Wake Up Inside Forbes

My first night sleeping at Princeton lasted for an hour (for clarification from the title, Forbes is my residential college, aka dormitory). One old Vietnamese belief states that when you first sleep at an unfamiliar place, you can't really sleep because you are not used to the bed. This is true for my case now, but I can't complain about the comfy bed. When I woke up at 4 in the morning, tried to close my eyes and found out that I had to leave the bed while everyone else was still enjoying their pillows, I knew jet-lag was still controlling my brain and, what's worse, it would put me into a coma during the day when I would be supposedly joining the orientation activities. Well, I have no better choice than to make use of the time then.

I decided to write a blog post.

Truth be told, this post has been a procrastination. Back to my last days in Vietnam, I wanted to write a post telling how much I loved my friends there and how I realized I was so unwilling to leave my parents and the little kitties (my siblings), yet when I would rather use that time enjoying the last moments, I didn't put myself to write anything. When I finally had time, even ample time, to write something when being stuck at the San Francisco airport, I was already too tired to type anything good.

My little HP corner in San Francisco Int'l Airport

In fact, Princeton is making me miss UWC. It is such a different world. There are so many more people (about 6,000 compared to 251 at UWC-USA [200 students + 50 faculty + 1 post office workman]) that you have the excuse to just not look at the eyes and pass by someone, pretending not recognizing their existence. I still have the UWC habit so when I came to campus this morning, I said hi to the people I met on the way to my dorm. Guess what, they said hi back, while looking like "Hey, do I know this strange guy?". They don't say hi to someone they've never met, and I knew that when I finally realized I was no longer at UWC, when you just approached a new person in orientation and started your favorite sentence: "Hi, I'm [dot dot dot] from [dot dot dot]". Well, I was a bit uncertain and shaky about my choice to enroll Princeton a very tiny bit this morning because one of the big factor of my decision was the friendly environment that really resembled UWC, and it just didn't turn out to be like that anymore. Luckily, when I and Jane passed by Whitman residential college (residential college is Princeton's term for dormitory) in the evening, we saw a group of 20 students making a circle on the grass with three people playing guitars and ukulele while the rest sang. That was just so UWC! (especially Ghost Ranch and random picnics on the field in summer). Princeton had proven itself to be not a bad choice at all.  I really didn't choose wrong hehe.

I told my father last year that I wanted to become a Princeton Student. And now, I am an official tiger.

I got reminded by a close friend that I shouldn't make getting into Princeton a big deal. I agreed with him by then, since I really believed the college admissions process, despite however objective, was partially random. Many good people aced it, and a small portion of equally good people just didn't have that luck for several reasons. That said, I am proud of myself for the effort I spent rather than for the fact of being accepted by Princeton, since I may (or may not) have made it this far merely by luck. However, above all that talk about college admission, getting into Princeton is really a big deal however. It's important in the sense that now I have access to the world-class education, the great academic environment surrounded by wonderful people, and the unlimited source of opportunities; now it's up to me to make that advantage really useful. I was a bit afraid this summer about whether I would have enough capability to make this chance a blast or I would just let it bypass; yet, as I find it challenging, I am eager to do it.

Recently people asked me what I wanted to study in college, and my principal answer which I didn't tell anyone is that I will study anything that would make me as useful as possible for this society, with Vietnam being the priority. That said, I used to dream to become a computer scientist, made cool stuffs and earned lots of money. I could make software that would help people, making their lives more convenient. However, one day I realized that without software we could still survive, even at a lower living standard from the one we currently have. That's not to deny the importance of Internet or Windows and Google or whatever, and as a computer person, I can claim to understand that better than many people. However, as of now, I want to have a more direct impact. I want to become an economist who will either contribute to control the rather unstable macro-economy so that it will have less effect on the lives of people, especially the poor and workers, or contribute to make economic development a real concept, eradicate the poverty with little trade-off on environment and social equality. This may sound too serious, or even like a cliché essay in the college application but I really mean it, and I want to do it.

