Tag: Vietnam War

Calling on Leaders

Mongolian Khan, upon his first day out of jail, jumped on the horse to lead his nation to new height. Lennon and Yoko still purchased full-page ad in the NYT to run the same poster as they did 40 years ago “WAR IS OVER, if you want it”.

With the new digital order, thought-leaders emerged to shape our agenda and culture.

Gone are the days of orators speaking for hours in the arena.

In our digital age, one just looks you up, at his/her convenience.

The audience no longer has to shout out , as in the Network, ” I am mad like Hell, and I won’t take it anymore”. He or she simply clicks away or types in a negative comment.

Leaders will need to be transparent, harmonizing his/her on and offline persona (only a third of respondents said they were truthful on social networks). Past leadership styles e.g. empowerment, alliance,  command and control, and laissez-faire; need to be revised and perhaps, recombined.

Today’s leaders are real people, with hope, fear and dream, just like their followers (on a Harley over the weekend or ride a bike to work, New Year, New You in New York.)

In Matterhorn, we followed the new Lt of Company C through war-time Vietnam.

He learned to make hard calls, to sweat and to cry.

Leaders also face doubt and indecision.

But they are not philosophers. They do think hard but also act decisively.

And mind you, leaders are not accountants.

One of the Kennedy’s whiz kids regret having led the Vietnam War solely by number crunching. (Even the press briefing bore the cutting humor “5 O’Clock Follies”).

Leaders lead without regrets. When time calls for it, leaders are ready .

He or she is not a line manager ( who leads from behind or on the side). Leaders lead from the future, set the tone and inspire excellence . They reframe and rekindle while being “one of the guys”.

Leaders lead people to their deaths, and they thank him or her for it.

We have a few still around. Calling on leaders.

VINA MOUSE

Last week, an op-ed in the NYT lamented the death of Disney dream in America.

This week, they signed a multi-million dollar deal to build HappyLand in Long An, Vietnam. The dream doesn’t die. It simply moved offshore. Imagine you can tour both Cu Chi Tunnel and HappyLand in one full sweep.

The new Vietnam seeks to learn not only from neighboring Asian Tigers (Singapore, South Korea and Taiwan) but also from America and European Union. Many signed on with Fulbright scholarship for a year at Ivy League Schools (Yale, Harvard, Standford) to “reverse engineer” America’s secret sauce.

Vietnamese young population will have their Sputnik moment at HappyLand.

Build-and-they-will-come model. Modern cities and mindset. Planned economy. No legacy.

America on the other hand is weighed down with pension plan, health plan, and deficit reduction plan.

Every day, a bunch of people turn 65 in America. And not all of them move on to live in country clubs. Some already got condos in Mexico (warmer than Florida). Others to Canada to buy subsidized medicine.

The brave ones traveled as far as India, hence spurring up medical tourism.

I noticed an interesting trend lately: more American are getting work-permits in Australia, perhaps in construction related business. New Frontier.

To think that the Disney dream is fading out is to limit the scope of the argument.

It simply found new disciples elsewhere, in the land far away, whose name was known more for past conflict than future potential.

The change will happen so fast that by the time we emerge from our tour of Cu Chi Tunnel that we see the bright lights of HappyLand with Vina Mouse souvenirs and logo.

What happened in Vietnam stays in Vietnam. And a lot has lately. I hear the fade out music of “It’s a small world after all” somewhere in the background. Time to dream on.

 

From sleigh to moped

http://www.economist.com/blogs/asiaview/2010/12/christmas_vietnam

Ho, Ho, Ho in Ho Chi Minh City. Toys for tots, delivered by Santa on moped.

When the US pulled out of Vietnam, it played “White Christmas” on Armed Forces radio.

Now, it’s peace-time Vietnam, where people enjoy every bit of cotton and confetti used to decorate the city’s manger.

I was there two years ago at that same spot just to witness my friend’s got pick pocketed.

Posing for a picture might cost you dearly.

But people in Vietnam do seem to enjoy the crowd and festivities.

Here in the US, on Christmas Day, all the stores, including fast food chains, are closed (except for liquor stores).

What a contrast!

Yet, both seem to move up one notch on the extended families scale: the atomized US culture makes allowance for families reunion, while the extended family culture in Vietnam  joins the whole city in celebration. Whatever the reason for the season, people feel a need to embrace, to be appreciated (gifting) and to loosen their purses (hopefully giving to charity).

French cultural residue still shows, when people say “Joyeux  Noel“.

