Money and Myself

Today I read an article on my favorite newspaper about a boy who chose not to have breakfast everyday to save money for his severly ill mother and his poor family. The story has become a new phenomenon online, and people can't help complimenting such a caring son. I admire him too, but to me the story has a different position from just merely admiration.

I'm the saving kind of person, since I was young. I save for different purpose. When I was in elementary school, I saved the money my parents gave me for breakfast every morning in order to secretly buy a new power ranger DVD, a new set of superhero cards or go out and play videogames with my friends. At the time, I was already aware that our family was not even as wealthy as an average Vietnamese family, and that's why I had never asked my parents for any extra money for entertainment purposes. I thought that I had done the right thing, that I had been a responsible and reasonable son, until my parents found out how I had been spending their money. They god mad at me.

When I left my family to atten high school in Ho Chi Minh City, it was the first time I had to manage my own money. I was a good kid. I understood my childhood lesson well, and I promised to myself that I would not waste any money, if it was not for studying or living purpose. My parents frequently called me during those two years of high school, and the one question they always asked was "Do you still have any money left?". I knew well that they would not be hesitant to send me more money, even if it meant they had to tighten their spending on the rest of the family for the rest of the month; yet I rarely asked them for more money. I also chose not to have breakfast every morning (and that's why the article about the boy just reminds me of my time in High school) just so that I can use less money of my parents. Sometimes I gave up though, like a morning when I felt starving, then I would buy a bowl of noodles to have for breakfast, and try to cut spending somewhere else to compensate for that bowl of noodles. It was a hard time, but I felt so happy that I spent my parents' money well.

During those two years of high school, my consciousness about helping my parents with their finance grew so much. My parents trusted me more than any other parent could trust their son: they never asked what I spent the money for. Never. I guess through two years they knew well what kind of person their son was. One night, my bicycle got stolen due to my carelessness. I called Dad and cried, begging him to move my rented room to a more suburb area of the city so that the living cost would reduce to compensate my stolen bicycle. He refused, but then he had trust in me completely. I, too, promised not to lose their trust.

Three years after that night I got my bicycle stolen, I'm here in America. My parents no longer have to pay for my tuition, nor my living costs, nor my spending. I also worked hard, for two jobs, and earned my own money. The other day, I was skyping with my parents, and they asked me how much I had earned and spent. I earned a lot, but I had spent almost all of them. I didn't feel as bad when I spent the money as when I had to tell Mom how much I spent. It was only then that I realized I had lost my care for my spending, and also my care for the family. Originally, I intended to use the money I earned to send back home and pay my parents' debt. I never did. I spent everything.

Mom heard my answer about how much I had spent, she was silent for a moment, then she said with a smile "Now that you are a University student, there must be so many things to spend on." She didn't ask how I spent the money, because she wanted to keep her trust in me that I would never be wasteful. She was wrong. But I felt bad.

I guess someone has realized something big.

-------------------
Baltimore, November 2011.

The first lessons at Princeton aren't academics

Classes started. I'm taking 5 classes: Math, Spanish, Macro Econ, Computer Science, and Time Travel Writing Seminar. They are great - lots of work, but also lots of new things to learn. Done academics update, and this post from the title is obviously not about academics. Lectures with eminent professors are great, yet there are bigger lessons I've learned here at Princeton.

1.
I came to Princeton unemployed. By economics definition, being "unemployed" requires three conditions: (1) be able to work, (2) doesn't have a job and (3) actively looking for jobs. I was not working before, but I was not looking for jobs either, so I have never been unemployed in my life and this is the first time. I have two big reasons to work, and I was so determined to get a job before I came to Princeton. Yet when I came, no job was available.

Then I understood, being unemployed is by itself an emotional thing, like any other feeling: sadness, happiness, anger or jealousy. It's the mixture of eagerness, disappointment, worry,... altogether, so complicated that unless you are unemployed you won't ever understand. I went around asking for jobs, called different people, sent email to many departments asking for open positions. My consistence pays off: this week I've got hired for two jobs: circulation desk assistant at Princeton Humanities Resource Center and Office Assistant at Princeton Institute for International and Regional Studies (PIIRS).


Having a job doesn't only mean getting money; it also means learning how to spend that money. Never had I thought so carefully before deciding to buy something from a store, considering whether I truly need it or not. Not that I were a lavish consumer; I just became even more thoughtful for the very penny I earned. Before, buying an 11-dollar object would just mean spending 11 dollars out of my parents' or financial aid's money. Now, it means spending an hour of work. Everything is no longer monetary figure, for it is converted into time and effort now.

That's my first lesson.


2.
I promised not to talk about academics, but here I will bring up the subject again. I'm taking five subjects, and in combination with two jobs and 1 community service in the fall semester of freshman year, it appears to be way too much. No, it IS in fact way too much.  My parents have expressed concern, and even I myself am concerned. But currently I just have to sleep a bit later than midnight, try to arrange my time in the most efficient manner, and wake up a bit earlier than 9a.m. (college students tend to wake up very late, some people won't have class until 11am or 1pm). I just have to extremely focus when I study, cut off the time I waste on facebook or stop the habit of procrastinating. I just have to sacrifice a little bit here and there of the unnecessary pleasure, and things go under control. I still have time to do things I like: I can still take guitar lessons, hang out with my friends, watch movies with them on weekends, or just hang a bit on the dining table to have a conversation about whatever on the news. Life was hard, or at least I thought it was, and when I push myself a bit to be more efficient, life doesn't seem unmanageable anymore.

