Tag: Vietnam

Yearning for the new

The Year of the Cat.

Al Stewart in white suit.

Cyclical, eternal and in sync with nature. No “dominion over the land and seas” as in Western theocracy (in an ironic twist, outside my window, the work crew keeps digging, plowing, flattening and paving the sidewalks – one after another, from water to power, cable to phone companies – one dead-end street, multi-crew, stretching on for months).

People just want to rest, renew and reinvigorate.

Eat the fruit and replant the seed.

Eat the fruit, and remember those who planted the seed.

Greet the young and remember the old.

In letting go, one is free to receive the first visitor on New Year.

I could always tell who was going to be our first visitor while growing up in Vietnam.

Great Uncle, in bow tie.

(It would be an equivalence of man in black during New Year Eve’s party).

The bouquet, the basket of fruit and a bowl of brisket, all symbolize abundance from nature . This was during a pre-supermarket era i.e. fresh, not frozen.

Lunar New Year presents a different perspective.

I remember a movie joke line “the only restaurant opens over Christmas is Chinese“.

And perhaps the opposite is also true: the only establishment that is open in Vietnam during Tet is Circle K. (backpacker’s alley).

I miss the firecrackers. They replace them with fireworks now.

But the scent and sound of firecrackers truly marked the changing of the “animal” (from Tiger to Cat). New Year Day saw various shades of pink and red firecracker’ s ash on rich man’s lawn.

Everyone yearns for the new: new clothes, new money  and new coat of paint. The ancestral altar also got buffed up. My late parents used to pen some poems right after midnight.

If they had Web 2.0 back then, they probably would have gone on Facebook and “status” it. People forgive and forget. Life is hard enough with war, separation and loss.

For three days, food is taken for granted.

Sit back, relax, and enjoy. Let’s hear it! 10-9-8…count down. No, there is no such clear-cut.

Just a crack here and a pop there, and before you realize it, New Year has arrived . It dropped a ton of optimism in a hurry, like an overtime UPS man running late. Growing up in war-time and in poverty is like doing exercise: you have to do it every day to make it work for you (you learn to look at yourself and others not by the amount of possession,  but by the richness of one’s relationships).

New Year in Vietnam is  a time for communal self-renewal. Everybody yearns for the new, for a better tomorrow. For now, Al Stewart’s the Year of the Cat will do just fine, since it was a top hit back then. Every twelve years, it becomes relevant all over again.

 

Use it

Safeway doesn’t feel safe. Desert is now full of people ( from the media to law enforcement).

Last weekend Arizona shooting reminds me of “Under The Banner of Heaven” which revealed the intersect of religious occult and gun culture in the region.

It also highlights young people’s plight to make a name for themselves (in this case, committed a high-profile act of violence). On the contrary, it brought to mind an already high-profile figure trying to go the way of Buddha.

At least, Prince William tried to go rough even just for one night (to draw our attention to the plight of homelessness a year ago).

http://abcnews.go.com/International/prince-william-sleeps-streets/story?id=9401023

Whatever makes you sleepless at night, use it.

In “Unwanted”, a Vietnamese-American dentist-turned-author recounted his plight as a half-breed coming of age in post-war Vietnam. He turned tragedy into triumph (instead of having the raw stuff floating around day in and day out at his dental practice), rejection to acceptance.

We have heard of constructive criticism, tough love etc….

Now we hear about civilized discourse.

Immediately after a crisis, American went shopping, this time, for the same gun (sales went through the roof).

Hello? we each have our own hangup. Use it!

After being dropped cold-turkey into the 76 winter storm at Penn State, and got added into a Journalism class, I was told I would never make it (thanks prof!). Use it!

The closing shot for “the Social Network” (the movie) shows our protagonist press

“Send request” to friend his own girl friend. He built Facebook hoping to sign up just that person.

With all the energy (boosted by Energy Drink), the cheering at Superbowl

(and toilet Bowl), we as a nation have a lot of pent-up passion. Use it.

And for the 15%, mostly men,  the majority of whom in the now over-saturated construction sector, we can use the muscle. We have read about floods in Haiti, Australia, Vietnam, Brazil … which need infrastructure rebuilding. Can we put 2 and 2 together: we buy your stuff, but you hire our men.

Use them. Was it just me who see dots unconnected, and people unlinked?. I will turn on the TV to hear what President Obama has to say at the memorial service for the victims. I hope to hear his constructive ideas on how to turn tragedy into triumph, hopelessness into helpfulness. Tragedy? Use it.

