Imponderables

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, aside from “death” rate, we got divorce rate.

Yet people keep falling in love, and getting married.

Hint: more shopping and spending for a family of two and more.

In America, there is no shortage of imponderables.

I am starting to read Paterno bio. I could barely get through the first few pages.

Something quite imponderable there (despite the lucid prose).

After all, what happened in America, stayed in America.

Sex shops, butcher shops.

Churches and strip clubs, sometimes near each other.

Schools and parks (for homeless people) near fast-food and donuts joints.

Dental office next to candy shop.

And 24-hr gym (all you can lift)  near Hometown Buffet (all you can eat). Go figure.

America spends a large chunk of change on incarceration, pornography (hard and soft e.g. NYT best-seller list, top 3 are taken by the same author who caters to women taste for escapism), guns and amos (especially amos, modeled after HP cartridge business model), medical marijuana and spirits (that get you on a downward spiral).

My name is Thang. And I am not an alcoholic. So help me God.

Somewhere somehow, the line has been moved: the incarcerated are better cared for than the non-incarcerated.

The top 1% refuses to pick up golf balls, while the rest can’t afford meat balls.

Kids aren’t learning (slipped in ranking), while workers need to but can’t get it paid for by the employers or government.

Politicians are talking, but leaders aren’t leading.

We are bidding for time, for election, for miracles, and are freezed like deers in front of approaching head lights.

Actors are either making quiet retreat (Sundance Festival), or gone overboard (Eastwood and Samuel Jackson).

It’s the best time to be in  late-night comedy.

But SNL fans can’t stay up late (wrong demographic for that time slot).

Voting booths seem to always have problems in Florida. (Voters should be required to have an eye-exam). We are enjoying our time on the deck, but forgot to check the ship’s name. ( Titanic ?).

Even if it’s free, no ride lasts forever.

Every once in a while, we need to check the navigating instrument. No such thing as auto-piloting (Google unmanned car?).

Not in this age of post-innocence. Not at this time of austerity. Not now. Not ever. We need to be vigilant against those who quack like a leader, walk like a leader, but in fact, are not leaders at all. Leadership comes with a price. They come to take credits. This is the root of all imponderables: those who can’t lead, lead. Those who can, refuse to stay in the game.

My edu-tour to Vietnam

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 and say goodbye to the alley

– everybody is in motion, rain or shine. Those who work in A/C environment also pound at the keyboards, hence fingers in motion

– individualism will have a hard time here

– living and working in Vietnam equals to living and working inside a fish bowl

– one force gets multiple counter-forces, in all directions, hence, defies physics as we know it

– people lock their doors so carefully that it seems as if they locked themselves in more than lock someone out

– music and movies somehow freezeframed as if the Americans had never left (Woman in Love,  I’d love you to want me…)

– peddlers would ride their three-wheeled stalls down the street while on a mobile phone: double-mobility

– you lose a lot of weight while here (sweat and luckily, not tears)

– you will be approached half a dozen times a day by lottery ticket sellers or xe-om

– Carl Jr and Burger King are here but not Mc Donalds (and not because Vietnam is more anti-MacDonalisation than the French).

– people ask why you live and eat alone. My loneliest meal was having a steak and fries just because my appointment screwed up

– consumerism has not saturated the place with high-margin products and services: spa, sweets and sporting goods

– unless you are an established brand name, forget trying to get in now. Amway all the way.

– you can get live entertainment every night : singers on scooters would bar-hop, while in-house musicians play for time

– another generation of kids are growing up watching flat-screen TV‘s and I-pads touch screens. In twenty years, with full effect of global osmosis in tech and commerce, you will not learn as much from your six months here as I have about the old and the new.

24/7 world. Outsource that software testing project. Fly here to check the lab out. Do what you have to, while it’s still fertile. While the water is still lukewarm. Once things are set, you will be just another globe trotter looking for a trophy to bring home. After a stop at a burger joint, of course. Please don’t eat alone. Still not acceptable then as it is now.

Teen boys’ dreams

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 group – cutting classes… knowing a few of us would be drafted to the war zones”.

Also posted was a picture of three guys, who shared a table in the back of the class, all with bell-bottom pants and innocent looks (one of them later came back from the war zone with only one eye left). Ironically, it’s him who later created the web page, which also runs a personal ad looking for the other two.

