceptance. Got to look at myself in the mirror and smile reluctant.

Taking chances

Peter’s Principle states that line managers are often promoted “beyond their level of competency”.

In other words, a technical guy, best at his job, ends up being the boss who has to crawl his way through business dilemma and personnel issues.

In life, however, some problems cannot be solved at the same level where they had first occurred. Bully problems at school, for instance, need intervention. Or as recently as this morning, Sandusky‘s sin exposed and dealt with in public.

It’s a call to take chances, to take risks if we were to make any progress.

This Recession has drawn out both the best and the worst in us.

Some of us rose to the occasion. Diversify ourselves. Or take the high road (going after our passion or non-profit work).

Others just checked out. Drifted.

I have met a bunch of expats who kept staying in-country indefinitely.

Extended vacation.

Or permanent student.

Profitable venues i.e. financial and housing sectors are hitting bottom.

We are left with the “sure things”: food, clothing and shelter (renting).

Even families once so close now seem so far. Recession pull them apart, that was.

My friend reminded me how long it took Japan to get through its V-shaped recovery. 18 years.

Ouch! I will be dead by then.

Still there are things that need risks: crossing the street, eating one more bite of that greasy foods or banking on the elusive thing called love.

Friends went into fields which are quite different from their academic and career backgrounds. That’s risk-taking.

I spotted excitement and adrenaline.

For VC‘s, they need to hit 20% of the time, to cover the other 80% failures.

Still it’s worth it.

Still taking that chance.

Still go for it. Or else it wouldn’t be solving the problem at a higher level.

Because after all, many of those problems cannot be solved if left where it started.

But beware of over-promotion (beyond one’s level of competency). Peter’s Principle.

Start acting

After the trilogy: Start seeing, start hearing and start thinking, I am on the roll.

Behaviorists have debated whether action precedes attitude, or vice versa.

Nike commands: JUST DO IT.

Start acting.

Some guy somewhere mustered his courage to ask for a girl’s hand.

That girl after much deliberation, accepted.

Boom! Action. We are conceived out of love in action.

From conception to cremation, you and I are products of someone else’s action.

In between, it’s on us to act.

Quick assessment of the situation, weighing the options, pros and cons, Bang! Done it.

In case you are curious, I wasn’t born with silver spoon. Indeed, quite the contrary.

But I was schooled in French , then Vietnamese elite high school, then Penn State and Wheaton (private college).

In between school years, I raised my money to travel the world and do relief work.

Action.

A Newsweek article about Boat People dying at seas? Let’s go!

Action.

On the roof of an overcrowding prison-turned-refugee camp, there was space for worship?

Boom.

Let’s carry the amplifiers (heavy) and supplies to hold open church, open door.

People need to pass their time while awaiting resettlement to a third-country? Boom, let’s keep them busy with Present tense (English), and mostly Future tense (hope).

Action justifies everything: our existence, and out earning. While in action, we might face objection and obstacle. Bruce Lee said, “screw the obstacles, I create my own opportunities”.

Start acting. It’s scary at first. Like the first walk on our own, or the ride on the bike,  or that first stroke in the stream.

I don’t ask you to try extreme sports. Just to act on what you know needed action.

Please don’t wait for Superman.

Or like the invalid who lays around the healing pool, and missed out a total of 38 chances of getting healed.

Action also means positive: start carrying that tune in your head, energy burned is energy earned.

What’s your war chant?

Could you arouse people’s emotion and instill their confidence?

Start acting, and you may in the process, become what you are meant to be all along.

That guy who asked that girl for her hand, is not an unsolvable riddle. They are our parents in whose images we are shaped.

My Happy Valley

A photo of  Penn Stater, eyes glued to the Collegian, brought back strong memories of the HUB (Student Union Building) and my time in Happy Valley.

State College was home to me for 4 years. Happy Days. The Wall. The Corner Room. Beaver Stadium. Best ice-cream at the Creamery.

In the Spring, at outdoor concert , we heard  “Here comes the Sun” as an opening act. I saw Bruce Springsteen at a concert in the HUB Ballroom, and remembered thinking, “that man got juice”  (Born to run).

