halphasian

40 Years

2015-04-30T19:15:25Z

It's a big day here, so I shouldn't let it pass without somehow commemorating it, but it's always a day of mixed emotions for people from "South Vietnam."

As you probably know, what Americans call the "Vietnam War" ended on April 30, 1975. (From what I've read on Facebook recently — sort of ashamed I didn't have this memorized — Mom, Khoi and I left on April 13 (possibly April 12? EDIT: No, it was mid-March), and Dad left on April 22.) This day has been celebrated as a holiday in Vietnam ever since, going by various names: "Victory Day," "Liberation of the South Day," or the more politically gentle "Reunification Day," which seems to be currently in vogue. This year is the 40th anniversary of Reunification, so there have been some major celebrations throughout the country.

I had heard that the ceremonies in Hanoi were going to be toned-down this year (no need to gloat), while the focus would be in Saigon/Ho Chi Minh City, with an emphasis on the "wholeness" of the country and, importantly, the 40 years of peace. (Well, if you ignore the other wars and skirmishes that Vietnam has been involved in — but those were relatively short-lived, and there hasn't been anything major in at least 25 years. So... anyway.)

The Prime Minister was down here today, and presumably many other government bigwigs, and they had a huge parade downtown, ending fittingly at the "Reunification Palace," which was formerly the "White House" of South Vietnam, and is where the tank symbolically crashed through the gate on April 30, 1975, and ended the war. I intended to go watch the parade, but it started at 7 a.m. and I had trouble waking up, and by the time I drove down there, it was over. I saw a bit of it on TV, and I also saw some of the preparation in the weeks leading up to it. For a celebration of peace, they seemed to have a lot of uniformed military people involved — though they were mostly dancing, so it wasn't too threatening.

There were also fireworks at night, and I did get to see those, though I had to drive a little ways to get a clear view. (And it was still a bit obscured.)

There's a lot to say about this day, but I don't know if I have the capacity to say anything worth reading. It's an interesting time. We lost. We fled the country. The "bad guys" took over. Everything REALLY sucked for about 15 years. But then things started to get better. And people started to forgive. And people started to come back. And people started to have more freedom — to study, to work, to travel, to use Facebook. To not be starving. And the Vietnam of 2015 is really not a bad place at all. Sure, there's corruption, and there's massive inequality, and many people are still struggling and suffering, but I feel that the overall "happiness" level is reasonably high. It's a safe place to live. It's an exciting place to live. It's a place where you feel like next year will be better than this year, and the year after that will be even better...

I sometimes try to imagine what would happen if April 30th hadn't happened — or if the U.S./South Vietnam would have won. Would there still be two countries? Would there have been a peaceful merger? Would things have ended up better? Or worse? Maybe it's pointless to even think about it. What happened, happened. And, despite the tragedy of lost lives and years, the ending isn't nearly as bad as it could've been. The young generation of Vietnamese, now that they're not worried so much about survival, are starting to get politically active. They've already made the government reverse some of their plans. Maybe the whole Communist regime will fade away. (But, again, will what comes next be better?)

***

On to some personal things...

I haven't written since Tết, which was now more than two months ago. To recap my "Tết resolutions":

1. I finished War and Peace over the last holiday. That was a source of immense relief. When I start a book, I need to finish it, and that one made me feel guilty for more than a year. But then I quickly jumped into another project: Reading the entire (available) works of L. Frank Baum. They're much easier than War and Peace, but there are a lot of them.

2. I'm using my iPhone 6. You've possibly seen photos taken with it.

3. I got my suitpants hemmed, and have worn one of my suits twice. (I haven't worn the other one yet.)

***
This week has been another holiday week. There is, as usual, the April 30-May 1 (International Labor Day) combo, but this year Hùng Vương (Hung Kings — the founders of the country) Day fell on April 28 as well, because Tết came so late this year and pushed it back. I hadn't really realized that Hùng Vương Day was a lunar holiday. I guess I thought it was a "third Thursday in March" kind of thing, but it's not. So there were three holidays this week, and most government agencies turned April 29 into a holiday, too, by working on the previous Saturday. My company (the intellectual property side) followed that schedule as well, so I took the Saturday option and I am now in the middle of six straight days off. Of course, I didn't plan very well, so I'm still in the city. I thought about going to Korea to visit Jim LV, but didn't get tickets in time because some other things were in flux.

***
Last Sunday, my friend Flora had a farewell barbecue at her fancy apartment complex. (She's not actually leaving Vietnam, just quitting her job and moving to a different apartment.) It was very interesting to find myself in the company of a continuum of "Vietnamese-ness": Flora, like me, is half-Vietnamese. There were, of course, full-Vietnamese people there. But there was also a 1/4-Vietnamese, 3/4-French guy, and a 1/4-French, 3/4-Vietnamese woman. So we had a Vietnamese rainbow. I hit it off pretty well with both of them. I think we "mixed" people have a kind of — what's the word for when you are naturally inclined to like someone? — affinity? something else? for each other.

***
Random anecdote from a few weeks ago: I went to lunch with a friend/colleague who had some friends visiting from Hanoi. There were three women, and their names were Han, Hanh, and Hang. Now, in Vietnamese, these are actually three distinct vowels and three different tones, so they're not THAT confusing, but those are pretty darn similar for novices. And I can't remember which was which.

Holiday mode

2015-02-17T13:39:14Z

I haven't posted here in a while. I guess it's time to give my dad something new to send random comments to a year later.

After shutting down my computer and leaving work today (before dark!), I am now officially on Tet holiday. This lasts for one week now -- for my company, it's the last day of the old lunar year (Wednesday this year) and the first four days of the new lunar year, plus "in lieu" days if those days fall on the weekend. Other companies, including our office building management, take a whole Monday-Friday week off (effectively a 9-day vacation), so our building has been very empty this week.

As usual, I have been lax in planning for the holiday and at this point it's very difficult to get tickets anywhere (or, rather, to get back from those places -- I was hoping to get to Danang but there isn't a single ticket available to return to Saigon, on three airlines, from Sunday to Thursday). I may end up saying in Saigon for the entire break. Not the worst place to be.

