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: Race and ethnicity in the United States Census

  • Stars and stunts

    They stretched the truth to “show” it in better lights (as in Argo). They twisted some arms, pushed the envelopes and burned both ends of the candle (one end is dream, the other memories). They stepped into characters, sang the chorus and spoke the lines. Light, sound, camera and …”action”. Moving pictures. Marketing of dreams and…

  • Fool’s errand?

    On NYT‘s Op-Ed‘s Pages, I found a piece “Asians are too smart for their own good”. The author brought up a historical parallel between Jews’s admission at Ivy League schools back then, and Asian‘s now. She neglected another important parallel: Japanese-American got put in internment camps not too long ago. With BRIC‘s second generation, growing up in America,…

  • Growing pain

    Tragedy and triumph seem to go hand in hand. Past pain could be paralysing yet addictive. Those who couldn’t get over it end up going back to it. Not for the broken experience but for the context where pain first occurred. When shattered, we threw the baby out with the bath water. In coming back, with time…

  • Sudden Dream

    If you dropped everything and listened to all the casual remarks, you would be paralyzed. The current economy is like an elephant, perceived by four blind men: it’s going to get better, it’s like a wave form, a V-shape, a downward cyclical. They could illustrate and demonstrate. They could even persuade. But who is to…

  • Fragmented and segmented

    Marketers have had a field day over the last few decades: market fragmented and segmented. The former is a reality in our pluralistic society. The later, careful study and strategy to go after niche markets. Microtrend covers this very topic: knitting, teen markets etc…as long as the niche constitutes 1% of the total mass market. It’s a…

  • They keep coming

    In a few days, they might put on Neil Diamond‘s America. Voter registration. Organ donor. Vehicle registration. They bring some cash (let’s hope so) and a load of dream. Many had left personal chapters of their lives before boarding that plane. Just like the Irish and Polish a century and a half ago. Except that the ports of…

  • The 11th law

    Forbes ran a piece on the 10 laws for our century i.e. Metcalfe, Moore etc… Encompassed above should be the Golden Rule, the 11th law. Committed to communicate and collaborate. Contribution. Do unto others. Racing to the top, but also helping others to get there. I experimented with the Asian model of running a sales…

  • Blind in wilderness

    Years ago, I took a course in Wilderness Survival. One of the classmates was a blind Korean guy.  The others all white males. We were to spend the entire five days in the White Mountain of New Hampshire, with one solo day. Our “final” was rock repelling. I kept looking in my teammate’s eyes and…

  • Asian self-awareness

    In some cultures, people felt ashamed to put on clothes, or if they dressed at all, they would go to the middle of the house in plain view instead of the far corner (where it would draw more attention to the act of changing). Au contraire, at 24-hr fitness, I notice most of the corner…

  • Census in our mind

    1976. Washington D.C. Belt-bottom pants and boom-boxes. The city was predominantly black. 2011 Washington D.C. Gentrified, half-black and half others.And that’s just one stat in the 2010 data. Asian population in Arizona, Texas and elsewhere like Philadelphia should surprise any demographer. While America went to war in Europe, European ended up at America’s shores. Then…