On my first trip back to Vietnam after 25 years away, I managed to track down a friend who used to sit next to me (table next to last). He in turn helped connect the three in the picture I have just seen.

Those early day “postings” were our version of facebook. They bore imprints of innocence and premonition for our soon-to-be-lost youth , fours years after Tet 68 and one year before the Paris Accord, which was signed 40 years to date.

I still remember those diaries. They were passed around at the end of the school year, to record our impressions of each other and our time in middle school. During the year, we had produced our version of Wall Paper (the student version of White Paper), for the entire school to read.

We stayed up late, typing, designing and laying out. Then, we used the school stencil (roneo) papers the night before deadline.

We named it “Uoc Vong” (Aspiration).

Since co-ed only introduced a few years later and only for night school, we boys had to stick together all those hot afternoons. Extra-curricular actvities would include volley ball, soccer, ping-pong, Rock music practice, karate, fund-raising campaigns for refugees fleeing the war zones (the girl in the  picture) and a bit of home-grown journalism.

Those four years were incubating time.

We were pruned in school tradition with “flame” as our mascot and learned to emulate upper-classmen (Quoc Dung who wrote music at the age of 12, and got noteriety at 16). We participated in and campaigned for student representative posts. Even after getting elected to the Student Council, I still had to observe the pecking order (seniors got to pick the best all-girl schools to sell our Tet magazine to). Being junior, I ended up with a nearby “rough” co-ed schools (where other boys surely wouldn’t give us free rein on their campus to court “their female classmates”).

We also learned a very important lesson: friendship lasts forever!

After four decades of drifting apart (with one known dead, and two wounded) then stumbling upon that picture of the tallest boys, with Lobo‘s hair and bell-bottom pants, facing the black/white camera, I felt a lump in my throat. If they had only known.

Had I only  known.

Yet even then, I sensed that our lives would be swept along by strong political currents.

I wrote  on our Wall Paper ” around the bend, further ahead, where we have yet seen, but with a good chance of turning out not as thought.. in whatever shape or form we found ourselves then, let’s meet and greet as if time had stood still and that we remain friends despite of it all”.

That turned out to be a self-fulfilling prophecy. The one-eyed red-beret is currently visiting Vietnam. I showed up early on the third day of Tet at his door step to fetch him, and guided him across a busy street.

He used to be a black belt but has to wear black boots to straighten his crooked ankle (a one-eyed shaky hand and crooked leg man). “No matter what shape or form we found ourselves then, let’s meet and greet as if time had stood still”.

In the US, Vietnam vets are calling attention to the plight of vet homelessness.

It’s the same everywhere: we are quick to forget, unless something triggered our memory and sparked our imagination. It’s not an unsolvable issue, but the “social” dimension needs to be personalized. When asked why a little girl tried to save a star fish when the seas are full of them. She replied “it matters to that one”.

My teen boy’s dream has made a 360-degree turn on me; my personal Timeline has just sent a reminder to my inbox, urging me to click on a link to the past.  Around the bend, further up the road where things have yet revealed themselves to us, let’s make a commitment to stay friends despite of it all (war and its unintended consequences). Dream, dream, dream.

Time, on whose side?

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 used to have a song out called “Time is on your side”.

I don’t think so.

One can conjure up various scenarios for end-of-life, but it will end regardless, without credits roll (perhaps we should get going with our acknowledgement page just in case).

Feature-length movies, by convention, last one hour and a half (same way Twitter limits a tweet to 140 characters).

Except for Costner’s and Cameron’s (Dancing with Wolves and Titanic).

Life happens while we are busy planning it (John Lennon).

It came concurrently and not sequentially:  a brief sunset, a nagging child, a teacher’s stern look.

One can find happiness in confinement (Life is Beautiful) or at the last moment (Mozart’s Requiem).

It’s not over until it is truly over

When I was 4 or 5 years old, I saw neighbors carry out a dead man .

He had lived alone in a house in the alley.

I did not know his name. Only learned later that he had died without any relatives around him.

By all measures (culturally), he died unhappily.

He could have lived twice his age then, but his death was still viewed as an unhappy one. Quality trumps quantity.

Biotech has extended our “feature-length” narrative, from one-hour-and-a-half lifescript to that of Titanic’s and Dancing with Wolves’.