My "big plans" so far include:

* Finally finishing mother-effing War and Peace. I feel like I've been reading it for more than a year, and it's a bit of a slog. But I'm in the home stretch now. Only about 400 iBooks landscape pages left. If it was more compelling reading, I could finish that in a day.

* Finally starting to use the iPhone 6 that I bought when I was home for Christmas. I have not even taken it out of the box yet. It's still sealed. I guess I had a bit of buyer's remorse over spending that much money on a phone. I'm not a phone guy, and I worry about carrying around something worth $800 in my pocket every day. (Really, I worry about losing something worth $800.) I had considered selling it when I got back to Vietnam, but I didn't advertise it and now most of the people who really want an iPhone 6 already have one. Plus, my hand-me-down iPhone 4 has a short battery life and some minor issues when used heavily, so I should probably just go ahead and migrate to the new phone.

* Finally getting my suit pants hemmed. Or maybe not.

Kinda scary

2013-07-07T03:41:45Z

I know plane crashes are rare, and this Asiana crash in San Francisco was "minor" compared to how much worse it could have been (that's no consolation to the families of the two fatalities). But when it's an airline you've flown, and an airport that you've spent more time in than any other (probably), it really hits home. I may have even been on this exact same Flight 214 once.

So... I'm flying home across the Pacific in 4 weeks on United Airlines, via Hong Kong and Chicago. Frankly, that sounds a lot riskier than Asiana, via Incheon and San Francisco. But the odds are still in my favor, right?

Chúc mừng Ngày 4 Tháng 7!

2013-07-04T16:18:07Z

EDIT: Fixed Vietnamese spelling mistake in header

The Labor Code of Vietnam legislates two extra holidays per year for expat employees: one day for their cultural New Year (Jan. 1 is already a holiday in Vietnam, so this is nullified for me), and one day for their country's National Day (the Fourth of July for me). My company allowed me to defer this day until later in the year, so I opted to go to work today instead of taking a random, isolated Thursday off to sit around at home doing nothing.

Here's how I celebrated the 237th birthday of the United States of God Bless America:

• Lunch with Annika at Burger King — the first time I've been to a Burger King in Vietnam. (They just arrived last year, and I don't often eat fast food here.) It tasted like Burger King.
• Domino's Pizza as an afternoon snack at the office. I don't know who ordered these (four different varieties) but it was a nice treat.
• Dinner (pulled pork sandwich) at Texas BBQ in the backpacker area with my American friend Phil and his wife.

That's what I do on American holidays. One guilt-free day of pure American livin'.

When I got home tonight, I saw that the landlord had given me a brand new electric Infrared Cooker to replace my reclaimed gas stove. It looks like this:

High-tech, yeah? Wikki-wikki what! Supposedly it works with any kind of pot. Haven't tried it yet, but apparently this is how it works:

The electric heat stove take use of the far infrared to heat the food. It is especially suitable for the modern family cooking.

This weekend I'll try to make some modern family coffee and ramen.

Second quarter

2013-07-01T16:42:58Z

Well, whaddya know? Everyone's posting here again all of a sudden. I'm sure it won't last, but I'll join the fun for a day. Another "quarter" has just come to an end, so I guess it's time for my check-in anyway, even though I don't really feel like writing right now.

To be honest, 2Q2013 did not live up to my expectations. It was more stressful and sad and malaise-ful, and less productive and edifying, than I had hoped. This doesn't mean it was bad, just that I didn't feel that everything was "clicking" in my world as much as it did in 1Q2013. I wasn't as happy with myself or with my surroundings. A lot of little things happened, but not very many big things. I had two (work) trips to Hanoi, and one (motorbike) trip to Ho Tram, a beach north of Vung Tau, on the long holiday. I turned 41, which is kind of a "who cares?" birthday. I'm experimenting with the New York Times 7-Minute Workout. I'm working my way through every episode of Seinfeld (most of them for the first time). My fantasy baseball team's in a rut.

Yeah, kind of boring.

Random snippets:

* The landlord took away my stove (in-counter with two gas burners) today and replaced it with an electric tea kettle. He said something about the gas being "dangerous," which is probably true. They also installed a smoke detector last week, along with something that is either an emergency light or a hidden camera, at the behest of the local police. I am a little disappointed that my kitchen has become de-kitchenified, but to be honest the electric water boiler fulfills about 75% of my kitchen needs anyway. Mostly I just used the stove to boil water for coffee and to make noodles. The new device should be quicker and easier for coffee, and I can still make noodles the pour-boiling-water-and-let-it-sit way — but how am I going to add the frozen dumplings and fish balls? Maybe I can convince the landlord to give me a microwave. Or an electric stove.

* I got my annual raise in my June paycheck. Another +13%. Pretty good! Although I should note that I am still making significantly less per year than I did 13 years ago working for Excite@Home. Of course, I am also spending half as much. I hardly spend any money at all.

* One costly thing that I did just get pressured into buying is a pair of Air Jordan basketball shoes. The soles on my current shoes have been worn nearly flat by the cement court I usually play on, and that's not a good thing. It can even be dangerous. I considered buying shoes here, but they're hard to find, especially in my size. I mentioned this to one of my new basketball buddies (he's Vietnamese but is taller than me and has even bigger feet than I do) on Saturday afternoon, and on Sunday morning he called me to say that his sister would be coming back from Australia next weekend and she was at the outlet shoe store in Melbourne RIGHT NOW buying shoes for him and did I want her to bring me anything? Then we had a very 2010s (what are we calling this decade?) exchange where his sister took pictures and videos at the store with her iPhone, sent them to his iPhone, and he sent them to my laptop. All this nearly in real-time. And after he went to all this work, I couldn't really say, "Well, I don't think I want any shoes," so I agreed to get a pair that look exactly like this. Some of you probably know that I haven't owned a pair of non-black basketball shoes in more than 20 years, and my modus operandi when shopping for basketball shoes is to buy the cheapest name-brand (Nike, Adidas, Reebok, Converse) black shoes I can find, with no regard to style. And now I'm getting a pair of gray shoes that cost more than $100 (though he stressed that they would cost $50 more if I bought them in Vietnam). I feel so totally-in-your-face and proactive, and unlike me. Maybe it will improve my game, which is definitely not getting better with age.

