Tag: The New York Times

Crying girl

I walked by a shop today and I saw a girl holding a knife, crying.

She was peeling onion for the restaurant.

Artificially induced tears. Not triggered by sad emotion.

Real, nevertheless.

It made me appreciate behind-the-scene people (since I happened to have breakfast with real onion, the same kind this girl was peeling).

Nickel-and-dime folks make a living by sweat and tears.

Or those who shed blood for our nation’s security.

Blood, sweat and tears.

My friend’s Dad who recently passed away, used to deliver a sermon on Jesus Wept.

The I-am-with-you gesture only God incarnatel can extend.

Go ahead and tell the Newtown parents to stop crying.

Tears from the onion peel might stop, but tears that well from within (induced by tragedy uncalled for) are hard to stop. Ever. They will creep up at unexpected hours, in the dark of the night, or in the middle of a crowded lunch hour.

I am sure the girl I saw had been doing this for a while, if not everyday.

She knows when to stop, but then, not stopping too long.

The mechanical reliability performed by human.

If only the owner went ahead and bought a machine.

Then the girl would be out of a job.

She would then be crying for real.

Some factory girl in China would dutifully ship the order, my job over yours.

Blood, sweat and tears.

We were “cursed” to toil the ground per breaking the contract with our Maker. For now, tears to make a living in Saigon, tears for neighbor’s kids in Newtown, Our Town, and tears in Heaven, as Eric Clapton put it.

Yes, we need perspectives and point of view to overcome tragedy. We also need help and comfort from one another (in Newtown, strangers gave each other a hug, very needed hug). No man’s an island. Many eat onion, some don’t. But someone got to peel the damn thing. What I saw today was real tears. What I saw on the NYT photos the other day, was digital, but real nevertheless. Jesus wept. Not just Crying Girl, but also Crying God.

Oil-and-water economies

David Brooks of the NYTimes had a piece about the US economy which he coined as “mid-life-crisis economy that needs  to be rejuvenated”.

That’s oil.

Here in Vietnam, I found quite a contrast.

Young demographic, young economy that goes no where but up.

Community Colleges, Trade and Vocational schools, English classes.

One by one, they will progress to the next tier: married, having children, house-hunting and interior furnishing.

The accumulation game: he who dies with the most stuff wins.

People used to be content with three meals a day and a scooter parked in the house.

Then came the phone, the Ipad and the I-pod.

All of a sudden, expectations rise.

A new holiday ring tone, a remote for the scooter alarm, a new app for the I-pad.

Big-box supermarkets are gearing to push consumption pass their “valley of death” (early adopters seem to have done all the shopping they could besides taking trips to Singapore and Australia).

The early and late majority still bond with traditional outdoor venues: bartering is still common, but slowly it is being phased out.

One lighter note during Christmas: the meat-stall ladies up North uploaded their spontaneous dance number onto YouTube.

I can picture them with cell phones urging a quick delivery, but  they are now going “social” and “visual”.

Vietnam got started 40 years ago with Kennedy’s reluctant but pushed-ahead with that fateful decision to engage.

This has set the country back (while Steve  Jobs and Steve Wozniak grew up and toyed with personal computers in their garage).

Now it needs to play catch-up (while taming inflation). A dance that needs skills.

In war, the two sides already seemed to act like oil and water.

Now in peace , the two economies couldn’t be more different: one needs rejuvenation (per Brooks), the other revision.

Vietnam, next Hong Kong?

On my first trip to Hong Kong summer 1981, I was taken in by the energy and entrepreneurial spirit there.

A camera shop (pre-Iphone era) next to a watch shop (again, pre-Ipad era) next to an electronics store.  Shoppers from India, Europe, Australia were all there, bustling about. Double-deck buses (still under British colonial rule) moved to and fro from Kowloon to Sham Shui Po.

China‘s Champs ELysees.

And that’s 30 years ago.

Now, boarding a bus in Saigon, full of college students from the University of Industry, I saw Vietnam‘s future 30 years from now.

Every kids on that bus ( with Samsung phones) will start a business or work for MNC companies, which will surely be coming (when wage pressures increase in China and water level rises again in Thailand).

In fact, Quang Trung Software Park is holding a conference on that very same topic (Human resources, mostly ICT, in a flat world).

Thailand wants to play a lead role in connecting and collaborating at this gathering.

Alliances for a planned and collaborative future (who is going to be the next Hong Kong or Singapore?)  Indeed, Manpower and other HR agencies have sprung up all over town. With hard and soft skills, one can command a decent wage here.

The living condition leaves much to be desired however : supermarket is located next to a dry dirty river, for instance. But all that can and will be fixed in time. Right now, younger learners are enrolled in foreign-own classes, picking up an expression here and a tune there.

My relative sent his daughter to the US to complete high school, Singapore to finish college and now to Australia for graduate school.

Stories like this put Vietnam on the path toward becoming another Hong Kong , while Hong Kong itself has moved up the value chain (per NYT Friedman) to full service economy, “off-shoring” its manufacturing further up North.

In other words, if those “Boat People” were to arrive today and be allowed to go off camp to work, they would be at a total loss, as opposed to work off-book in the garment industry as back then (“tailored in Hong Kong”).

Back to ICT as a way out

Young people naturally pick up new skills faster than older workers.

