Thang Nguyen 555
Cultures on Collision Course
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Tag: United State
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Dead Valley is known to be the hottest place on Earth. Yet millions have traveled pass there on their way to Las Vegas. Venture Capitalists are also well versed in what’s so called “valley of death” i.e. when a start-up moved pass its honey-moon stage, and simply cannot sustain the burnt rate. Yet people keep trying. Then,…
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When you are on a tourist visa, you have to keep renewing it every three months. Each stamp was like a certificate of completion of my self-education. I learned that: – my friend’s music students, blind or bright, respected and adored their dead teacher – dead people, in casket, still get his/her last chance to bow…
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It’s all there on my friend’s web site: the seating lay-out in the classroom (three jr-high students to a table) I drew up 40 years ago. When you click on a name, it pops up a few byline and that friend’s mushy words about “summer time” or “we will never be this good as a…
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Just like an old-time movie, friends met yesterday to rehash. We mentioned briefly the passing away of our friend’s brother: nerdy, good old boy and an ATM machine service man and family man. In short, the least likely candidate to die young. Yet, he had been long gone (by now 3 years). Earth, Wind and Fire…
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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…
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Time heals all wounds. It also ushers in a generation, now in high school and college. Here in Vietnam, students have classes on Saturdays and even Sundays. Kids of all ages, in uniforms or out of, but always with a backpack, riding on wheels of all types: bikes, electric bikes, scooters, sedans, and buses. They…
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In Vietnam, don’t be surprised when you are placed next to a complete stranger, who knows someone who knows your host. It happened to me at Christmas party this year. Next to me was a Vietnamese-American returning from multiple tours in Iraq. He was here to fly his wife out. She had flown in as…
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Among Dylan’s many memorable lines is “you don’t need the weatherman to tell you which way the wind is blow-in”. Even without the weatherman, we can feel that things are at a boiling point. Like in the movie “the Network”, people start to open their windows and bell out “I am mad like Hell, and…
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