A stranger in my permanent memory

I kept bowing to the woman, as she was doing the same to me. Studying Japanese for hardly a month, I felt so powerless when the most profound thing I could say to the woman was "domo arigatou gozaimasu" (Thank you very much), while what I wanted to say so desperately was "I will never forget you." I, then, said bye to her and left the store feeling extremely unsatisfied, and I never hated the language barrier so badly.

The woman owns a shop selling stuffs drawn by her husband. Her passed away husband. He was an artist, a good one. He invented his own comic character- probably his lifetime signature as an artist- that was portrayed in essentially everything in the shop: postcard, keychain, T-shirt. I never got to know what kind of person he was, nor what charm he'd got, but one thing I know for sure was that his wife loved him dearly.

The shop was not very well-lit. It was part of the shopping complex built on mostly bamboo and wooden materials after the March 11th earthquake and tsunami in Tohoku, Japan last year. The city's name was Onagawa  (The picture below was a garden work that said "We Love Onagawa" (Ona = "woman", Gawa = "River"), one of the region hit hard by the tsunami. Local businesses that got destroyed by the disaster gathered together and built a new shopping center (of roughly 30-40 small shops) to sell mostly handmade stuffs. The term "shopping center" may be misleading, because at the time we arrived there was no shopping going on. We, 20 people, were the only customers at the center at that time, and most shop-owners seemed to be sitting around idly. This is not surprising, considering the fact that demand is extremely weak in this area, due to unstable employment, and most citizens no longer know what to do now that the disaster is over, debris is everywhere and all their boats (fisheries was their main source of income) were destroyed. Therefore, the shops at the shopping center did not seem very promising, and their daily income lingered just as much as their hope for the future.

The wife of the artist was no exception. I don't know how it used to be when her husband was still alive, but upon my visit her business did not look fine at all. When I arrived, most of the lights in the shop was turned off, probably to save energy bill, except for the little light right above the desk where the woman was sitting. She sat facing the wall, continuously writing as if there was no expectation for anymore guest to the shop for the day. She probably had called it a day, before I entered. 

She noticed as I stepped in, and right away she ran to greet me in Japanese. All I understood was "welcome to the shop," and the confusion started. She soon figured out I did not speak any Japanese, nor understand it; but she didn't care. She kept explaining to me what the comic figure was, and that her husband created it. Her husband at the time remained only as a picture sitting on the chair, so it didn't take long until I understood that her husband passed away. She talked much about things that I did not understand, but as she pointed at from one picture to another of her husband and her, I knew that she was missing him. I, accidentally, may have acted as an emotional trigger that opened up her memory of him, the memory that was so desperate that she had to tell someone regardless of whether that someone would understand her or not. Language barrier did not matter, love was the absolute priority. I could not do anything besides trying my best to show my honest sympathy.

I spent a good amount of time listening to her, because I thought she needed it. When she seemed to have settled down with her story, I offered to buy five postcards (that were sold for 500 yen). I loved how the postcard looks when it is put inside a photo frame, so I also offered to buy a frame. Through a mix of words and actions, she conveyed to me that she would sell the postcards to me as a normal customer, but the she would give me the photo frame as gift. I was confused by the question of what I did to deserve such kindness, so I refused. I intentionally bought the postcards just to give her the mental reassurance that there are still people who like her husband's drawing, and I know well my 500 yen would barely cover the photo frame, let alone the postcards. Her insistence, however, suggested me that it would be rude if I kept refusing her present. So I took it. She further offered me to sit down, have nice candies and offered me a cup of coffee. I listened as she talked for another while. After a 15 minutes, when she has settled down with her stories, I found an excuse, saying that my friends were waiting for me, and I left the store.

As I said before, I was trying really hard to tell her that I would never forget such a kind woman with such a big heart, but my Japanese did not allow me. After I left the store, I took out one of the five postcards I bought to write a message, asked Eno-sensei (my Japanese teacher) to translate my message into Japanese. It said "I hope you will always be able to keep your smile and kindness to people" - those words couldn't express fully what I felt, but that was the best I could do. I ran back to the store, gave her the card and said bye again before she could read the card. 

The last thing I know, when my car started departing the shopping center, she was standing behind holding up my postcard and waving good bye until the car turned around the corner and no longer in sight.

So this is the drawing of her husband, contained in the photo frame she gave me. I met millions of stranger on the streets, but this woman may have been the one I'm most committed to remembering.

The stories (part 2)

Story #2: The remarkable people and NGOs

Everyday, we complain about the indifference of people towards social issues. I do too. But the Princeton Housing Foreclosure Breakout Trip was really eye-opening and reassuring, for I was shown how many people still care so much about others, and when they do care, they do extraordinary jobs to help alleviate the problems that society creates.