Okay, it's long enough. I hope this post can be a reminder to myself about what I want to do and why I want to do, as well as how enthusiastic I am when I put my first steps in college. Now the sun is up, and it's time to move out.

P.S: This post ends with a bonus picture of me and my brother 8 years ago:

Orientations - Random Big Old Memories.

All these randomly written things were randomly remembered, of random big old memories.

Too many people...

"Hi, I'm Vuvu from Vietnam."


Two orientations, 3 classes, 300 people and 300 times. That's probably the number of times I've repeated this sentence over and over. I've said it so many times that it's probably hard to point out a single person I haven't told him/her so. Now to think about it, it was probably a wise choice to pick a nickname such as "Vuvu", since it should have been much easier for people to remember compared to tons of other names on campus.


Remembering names during orientations at UWC was like... having a quiz: "Hey, wait! Don't tell me yet! I think, your name is...". The next thought would probably be "Damn, he forgot to wear his name tag". That was why Linda tried her best to persuade students to keep wearing their name tags even after orientation. She would be standing in front of the cafeteria with a basket of candies, ready to be given out to "good" people who still wore their name tags at the fourth week at UWC.


Then, having to get to know some two-hundred people at once was even more problematic at UWC. The trouble doubled: you have to remember not only one's name, but also his/her country. That was rather confusing, and people had the tendency to put one person into another country different from his own. Eyad and many thought I was from Cambodia, while most of the Latinos didn't even bother to remember I wasn't from China.

I even got lost at UWC-USA.

Maybe Einstein's Relativity can explain whether UWC-USA was actually big, or I was actually so stupid that I couldn't remember my way during my first orientation, or both can be correct depending on specific reference frames. My first day in Montezuma, I came to UWC-USA on the 1-AM bus, and the only place I had known prior to my arrival was the Montezuma Castle.


I woke up the day after in Denali, and walked downstairs to the backdoor exit. There happened the odd: When I came inside Denali from the front door, it only had two floors; yet for sure Denali looked like it had three floors from the back! Another story, they were playing hide-and-seek in the castle. I was in student center, I walked up stair, and I was still at the ground (while I thought I should have been at a second floor). There came the explanation: I never encountered a house with basement in Vietnam.


During my first campus tour at UWC, I was so confused with all of the buildings they showed, then the Cross and the hot spring, which even made it harder to remember places' locations. One year later, I - a tour guide then - enjoyed seeing that confusion on the new-comers' faces. And another year later, I realized the place was actually not as big as I thought. Or maybe, it had shrunk since I had known it better.


Now I have known it so well. Maybe that's why, no more orientation for me.

Dance Fun, Mahii Ve and Random Singing sessions

My roomie said I had no sense of rhythm. Probably that was a joke, with a bit of bitter truth, just like how he told me I had no sense of humor. Yet, little did he know I was so into Dance Fun and Mahii Ve, and that was one of the highlights of on-campus Orientation. I didn't especially like the song, nor the dance. They were okay, but what impressed me was the image of two hundred people trying to dance the same movements of Mahii Ve, the movements that they would still remember several years later. That reminded me of the High School kids in some American movies. Now and then before coming to UWC, I stared at the TV and caught the image of student mass-dancing at US schools, and that looked real fun. I did break my own limit a bit when I did the sexy movements during Mahii Ve, probably the Vietnam authorities and traditions would never want that. But wasn't it what UWC was about? Overcome yourself here and there to try on new things, wasn't it?


Another great moment was the random singing circle in front of Denali and Kili at the orientation in my 2nd year. I felt like, and I could be certain, that was the moment that UWC students were connected the most, united the most, UWCed the most. Wahhhhh, I really loved that.

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.

When Life Treats Me Too Fairly

The expression of today: "What the hell!". That's exactly what I felt like when I heard the news. The camp that I had been waiting for got cancelled due to several organization issues. I heard this news just several hours after I received the email from the US General Consulate informing that my request for an early visa interview was denied. So, no visa, which means, I can't purchase any flight ticket until mid-July when price gets so much crazier. Then, the plan to go to the camp and the visa interview forced me to postpone the family trip to my most favorite city in Vietnam. Haha, it just seems like, the weekend that I expected to have so much fun just turned me down like a sinister betrayal of hope.