What are we going to do with all those extra hours? Amusing ourselves to death while waiting for death (there hasn’t been a playbook for seniors – Paterno for instance has just passed away at 85 after getting sacked by the BOD at my school).

In Silicon Valley where Steve Jobs started out, the motto was “trust no one above 30”.

Yet, Sculley and other investment banking CEO’s pocketed huge severance despite their poor performance.

Time is on whose side?

Of course not on the side of the poor or the pure of hearts (keep the faith).

Even with director’s cut, a feature-length film still needs to be trimmed down.

As creatures of selective memories, we often edit out and reinvent our past.

Nowhere else can you find serious anticipation of the new and relinquishing of the past than in Vietnam, during Tet.

The Year of the Dragon has finally arrived. It roars, dances and puffs out fire.

We invent myths and matiarials to redefine who we are (he is from a Royal breed, a Lexus owner).

Vietnamese people  are known as descendants of Dragon and Angel. To understand Vietnam, you need to understand its literary life.

Vietnamese  honors duty above death, sacrifice above love. These tales of heroism are the baseline. “Time is on whose side” is an irrelevant question. Happiness defined as personal fulfillment is also out of the question. People here see themselves as in transit, with Earth another station along the way. Home is where ancestors are waiting, provided you had fulfilled your filial obligation and honored them by courageous living. Try to work that in the State of the Union address, and see its impact on American society? (You lied!). On the CEO’s on Wall Street. On the armed men who preyed on US campus.

America needs Vietnam as much as Vietnam needs America, since time is on neither side.

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.

Maybe all we need is time

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 shop at night markets where there are food stalls, snacks stalls and magazine stalls.

Life in the fast lane (the only time I slow down is when I jaywalk across a busy street).

I have tried to put Vietnam in a box, but so far it’s been in vain: not scooter nation, not helmet nation, not multi-tasker nation.

I know one clear difference between life here vs in the US: your survival instinct better kicks in quick (Maslow‘s basic need).

Because it’s noisy, dusty and hot, people want to cocoon themselves in A/C  cul-de-sacs.

Common use of language also helps people cope: “choi” (play aspect) is inserted in every other sentence: “choi troi”, “choi chu”, “choi noi”, “choi luon” (upstage, wordy, flashy and go all the way).

Give Vietnam some time.

It will soon get to be a nation of 100 million, whose population is evenly distributed in a bell shape.

The UN person, Mehta, warned Vietnam about the “middle-income trap”.

They have seen it happen with Malaysia, Indonesia and the Philippines.

The trends are there for Vietnam to grow.  Next step is to harness growth to produce desired outcomes. It’s not accidental that the former leader of Singapore was invited to speak here quite often.

He knew a thing or two about realizing a nation’s dream.

Maybe all we need is time. Some watch trains go by, all of their lives. Watching and wondering how others met and make it last. (courtesy of Stephen Bishop).

Random meet

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 well, but from Australia.

Happy ending: he was back from the war zone while she from a former one.

The company she works for has agreed to transfer her to the US.

I was like NYT‘s Friedman, marvelled at how “flat” our world had become.

A teen-age girl at the table couldn’t help “omg”, “omg” “so you’re like in Hurt Locker?”

We were trying to break the ice waiting to be served when the spot light turned to our returning soldier. Rest of the night was “omg” etc…

I couldn’t help reflect on “the Deer Hunter” syndrome, and how drastic the change had been in our reception of veterans.

This story hasn’t taken into account how high-tech this war was as compared to Vietnam. Incidentally, I read a statistic that mentioned the average life expectancy for Vietnamese: 1960-40 years, 2010 – 73 years.

No wonder it’s jam-packed “scooter nation”.

When my fellow dinner guest left on his perhaps in-law scooter, I said “if you can make it in Iraq, you can ride in Vietnam”.

We were joking about his need to keep in shape after all the good foods.

One common ice-breaking tip is “who would you choose to be dinner guest.”

Some people mentioned Bill Gates, others, Kennedy.

My favorites would be Charlie Rose, since he can draw anyone out of his/her shelf.

Barbara Walters would be interesting if she stopped being a journalist, and just be a conversationalist.

I then would invite Elton John, George Harrison and John Lennon.

Let the party begin.

Random meeting but more enlightened towards the end of the dinner.