* I had to proofread a trademark appeal at work last Friday. (What is an appeal? A company tries to register a trademark in Vietnam, the Vietnam authority rejects it for not being distinctive enough, and the company appeals the decision by trying to prove that their trademark is, indeed, distinctive.) One of the arguments prepared by our lawyer for the trademark, for a line of apparel, was that the trademark had become well-known to consumers through advertising in "world-famous fashion magazines like the Wall Street Journal, LA Times, and Magazine." Even more ridiculous was the next argument, that the trademark was well-known because of its appearances at "many famous fashion shows around the world such as Undated catwalk and Undated photo shoot." Um, yeah. Someone had some reading comprehension problems.

* Movies seen in the theater: Iron Man 3, Fast & Furious 6 (don't ask!), Star Trek Into Darkness, World War Z. Movies seen on DVD/TV: Argo, Iron Man 2: Iron Mannier, Winter's Bone, Source Code, Brave, Your Highness, Wreck-it Ralph, American Reunion

* Books read: Gulp, the only book I've finished in the past three months is The Glory of Their Times, a celebrated book about old-time baseball players. I need to start reading again! I've actually just started re-reading The Great Gatsby, which seriously underwhelmed me the first time I read it (in my mid-20s).

Well, I didn't feel like writing, and yet there's a whole lot of words (maybe I wouldn't call it "writing") up there on the page. See you again in three months.

* Oh, almost forgot to mention — I'm coming home to the U.S. in August. I'll arrive in Grand Rapids on Saturday night, August 3, and will stay through Friday, when I will fly to California for the Huynh Family Reunion and a brief in-state family trip. If you need anything brought back, let me know now.

It is indeed a crazy world

2012-11-25T15:19:58Z

Remember this post from Feb. 24, when I mentioned that I was one song away from having in my possession every single Top 40 (on the Billboard Hot 100) hit from the 1970s and 1980s? The one song remaining was Mac McAnally's "It's A Crazy World," which was not available at the iTunes Store and had only seen a brief release on CD.

I was doing some Christmas surfing on Amazon.com tonight and thought I'd check in again on my old friend Mac, and HOLY FLERKING SCHNIT, his album showed up in the Amazon MP3 Store (not just the regular CD store). I zipped over to the iTunes Store and saw it was there, too. I swear it wasn't as recently as 3 days ago.

Short story even shorter, I bought it. And now my collection is complete. All that's left is upgrading low-quality vinyl transfers and such. I feel triumphant but also a little sad that the 13+ year hunt is over. Now I can either move on to the much harder but more rewarding 1960s, or the easy but dreadful 1990s (actually, only 1995-1998 are required).

Goodbye, September

2012-09-30T16:03:50Z

Crap, now I'm feeling pressure to even blog once a month. It's about 11 p.m. on the last day of September and, predictably, it's been a month since I wrote anything here.

Today (tonight) was Tet Trung Thu, or the Mid-Autumn (or Moon) Festival. This holiday has been described as the Vietnamese Halloween, which isn't quite accurate but I suppose it's close enough. It's a children's holiday, really, revolving around dressing up and harassing people and eating stuff that makes you feel gross.

I spent the evening at Dam Sen Park, which I believe I have probably written about before. It's the Vietnamese version of Disneyland, but even for Vietnam it's decided downscale and cheezy. But fun! They now sell "package" tickets at the entrance that get you in the gate, and also let you go on "all the rides." (Except for the ones marked "Not included in package ticket" once you get into the gate, which is about 20% of them.) I rode the ferris wheel (paid extra), went on a log-flume ride that got me drenched, rode a pedal boat across the lake, went on two separate bumper cars, walked through a very easy house of mirrors, rode the monorail, watched an extremely cheezy "Main Street Electrical Plus Power Rangers" knockoff parade, and ate fried fish balls. Pretty good holiday, if I do say so myself.

Not much else going on here. Baseball season is almost over, and I've been paying close attention to that (Tigers, A's, and fantasy). College football season started with a bang but has quickly become uninteresting. I'll watch the MSU-Michigan game but probably won't bother with waking up early/staying up late for anything else this year.

Work has been very busy for a few weeks, but both of the bosses are in America this week so I'm looking forward to some 9-to-5 days.

I wish I had more to say but I kinda just wanna go to bed. Hello, October!

Not you too, August!

2012-08-31T16:57:01Z

I guess my LiveJournaling has permanently devolved into nothing but end-of-the-month check-ins. August sure went fast. These were the major events:

• I broke my nose playing basketball. I suppose it's more accurate to say some other jackhole broke my nose. I certainly wasn't the one ramming my nose into the back of his head. That's not how you play defense. Facebook tells me that I "didn't break any bones" — despite what the doctors and x-ray told me — so that's a relief!

When you look at my nose now, you can barely notice any difference, but I definitely can feel the crookedness, and I spend a lot of time each day doing so. I never noticed my nose before, but I'm certainly aware of it now. I debated for a week about whether or not I should get surgery to repair it, and ended up doing nothing, partly out of inertia and partly out of a suspicion that the post-surgery recovery stage ("No breathing out of your nose for 10 days!" "Wear a face brace to work!") would be much more damaging to my self-esteem than another 40(?) years with a nose that is a smidge offline. Probably the right decision.

• My friend Stephen (from Toledo/Flagel University/Saigon/UC San Diego/Singapore) came to visit for 10 days and stayed with me. He was looking for a post-MA job in Vietnam but didn't have much luck. Now I hear he will be working in Cambodia. At least he'll still be in the region.

• I finally finished the Complete Project Gutenberg Works of Mark Twain. That's basically everything he ever published, and a lot of things he didn't. (The final hurdle was reading the Complete Letters of Mark Twain, a "book" that was probably longer than any of the others.) I don't remember exactly when I started this project — when I read that first page of The Innocents Abroad — but I believe it took me right around one full year to finish. It was pretty intense. At the moment I probably know more about Mark Twain and his works than anyone you know, so if you've got questions, feel free to ask them before all that knowledge leaks out.