It's even funnier when I look back at what happened yesterday: I had such a fun day with my best friend watching sun rise at the beach in the early dawn and watching movie together in the afternoon; two close friends since middle school secretly gave me a surprise after we hadn't met for a year; I was able to download the two albums of Kings of Convenience, whose music drove me extremely happy; etc.

What is it that makes today so different from yesterday? Why can't today, a new day of life, be just as nice as yesterday? Why does it have to be that when I have already overjoyed myself in one day, I have to face disastrous events on the day after? I keep wondering. I am more than certain that, if my life would have been just a plain straight line (which I would not exactly want it to happen) in which either good things happen all the time or bad things occur everyday, I wouldn't have felt so bitter today. It's when these comparisons and contrasts between the days in my life are made that the situations start to get even worse, I believe so.

Well, I guess life treats me too fairly. Maybe I should just learn one fact of life, that if I'm happy in one day, I should be made to be sad another day. The only solution now is to listen to Kings of Convenience, calm myself down and try to make sense to myself that, today is so bad because life wants to give me a better day tomorrow.

The miracle of hope.

Just suddenly found this funny picture taken several years ago - when life still hasn't become so complicated.

A day to remember

It's 3 AM at home. I'm finally back from the 2-day trip to Ho Chi Minh city (HCMC), including 16 hours of traveling back and forth the distance of 400km. Maithreyi thought that it was crazy to travel such a long distance and tried to cancel the trip for many times so that it would be better for me, but I knew from the very beginning that it would be worth it to meet up this time. And after all the planning, we finally met in HCMC. Here we are:

It's us, meeting up after a year!

We didn't seem to change that much compared to when we first met at UWC Adriatic, except for the fact that I looked a bit older because I forgot to shave for a week :P. Anyways, it was exciting when we finally met again, one year after the memorable event Water Cycle and Climate Change Summer School in Duino, Italy. I remember the last night at Duino, we decided to stay awake together just lying on the grass and gazing stars, waiting to watch sunrise at the Adriatic sea. That time when the sun eventually rised, signaling that our farewell was coming soon, we never thought that we would meet again. Yet, a year later, we met, which couldn't have happened if her dad hadn't changed his work place to Vietnam. I am now convinced that things do happen, when we never expect them to.

We didn't change, and neither did our friendship.

We spent the day going around Ho Chi Minh city, actually we only walked in the downtown and visited some tourist sights (Duc Ba Church), since we didn't really have time and we spent most of the time talking to each other. I guess there are way too many things to talk about, those that were saved up throughout the whole year not seeing each other, from college application stories to how life is after UWC, from something really random such as how to cross a street in Vietnam and India to something really emotional.

Us, in front of Duc Ba Church.

The best thing of this meeting was that I could tell her all my thoughts about UWC, express to her all my love to UWC and how much I miss UWC. It was nice to meet a UWCer again after leaving UWC, since it's only that UWCer that may be able to understand my UWC nostalgia. At home, people may care about me being sad and I may have told them that it was because I missed UWC so much, but it's the first time after coming back home that someone sympathizes with my UWC nostalgia. She said that we only said goodbye to be able to see each other again. I do believe her, because meeting her in Vietnam is the biggest proof that I will see my friends again someday, in a really unexpected scenario.

Us, and the dragonfly souvenirs in Vietnam

We spent two hours in a very nice and quiet coffee store near the Turtle Lake. We chose it because from there, you could get the whole view of the busy streets in Ho Chi Minh city. What was nice about sitting in a coffee store in the afternoon is that the store appeared to be a capsule in this life where time is slowed down inside. It was nice to experience how people just sat down and took it so slowly while outside everybody was rushing to their destinations in their busy lives.

This is not the coffee store that I'm talking about, but anyways, we keep going from one store to another.