I too was on the run. From the burning monk and burning napalm. From the war last day (7th Fleet spanned the horizon as far as the eyes could see) I too was born to run. The road took me to Native American geography (Susquehanna River and Indian Town Gap). Most memorable was when  I ran into and received kindness from a fellow refugee I met on a  Harrisburg snowy night.

Across from campus, at the Corner Room, we had many coffee refills without getting dirty looks.

Raymond Brown, the Penn State Choir Master, drilled it in us to “Breathe” and “Think”.

His football counterpart, Joe Paterno, had turned Head Coach a decade before I got there.

When I left for a TV internship, he was still there. Today, as of this writing, he is still there (sneakers and Tootsie glass).

(Latest news break announced this would be his last season).

I never came back to Beaver Stadium for commencement. I was an intern at an ABC-TV station in Wilkes Barre on my last quarter.

We got a call to cover nearby Three-Mile-Island incident.  As usual, we set out with our battery pack and a fresh roll of tape.

Then the story broke, and we ended up in a ghost town (people rushed to withdraw cash from ATM”s) again, with lots of coffee refills

and still with no dirty looks, only worry ones. It’s the second time within the span of 4 years that I was stuck in one set of clothes for days on end.

In the span of those four years, I was insulated from a changed world outside of Happy Valley. That world had turned more cynical, and more sexually aggressive (Last Tango in Paris).

But I managed to take courses in Science, Technology and Society whose premises stay with me until today.

We invented the Machine, but in the process, the Machine reinvented us (I am a BMW driver, an I Phone user etc…).

What I saw before Happy Valley (7th Fleet on the War last day, B-52 bombers overhead at night etc…) and after (nuclear power went wild) served as two bookends, with near fairy tales in between (We went singing at nursing homes on Sundays, or performed with Andre Previn and the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra at Heinz Hall).

We were still using punch cards at the only two computers accessible to students. All of us used manual type writers to write term papers and produce newspaper, the Collegian. My dorm mate worked as an Editor  there.  Right after we saw Bruce Springteen, Jeff’s eyes lit up when he saw I could play the solo part of  “Born To Run”.

It must have been a trip for them to experience a foreign student first hand, as opposed to viewing characters like Sixteen Candles’  Luong Duk Long “what automobile?”, and to find out I shared  delayed curiosity and hidden aspiration (Deep Throat shown on campus? Is this Bob Woodward’s idea of a joke?)

Seeing today’s students holding up the Collegian warms my heart, despite the sad circumstance surrounded it (sexual abuse and institutional cover-up scandal).

http://www.collegian.psu.edu/archive/2011/11/07/column_sandusky.aspx

I know next to nothing about football besides coming into contact with a few players who dozed off in my Speech class and Jimmy Cefalo who served as an intern at the same time I was at WNEP-TV.

But for years since, I haven’t found a place, and a time, that shaped the lives of so many, mine included,  for the good.

When the Lion, our mascot,  did one-hand push ups, we and alumni counted out loud, you could feel the stadium rock. We all felt mighty proud. And rightly so, because WE ARE…and still are PENN STATE.

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, portrayed by DeNiro, ducked behind a taxi driver and asked to be driven pass his own Welcoming party.

Out of three “deer hunters”, one came back without injury to the mind or the body. Am I thy brothers’ keeper?

In CBS  Vietnam‘s documentaries, soldiers were shown sitting in the shade, smoking and listening to transistor radio which was playing “Oh, I don’t want to die”  (Reflections of my life).

Yet decades later, land mines still exploded claiming many more limps and lives.

The late Princess Diana was advocating the elimination of land mines.

At long last, the largest nuclear bomb in TX is being disassembled (the article said engineers have since died off, so it’s hard to locate the blue prints).

Farewell to arms.

Hemingway, go home.

All we need is love.

Faith in humanity. Speaking of humanity. We saw quake in Turkey and flood in Thailand.

The heavy rain and flood forced Thailand to close its airport and evacuate parts of its capital (the toll: 506 deaths).