• I traveled to Hanoi last week to help with the quarterly Board of Directors meeting. They're now meeting once a year in Vietnam — last year was Saigon, this year was Hanoi. My main role was creating some historical displays, covering our firm's 120-year history and especially that last four years of expansion in Vietnam. I thought I was missing Hanoi a little, but when I got there I discovered I was wrong. I was still pretty unhappy; not about anything in particular, but that's just the impact Hanoi has on me. It lowers my spirits.

Not a whole lot else is going on. I got excitingly close to first place in our fantasy baseball league, but it turned out to be a mirage, and now I'm fighting to hold on to third. I finally got some pants shortened by a guy whose business was literally a sewing machine set up on the sidewalk. I still haven't gone to the dentist, even though I have a chipped filling that is annoying to eat with. I loaned a friend 35 million VND. I haven't bought a car or much of anything else. I'm not playing tennis. Check back in this space in one month, maybe I'll have more to write about!

Goodbye, June

2012-06-29T16:06:15Z

I haven't posted here since before I turned 40 ("A decade ago," by sportswriter math) but I didn't want to leave June completely blank and July is coming oh-so-quickly, so here's a late month check-in.

Tomorrow morning I am flying up to Nha Trang, where I will serve as the official scorer for the first two days of an international youth baseball tournament organized by my boss. On Monday morning I will fly back to Saigon and will go straight to the office. (Actually, I will probably stop at home and change my clothes.) I'm looking forward to the trip, but I think it will be pretty baseball-heavy and I don't know if I'll have much time to go to the beach or do any other tourist things.

The other big news, which most or all of you already know about, is that I will be coming back to Michigan next month to help the Linebaugh family be duly honored at the Ionia Free Fair, and hopefully do some other things too. Jason and Khoi and Karla will be back too, and it will be the first time we have all been together since... Wow, I don't know. Khoi's wedding? Maybe there was a Christmas in there somewhere. I'll be home from July 20 to July 27. Let me know if you want anything (legal) brought back from Vietnam.

As far as everything else, things are going well. I'm comfortable in my apartment, I enjoy my co-workers, I like living in Saigon a million times better than living in Hanoi. I actually have had a lot of things to write about but haven't been writing. Maybe July will be different.

Apartment Illustrated

2012-05-21T15:35:02Z

I've been in my apartment for a week now, and I've got most of my possessions moved in, though the kitchen is still pretty bare. I'm pretty happy with it so far, though I'd like to make a few improvements.

I took some pictures over the weekend and posted a new Flickr set so you can see how it looks.

As usual, I've put the story in the descriptions, so please page through one by one if you have the time. I'll try to post more about my new life soon.

Housed

2012-05-13T17:02:33Z

I was going to backdate posts and fill up the whole weekend, but I think that's probably futile. No streak is going to happen; I just have to get better at regular posting during non-streaks.

The big news right now is that I got myself an apartment. After looking at 12 rooms in 8 buildings over a week and a half, I ended up choosing one of the first ones I saw. (This was one that my friend introduced to me, and naturally he "encouraged" me to choose it so he could get his commission from the landlord.) When I first visited it, it wasn't love at first sight, even though it had most of the fundamentals of a livable room and no real deal-breakers. We went back to look at it this morning so I could make a final decision (it was between that one and the one I saw Friday which was in walking distance of the office) and I guess I can say my second impression was better than the first.

Probably the best thing about this place is that it's big (relatively, at least), and was by far the best value based on price per square meter. It's a typical Vietnamese "shoebox" room, long and rectangular, but it's probably 11-12 feet wide and three times as long, with very high ceilings. It also has a kitchen area, with a sink and refrigerator/freezer, and a decent-sized balcony. It gets a lot of natural light, has a nice LCD TV, is on a quiet alley off Ly Chinh Thang, and is not far from work.

Ironically*, the closest restaurant to the end of the alley is Phở Bình, which I wrote about a few days ago. Also ironically*, it is very close to the former home of my ex-girlfriend Miss T. [* By ironically, I don't mean there is anything at all ironic about it, but rather that the fact that follows is a mildly interesting coincidence. That's what "ironic" means these days, I think.]

The weak(er) points are the extremely simple design — it's a shoebox with a bathroom cut out of one corner. By moving around the furniture I can create some defined "spaces" (at minimum, a dining area and a sleeping area), and if I hang up some decorations (which I should note I never do) it might look "homier." The bathroom is functional but not luxurious. At the moment it's also a single room with a wet floor, but the landlord will put in a curtain that will partition off the shower area and keep half of the floor at least mostly dry. I'd rather have a proper shower, but I can live with this and have for many years. The water pressure is decent, which is more important. The bed is probably OK (it's new), but feels a little "lumpy" from the springs. If it turns out to be bothersome, I will either get them to change the mattress (they say they have several), or I'll buy a soft pad to put on top of it. Hopefully not an issue.

I put down a one-month deposit today and will move in tomorrow or Tuesday, though realistically I'll probably be "moving in" all week, maybe daily trips from old home to new home carrying whatever fits on a motorbike each time.

Hopefully I will have pictures up by mid-week.

Still not housed

2012-05-10T16:45:44Z

I went to see three apartments today. The first was nice (two options: small room or big room) but both rooms seemed a little too expensive for what you get. I was invited to have tea with the landlord and I think she liked me, but I don't know if I should press my budget. The rooms are very attractive, with especially nice kitchens and bathrooms, but the small room was a little too small to justify paying $500 a month, and though there was nothing wrong with the big room, I really don't want to spend $650 on rent.

The second place was a classic bait-and-switch. I saw a great-looking room advertised for $400 a month on a website. Talked to an agent and found out that it was actually $500. Went to the building and found out the one on the website was actually $650 (but otherwise almost perfect, including being a two-minute walk from my office). The one that was actually $500 was much smaller, on the ground floor, without any windows. It was like living in a basement. The furnishings and fixtures were nice, but I'm not going to pay that kind of money to live in a basement. Also, the landlord's main bargaining tactic was saying, "You should spend more!"