After having 6 hours of hanging out together since 12.30 AM, we returned to her department, where she demanded to write a secret message on my laptop and I can only open it after I get on the bus to home. What a meanie, telling people to read message in the most emotional moment of farewell! Anyways, the message was really nice, and I couldn't stop smiling when I read what she wrote. Somehow I felt like she could understand me so much just after 3 hours of conversation, and that's much better than the fact that some friends never got to understand me even though we may spend hours together.

Trying out the traditional Vietnamese hat

Okay, I have to talk about the message that she wrote for me. I opened the message at 2AM when I was on the bus home. The last sentence she wrote in the message was that "Stay the awesome Vuvu you are". Somehow, the message she wrote to me openned my eyes and made me realize that, for some reasons, I have quite forgotten myself. "You are living for yourself. Your dreams, your goals, your aspirations". Yes, after reading that, I wondered "since when did I forget to pursue my dreams, and goals, and aspirations?". Yes, she made me realize I'm fading myself away, and it's time to take "the awesome me" back.

Maithreyi posing in front of the church

Thank you Maithreyi for a great day. Thank you for being a great friend. Thank you for so many good advice.  It's so nice and crucial that we met. Thank you for steering my life now into a different direction.

We are friends, forever.

Right before we left it there...

"Region, region" - the girl screamed out loud in the midst of a busy airport, with tears bursting out from her already-watery eyes.


I turned around, my nerves subconsciously forced my heart to beat with an incredible speed, as I was hoping that I hadn't just imagined the voice calling me out of nostalgia. 


Then I saw her, my little Indonesian princess.

Hehe, maybe it's time to stop being so dramatic. Actually I was just looking at the pictures I took since Graduation, and I suddenly found the picture of only me and Titan at the Los Angeles airport. I just realized that Titan was actually the last UWC person that I saw before I got home, ending my two-year journey at the most wonderful place on Earth.

Eating ice-creams in the airport

That day, we said good-bye before we flew out of New Mexico. The situation that day was rather ironic, we both were heading towards Los Angeles Airport, yet we had to take two different flights with only... 10 minutes difference. At the time, I really wondered why life had to create those unnecessary separations, since being together for another 2 hours on the plane should have been so valuable to us, the people who would enjoy the last UWC moment to every split of a second. Later on, when we finally met again in the Los Angeles airport, experiencing how happy we were made me realize why that separation existed in the first place. It was said in a movie:

"The longer you wait, the happier you will be when you meet again"

And this was absolutely true. Now, I'm rather thankful for that ironic situation, and it convinced me that everything in this life does exist for a reason.

I scream "Ice-cream".

We sat ourselves down in a tiny restaurant in Los Angeles airport. Even though the sign said so, it was not exactly a restaurant. There wasn't any food really, and that's why we had ice-cream instead (and even ice-cream was expensive). After ordering our ice-creams, we had another hour before we departed for our homes. 

"I didn't win the contest Vuvu, the blogging contest"

"Well, you won it once, what else do you want?"

"But I didn't win it this time Vuvu."

"Winning once is at least better than not ever winning at all."

That was the kind of conversation we had for the last hour. All random stuffs, no more tears, no more UWC, no more emotional talk about whether we will be able to keep in touch in future. I guess since that moment, we already tried to move forward and learn to adapt to what would happen when we no longer stayed together. I bet it made me feel much better than how I would have felt if we had talked about anything else. 

Titan writing in my "yearbook" pages

Nice handwriting :P (Almost as good as mine xD)

We left soon after for our flights which were again, only 30 minutes apart even though we both were heading for Asia. What was worse, our gates were right next to each other, and that fact just irritated me so much. Sometimes we crazily thought of exchanging one of our tickets to another passenger for us to be on the same flight. We thought so before we realized it was just as crazy as our attempt to stay together any longer. The time eventually came, and we finally said goodbye. I was confused, so confused at that time. Yet I know one thing: the farewell was short. 

It was only 5 minutes, 3 hugs, 10 good-byes and one huge desire to meet again.

Region, I wrote this because I suddenly missed you :(


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A boring summer day

Vietnam, June 6th 2011