This is especially true for language-acquisition.

Once we can integrate the two camps (business savvy vs tech savvy) we are on our way to a promising future.

I notice primary schools and Universities here have started an all-English curriculum,  Vietnam’s latest attempt to copy the Asian Tiger miracle. Private universities are busy constructing “campuses” modeled after counterparts overseas (Hoa Sen, Tan Tao ), still have to shuttle students to and fro on chartered buses to city’s outskirts.

Countries like Taiwan, Singapore and S Korea have all traveled that road.

The raw materials are present, as evident from my bus ride which was all of a sudden empty after the drop off  at the main campus. Franchise concept has taken hold here: sticky rice chain, sugarcane juice chain, KFC chain, Lotteria chain and Tous Les Jours.

Being a “virgin” market has some pluses. Investors can’t wait to stake out location, location, location and brand positioning.

But the locals will learn the ins and outs of good and bad use of capitals.

(23 things they don’t tell you about capitalism by Chang).

The solution: go ahead with caution, but still move ahead speedily when  opportunity presents itself.

Just the way heavy traffic is here . Just the way people are moving about in Vietnam now. Just the way I saw in Hong Kong then.

Technology doesn’t sleep, but we do.

I had my share of empty TV studio, that is, between broadcasts (6PM and 10PM). Now, there is no recoup time. We have evolved to Office 365, with servers resided in the “cloud” instead of the (telco) closets. Mobile working has evolved from CB radio, to Motorola brick phones, from Skypage to Skype chat.

Cryptography moved from a code book to complex self-improved algorithm (Amazon shopping experience : buy this + this = this.)

Pop-up ads even have a “K” for keep (time-shifting ads), while some companies are now offering a service to measure your Twitter‘s scores (influencer’s graph).

McLuhan was on the mark about “the medium is the message.”

Dot.com domain was just a start.

ICANN is opening up more domains.

And within a few years, we will be inundated with dot.this, dot.that, same way we now have with mobile phone area codes (which used to have a zero and a one in the middle of the three-digits).

As with cable TV channels where pundits feel the need to fill the emptiness with noise, new technologies such as Twitter and Facebook (and Google Plus)  will challenge us to come up with “sound bites”. Our attention span has evolved from attending for hours on end under preacher’s tents to today’s tweets.

Our brain has learned to process messages and images much quicker.

Bum, here is a Bieber’s (Be Bop a lula), Bang, there’s a GaGa (innocent like a Chic out of her egg-shell).

Good thing that we can upload and talk back. But not for long, just 140 characters.

You can tweet again, but it won’t be a part II of an earlier tweet. No guarantee.

So we learn to tame new technologies, and cope with their sheer availability.

User-generated content. BTW, from Page One, a documentary on “a year at the New York Times”, journalists on Charlie Rose, commented that the paper was now in better shape than it had ever been.

So the proliferation of citizen-journalists doesn’t threaten or dethrone existing media. Not when it’s the NYT.

Meanwhile, I keep reading volumes of “likes” from one Facebook friend.

All of a sudden, I miss my solitude in a broadcast studio when show’s over.

Lights off. Let’s go home. We need some sleep. The audience already turned off their sets.

In Vietnam, they would put back the Indian poster for white balance.

I guess it’s called the “sleep mode” because studio cameras need longer warm-up time. In today’s parlance, it means our influencer’s scores got dropped a bit when we are offline. The real self needs rest, so the virtual self must give.

Long tail

2,000 cars (Nano, by Tata) and $20 per gallon of gas?

HP printer and ink model.

Thin client, thick server.

I got it, I got it!

In the same vein, they should subsidize “Blu-ray” disc player, that way, more of us (late adopters) will get onboard quicker.

Mid-summer! Beach time. But not innocence time.

I notice some teenagers stopped by the Barnes and Nobles Woodstock display table.

To these folks, the Flower generation must have the same appeal as the Amish, i.e. the sub cultures America tolerates.

I notice two Op Ed pieces in NYT recently, which speak about “Meaning of Life”  (Richard Cohen) and “NASA 4 lost decades” by Tom Wolf.

The first piece was about an experiment on life prolonging (by curtailing your diet intake), but the other monkey which ate all he could appear to be happier and more vibrant (who wouldn’t show survivor’s guilt when all your party friends already dead, leaving you the dieting nerd as the last man standing). Joie de vivre!

I struggle a little bit when trying to make sense of the Race in Space. I remember the Regan’s Star War shield.

But as far as trying to “conquer” Space, it’s the stuff for Trekkie.

I can barely be a techie (being in technical sales).

However Wolf’s observation makes sense: if the Sun is to be blowing up at some point, at least for the human species to survive, we need to work on some contingencies, however costly and enduring those commitments might involve.

Maybe the premise isn’t strong enough to sustain itself through various administrations, with their own juxtaposing and opposing priorities.

Right now it’s health care (after the environment whose legislation got through last month).

All of the sudden, nobody seem to remember many of us still suffer the economic downturn, as Paulson put it,

“could have been worse”.  The stimulus itself has disbursed about 10+% as of this writing. Maybe it has a long tail too.

Why don’t GM consider using its bail out money to purchase Tata or Chery (Chinese auto company). We can always get it back in the long run with $20 per gallon of gas. HP did it with its printer sitting next to me as I write this.

 

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