The last apartment, kind of a bonus visit, had an elevator, felt like a hotel room, was in a district I'm not familiar with (but actually close to downtown) and was only $450. I guess that one's still in the running, though the way it was arranged felt a little "tighter" than some of the others. So I don't know when I'm going to get an apartment.

I had lunch at Phở Bình, which you may have read about in the Lonely Planet. These days, it's just an unassuming phở shop, but in the '60s it was the underground headquarters of the Communist movement in the South. As such, it's now a national landmark. The phở, though, was pretty mediocre. Meaning it was better than any phở I ever had in Hanoi, but not as good as 80% of the phở in the U.S. An interesting thing about this shop is that it was staffed entirely by middle-aged men. That's something you don't often see at restaurants here.

Ice to see you

2012-05-09T16:29:46Z

You know that famous anecdote about how, before the days of electric power, big ships used to go up to the Arctic to fill up their holds with giant blocks of ice chipped away from icebergs and bring them back to the U.S. to sell, and even though 75% of the ice melted en route, they still made a handsome profit, and then Thomas Edison started selling electricity and people were able to make ice cubes at home, and then all of a sudden those ice-fetching boats were obsolete white elephants, and that is supposed to be a lesson that you have to embrace future technology or you will be left behind with a big worthless boat and a product that no one will pay for? I don't know how much of it's true, but it's a fun story to tell schoolchildren.

Anyway, tonight I saw something similar: an open truck carrying huge blocks of ice, presumably to deliver to stores and restaurants. These blocks were probably 1 foot square by 4 feet long, and there were several dozen of them stacked on the truck, which didn't appear to be refrigerated. I've seen these blocks of ice before, usually on the back of motorbikes, but I don't think I've ever seen so many of them at the same time in the same place. It felt like a trip back in time.

Ice, of course, is a valuable commodity in the tropics, but pretty much every home in urban Vietnam has electricity, and I think most of them also have refrigerators with freezer sections. I suppose if you need large quantities of ice (to serve to your beer-drinking customers, for instance), it might make more sense to buy ice in quantity than to make it yourself, because industrial ice makers are probably quite expensive. [I assume these huge blocks of ice came from a factory, not the Arctic!]

A secretary is not a toy

2012-05-08T14:42:03Z

It is weird how much attention I get from the staff in the HCMC office. In Hanoi I felt that people sometimes went out of their way not to interact with me; in HCMC I feel like a VIP.

I'm suffering from a bit of a cold today — I think probably the result of changing weather and going in and out of air-conditioned environments — and around noon the office manager asked me what I was going to do for lunch. I said I thought I would go out for some chao (congee, rice gruel) or soup because I was trying to fight off a cold. She then immediately asked, "Do you want to have someone go out and get it for you? You should stay here and rest." And before I knew it, my lunch was ordered and I was just had to wait around in the office for it. (And someone mysteriously paid for it.) Then they fussed over me and made me take some cold medicine.

I also now have an assistant who will enter my timesheet for me every week (one of my least favorite jobs) and I can get a coffee made for me anytime I want. I'm really more comfortable doing all those things myself (I kind of don't like having people "serving" me) but it's interesting to see what life at a Mad Men-era office would be like.

Peace

2012-05-08T14:33:34Z

For those of you worried about our office politics, I'm happy to note that the two guys who were arguing so animatedly last week went out to lunch together (with me) today and there seemed to be no lingering hard feelings. So I guess that's just something they normally do, and what seemed bad to me was just "a day at the office" for them. Good to know.

We ate at a nearby Korean restaurant which was, as usual, filled with teenage girls. "Korean" is a huge trend right now, whether it's soap operas, music, fashion, or food.

Basketball update

2012-05-07T16:22:25Z

Yesterday, Basketball An and I once again went off in search of a basketball court. The last time we tried this, almost a year ago, we discovered that our former "home" court had started charging for use and had subsequently been abandoned. (Most of the "ballers" in this city are not rich kids.)

We stopped at a popular court on the road to the airport that we'd often heard about, but had never played at. There was a half-court game of 4-on-4 going on. At first glance, it looked like a normal Vietnamese game: a bunch of skinny, somewhat ragged kids emulating NBA stars they had seen on TV, exuding a cockiness that I guess is inherent to streetball players all over the world. I recognized one or two of the guys from years ago (when they were probably high-schoolers). They were playing the typical local style of "drive wildly and take a shot if you can see the basket and don't pass unless you absolutely run out of other options, and on defense everyone swarm to the ball and try to steal it."

My usual instinct when I see this is to think, "Let's teach these guys a lesson in what real basketball is: selfless passing, setting picks, tough man-to-man defense, boxing out... They won't find the going quite so easy when they're up against this big (size is relative, my friends) American." But then after watching some more, I realized, uh-oh, these guys are actually really good. They. Did. Not. Miss. A. Shot. Obviously, that's an exaggeration, but they really did make about 75% of the shots they took. It wasn't always textbook form, but the ball just kept going in over and over and over. Was it bad defense? A little. But these guys had something magical going on. They knew exactly what they were doing.

When Basketball An and I finally got into a game (4-on-4, playing to 7), we found ourselves down 5-0 before we even knew what hit us. We eventually climbed back to 6-4 before they nonchalantly polished us off, but I don't think An or I scored any points. After the game was over (quickly), we were like, "WTF was that?!" Luckily/unluckily, the court shut down for a karate class before we had a chance to get a rematch.

Not really satisfied with our 5 minutes of basketball, we drove around looking for another court and finally ended up back at the old one. It still costs $2-3 per hour for a court, but I guess the players have accepted that as a fact of life, and have returned. So there were a bunch of guys there, some of them familiar, but most of them young. We got in a couple of not-so-competitive games, but it was better than nothing. It's good to know that at least there are players there — that's the important thing. I hate going to the court and finding it empty. I'm even willing to pay the $3 myself (big spender!) and let the rest of them play for free, if it gets me some games.