As if on cue, I have a Facebook friend who decided to post Francois Hardy’s C’est Le Temps de L’Amour.  People are seen to hang out in front of Notre Dame Cathedral in Saigon, taking pictures and taking in the scene.

When I was in Cote d’Ivoire, I sensed a deja vu. It turned out that former Saigon is not too culturally distant from Abidjan. We all read about refugees began to pour over to neighboring Liberia (which some years back had its own instability) in anticipation of a military intervention there to enforce election results.

If you ask the people there, chances are they would say they celebrate Christmas as well, but not in the form you would recognize (longer church service for one). So Santa has to adapt, from one country to the next, and in Vietnam, from one District to another on mopeds.

It must be very hot in that bright red suit in Ho Chi Minh City, Ho Ho Ho, Hot, Hot, Hot.

 

Time to change

Change bears a different connotation to different people.

In the 60’s, change threatened the status quo (Hell No, we won’t go).

It’s inevitable that we need to adapt (from jukebox to boombox, from paper-back book to e-book).  A few years from now, we would rather be dead than getting caught carrying  a hard-back book (today’s equivalence of carrying a brick phone w/pull-out antenna).

In fact, leadership is all about change management: take R or L at the fork in the road (yahoo)

take both (Cisco), or take the one less traveled (Robert Frost).

Change has been equated with letting go. But it’s not. It’s being adaptive and relevant.

Downgrading, downshifting, downsizing and retrenching.

The exact reversal of the 80’s “trading up”.

In the Hummer and the Mini, the author tries to point out the paradox in taste and style. At the present time, we might have to do away with Hummers altogether

(have you noticed gas prices lately).

And there is forced change e.g. aging, empty nesting or season change whose cold front disrupts our holiday travel. Here in Florida, they use helicopters to bring down warmer temperature to protect crops (same technology was used during the Vietnam War to spray Agent Orange to destroy crops).

The positive side of aging is maturity. Having been there and done that, one detects a familiar pattern (deja vu) and can easily connect the dots (for instance, Haiti and Vietnam both had some French influence. This makes easy for the Vietel engineers to connect with locals while trying to rebuild Haitian telecom infrastructure.)

Unfortunately, the path of least resistance is often the path most taken. It saves time when everything is in place, the same place (efficiency model). Have you noticed that as creatures of habits, we always congregate around the fire-place (or TV, its modern-day replacement) and water cooler at work (or the conference-room speaker phone). But that’s our pre-Google false sense of comfort.

Now that the transformation to digital is almost complete, we must embrace minimalist life style (watch out Good Will and Salvation Army, you will have to expand your warehouses).  Digital natives will not give a second thought (since they are not attached to things non-digital) before junking that jukebox or that Polaroid.

We are change managers. And managers must decide what’s important and what’s urgent, what stays and what goes. Most importantly, from future vantage point looking back, will today’s decision hold? Are we being self-disruptive enough or face forced change?

The more we want to stay the same, the more we will have to change. Or just sit there and get run over by the train.

And that time is now.

Telcom’s waste in Vietnam

From beepers to printers, from pay phones to city-phones, Vietnam was in a hurry to leapfrog to latest in Telecommunication.

After all, there are a lot of territories to be covered, even now, with 3-G. But some attempts stick, others faltered according to an article in Labor newspaper.

http://www.bernama.com.my/bernama/v5/newsworld.php?id=538113

It stated that some rural households were given all three proprietary sets even when not need-justified.

Join the club! It’s not just Vietnam which tries to catch up. It’s the entire post-industrial world which try to connect 24/7. First the device, then the social network. They are discussing mutation of Web 2.0 such as Meet up when your flight is canceled, or rousing young Mexicans to join a dance to promote tourism etc….(too bad the nude photographer did not have this app available to him when he first got the idea of going from city to city to take “artful” group nude pics).

Some wise doctors even prescribed an office with treadmill and desktop combo to combat obesity, to him, an inevitable result of our information age.

I am not sure how CFO’s will buy-in to HR proposal to equip their offices with not only high-speed computers but also slow-moving treadmills (they have just considered cloud computing to get rid of the servers to save on energy bills, now this?).

It lends new meaning to “sweat equity”. Hawkins is no stranger to tapping his key board while on wheels. The guy has always been prescient (except for understanding what love is).

Wi-fi technology has given ways to a host of application (laptop and latte).

Back to our wasted phone booth and city phone (limited range, with no roaming). These apps have not been widely adopted in Vietnam.