Pushing myself a bit, that's the second lesson I've learned.


3.
Princeton is full of talents, obviously; but there are many opportunities as well. I wanted to join a singing group at Princeton, either the University Choir (Glee Club), Chapel Choir or any of the ~10 a cappella  and theater groups (Especially Triangle had been my dream since Princeton Preview Weekend). It was, certainly, very competitive, but I was confident that there would be a place for me somewhere in that pool of opportunities. But, yeah, life is unpredictable, a chance event, a dice rolling game that any face of the dice, no matter how cruel, can turn out.

Truth is, last week was the week that I got the most rejection letters ever in my life; it alone is double than the total number of rejection letters I previously received in my whole life combined. Sunday I received two, Monday I received three, Tuesday two, Wednesday two, etc. The number of rejection letters I received in a day last week can be described as a linear function of the number of auditions I underwent: f(N) = N. This, I could never imagine, even though I had prepared myself for this worst situation.

I felt bad. I thought I was good enough. I didn't know why I didn't get in. Or, can it be that they hate me as a person? Can it be that they have already favored someone else? That was how I felt on Sunday and Monday.  I was really an ignorant idiot trying to explain whatever happened to him so suddenly. It was not until two days after when I overheard someone's practice, and someone else's audition that I felt so happy. Literally SO HAPPY. They were so good, and their voices were god-like. That was such a soft, easy-going yet confident sound. No wonder I was outweighed. At that point, I no longer felt bad, for I had totally understood why I deservedly was pushed out of the game. In fact, I felt so good that here there are so many talented people who would (1) make Princeton even better and better, make it deserve being the place I chose and (2) motivate and challenge me to better. Not that I like competition, but I chose this competitive environment because I wanted to be better anyways. So, this is perfect.

At Princeton, I learned to accept and move on.

I have to write one separate post for my best Princeton experience.

Outdoor Action 2011 was rather an unusual one. (Note: Outdoor Action is a wilderness program at Princeton University, which brings a groups of 10 students and 3 leaders each to the woods for a week). There was continuous thunderstorm and rain for three days straight in the Pennsylvania and Virginia region, resulting in the evacuation of all OA groups. As people joke around the fact, OA 2011 is the first time ever in the long history of OA that our wilderness explorers ended up staying in the hotels and eating pizzas for dinner. It seemed - to an outsider - as if the purpose of the trip, i.e. bring the groups together through the difficult time in the woods, had been ruined. Some people even laughed hard at the fact that our OA lasted for 3 days, instead of a week, and in their laughter they wondered "Poor guys didn't get anything out of the ruined trip".

We, the insiders, understand the matter better: Before we got evacuated to the hotel, we stayed for more than 2 days in the non-stop rain. Even now when typing this note, I still can visualize the raining days, the unclear vision due to dripping water onto our disrupted eyes; I can feel again the wet clothes sticking to the body and the water running from head to toe; I can remember clearly the disappointment when we had no way to light up a fire  for all the woods collected were drenched in water, or the self-asked question "How are we to sleep tonight with our sleeping bags wet?". Since we hadn't brought that much clothes to the wild, in order to make sure we had dry clothes to sleep with every night, we had no choice but to put on our wet clothes again during the day-hike. It means, there's a pair of wet clothes that you had to constantly put on every morning, even though it felt like the grossest thing ever. Never before have I missed home, pitied myself and wanted dry clothes so much.

LADIES OF THE TRIP
A few minutes before the thunderstorm commenced a week of raining and a potential flood.

Yet, there's always light in the darkest moments. If it hadn't been for the severe weather, we wouldn't have got so close as a group. Our group - LH98 - started off our trip as complete strangers playing awkward games; yet, after only three days we felt like we had been best friends for long. One night, we - 13 people - had to sleep altogether in a shelter that had a maximum capacity of 5 people. None of us could lay down our tiring bodies entirely, and each of us had to sleep in a weird position. Alvina - a dancer - felt comfortable in her yoga style: slept sitting and laid her head on her toes; Alomi slept sitting the whole night; Evan slept between Julia's legs (this sounds very inappropriate); some leaned against the wall; and I and David just slept one on top of another. That night I couldn't imagine how I would get through the long night, but eventually everyone passed down due to exhaustion and woke up the morning after finding each other in a weird position. It was in no way a comfortable experience - but it was fun though. What's worse that night, there were only 4-5 dry sleeping bags for 13 people, and the night was really cold. We ended up sharing the sleeping bags, using them as blankets to cover more people at a time. I could only get the "blanket" to hide my toes, considering my wool top kept me comparably warmer than others.

This is the first night when we can actually lie down.

Then there was that one afternoon we were waiting for the support van in the windy cold. The wind just made everything worse: it penetrated into our clothes, made the cold colder, made what's wet wetter. I no longer remembered how long we waited, maybe almost 2 hours. Those 2 hours may have been the worst part of OA - and the most desperate moment for me - and it may have been the best part of OA at the same time. There are several things people can do when they are extremely desperate in the cold: they can huddle and kick a nut around the circle (pretending to be playing soccer while not being able to run around), they can play pokemon (just act silly), can play human Tic-tac-toe, or do the simplest game: throw rocks at the tree. That said, it should be clear how cold and desperate we were; but at the end of the day, it turned and transformed into the best moments one could have in life.

Okay, this can go on and on if I can't control myself. There are tons of other things that made OA the best thing that could ever happen, and hopefully even though they are not written here in this blog, I won't forget them.

I think I'm just bad at concluding things. Let's just leave it the post unconcluded.

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.