When it rains it pours there in South East Asia.

I was in Vietnam last year. All of a sudden, it poured really hard.

From a sidewalk cafe, I saw a middle-age lady in cone hat tried to push a scrap metal cart whose wheels were half buried in water-covered pot holes.

Now, the UN is advocating Environmental sustainability, with 7 Billion people sharing Earth’s limited resources, foremost is clean water.

China was quick to beef up R&D in solar and desalinated water.

We can not pretend we live in complete isolation. Debris from Fukushima quake drifted to California.

Flood in Thailand slow down server production, which pushes companies to the Cloud.

First wave: Main Frame, second wave: personal computer and third wave: cloud, which brings us in full circle.

Talking about automation, and unemployment. Stats shows high unemployment among returning veterans of the two wars. It’s time for that Welcome-Home sign again.

Hope they find a job and not wait too long for to receive those benefits.

Hope they won’t  have to duck behind the taxi driver.

Farewell to arms, to guilt and to self-recrimination.

All we need is love and a little faith in humanity. Princess Diana would have been proud to see a female film Director received an Oscar for Hurt Locker. The subject: land mine.

Weekend Insert

I spent many college weekends at the library. The journalism library.

Work study program (certain publications need to be behind the desk. My desk.)

That P/T job followed two years of working at the campus TV studio.

I keep wondering how many of those communication students made it in the real world.  Has anyone landed on Page One!

After all, we weren’t Columbia Journalism School.

Just a land-grant farm University, whose football coach is still around after almost 4 decades.

(as of this edit, this is no longer true. JoePa was fired yesterday and Happy Valley turned uproar, flipping a CBS-news van on its side).

I realized then that many would go on to marketing and advertising.

A few would move up market, and eventually be settled in metros like Pittsburgh and Philadelphia.

Occasionally, the school bulletin still advertises “insider” job openings for Associate Producer of sports TV, let’s say down in Jacksonville, FL.

But I have a feeling that many of those students who were there at the library on those weekends, are not holding communication-related jobs.

It’s too integrated a field of study. And unless you found a niche (dog food adverts), and honed in, chances are that you would end up in sales, as in my case.

Still, I hope to be surprised by a New York Times book review title, whose author I might recognize. It will be  a happy moment for me. That somehow, my butler-ing at the library on those weekends wasn’t in vain.

Words have always been cheap.

Now even memory (and expertise) faces its own deflation. Just google it.

Consequently, kids just text and invent shorthand that soooo SMS-fitting.

It’s been sequential, for movies to be derived from screen plays which are adapted from books. Now, it’s movies first, then games and cartoon or tie-ins.

If you feel socially awkward to “friend” someone online, maybe because people you actually know already died, or that they are also bewildered in this new social media landscape. Studies show that it’s the 2nd or 3rd degree connectors that somehow influence us most (see Connected, by two Harvard researchers – who found a link between obesity and those we hang out with online).

I didn’t realize then, what I now know, that those minimum-wage hours have been habit-forming for me. I have grown attached to print and the sound/smell of quiet minds at work. I know those same students perhaps still flip the channels to find out how Penn State team is doing (lost to Alabama), and maybe, still read a newspaper during commercials. Nowadays, you can hardly find any publications considered sacred or in short supply enough to be kept behind the desk. Consequently, I wonder if the school of journalism is still keeping a weekend part-timer  just for that.

Conversant program

If it weren’t for people like Shawn, I wouldn’t be where I am today.

You see, Shawn was a shy Penn State student of  the Horticulture department who wanted to volunteer his time.

It turned out that the Foreign Student Conversant Program matched us together in our first year of college.

That year as it turned out was my best year: how to pronounce “hor”, like in “whore-house”? onto going to frat parties where Shawn finally joined.

There are aspects of English which come across to learners as incomprehensible (what’s that silent “P”  doing there in front of “psychology”) to euphemisms we invented as we go along like “enhanced interrogation” , “assisted suicide” and Leanning-in/Leanning-out.