Edit 1: The President concluded with “in the child’s eyes” inverse pyramid speech structure. He helped the nation to visualize a possible America, a new American Century, worthy of our children’s expectations. For me, it just seemed like yesterday that I watched the Twin Towers collapse live, on TV. Today they are burying a 9/11 baby. What a waste! Unless we all conspire to “use it”.  At least, we had a precedent in Mothers Against Drunk Driving movement (remember exhibition of  what’s left of a DUI car wreck?) That’s the power of visualization. The transforming power of “use it”.

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.

Viet-Am Third Migration

First wave: 1975, 4 “ports of entry”: Arkansas, California, Florida and Pennsylvania.

Second wave: 1978 -2008 South Westward to California and Texas.

Third wave: joining everyone else during this Recession to the Lone Star State, where 8% unemployment still looks better than 12% and 10% in Florida and California, respectively.

Part of the American Dream is mobility: chasing the tornado to find the rainbow in the end. If it’s out there, we will hunt it down, dead or alive.

So begins our journey, to the moon and into the cave (found one recently near Lao’s border in Central Vietnam – see latest National Geographic).

Like Gordon Gecko in Oliver Stone‘s latest installment, Viet-American, over a bowl of Pho in Hong Kong Mall, Houston, says, “it’s a game, a game between people”.

I have yet seen a set of more competitive people. They push their children and themselves to achieve and acquire: straight A+’s for the kids, Lexus’ for moms and Heineken for dads.

Pajamas culture in collision with Long Johns’. At least, both extol strong work ethic. Size apart, third-wave Viet-Ams (mostly in Houston and Dallas) found natural affiliation with Texan (machismo) in dominion over the land (agrarian bent), the sea (Galveston) and exploration of natural resources (oil).

Herd instinct kicks in. Warmer weather, Sun Belt migration pattern which already started since 1978 (with one hiccup during the oil burst in early 80’s – to preticipate Silicon Valley dot.com burst 20 years later).

No wonder they opened another Vietnam consulate there in Houston to ease Visa processing. It’s time to roll that dice again, Texan style. There was a Rock and Roll band already stationed there. The CBC, after a stint in Hawaii, are content to stay put (instead of “born to be wild”). The aged fan base got two phases of the past all mixed up: ball room dancing (French influence) with R & R (GI’s influence during the War).  Oh Suzie Q! Napalm girl now turned 40.

For the Viet-Am Catholics, this would be their fourth and final migration: 1954, from North to South Vietnam just to join every else in 1975 and later years out to seas, and risk becoming pilgrims at the mercy of pirates while looking for paradise.

Their sons and daughters now have Anglicized names. Some ran for office, others turned accomplished journalists. One of them had a piece on NBC Nightly News . Thanh Truong covered a fire-causing death of hobos’ in New Orleans.

Ending his report in a note of empathy, Truong commented “they came here seeking shelter which turned to be a memorial”. Let’s hope the same comment won’t apply to Third Wave Viet-Am U-Haulers to Texas these days. Just another untold tale from a lingering Recession.

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.

 

Where have they gone?

Subtitle “Time to remember”.

When I was in high school, the consumer society began to take shape in Vietnam: beer, cheese, cigarettes, toothpaste and vinyl music albums. Then we moved on to AKAI tape.

By the time I got to the US, the first item I purchased was a portable cassette recorder

(to record music from home, not knowing that someday, they could be digitized, compressed and downloaded).

We used Super 8mm for home filming, and Sony 3/4 inch field recorder for news gathering (some stations still hung on to 16mm film, but this required dark room, which slowed down news processing) while college roommates wouldn’t let their  8-track player out of sight.

Audio Editing back then required one to cut the tape by a razor and scotch-tape it back.

And computer time at the lab meant sitting in the hall with punched cards in hand. Those equipment are now museum pieces. Gone also were names like Zenith and RCA. (BTW Samsung is getting into Medical Device space ).

We have tried so hard to deliver goods and services from point A to point B.

Encoding and decoding the content, medium-agnostic e.g. tin cans, message in the bottle, pigeons.

(in today’s term,  “dumb” phones).

Learning in an analog age was cumbersome e.g. researching a subject (Dewey system) and tabulating the findings.

I posted a BBC clip about the Joy of Stats. The professor was able to show case 200 years of progress in 4 minutes. Comprehensive and captivating.

3-D holographic presentation sure beats the transparencies of the overhead projector (whose bulbs got hot and burned out quickly, often times, in the middle of the spill).

Or the slide trays which “sync” pulses on music tracks, and we called that multi-media.

It is hard for today’s teens to comprehend the pre-Google pre-YouTube age. And just for amusement, we can show them a picture of mobile movie box (often on bicycle). I spent a large chunk of my allowance on those Charlie Chaplin clips with head stuck inside the dark drape.

The kids I hung out with, Pierre, mixed French and Vietnamese, Ali, Indian and other half-breed French kids in the neighborhood. where have they gone? And the technology and tools I was used to, where have they all gone as well.