I realise one thing after last night: you might not agree with a policy (what Mass Destruction Weapon?) but you need to accept the person, soldier or civilian. We are all floating together (Christ Church in New Zealand got struck twice sitting on the ring of Fire) on the seabed and sitting around the table together.

Disagreement or agreement, we are fellow human beings, seekers of truth and beauty. And perhaps, for a moment there, he and I were both “viet-kieu” (you need a second helping there).

Random meet, but perhaps not quite random after all. Merry Christmas soldier boy!

In the mirror

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 I won’t take it anymore”.

Except this time, instead of opening their windows, they opened Windows and Adbuster, which called for Occupy Wall Street (and McToilet on Wall Street).

A leaderless protest against figure-less forces that have worked against them e.g. commoditization, globalization, or automation.

Their 60’s counterparts wanted to rage against the status quo.

Conversely, “occupiers of Wall Street” just want to have an occupation that pays a little more than “nickel-and-dime”.

The wind is blowin but not in their favor (Andy Rooney has just retired leaving one vacancy for roughly 2 Billion people who recently joined the rank of the Middle Class).

Instead of “Hell No, We won’t go”, they are now yelling “Hell No, PLace To Go”.

India? China? Brazil?

To land a job in  BRIC‘s countries, one needs a crash course in language and culture.

(I resent the author of a recent Economist’s article, ridiculing “poor English” in Vietnam. Cheap shot at best, and colonialistic at worst.

http://www.economist.com/blogs/johnson/2011/09/english-vietnam?fsrc=scn/tw/te/bl/iamenglishteach

Go ahead and try to learn Mandarin).

Employers look for those with soft-skills that couldn’t be outsourced such as critical thinking, communicative and collaborative skill set across the cultures, but also to pay them at blue collar wages (high skill/low cost) since employers themselves are caught in a competitive race to the bottom due to outsourcing, offshoring and now re-shoring. Damn if you do, damn if you don’t.

Currently a jobs bill which runs at $200,000 per job is on the table.

Foreign students said “No thanks” (even when their HB1 visas were extended) and went home after graduation (BlueSeed is trying to dock a ship out in Seattle Waters to go around this rule).

At first, I thought it was because of the wives (who couldn’t find spices in groceries stores) who pressured their expat husbands to return (let’s stay to India and Singapore) – Japanese executives wouldn’t choose to work here in the US for fear of derailing their career tracks – But, I found it’s more of a pull than push force that they chose not to stay around (follow the money i.e. emerging domestic markets).

In “It used to be us”, the author of “The World is Flat” himself is baffled by his own themes (globalization and IT revolution).

Now, even call centers got automated (outsourcing next level, to automation), so high-value representatives can proactively chat with callers.

We are all caught off- guard: a job loss here, a dead-end career there.

Before we know it, we blame it on Wall Street (partly true, but not the whole picture – the same way India’s service industries and China’s manufacturing industries got the blame for our Lost Decade, or the Japanese lean -semiconductor- manufacturing in the 80’s or the Vietnam War for taking the Johnson’s administration’s eyes of the-Great Society).

But the story is more complicated than that. The solution seems to be multi-pronged because the problem is multi-faced.

Jack Ellul already touched on the idolization of “technique” back in the 60’s. Now, techno-fundamentalism is pervasive in every faced of life (what could be digitized, must be digitized – Larry Page was quoted to say : “let’s have a million engineers” to outrank or outPagerank Microsoft’s 25,000 strong army), forcing “human” to reflect and re-think about what it is that makes them marketable (the human touch, emotional intelligence etc….) in the 21st century.

No wonder we feel short-changed (too many of us chasing too few opportunities at the bottom – even high-paying construction jobs are no longer there on this side of the housing bubble). At the top, one will take a CEO job, like at HP, but for only $1.00.

It reminds me of Newsweek which was acquired also for $1.00).

This Halloween we will be in default costumes, that of homeless men and jobless women (carrying huge luggage, or brief case).

It’s time to revisit Native Americans on the occasion of Columbus Day (to press restart).

It’s time to reinvent  the American Dream. We don’t have to look too far, since the cause and the cure for today’s malaise and misery are right there, in the mirror.

I hope they keep the mirror squeaky-clean there at the McDonald on Wall Street for our protestors’ comfort and convenience.