What Shawn did was :

– he showed me that he cared (by listening more than talking)

– he was trying to cope with the new situation on campus himself

– he was way ahead of the curve on environmental awareness and his calling in that direction.

We lost touch even during college, but I will always remember Shawn for his kindness and friendship.

The last time I saw him was at a frat party, in a crowded Greek-alphabet house off-campus.

We did not talk much that night besides acknowledging each other across the dance floor. So much for being “conversant”.

The fact that we were there in the same room, him rushing the fraternity and me rushing for life in America, said it all.

It was an unusual pairing: he from rural Pennsylvania, I big city. Shawn had not seen nor heard any noise except for Fourth of July fireworks, and I, witnessed practically every Cold War arsenal exhibited in the hot theater of war.

We found each other through the International Student affairs program. We often got “sexiled” (again using Tom Wolfe‘s term) and both felt proud that “WE ARE”  “PENN STATE”.

In our age of globalization, where a small dispute in the South China Seas could trigger a major war (Tonkin Resolution whose Pentagon Papers will be declassified Monday, and now China vs Vietnam with territorial disputes), we can use a bunch of “Shawn” for soft-power influence.

I did not tell Shawn much about my failed attempt at the US embassy in Saigon, or about my subsequent floating in the salty seas.

That fact was understood as subtext over rootbeer and fries. Shawn with a beard, and me hardly had to shave at all.

I wonder what he made of me. I just know that out of the 30,000 students on campus, Shawn was my friend, the very first one.

And the only one I have ever known to pick that particular major. I learned a new vocabulary out of him, if not a whole new appreciation for volunteerism. I learned another concept later in life: “paying forward”. To me, Shawn triggered a chain of events which last way past his freshmen year. He, in today’s social media parlance, essentially “friending” me, conversing instead of chatting. I miss those face2face days over rootbeer.

Losing one’s self

In a recent NYT op-ed, David Brooks summed up prevailing graduation themes: find yourself, live to the fullest, be passion-focused etc.. instead of losing yourself in solving others’ problem. Even my kid knows that time passes more quickly when you are absorbed in a task.

When you lose yourself, you end up finding it.

Before graduating, I took up an internship at an ABC affiliate in Scranton, PA.  At the time, it had a huge dump for abandoned cars. Mount Pocono was not too far away. Often times, the only news in town was trash workers’ strike, which I helped cover with passion.

Then, we were sent to Harrisburg to follow a lead on a nuclear power p accident. Before I knew it, I was held up for days, learning more about broadcasting than I could ever learn in 4 years.

I never went back to Beaver Stadium to receive my diploma. But I did get my badge of life. After the experience of working for nothing, but learning everything, I went on to make three rounds of volunteer overseas to lose myself again and again (all along acquiring the sense of place, of cultures and social webs.)

He who is no fool to lose that which he cannot keep, to gain that which he cannot lose.

From there, I found my modus operandi: work hard, play hard, and work some more (adrenaline producer).

Schools are so structured and protective. The institutions are built on a foundation of learning, character building and self/status-preserving. Students aren’t encouraged to take risks, much less think out-of-the-box (occasionally, they brought in speakers from “outside”, but the script remains the same: conformity).

I hung out with a group of well-meaning students: wholesome and healthy (Get Together, Kum By Ya).  But life outside of campus is quite off-script. On campus, Joe Paterno might be our “God“, Raymond Brown, another one (Penn State Choir), but the Trinity in real life, I found out, were gold, silver and green.

It’s hard to convince people to think critically and carry on intelligent discussions without screaming, attacking and holding a personal vendetta.

At work, instead of collaborating, I found clique after clique.

In school, I forgot that I was non-white. In life, they make sure I am reminded of it.

So, to recent grads: keep losing yourself that you may find it.

Other people may know some parts of you better than yourself. So, to fully discover yourself, you will have play sport-contact against life’s jagged edges.

One day, hopefully sooner than later, you will come to a sudden realization that you are not the center of the universe, and that not every one accepts and loves you unconditionally as your mom and dad have (I use present tense for you, but past tense for me).  And the most you can elicit from strangers are like a line in a Chicago album “does anybody know what time it is”.

