Thang Nguyen 555

Cultures on Collision Course

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With some short-term relief work in Asia/Africa and long stint in Telecom, Thang also earned a B.A. at Pennsylvania State University. M.A. in Communication at Wheaton Graduate School, M.A. in Cross-Cultural Communication at Gordon-Conwell Seminary, Boston. In addition, he earned a CELTA – classes taken in Hanoi for cultural re-immersion.

Tag: Vietnam

  • Adventure in my homeland

    One of my earliest  collections was the Adventure of Tin-Tin. It was a roadmap for my adventure later in life, which took me to ten countries and roughly fifty cities in North America. But nothing had prepared me for an adventure in my homeland. Certain familiar elements still exist: Chemin de Fer, Ben Thanh Market and…

  • Blind in wilderness

    Years ago, I took a course in Wilderness Survival. One of the classmates was a blind Korean guy.  The others all white males. We were to spend the entire five days in the White Mountain of New Hampshire, with one solo day. Our “final” was rock repelling. I kept looking in my teammate’s eyes and…

  • Death-affirming culture

    During lunch time at my first job (Child Welfare Bureau at Indian Town Gap, PA), we threw a football, my first. That was supposed to be my induction into the Penn State culture the following Fall. Here in Vietnam, at lunch time, I walk by a casket store. As equally shocking for foreigners as my…

  • Customarily Bad Luck

    It’s known urban legend here in Vietnam that you do not take a photo with three people. Someone will need to stand in to defy the odds (of bad luck). It is also bad luck that a person in the photo but was cut out. I once saw a family picture which had a missing member.…

  • Par Avion

    I almost stepped on an envelope with imprint of an airplane on the cover. It’s been a while since I saw that design. We used to write intimate letters, telling in detail what had happened in our lives, then “seal with a kiss” an envelope which had “Par Avion” on it. In fact, when Vietnam…

  • Slippery Saigon

    Someone told me that the rainy season here would end soon. Yet it is raining still. Outdoor activities like kung-fu class, xe-om, beer stalls all ceased. I seeked shelters . The trick to walk safely here is to step firmly with one foot into the sidewalk, not at its edge (which slopes down to facilitate…

  • Art expressions in most unlikely places

    You would have never thought of running into people ballroom-dancing in the park. But here in GoVap new park, where the young trees are still being nursed, and the lights barely lit up, people came out and did just that. Young and old, male and female, they came out when the heat started to ease.…

  • How can I tell her

    Lobo was hot in Vietnam during the 70’s. Decades later, on an American stage, his Vietnamese fans even invited him to perform live for music video. Just a simple man. “I love you too much to ever start liking you, so let’s just let the story kind an end…” The contradiction and dialectic – friend and…

  • Crossed markets

    Forbes kept praising the success of luxury brands in China while web sites in Vietnam and China mentioned “Pepper Spray on Black Friday”. Chinese-made goods, sold as lost leaders, to the first 100-early-bird shoppers. Planned scarcity. Hype-creation. Sensational, sizzling headline-grabbing video op for YouTube. We need attention. The media need it even more. (For some counter-intuitive…

  • ICT talent in a flat world –

    re-post from 2011. This past year, things are getting heated up with “friend-shoring” chip manufacturing with Biden’s visit. ________________________________________________________________________________ If it hadn’t been for the slightly warm temperature, the water bottle that bore “QTSP” (Quang Trung Software Park) and the simulcast headsets, I would have thought I was back in 2005 at  a similar conference in…