The World I Saw When My Eyes Were Little

I bought two books in a day, and without a precise reason, both of them are about one's childhood.

1.  The boy in the striped pyjamas (Chú bé mang pyjama sọc - in Vietnamese): This has to be one of the best books I have read. Not that I've read that many books, but I can claim with certainty that this is a book of quality. Unlike Da Vinci Code, Harry Potter 7, and the other books that made me keep reading for straight hours after I opened the first page, this book is written with a very slow pace. The first half of the book didn't seem to impress me that much; one day, I read chapter one, and another day, I read chapter two. Then, one random day, when I picked up the book again and read the last few pages, I could feel the tightness of my heart beats, one coming right after another, while I intensely followed the footsteps of the young Bruno, worrying about the cruel things that might happen to this innocent mind. I decided not to spoil any content-related material here because I wanted those who haven't read the book to have the chance to experience it themselves. But, this is the only book that when I turned the last page and folded the book, I put it on my heart and started to contemplate things all over again, as if I still hadn't believed what just happened. Anyways, great book to read. And the movie was also great. I got killed again when I saw the movie, even when I had already read the book. What a genius work, killing me twice by two different versions! Thank John Boyne for making this book available to mankind.

The published cover of "The boy in striped pyjamas" in Vietnam

2.  Cho tôi xin một vé đi tuổi thơ (Give me a ticket back to childhood - in English): Let's start with a poem by the Russian poet Robert Rojdesvensky:

[...] 

Today I rushed out of home

to the station,

queue up for the ticket:

"The first time in a millenium,

perhaps,

give me a ticket back to Childhood.
The middle class."

Detachedly, the seller
quietly whispered

"Sold out".

[...]

The cover of "Give me a ticket back to childhood"
by Anh Nhat Nguyen

This book is written by Anh Nhat Nguyen, the Vietnamese writer who wrote many works suitable for children, simple yet always deep. It's not a book to haunt me for days like The boy in striped pyjamas, but it has the ability to make me burst out my laughter whenever I encountered some funny lines (This is amazing, considering the fact that I don't know since when I no longer laughed at intended humorous stories). It also made it way into my mind, and revealed the little secrets I hid from my parents for too long, before I forgot them myself. There's one paragraph about how the author used to hate sleeping at noon (a Vietnamese habit) and pretend to close his eyes to deceive the parents, and he always end up sleeping for real. When I read this paragraph, I just could not stop smiling, because I couldn't express how much it applies to my case when I was young, and I bet it must be the same thing for many kids all over Vietnam too. Reading the book, I realize  the little secrets that I thought to be only mine are actually universally true for all the Vietnamese kids (like how I always pretended to be sleeping at noon and always ended up sleeping for real). This thin book (only 200 small-size pages) is not really special, but it seems to be a little diary that keeps the author's childhood, while reading it reminds me of my own childhood. How amazing.

Okay, I think it's already an amazing thing that today I can write this much. Recently life seems so busy that spending one or two hours for blogging seems so difficult. I guess life at university will be much harder than this, so I will try to make use of this time to keep up my blogging as much as possible. Another part of this childhood post may be released soon.

Good night to anyone who has read this post till this line.

Looking back, looking forward

To be frank, today happened to be just a normal summer day: wake up at 8 a.m., have breakfast with my family,  study Spanish and fall asleep again until lunch, go out after lunch to meet up with a friend at the coffee store, have dinner, study, sleep at 1 a.m., that's all. Maybe, it was actually a little different today: I ordered a cup of coffee with rum instead of coffee with condensed milk like usual. Some parts of my head are still spinning a little bit because I hadn't really drunk anything alcoholic before, but it really tasted good that I will order it again the next time I go to the coffee store.

A person said that I only ordered that alcoholic drink because I wanted to prove that I was already a grown-up, and that may have been partially true. Yes, for the fact that I am already a grown-up, who is prepared both mentally and physically, and also ages enough to be able to start drinking those alcoholic stuffs; yet, there's really no reason for me to try to prove that I'm a grown-up by doing that. First, who says that I want to be a grown-up, and second, why can't I just simply order something new that I have never tried before?

Anyways, that's not really what I want to tell in this blog post. Rather, I want to tell a little story:

"Once upon a time, there were two middle-school friends whose personalities were really different from each other. One was really the man of ideals: he had the talents, he was a genius, and he dared to dream big. He had the passion for Math, and he really lived his best to pursue his passion. The other one was rather a shy one. He wasn't really good at anything, he was also the kind of person who would do everything he could to pursue his dreams, yet his dreams were never that big since he was always afraid of dreaming things that he could not achieve. To him, his friend had always been a source of inspiration that motivated him to try to dream higher and higher.

Life treated these two good friends differently. The one who never had the guts to dream high luckily got a scholarship to study in America, and 2 years later, luckily got admitted into those top universities of the world. Not to deny his effort in the middle of the way, but life was really easy on him and always gave him the luck that he needed to achieve something. On the other side of the world, the talented friend had to struggle with family problems while he was at high school. He also accidentally failed in a contest, a failure that had no reason to have happened put him in depression for a long time. Losing trust in himself, he continued to fail to get into the university that he wanted to go to, and had to be settled in a less competitive university.

The two friends finally met again after 4 years, the period of time that everyone was so busy with his own life. The one from abroad had been feeling really bad for all the bad fortunes that happened to his friend, but only until he got to listen what his friend had to say. It was the first time in all those four years that he got to know that his friend decided to borrow money from his mother to pay for his university, rather than just let her pay for it, because he wanted to be independent from his parents. The money he borrowed was also used for studying English. He studied English because he wanted to go study in the U.S. one day after he had graduated. He wanted to study in the U.S. one day because he wanted to become a useful and knowledgeable person who would return and serve his own country with all his passion. "I want to be a person who has an ideal in his life, and who would die for that ideal" - he said to his friend.

After listening to his whole story, the friend from abroad was so happy to see back the inspiring friend who  would even dream high in the hardest moments, from the darkest failures."

That was the little story. I don't know why I told you my day in that way, but today I met one of my best friends from middle school. It was such a good day, and I just got to realize that even now when I'm lucky enough to be standing at a better position where more opportunities are welcoming me with open arms, I can still be inspired by this friend, who has been inspiring me by his dreams and goals and passion. Today, my friend told me that he was also motivated by me, who was able to achieve whatever I wanted. Little did he know, maybe he was not as successful, just being able to dream and be willing to die for that dream like him is admirable enough.

Thanks for a great day. Thanks for a good catching-up with our lives. Thanks for telling me again that you are doing well. Thanks for reminding me to keep dreaming and fighting for that.

Life can be so wonderful suddenly xD I love it.