To be sustainable, we will have to do away with resource-intensive tools.

And to accommodate a larger crowd on spaceship Earth, we will have to learn to negotiate in this new economy of hope.  In San Francisco, they are now testing a car-sharing model with many benefits e.g. help pay the bills, reduce CO emission and require less parking space.

If you come to San Francisco, be sure to wear some flowers in your hair.

And marvel at the Golden Gate Bridge, which still stands uncontested throughout the rise and fall (and reinvention) of Silicon Valley. That I found reassuring. A bridge from point A to point B . It’s still there, so is my resolve to cross it.

 

Forgetfulness is necessary

In clinical terms: selective memory.

Speak ill not of the dead, for instance.

Auto-biography is another version of selective memory (before actual amnesia).

For me, to see Dow Chemical opens a polymer and acrylic factory in Vietnam, roughly 40 years after Agent Orange got sprayed over the same landscape, is a great example of collective amnesia. Vietnam must be a very forgetful country, or a forgiving and pragmatic one.

Intel, Samsung, Canon all set up shop there. These names are not attached to any controversy we know of.

IBM and Coke got their own black eyes in the past.

But one must move on, travel the globe to seek bed partners never thought possible 40 years ago (I may have repeated what Secretary of State Clinton said in her recent remarks about Vietnam).

The President is in India. I thought I saw in passing his test-driving a nano car.

(In an ironic twist, he is a de facto CEO of GM, checking out a foreign competitor, in this case, Tata).

After India, whose stroke of luck continues after Y2K, the President will take a walk on memory lane: Indonesia, home of volcano and the largest Muslim population on Earth.

One cannot schedule a better get-away from gridlock than this. While things seem to jam up over here, everything explodes over there.

I alluded yesterday about how long it took Detroit to build smaller cars (began with Pinto) . And now, Harley Davidson has made-in-USA parts assembled in India (that way, the nouveaux riche in India and China can join in the chorus of “Born to be wild”. It’s expensive to be wild!

The pendulum finally swings to the opposite : “Small is beautiful” is adopted here in Detroit, and Harley in Mumbai.

“I want to hold your hand”, the Beatles sing. They went to India 40 years ago for R&R. Now the seeds finally took hold here in the West. This time, albeit not reversing “the British invasion“, off shoring to a former British colony via broadband links and Harley parts (tattoo stickers not included).

I wish I can be forgetful on demand. The time calls for it: a healthy dose of amnesia. No context, no frame of reference. Just do it. Do not think too hard and too much. Go with the flow (of information and money).

 

Halloween in Vietnam? A redundancy

Young people are out in drove, that is, if they were not already on bikes, racing like mad on weekend nights.

This time around, in costume. Halloween costume. In Vietnam, of all places.

First, the masks trickled in at tourist and expat hot spots. Then, wider adoption is made possible by cheaper goods from next door China . No stranger to superstition and spirits, Vietnam has always opened to trying new things, from Tango to Hip Hop, Vespa to Roll Royce.

Only this time, young people agree with their elder generation: the spirits world.

Their parents would burn incense on the 15th of July, Lunar calendar, and the younger generation dress in costume, Twilight style. Long held reverence for both the living or dead (animism and ancestral worship), Vietnamese are no strangers to para phenomena and cyclical lives. In contrast, to be consistent with their linear and industrial model, Westerners have tried to suppress witchcraft and superstitious belief which gained popularity in revolt of Darwin and the rise of science and technology.

That can’t explain away Twilight, the Blair Witch project and tons of Halloween  candies and candles flickered inside pumpkin shells on US front lawns.

But in Vietnam, year around, in any household, one finds incense burning at the family altar. Even in Catholic households.

In fact, Cao Dai ism accommodates all spiritual traditions under one roof (Victor Hugo was one of the saints).

Caodaists wear white, symbol of purity. Another striking contrast in how funerals are conducted. White robes in Vietnam, all Black for the West (this tradition is widely adopted by Vietnamese overseas who attend Chapel services in Rose Hills, a popular cemetery in Los Angeles, California. The Buddhist Vietnamese in the US struck a compromise when colliding with public ordinance and traditional mourning practices: they brought in the monks,

then the limousine people take over.

So, the children in Vietnam  got both Moon Cake last month, and Halloween candies this month.

Halloween allow both adults and children to take on an alter ego. Someone said aptly that “give me a mask, I will tell you the truth”.

Actors do that all the time, and get paid handsomely.

Halloween, it’s one day out of the year, when the bad and ugly feel accepted at the table, or a bar stool in Vietnam. Westerners are welcome to join in what had already been a built-in practice in this culture: a reverence for the non-living.

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.