Tag: Steve McQueen

Be sure to bring some flowers

That voice which slows toward the end of the song as the chord changes:
“If you’re going to San Francisco…” accompanied by the 60’s signature tambourine, has died. But his one-hit wonder stays, perhaps more famous than the city itself.

It’s a state of mine. A period in history, with in-depth expose by Tom Hayden and Tom Brokaw. A new explanation and “a vibration” (today, we got “going viral” ). People in motion.  Keep moving. Keep evolving. Keep changing at the grass root level.

No one wanted to be “institutionalized” (One flew over the cuckoo’s nest). Individualism championed by groups and movement, ironically. Out of the box, out of the can.
We got Papillon, the Great Escape (both played by Steve McQueen, a San Francisco’s familiar face).  We got the ethos (youth), the prop (flower), the non-verbal greeting (peace symbol), the hair, the costume (Indian fashion) and an anthem.

I first heard the song right before Tet 68. School was closed due to the uprising throughout South Vietnam. With a lot of time in my hand, I practiced the guitar. San Francisco over House of the Rising Sun, Goodbye Yellow Brick Road over both.  The girls (older than I) were with flowers on their hair.

Later, when I had a chance to revisit Vietnam, I looked up an old classmate who had been paralyzed, When I played the guitar and sang for him, who lied motionless in bed,  he requested San Francisco (people in motion).

My friend was one of the “gentle people” I have met in my life. He is into poetry, music by Trinh Con Son (Vietnamese Bob Dylan). And he got paralyzed for rescuing some kids who were standing under a fallen iron gate.

People in motion, people in motion. But my friend has stayed immobile.

And the singer of that signature song has died.

Somehow, I don’t think it would end here. I know the spirit lives on, in San Francisco. People are passionate about the city, its livability, environment and ethos.  Legislation there is fierce and uncompromising when it comes to sustainability. After all, we want to see flowers grow there, along with civil liberty and civil rights.

Even so, be sure to bring (and wear) some flowers when you go there.

The Bay areas get nice weather, gentle people and lots of hills. I even ran a Bay-to-Bridge race once, just to take in the scene. And the Chinese New Year Parade there is the event not to be missed. That era, those street corners and the people once flocked there to search (for a new explanation) and share (laying foundation for today’s internet peering, open source, wikipedia and interoperability) under one huge umbrella: McKenzie’s San Francisco.

Heck, I was just trying to get to Middle School in Vietnam. And I just stopped short of wearing some flowers in my hair. Instead, we settled for those flower stickers, along with the peace symbol, despite living at the height of the war. RIP Scotty.

Vietnam goes “social”

Mark Zuckerberg is here for Christmas vacation.

http://english.vietnamnet.vn/en/science-technology/16933/facebook-s-ceo-visits-vietnam.html

Perhaps he would find a striking difference between the way people celebrate the Holidays here as opposed to Northern California.

In the US, the joke is “if you got tired of the Turkey, you can always order Chinese”. McDonald’ s and KFC‘s are closed.

One culture withdraws to nuclear-family gathering.

The other (VN) pours out to the street, Buddhists and Catholics both.

Someone mentioned that during the celebration of Buddha’s birthday, the Catholics here reciprocated by joining the throng on the streets as well.

Golden Rule.

I learned in cross-cultural classes that the hardest distance to cross is the last few inches (between two people).

Here in VN, in internet cafe,  people log in to connect via social media to friends far away, but are oblivious to the next person.

We have evolved as species who use technology as a hyphen (send me an in-mail, text me, call  me, drop me a line).

Back in the feudal age, people used accessories and ancestry to class-ify people (Bovary – Gastby).

Now we got algorithms doing the match-making and recommending.

“4 friends in common”, so?.

The Web speculates that Mark is here to “push” Facebook in this untapped market.

True or not, he would find plenty of food stalls to choose from, instead of  Chinese take- out on this very day.

I can’t explain the loneliness single people experience in the States, especially up North (like Maine or Massachusetts).

In fact, America (the band) did try to capture this in “this is for all the single people, thinking that life has passed them by”.

Here, besides having food stalls open at any time, people celebrate Christmas wholeheartedly and wholesomely.

I got back from visiting my cousin on the outskirts of Saigon. The bus began to pull into the station, but the Christmas music was so good that  I  wanted to listen till the end of Sad Hymn… while outside the temperature would put Arizona’s and Austin’s high heat to shame.

People here survived many wars (my cousin’s husband was declared missing-in-action for more than 36 years). But life moves on as shown in her ensemble of  children, grandchildren etc… And yes, people love music, their secret sauce in patience in suffering.

The end of the bus line, normally sweaty and unpleasant, became bearable because of pipe-in music.

Steve McQueen the King of Cool, often portrayed Prison break rebels. The moment he was put back into solitary confinement, his prison mates would toss him a baseball glove and a ball. There, in the dark, he would throw the ball, creating rhythm and routine. Survivors know what it takes to pass the time. That same 24 hours could be an eternity to those who don’t know how, or a brief blip from eternity’s perspective.  Let the clock tick toward year-end. Vietnamese already went out and bought their 2012 calendars.

Now, this came from a people who fought Dien Bien Phu manually, and their “American War” with low tech. Now, social media want to make a splash here. Let the game begin. See who is more connected and how enriching the experience will be for a country bent on education. Facebook might sell, but I doubt that frozen turkeys will even for Christmas (my friend called last night at 3AM thinking I was still up to join him at a noddle stall). Go figure! Merry Christmas Mark. Make sure you post relevant and engaging “Like” about Vietnam.