Whoever pitched these products did not foresee the ubiquity and fast roll out of 3-G in Vietnam, hence, death on arrival e.g. S-phone. Once you got a hold of an I-phone, it’s hard to come back to beepers, pay phones and city phones. Owning an I-phone is making a statement i.e. I have arrived.

Observers new to Vietnam are marveled at its rate of  I-phone adoption i.e. how can people own an I-phone which costs nearly 2/3 of their annual income!

The same question was asked not long ago and still raises suspicion when people saw young women on Vespa and other expensive import scooters. Often, they were dismissed as being call girls until those critics themselves could afford these newly price-reduced scooters.

The next wave would be cheap auto imports and other electronics manufactured right there in Vietnam for domestic consumption (Canon and Samsung).

By then, the country will be inundated with industrial waste. And rural households will not only receive all three network termination devices, but also a host of other hand-me-down waste components such as tube TV‘s, desktop computers and even a phone booth, if they want to use is as shelter from the storm. I can’t wait to see people trying to place a 3-G mobile call inside a phone booth in the rain. At least, old technology and new technology can both be put to use in modern Vietnam, where nothing is considered waste.

 

Juxtaposing

It just so happens that I am reading Matterhorn and Love Like Hate one after another. The former depicts the Vietnam War from a GI‘s perspective, the later from a Vietnamese viewpoint.

Coincidentally, people depicted in both novels came across as victims of an uncalled-for conflict and whose lives were disrupted and devastated. I found glimpses of truth in these novels: camaraderie, self-transformation and shifting policies (Matterhorn crew depended on choppers for medivac and ration drops, Viet Kieu in Love Like Hate depends on Boeing for home visit).

One can’t wait to get home,  state side (after the drafted tour of duty), the other, can’t wait to save up for the next visit (to show off).

Long ago, I had an idea for a movie script. I called it “OK Salem”, after wartime  popular street greet (it’s either Pall Mall or Salem).

The two central characters in my imaginative “OK Salem” are a lieutenant like Mellas and a shoe-shine boy (like the sidekick kid in Raiders of the Lost Ark). The two befriended and bonded (communicated mostly in numbers e.g. number 1, number 10).

Later, the street kid drifted to America and made it through college. The veteran, meanwhile, turned homeless. A chance encounter brought the two together, albeit with a role reversal. Now, moving on to the other side of the Pacific for a mis-en-scene, each serves as a mirror for the other’s former self.

I could never finish my script, since it is a work in progress (struggling writers all say that). But I know many are still living in the shadow of America’s lost war.

Matterhorn was said to be an epic novel, thirty years in the works. In the novel, there were occasional race and class in-fightings. I felt the exhaustion just trying to imagine what’s like to follow these Marines deep into the jungle of futility.

And ironically, in Love Like Hate, I found sub-texts of in-group discrimination 

(Viet Kieu against the native and vice versa).

To enjoy both novels which cover same region and same time span helps put the war in perspectives (Apocalypse Now 2.0). To read these two novels side by side, is analogous to see “OK Salem” on my desk (unlikely coupling brought together in war).

I know many of us are sore losers (and sore winners) frozen in time (with occasional relapses). I have walked pass many campaign signage in Little Saigon, whose sidewalks have been used as platforms for frequent war rematch.

I am not sure there will ever be real winners in war. But it sure looks like Matterhorn will endure as a safe repository of memories of a place and time far away, yet whose vested emotions remain so close to the heart.

Even mine.

seeing daughter

My father often went off to see his daughter, my half-sister. My brother tried to see his son from a previous marriage every few years or so (coast to coast).

Now I found myself in the same situation: seeing my little girl whom I took back from the hospital 19 years ago. I am sure she is just as excited as I am.

We won’t miss a beat. Those DNA resemblance.

But the social setting is going to be different. It’s going to be a third place, neither home nor work place.

So I chose Ben and Jerry. At least, that’s where I used to take her. Small vanilla, in the cup.

I won’t feel awkward. I will feel like I am in touch with my old self.

We anchor ourselves in people and places, even as time moved on. In hard times, we got demoted to the lowest level of Maslow hierarchy of need: survival.

I know I live on through my daughters. They love life, and laugh with friends. Both of them show my outlook on life i.e. no matter what happens, don’t let the world rob you of your smile.

Face tomorrow with optimism and not self-sabotage.

Appreciate the past for what it is, but not letting legacy dictate the terms.

Never get yourself into a box (eventually, one might have to, but still with the option of having one’s ash scattered into the seven seas).

I don’t know what I will say to her today. Most of my lessons, she already learned. I cannot help her prevent heart-break or headache. Time and Tylenol will do.

