Tag: Trinh Cong Son

Love sees differently

It’s half past five AM. Outside the Women Association of Ho Chi Minh City, I heard music. Not hip hop, not trance. Jut Gold music “Gui Gio Cho May Ngan Bay”, blasted from a boom box . It’s dark, but the sidewalk hosted a group of women practicing Tai-Chi.  The music was about acceptance, about one wing drops after another. But here they stood, with graceful moves and fateful lives.

Their counterparts meanwhile distribute magazines, newspapers, meat, seafood etc.. for the city of 10 million. I struggled to find room on the sidewalk for the run, before hordes of scooters claiming their right of way.

Common city dwellers don’t seem to be able to afford living space. NUSKIN and new Life Insurance, big-box Fast Food and sugar-drink companies such as Coca Cola drove up commercial real estate prices.

As a result, the face of the city has changed, over the last six months (faster than in the US).

One can spot the need for women gyms, for skin care and cosmetic products.

But then, love sees it differently. Here were mothers of revolution . Of future leaders.

and of past glory. Still out there before dawn. Still guarding the age of romanticism (w/out make-ups or cosmetic surgery).

Still staying fit for the fight. Vietnam is synonymous with war. War against Chinese invaders, French colonialists,  American reluctant Imperialists, Cambodian “cap-duon” and now, in full circle, back to the Islands against the Chinese  industrialists.

Still “Gui Gio Cho May Ngan Bay”, still with that cigarette-hoarse voice of Khanh Ly, the exile folk singer, muse of Trinh Cong Son (and Trinh Nam Son will be here for just one night) known as Vietnamese Bob Dylan.

Love sees it differently. The same song could be used to soothe the soul, comfort the afflicted, or to motivate the team . At any age, at any time.

I blogged about the resilience of the Vietnamese women (Mom’s Ao Dai).

Now I realized I did not know what I was talking about. I barely scratched the surface .

The Diary of Dang Thuy Tram spoke of a woman doctor who walked the Ho Chi Minh Trail, just to be near the war front where her lover had gone before. It spoke of the diary with “fire”. To others, war was hell. Love sees it differently (she died a martyr’s death, never to be reunited with her lover).

The irony did not escape me that, in contrast to Western sense of appropriateness,

here women could be warriors, housewives and heads of  firms, with no conflict.

Their ability to synthesize and compromise says a lot about how this society manage to gloss over enormous challenge.(see After Sorrow).

A city of 10 million or 1 million, it doesn’t matter.  What matter was how those women have taken over the education in public, and the management of the household in private. It’s they who make it happen. Just show up and see at 5 AM, the music and movement. Then you will see the tip of the iceberg. Often we don’t see those undercurrents. But love sees it differently. It got you up early and forced you to notice. I noticed. I learned.

Shore this!

It’s not good enough with automation.

They need to combine that with outsourcing, off-shoring, in-shoring and now, near-shoring.  The idea is to line up the  Filippino call-center workers at mid-night (to go to work, not in line for next-day Black Friday sales) to make a go at scripted greetings like “Have I done everything to your satisfaction”.

Now Google wants to be unique: back to using the shop down the street so Googlers don’t have to fly to China.

Meanwhile, Africa is buying in to the Chinese Dream.

What happened to California Dreaming? To the Mamas and the Papas.

Aren’t all the leaves brown any more?

(I definitely need to “walk into a church, and sit down and pray”).

Industrial might. Pressures of automation and legislation.

If one can get the right mix of technology prowess, regulatory compliance  and market demand, he/she  rules.  The kids are playing with the I-pads instead of cabbage dolls.

All the powers to them.

More information, hopefully leads to smarter and more compliant kids.

Not so sure on that last point!

When honeymoon is over for off-shoring, and inflation takes its toll in wage-pressured China, we will see a sad wave of unemployment and unrest there.

Of course, they can then “sub-shore” to Africa, to be evangelists of the new Chinese Dream.

Sort of Chinese Peace Corps. Know-how in exchange for rare earth. Fair trade.

Trinh Cong Son (Vietnamese Bob Dylan) had a line “Why travel to and fro so much, to tire your life out”.

The thing about companies and market is that they often don’t know what they want. A few years back,  focus groups said they wouldn’t buy a notebook (today’s I-pad). Go figure!

un film de Coppola

I heard “Bonjour Vietnam” again last night…”un film de Coppola…”

http://stanmark.multiply.com/reviews/item/9?&show_interstitial=1&u=%2Freviews%2Fitem

It evoked psychedelic images and texture of horror (adapted from  Conrad’s Heart of  Darkness.) Yet we were sitting in a boutique studio, with aged ladies sang along to Le Uyen Phuong’ s Last Word to You , equivalent of Bono and Cher: “let’s lay down one last time, kissing and caressing as primates in the wild.”

To top it all, we were introduced to an Anglo singer who performed three numbers, two of which by Trinh Cong Son, Bob Dylan’s equivalent of Vietnam (Ha Trang and Diem Xua).

For a moment, I was unsure of where I was: America? Vietnam? What time zone was it? Good Morning America or Bonjour Vietnam?

Both sides have paid a hefty price for the conflict that tore both nations apart: the anti-war movement in the States and the still-have-work-to-do integration of  the new Vietnam. Unlike in “un film de Coppola”, Vietnam Today has to manage the ever rising expectations in a flat world.

“Just want to overtake Thailand” commented an engineering department head at a Community College. Well, at least on two occasions that I knew of, Vietnam did just that: SEA games, and rice exporting.

Tourism is still up for grab for both countries.

The upcoming two-week break will see a lot of domestic touring.

Vietnam will see an exodus of its people taking buses, trains, planes and automobiles, just as  American comedian  John Candy and Steve Martin portrayed two strangers met in a snow-stranded airport.  In Apocalypse Now, our main character also came home, with chopper roar in the background overlayed Sheen’s narration ” I have found the enemy and the enemy is us”.

Coppola ran over budget multiple times (Dennis Hopper was half-stoned during the entire shoot).  But somehow, it turned out to be one defining movie of that decade.  To juxtapose 2012  (with dooomsday written all over) with the images of Apocalypse Now is to be redundant.

Vietnamese growing up all over the world can relate to “Bonjour Vietnam” who was sung by a Vietnamese-French girl.  They are curious, but have no context for their immigrant legacy. To self-protect in our age of data deluge, they partitioned their hyphenated existence from their parent’s experience. But the more they try, the stronger the grip (which according to sociologists, will manifest fully in the third generation). Eventually, both generations will have to reconcile and negotiate a truce. In Vietnam, it’s peace time. It’s America who is still in the state of war or readiness for war.

Bonjour Vietnam. Happy New Year. Let my people go.. home. Let them read from the tablet. Hopefully on it we will find:  love God and your neighbors (far and near) as you would yourself i.e. fight not without , for the enemy,  as found in un film de Coppola, is us.