The Vietnamese pleasantry

A few days ago, we were entertained with a lavish meal, of all things, in a  wedding banquet hall. Being the first customers that evening, we ate in this huge wide open space.

One by one, the dishes arrived. To me, that’s a lot of cholesterol in one shot. But I couldn’t get enough of hospitality and genuine friendship despite the poorly executed ambience (they could have partitioned the hall to get better ambience).

Human connection more than often transpires space and time. Two friends can pick up where they left off  last time, be that a decade or 40 years in between. The old “bookmark” was a good place to start. From there, it’s time to mine empathy from those of the same frame of reference (in Netherland, the writer touched on an emotional soft spot often experienced by immigrants in America). It’s still unclear whether brave decisions, like that of Steve McQueen in Le Papillon ( to escape 7 times) was better than that of Dustin Hoffman‘s (to stay and plant tomatoes).

During and after the war, millions of Vietnamese scattered to the four winds, to neighboring countries or far-away ones (I met a family who open a restaurant in Cote d’Ivoire). I have seen how they shop, live and communicate (and sometimes, send back money). A notable experience was three-time evacuees from E New Orleans (North-South, East-West, and lately, Katrina returnees to rebuild more quickly than first-timers).

Given the historical context of getting “smoked out” of their villages, the Vietnamese overseas are quite brave in their own terms. The cultural gap couldn’t be wider (as compared to the wave of  European who first arrived to the US .) Yet, they thrive and survive the down turn, sometimes, by doubling or tripling up. Not as physically strong as the Mexican day laborers, the Vietnamese average workers ended up in assembly lines (Silicon Valley in the 80’s, then scattered all over including RI) holding on to jobs that have yet been shipped to lower-wage countries. Once out of the box, Vietnamese women have stepped up to be leaders of the families.

En par with American counterparts, they juggle cultural expectations, career choice (majority of whom as manicurists) and family obligation (in-laws living under the same roof). I have observed first-hand how my mom, a woman of mere 5 feet, tackle those various demands. In her lifetime, she faced two evacuations, spoke two languages and still managed to amass a huge savings from three decades of school teaching. It’s ashamed that those piles of money had to be tossed at seas during our trip to America.

Still, the grace and courtesy follow these women to strange shores. There, once again, they hold the steady hands of paying customers, assuring them that life can always get better, all along, bluffing and buffing. To them, no matter how it was inside, it is mandatory to show only their outward pleasantry.

(Yoko recounted this in her NYT op-ed,  that her late husband JL, protected her still to this day, every time she put on the shaded designer glasses to face the world, “don’t let them know they got you”).

Who would  know, behind those nail polishes are stories of left-behind treasures and broken dreams, and the smiles served as bribes to a better life. I owe this to one of those amazing women. Always pleasant with an enigmatic smile large enough to cover all the years of sorrow and struggle. The Vietnamese pleasantry.

Sean and investigative genre

Last Sunday, if you watched 60 minutes, you would have learned about “Three Cups of Teas”.

I am sure the network legal council department did its due diligence before allowing the segment to air.

The reluctance to go after these stories struck a familiar chord: nobody would be interested, we don’t want to shake the bush, it would harm future genuine efforts etc….. In  a 35th anniversary of All the President’s Men piece, we learned that Robert Redford had gone ahead with his hunch.

“let history falls where it may” he said, but he was interested in a “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid” type of collaboration (who else could play that better than Dustin Hoffman, having paired up with maverick Steve McQueen in Le Papillon).

That leads to the emergence and evolution of Sean Penn, from playing “bad boy” roles, to taking up the mantle as our generational conscience in Fair Game.

Sean Penn started out facing off Michael Jay Fox in Casualties of War playing villain, to his latest role as independent investigator of “yellow cake” (as compared to Watergate, his spouse-and-source got exposed immediately, not as Deep Throat which had laid low for decades).

For a moment there, in 1976, everyone on campus, especially the Journalism School, rushed around, and recreated a feel of a newsroom (the sound of manual typewriters and AP-wire churning out news lilke factory churning out Campbell soups). My dormmate, as an Editor of the Collegian and his friend, all bearded (Coppola’s look), would “run” with each story with all they had.

Deep Throat was shown on campus, sponsored by the Student Union (perhaps justified as an educational background to understand Watergate).

Then came Mary Hart (an educator) later co-starred with John Tesh in Entertainment Tonight.

She announced her retirement after 29 years of “giving us what we want” e.g. infomercial, infotainment, celebrities watch (as opposed to bird watch) which led to the tragic death of Princess Diana. In the wake of her son’s wedding, we shouldn’t forget how journalism has evolved, from  “just the facts mam”, to “just the dress mam” (we just want to see what Kate is wearing.)

We now have Twitter (reminds me of AP wire, except this time, triggered by pro-am movement) and Facebook. We can have information at our finger’s tip and on the go (google is improving with every search, self-evolving algorithm). Yet we stop being skeptic due to data deluge.

America needs to prove itself again that it won’t default on its promise or its debt. We can begin with the frontier spirit, circling the wagons. Where else, and when else can a few percent working in agriculture feed the rest , with surplus to export (roll over Malthus). It’s unprecedented in world history. And it’s also unprecedented in the eyes of the founding Fathers that their descendents would argue about how much debt they should incur. Ben Franklin (a penny saved a penny earned) would roll over just reading today’s headlines, well, except for the royal wedding plan. Talking about certain things which never change. In Fair Game, Sean gave a speech about never stop asking for “our future depends on it”. The Inauguration balls back in the 90’s played Fleetwood Mac’s “Don’t stop thinking about tomorrow”. I think they both urge us to stay alert, be critical in our thinking, but compassionate in our giving. That’s what the head and the heart are for.