I can only be there, surviving on my term and timetable. And I know, like her, I need a father who will mark the passage of time, by his unique reaction to stimuli. Some fathers reacted worse than others. Most try their best to live up to this parental role.

I am proud to say I have tried my best. I hope I have earned my stripes.

The rest, I leave to chance. After all, I was on my own at her age, facing extreme uncertainties and ill-fated future . I made it OK. And I know, I know, hers won’t be the same. It certainly is going to be better.

So, my meeting will punctuate not with a goodbye or good luck, but with congratulations for her sure and certain victories. I see them even before she comes to realize it. That’s what father is for (to mark historical context).

I bet my life that she will do me proud.

P.S. As of this edit, I see the younger one over Fourth of July. Same DNA. Same tempo.

She likes corn and peaches. We went to Water Park. Got sun burned but a warming heart.

Time will destroy yet heal at the same time. My mistakes, your lessons. I took her to visit my old house, old school and old neighborhood. I was at that age, at that tumultuous time. Presidents were assassinated, upheaval everywhere.

I was growing up real fast. Got a good dose of cold reality in my face and the future seemed less certain with each day.

How can you explain the Vietnam War to a ten-year-old? The past can only be understood from the future. At the present time, even with Presidential archives and declassified materials (on top of leaked Pentagon Papers), scholars still debate and dialogue.

Oh well. All eyes and ears are on the Egyptian scene and streets. The urge to splurge has moved somewhere else.

As long as ammunition is spent, and human lives wasted. Such is the affair of our world, our post Cold-War world.

the infrastructure bills that come due

Infrastructure improvement could cost billions. Kids need to drive someday. And as Mr Buffet wisely put his investment dollars into railways since containers need to be offloaded to the Wal-Mart near you.

Those who travel recently can recall “boarding by zone”, “e-ticketing”, etc.. All sorts of gimmicks , except for the limited runways and slots allowed for take offs.

So, we are back to asking ourselves: to build or not to build.

No pain, no gain.

And it’s a long-term commitment.  Bulldozers and concrete. Fixing the hole while driving through it.

(reminds me of Hwy 22 in Orange County or the 405 in West LA).

Nation-building at home.

While American allies reaped benefits from its generous foreign aid ( among them S Korea, Taiwan, and to a certain extent, S Vietnam during the war – except here, more infrastructure got damaged than built) and recently Iraq, MN bridge, or New Orleans levy are illustrated cases for the new bill.

Leadership is that quality which needs to be tested in times like this. One sees what needs to be done, and one takes action. Period.

Leveraging the downturn, and solving two problems with one solution. P and P/C, the golden eggs and the goose, keeping the nation employed, while paving the road to success for next gens.

Obama can walk out to a well-paved Pennsylvania head high, just like the Clinton/Gore team did with their Information Superhighway.

I have never opined on this blog, except on empowering people, through technology or globalization.

But I know, without infrastructural improvement, globalization will stall (imported goods cannot get to their destination, leads to exporting goods stall at home as well).

Do unto others what you would like yourself be done unto. May the best plan win.

In Vietnam, the town approved a new Happyland, to make Long An Vietnam’s equivalent of Anaheim. By the time the expected 14 million visitors frequented this Happyland, we hope here in the US, 220 million travelers would tell AAA that their holiday travel were excellent due to infrastructure improvement. Our reaction and action during this downturn separates leaders from followers, visionaries from Yes men.

strong as an ox

I am back to the land where people work animals into daily speech:

– strong as an ox

– wrinkle as a monkey

– dumb as a cow.

Everything gets used more than once (recycled): plastic bags, banana leaves. In Understanding Vietnam ( through literature) published by Berkeley Press, the author, after surveying many well-known pieces, came to see that the tension between “Hieu” and “Tinh” is key to understand Vietnam.

I would posit that this tension gets new expressions and variations in today’s context. For instance, the “Hieu” (loyalty to parents and extended families) could easily evolve to loyalty to a team or support system (women group).

Meanwhile “Tinh” gets complicated with the introduction of Western understanding of sexuality (even homosexuality).

I can understand why Asian young struggling with changes challenges.

PBS has a piece on this subject. A Chinese peasant girl went to the city for work (garment). She saved up enough for the annual trip back home on the train. Upon arrival, her independence came to a head- on with traditional mores.

Bang! Conflict. Collision. Compromise.

Changes in morality, changes in the tools we use and changes due to the influx of FDI and foreign influences (smoking or non-smoking?).