The next big thing

2012-05-06T06:43:55Z

The Vietnamese — or at least the Vietnamese in Hanoi and (especially) Saigon — are very big on trends. Every year it seems there is a new "big thing." When I first moved to Vietnam in 2003, it was the time of English schools and big, fancy cafes. Then it was (not necessarily in order) micro-breweries, Western-style bakeries, "upscaled" humble street food, American ice cream shops, conveyor-belt hot pot restaurants, LED signs for stores, etc.

When I first got here, Apple products hardly existed in Vietnam. I had an iPod and an iBook, and I'm not sure I saw any others through all of 2003. Gradually, you started to see artists and hipsters using Mac laptops at cafes, but when I left in 2008, Apple was still very much a niche brand. Rich people and spendthrifts sported imported iPhones, but most people barely knew what Apple was. Flash-forward to 2011, and suddenly iPhones were ubiquitous, iPads weren't far behind, MacBooks were the favored laptop for students and fashionable folks, and the Apple logo was everywhere. (Surely not with Apple's permission.) At this point, I think Apple is probably the most esteemed and beloved brand in all of Vietnam.

It's been said — though I'm not sure I agree 100% — that the Vietnamese are not innovative people; they are merely imitators. In some ways, this is true. If some new type of restaurant or shop turns out to be popular, you can be sure that there will be plenty of knock-offs or imitations following in its wake, probably even on the same block. Sales of counterfeit "name-brand" products (e.g., fake Polo shirts) probably outweigh sales of original Vietnamese brands in the same category (e.g., Nino Maxx). And yet there are original ideas here. For instance, the about-to-explode trend of "construction-site restaurants."

As background, you should know that at construction sites here — whether for single-family houses or large office buildings — the construction workers often live at the site through the entire construction process. When work begins, they set up a little makeshift shanty. After a few floors are complete, they move into the unfinished building. The workers bathe, sleep, hang out their clothes, play cards — and, of course, eat — right at the site. So earlier this year, when I was driving down Nguyễn Thông street, I noticed what looked like a streetside open-air canteen for construction workers and assumed that was exactly what it was. It was surrounded by green aluminum siding and chain-link fence, lit by some bare lightbulbs hanging from their cords. The tables and chairs were made of rough-hewn, unfinished lumber; the "floor" was built from loading pallets; the kitchen was little more than a couple of makeshift barbecue grills.

All of this is quite normal. However, I then noticed that the people eating there were definitely not construction workers. They were office girls, young couples, college students, rich businessmen and their mistresses... so I figured out that this was just a new kind of restaurant, designed to make you feel like a construction worker at the end of a long day. Kind of a bizarre theme, but whaddya know... it actually worked! This place is insanely popular, and now there are two or three more based on the same concept. I tried the original one tonight, and I found the food to be quite delicious, the price to be reasonable, and the experience to be... interesting. But the guy who came up with the idea is a genius. His setup costs must have been minimal — the whole point is to make it look like you spent next-to-nothing on your restaurant — and people can't get enough.

Reemergence

2012-04-30T05:16:10Z

Apologies for the long LJ silence. April's almost over and this will be my first entry of the month. The good(?) news is that there has been a lot of Halphasian's Maxim-ing going on — part of why I haven't been writing is because I've been busy doing other things or thinking about other things and haven't had the time to sit in front of my laptop. And of course an even larger part is just laziness.

The last time I posted, I think I was in Saigon. In the month-plus that has passed, I took another trip to Saigon, slept in a five-star hotel, got my visa extended, experienced some upheaval at work (which didn't affect me), got paid a surprising bonus, and kept living in Hanoi.

That last thing is about to change. This afternoon I'm finally flying down to Saigon "for good" — perhaps. I've packed everything up and will be leaving this apartment for a second time. Thirty-seven years ago on April 30, some people came (figuratively) from Hanoi to Saigon and they weren't exactly the most welcome visitors. (At least not from the Southern point of view.) So maybe my April 30 trip from Hanoi to Saigon is ill-timed, symbolically. But all I'm bringing is dirty laundry and a few laptops. Not communism.

Random assorted variousness

2012-03-28T03:21:45Z

• Stanford's women's basketball team made it to their fifth straight Final Four, and Stanford's men's team is in the NIT final. I would trade both of those for even one more Michigan State win, but hey, Go Cardinal! And luckily I won't have easy access to the women's games this year, so I won't be tempted to watch Stanford and then do my annual "Oh no, I'm never watching this again" swearing-off of women's basketball.

• I'd like to see the NIT final though. The last time Stanford won the NIT was in my sophomore year. The next year they made it back to the NCAA Tournament, then after a brutal season my senior year and an NIT first-round loss in my fifth year, they started an unprecedented (for Stanford) 11-year run of NCAA Tournament appearances — most of them ending in the second round, but with an amazing Final Four run in 1998 and two other 30-win seasons. Truly the golden age of Stanford basketball. It hasn't been the same since Mike Montgomery left*, but maybe this year's NIT is a sign that Johnny Dawkins has the program turned around. Most of our players are freshmen and sophomores. It would be great to have both of my favorite college basketball teams be relevant again.

* Mike Montgomery — that guy was freakin' awesome. I know we all love Tom Izzo and he's had phenomenal on-court success with a 99% clean and scandal/embarrassment-free program, but let's see how Izzo would do if he also was limited to recruiting players with 3.5 GPAs and 1200 SAT scores (or whatever the equivalent is in the new system). He'd still be a great coach, of course, but I'm pretty sure there'd be fewer banners hanging at the Breslin.

• I'm in Saigon for one more day (Wednesday) because the office is having professional pictures taken and they wanted me included. I will have to borrow a jacket and a tie from someone, because naturally I don't travel with such things (and don't even have a suit or jacket in Vietnam). Then I'll take a taxi to the airport right after work.