Life is difficult. Life in post-Recession era is even more difficult.

The only way to survive this downturn is to charge out of the gate, ready to give yourself completely away without hope of a return. Surprise the world with your Camelot zeal . Ask not…..Infect others with your enthusiasm and passion.

We need your strong muscles and your radiant smile.

I love those who pulled all-night going over text books. Now get ready for lengthier and thornier book of life.

It’s only just begun. Ironically the beginning was at the end, the way Orientals flip their books. Counter-prevailing as it is, David Brooks has a point. So was T.S. Elliot.

the dot connector

I am referring to Dr Rustum Roy of Penn State whom I met almost 4 decades ago.

I knew then just as I know now that he was ahead of his time. He pushed for integrated studies in Science, Technology and Society.

He showed up at a demo of  hologram which is now being worked into 3-D Telepresence. Along with his wife and colleagues from all over the world, he quietly developed Material Research Lab up the hill near Beaver Stadium.

But his most enduring and endearing influence on my life was that of his house church. The Sycamore Community signed on to be my sponsor to provide some  cushion from “culture shock”. (On the way to University Park, we even stopped to pick up a hitch hiking student, who looked like he just had  lunch at “Alice Restaurant”).  I was “clueless” among the giants. On one Wednesday night, I even strummed my guitar and had them join me in a chorus to Carpenters‘ “Sing” (the group went in circle and each “shared” something).

Dr Roy did not do too badly I might say.

But in looking back , I realize how my new beginning served the group right: they rediscovered their reason for getting together: to reach out to the downtrodden and focus then on the second “S” of his life work (STS).

I forever remain in their debt for my start in Happy Valley. The warm clothes and warm reception have been ROI’ed multiple times. And in the tradition of “integrated” studies, I have tried non-stop to connect the dots as I recognized them. But for every two dots I could connect, Dr Roy probably did ten or a hundred times as much. He acknowledged in his last interview on YouTube that these new technologies can now liberate “useful science” for the mass. Sort of “unchained melody” used to be confined in the “Vatican” of Science.

His sons were with hair down to their knees when I first met them.

And that how cool a scientist family could get to be. Between them, father, mother (a whole biography on her own) and sons, I don’t think that family let any revolution go unnoticed.

He was last quoted on yahoo as saying “I felt chilled down my spine” when the lab uncovered that salt water could conduct electricity. I would too if I had been there and witnessed the experiment.

But for all the white papers and honors he deservedly received, he remained a dear fellow sojourner, one who came before me as a Penn Stater albeit of a different kind not degree.

For “We are” and forever will be, Nittany Lions, lurking with inquisitive minds, while letting no dots go unconnected.

Kindness from your lips

My kid’s elementary school is collecting lip balms to send to our troops overseas.

It struck me that we spend our entire life trying to do good, from small gestures to larger ones, only to see others take it away in an instant.

I saw the beautiful picture of the 9/11 girl whose life ended last Saturday in Tucson.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20110110/ap_on_re_us/us_congresswoman_shot_girl

Said she wanted to attend Penn State (We are). Her grandparents live in Philadelphia,

hence the Penn State motif.

9/11 generation already shows some promises, potentials and now with its poster child.

It also struck me that with every click, every digital image and footprint, we leave behind our legacy. Henry Gates, the professor who had a run-in in Cambridge, MA last year (resulted in and resolved at Beer Summit on White House Lawn) authors a book about how DNA live in us from ancestors on down, never gone through mutation.

What we collect and store become archives for future generations.

It looked as if we lost a few leaders this past weekend, one of whom could have become Class President who delivers Commencement Address at Beaver Stadium.

In the East, there is a saying ” When Bulls and Bears are in combat, mosquitoes get smashed”.

That baseball team will miss its only girl teammate and Penn State its future recruit.

I am going out to buy some lip balms, but feel sad inside for the parents who couldn’t do a simple act of kindness I am about to do. Hug your child and have him/her hear kindness from your lips. The troops will know this too while under heavy fires.

Kindness in the most unlikely place.