Web sites are discussing a country bride who was set up to marry a Korean man through a matchmaking service, only to die a week after her arrival to the new country.  Groom wasn’t well in the head and did not take his medicine, or so they said.

Infrastructure need FDI. People need Foreign Aid even without “Tinh”, as long as the “Hieu” gets taken care of (building country houses with modern electricity and plumbing for parents).

This tension intensifies with each new element gets added-on into the old system.

So the parents of the dead bride now experience the most extreme of unintended consequences.

This leads me back to the bamboo as a symbol of strength, but a quiet one.

Bend with the wind. Unbreakable. Resilient.

I would rather use plants to describe strength, than animals (the Zodiac leads first with the Rat, yew!).

Western world, on the other hand, works machine, instead of plants or animals, into their daily figure of speech: robust, retooling, reboot.  Whatever the dominant factor at the time in that society becomes the mental construct of the day.

With 90% back then, and 60% today, Vietnam can’t help using the buffalo to describe strength (Buffalo Boy vs Cowboy). Everyone can relate to the usefulness and stamina of an ox, a traditional symbol of strength in Vietnamese literature. After all, it has been around helping to cultivate the field for thousand of years. (Similar to Wolf Totem in Mongolia).

But it’s bamboo that helped mobilize Quang Trung‘s troop to traverse the entire expanse of the country, during New Year, to defeat the invading army. Two soldiers carry the one who rests. Very much like Spain during World cup. They were unselfish. They stayed with their triangular formation.

They claimed victory, rightfully. History (rewritten one) always favors the strong. But the strong have known this for  some time: strength alone doesn’t assure victory. Just go to the museum of Natural Sciences and see now-extinct dinosaurs for yourself.

 

Vietnamese love for French songs

When traveling in Vietnam, you can still hear French embedded in every-day culture:

fork (fut-xet) , suit (com-plet) and tie (ca-ra-vat). Apparently they just went with the phoneticized versions for lack of  dynamic equivalents in French Colonial era or literal translation, such as “Hop Dem” (Boite de Nuit).

Some old hands can still carry a tune or two in French. From the music of Christophe to Art Sullivan, from Dalida to Charles Aznavour.

Ask anyone from the older generation, they will tell you they know Alain Delon, Catherine Deneuvre , Jean Paul Belmondo and Brigitte Bardot.

And you should listen over an iced-coffee with condense milk (cafe au lait). You see, it’s there, the French imprints in gastronomy and architectures (Notre Dame Cathedral), traffic cop stations at street corners, and the ambivalent tie (a rare thing given its tropical climate).

The older scholars are still conversant in French. Their worn-out  La Rousse copies testify to that.

Chances are they still have a beret lying around (up North, or in Dalat).

Old Time-and-Life pictures still show French officers smoking in Hotel Continental and Caravelle in the late 50’s (in shorts).

Foreigners’ hang-out places now see practically every nation on Earth represented (expats), but still bear the name French quarters.

Vietel won and carried out the Haiti Telecom contract despite the quake. The thing they have in common: speak French as former fellow colonies.

Speaking of history. Madame Nhu (the title says it all) was overexerting her derivative power with her bad PR comments (they can barbecue themselves all they want, nobody asked them to) about the burning monks. She once had been tutored by her soon-to-be husband presumably in French.

A friend told me I should try to make it to Paris before dying.  Apparently, Paris is our new Rome and Mecca (it’s still among the top ten tourist destinations despite the recession). Even the hyper-savers in China couldn’t help spending an average of $1800 there for shopping at Capitalism temples.

Since they arrived in tour bus, their schedules weren’t allowed for sitting down dinner. Just shop (although both the Chinese and the French love cuisine).

And if I can’t do it, a trip to my local supermarket will do. There, I get my French Roast coffee, and a baguette plus cheese (La Vache qui rit).

And on Youtube, I can  just select French songs e.g. Francoise Hardy‘s. Those singers, in tailored suits, sang with utter confidence and vulnerability:

“Mal, je suis mal…” or, “Il fait de soleil, je pense a toi.”

As a Vietnamese in origin, I was wired to love French songs. No way around it. It’s a good start for my schooling, in French, at an early age. What else?

Frere Jacque, dormez vous? I didn’t know I was homesick, until one day, I happened to listen to Adieu Sois Heureuse by Art Sullivan. It not only brought me back in time,

but also, to a place where I grew up, where a lot of dreams went unrealized, and many friendships, half-baked, left wanting for more. French is the best language for nostalgia. And where else better than in Vietnam where you can still find it embedded in every-day culture, and etched in the memories of exiled like myself.