• That means I did not ride my motorbike to work this morning. Instead, I took a "xe ôm" (motorbike taxi). There is usually a xe ôm hanging out right in front of our gate. He lives next-door and I think driving is his profession.* He wasn't there this morning, but there were two women and a man sitting in plastic chairs drinking coffee. They asked if I could wait a few minutes for the driver to come back, but then the women just volunteered (forced) the other guy to drive for me. I'm pretty sure he was not a xe ôm driver, but just a guy with a motorbike who had stopped for coffee. (Evidence: He only had one helmet, so I had to grab mine from home. Also he smelled clean.) But he agreed to take me with little protest, made $2, and (I hope!) returned my helmet to our house. Sorry for interrupting your morning coffee, guy!

* Funny story about this guy, I've probably told it here before: I don't usually take xe ôms because I have my own motorbike and Cousin TA is usually willing to pick me up/drop me off at the airport or the bus station. So I only take a xe ôm when Cousin TA isn't available, and I usually go with this driver because, like I said, he's right in front of our house. One time, maybe in 2008, I was heading to the airport to fly somewhere. Cousin TA was tied up at work and it was getting perilously close to the time when they don't let you get on the airplane, so I had to leave. I agreed on a fare with this driver, he got his bike out, mounted it, waited a few seconds, and then TOOK OFF. Before I had even gotten on. My aunt and I were a bit dumbfounded. Was he going to get gas? Did he have to run an errand first? It soon dawned on us: "I don't think he's coming back." By this time I was in a big hurry and couldn't wait for him any longer, so we had to roust up another driver from farther down the alley. I guess what happened is he THOUGHT for some reason that I had got on the bike, but never turned around to check. I don't know how far he made it before he realized he didn't have a passenger.

• Hard to believe it's already baseball season. There's a real live, yes-it-counts game in Japan this evening (Vietnam time) between the Mariners and the A's, though the season doesn't start in earnest for another week. I'm debating spending the $100+ for MLB streaming video. It's not that much money over an entire season, and I really would like to watch the Tigers, but I should probably think about the logistics, and how many games I would actually watch. Most of their games will start at 6 a.m. here and will finish after 9 a.m., so I guess I can watch a few innings before work and then covertly watch the last inning or two while I pretend to go through my morning email.

Well, that was a much longer grab-bag post than I expected to write this morning. Time to start working!

Worst Final Four ever?

2012-03-26T02:48:45Z

I will be rooting strenuously for Ohio State next weekend (though I won't actually watch any games). How weird is that? I don't even like Ohio State!

Could this possibly be the "dirtiest" Final Four in history? With a hat tip to Grantland's March Madness (Compliance) Power Rankings, we have:

Ohio State
Findings of major violations in 1957, 1994, and 2006. Two postseason bans, 76 regular-season wins and 7 tournament wins "vacated," 5 years of probation.

Louisville
Findings of major violations in 1957, 1996, and 1998. Two postseason bans, 7 years of probation. Rick Pitino is the coach. While his programs have been surprisingly (and suspiciously?) scandal-free, his personal life hasn't.

Kansas
Findings of major NCAA violations in 1957, 1960, 1972, 1988, and 2006. They've had three postseason bans and 10 years of probation. The current coach seems OK, but this is one of the most corrupt basketball programs of all time...

Kentucky
...though it can't touch Kentucky. Findings of major violations in 1953, 1976, 1988, and 1989. Received the "death penalty" in the '50s, and almost got it again in the '80s. Two-year postseason ban, 5 years of probation, 2 tournament wins vacated. John Calipari is the coach. Before coming to Kentucky, he took two different schools to the Final Four. Both of those appearances were later vacated. Trouble follows this guy around like toilet paper on a shoe. He has somehow escaped any direct punishment, but nobody trusts him. He is clearly and unapologetically running the University of Kentucky's basketball program as a one-year NBA Draft prep program.

Another Saigon weekend

2012-03-24T03:28:38Z

I flew down to Saigon last night, and I'll be here until probably Tuesday or Wednesday. Generally, when I fly to Saigon I just buy a one-way ticket and buy another one-way ticket whenever I'm ready to go back. That's a luxury that isn't really available in the U.S. (though perhaps it is on regular, short routes like San Francisco-Los Angeles), but Vietnamese airlines haven't yet adopted pricing policies that strongly encourage you to book far in advance. Prices will go up on busy days (e.g., holiday weekends) but I could buy a ticket, right now, to fly back to Hanoi this afternoon, and it probably wouldn't cost any more than buying the same ticket two months ago.

As usual, I left all my packing to the last minute. I got home from work at 6:00 and had a taxi coming at 6:30. Since I will probably be moving down here for good in the near future (April 9?), I wanted to take some of my unnecessaries (shorts, short-sleeved shirts, papers) down with me on this trip so I would have less to carry when I finally "move out." So I threw a bunch of stuff into my big backpack, made sure I had enough dress clothes for two days of work and the wedding, remembered to grab my passport, and then went out to wait for the taxi. Everything seemed fine until I was on the plane and realized that, oops, I forgot to pack any underwear. Luckily, I discovered that I still have a few pairs of boxers left here at the family house, and they seem to be wearable. So that's a relief.

Bad ending, great season

2012-03-23T03:08:56Z

An "I told you so" that I take absolutely no pleasure in:

Draymond Green, 5 for 16 shooting, 6 turnovers.

Since this will be the last opportunity to talk about MSU basketball for a while, I wanted to revisit that great 2008-09 team, Draymond Green's freshman year. Even though they won 31 games, went 15-3 in the Big Ten to win the conference by 4 games, beat two 1-seeds in the Tournament and made it to the championship game, they seem to be somewhat forgotten.

Earlier this year, Green said that he thought this year's team could beat the 2008-09 team. When asked why, he said (quite humorously), "Because we have a better coach."

As the captain of the 2011-12 team, in the middle of the 2011-12 season, of course that was the best answer he could give. But I think a lot of people agreed with this assertion and really did think that this year's team would beat the Oh-Niners because of grit and effort and teamwork and such things. Maybe they would. But I don't think so. I love the 2011-12 guys, but that 2008-09 team was really, really, really good. They have a case for being Tom Izzo's second-best team ever.

They didn't have as many dynamic, NBA-level players as the Cleaves-era teams, but check out this astounding depth:

Freshmen
Draymond Green, Korie Lucious, Delvon Roe, Austin Thornton

We already know about Green, but Roe was actually the better player for 2 years and probably would be heading to the NBA if he hadn't had the injuries. Instead, he's becoming an actor. Lucious would be the starting PG this year (and on 95% of the teams in the nation) if he hadn't gotten kicked off the team. That's three guys that could all play. Thornton didn't contribute much until this year, when he emerged as a very valuable role player, but he was in the playing rotation for three years. Not bad for a one-time walk-on.

Sophomores
Chris Allen, Mike Kebler, Kalin Lucas, Durrell Summers

Lucas was one of the greatest point guards ever at a school that's had plenty of them. (Maybe third best ever?) Allen was a very useful role player, a good shooter who turned himself into a good defender before he, too, got kicked off the team. He had a good year at Iowa State this year. Summers had a world of talent, but never fully developed. Still, he had a pretty good career, had some huge moments, and is good enough to play at the pro basketball equivalent of Triple-A. Kebler didn't play much for this team, but by the time he was a senior he had (surprisingly) turned into a legitimate Division I bench player.

Juniors
Jon Crandell, Isaiah Dahlman, Tom Herzog, Raymar Morgan

Morgan, like Lucas, seems to be underappreciated by Spartan fans IMHO. While there was always a whiff of "failure to reach expectations" about him, he really did have a good career and did a lot of things well. He's another guy who can play "just below the NBA," and my Mom thought he was very handsome. Dahlman peaked as a freshman then didn't contribute much, but he was playable. Herzog never panned out but was 7' tall. Crandell was a walk-on, and never did much outside the scout team.

Seniors
Marquise Gray, Idong Ibok, Goran Suton, Travis Walton

By his senior year, Suton was one of the best and most versatile big men in the country. He could shoot, he could rebound, he could defend, and he had an inside game. He was probably this team's best player. He's had some NBA tryouts and could still conceivably end up there someday. Travis Walton was a pure pass-don't-shoot point guard who was the best defensive player on this team. Extremely valuable, though not really a pro prospect. Gray was sort of in the Summers/Morgan line, a guy who looked awesome but never seemed to put it all together and, frankly, shouldn't be compared to Morgan or even Summers. But he was a useful and very playable bench player. "I Dunk, I Block" could only do those two things, but he was a fun character and a 7-footer who could play defense.

That's a total of 16 players. 10 of them would, at some point in their careers, be regular starters on good teams. Another 4 of them would be, at least for one season, useful role players (Gray, Kebler, Ibok, Dahlman). Only 2 of them were non-entities (Herzog, Crandell).

Anyway, that's 14 guys who were arguably as good or better than the 2011-12 team's 9th best player (for now), and the 2011-12 team is regarded as being very deep. (Counting Byrd and Gauna, who weren't good this year but will hopefully be contributors in the near future, the 2011-12 team has 11 legitimate players.)

The interesting thing about the 2008-09 team, and maybe the reason whey they are overlooked, is that despite having so much talent, not a single player from this team has played in the NBA. Green will probably be the first, but that's still not a sure thing.

Sài Gòn Xưa

2012-03-17T08:25:17Z

I've probably posted a link to this before, but on Friday afternoon I got re-engrossed in this fantastic collection of '60s-era photos from Vietnam. Highly recommended, particularly for hanjudy (both of them) and globalesque.

I especially like the sets with photos of Saigon when it was still called Saigon. Many of the streets still look vaguely familiar despite the Extreme Makeover the city has had in the past decade. But in those '60s shots, everything seems a bit cleaner and less crowded — not many motorbikes, but a lot of cars. I would guess that Saigon probably had more cars in 1968 than it did until around 2004.

I could look at these pictures all day. But I'll wait until I'm back at work.

Go Green! (Go Wood! Go Thornton!)

2012-03-12T16:45:17Z

[Doing some tricky non-logical backdating here to fill a hole, please don't think about the time zones:] Well, that game was worth staying up for! Big Ten Tournament champions!

I would like to note that, once again, Draymond Green was pretty crummy in a big game (4 for 15 shooting, buncha inexplicable airballs), although he did hit probably the biggest shot of the game with that three-pointer that had me saying "NO NO NO NO NO NO NO!" until well after it had gone through the hoop. He even admitted after the game, "I played awful."

Of course, 90% of the post-game stories still started with, "Draymond Green led the Spartans to a Big Ten Tournament title." He was also named the Tournament's Most Outstanding Player. Hey guys, Green contributed, but he was arguably the Spartans' 6th most important player today, and they played their best ball when he was on the bench. These Spartans are a true team, not a star and his supporting cast. Please, media, do some more research before you write such things.

When Green's emotions get the best of him (which happens quite a lot, he's an excitable guy!), he's lucky he has 7 or 8 guys ready to pick him up. But let's hope he can master his nerves by the second round of the NCAA Tournament. We're going to need our best player to be at his best.

Have you seen me?

2012-03-11T05:23:18Z

Please help! As I wrote a couple of months ago, I accidentally left my copy of the Nov. 11, 2011, Entertainment Weekly at the Incheon Airport before I finished reading it. I ordered a back issue from the publisher but just belatedly found out that they were completely out of the issue (the Muppets are popular!) and had nothing to send to me. EW now has a very good iPad app with archives, but it started a few weeks after the Kermit issue.

As you probably know, I have been an EW subscriber since 1994 and have essentially read every issue cover-to-cover since then. So for the sake of keeping this streak intact (you know how important that is to Huynh boys), I'd like to somehow track down this issue. If any of you are EW subscribers and still have this issue lying around (and don't mind giving it away or loaning it to me), or if you can snatch one from the dentist/nail salon/car dealer/mother-in-law's house, please send it to my parents. (One request: Don't spend any money, other than postage, on this — even if you really, really like me. It looks like I can probably read most of the magazine, though somewhat inefficiently, at the website.)