1. I no longer remember the name of this woman, but she was one of the people who left me a really strong impression during the trip. She was director of a Human Service NGO, which was part of United Way. Starting as a teacher and through years of experience, she understands perfectly the basic human needs and always tries to give unfortunate people their necessity. And I really trust her as a altruistic person, because I could see her eyes become red and watery when she starts to speak about the poor living situation for many people in the local area.


Her proud achievement is remarkable: the number of people her NGO served over the past three years have more than tripled, to over 30,000 people in 2011. Fortunately, this increase is not because the situation is getting worse and more people need help. Rather, it is because she enabled the organization to expand its operation, offer more services, create more outreach programs and become popular among the poor. Every Monday, Wednesday, Friday, her NGO will serve a food pantry to low-income people, with thousands of pounds of food donated.

2. PowerUCenter is a grassroots organization whose work significantly supported racial and economic justice in the Overtown City in Miami-Dade county. To be honest, 2 days working with PowerU was not long enough for me to feel the significance of their work. However, I was surprised by their hospitality, their passion to preserve the historic hometown of black people and their strong sense of community and relationship to the surrounding area. I was in the car with the leaders of the organization, and I could observe people on the street waving at them like long-time friends.


Overtown city is a very complicated city, with its history dates back to the early 1900s. Nowadays, the majority of the population is still Black American; yet the place that was once the attractive part of Miami has now been deserted, left underdeveloped (compared to other parts of Miami where skyscrapers and beaches attract more touristic attention). This city is also notorious for crime, especially drug dealing. That's why I think PowerU is really vital to the city's development, in which everyone has to be united to get their voices heard.

When we were at Overtown, we encountered a police operation, serving a warrant to arrest someone in an apartment complex. This is scary because 15 police cars all came at the same time, roads were blocked and we were right at the scene. We were all so excited!!!!! (even though we spotted police wearing masks and holding AK guns.)

3. The Miami Workers Center

At Miami Workers Center, they do all sorts of thing; but the one that we collaborated on was a campaign to provide legal services to those whose houses were foreclosed. For three days (2-3 hours each day), we went outside to the communities in the Liberty city, where a big part of population is Cuban (Little Havana) and Haitian (Little Haiti) and other Latinos immigrants. That was my first time hearing about the word "canvassing", which basically means to knock door to door to try to advertise for the campaign. So we have a list of houses in the community that was under foreclosure, and we tried to speak to them and get them to come to our free legal services, with lawyers that are willing to help them for free.


I especially enjoyed the canvassing. Knocking on people's door can be nerve-wrecking (I'm serious). Somehow watching a lot of American movies haunts me with the idea that if you knock on someone's door, the owner may as well appear with a gun in his hand and start to shoot you. Obviously it was not that extreme; but it won't be unusual if people slam door at my face. Besides from that, there's certainly a joy to canvassing: I got to listen to the life stories of those who are open to sharing. I encountered a woman who didn't even know the apartment she was renting was under foreclosure notice when we came. She was very concerned, and immediately asked us how she could handle the case. I encountered another homeowner who spent literally 20 minutes telling us how she was cheated by the mortgage lenders. People are surprisingly hospitable, as I said, and very open, even to strangers like us. After we left, that same woman ran outside to catch up with us just to give us a new bottle of hand-sanitizer, saying "This is for you guys. Probably gonna shake a lot of hands in your work". 

The most memorable canvassing was at an almost abandoned house. Everything looks messy, as if its owners don't feel the need to clean up anymore. They are moving out anyways; again, I don't know where they will go/ or where they can go. I called in front of the gate, and a Haitian woman walked out. She looked tired, and seemed irritated when we mentioned the word "foreclosed". At that time, there was a really cute dog running towards me from inside the house. I played with the dogs while my friend was trying to convince her to come to the organization to seek for help. When the Haitian woman realized I really liked the dog, she asked "You like it? I will give it to you". I gently denied, because Princeton obviously won't allow dog in the dorm, even though I really want to take the dog.


The day after, we happened to pass by that house again. We met the husband of the Haitian woman and had a conversation with him. The dog ran out again, now already ran outside the fence. I played with it some more, and the man offered me the exact same thing: "You like the dog? I can give it to you". At that time, I seem to understand what's going on. Obviously these people really want to give the dog away; they can't keep it anymore. Being foreclosed, and probably not knowing where to go, keeping a dog is another burden to take care of to this couple. Sadly, I denied again. This time, when we walked away, the dog kept running after us, as if it wanted to come along. The old man called the dog back to let us go freely. The dog stood in the middle of two parties, looked from side to side before deciding to run back to its old owner.


Again, this is one of the sad things that happen when the economy malfunctions. Dog is also a victim.

The stories

Last week, I participated in a trip to Florida with 10 other Princeton students to learn about the aftermath of the housing market crash in Florida. I at first intended to write a blog post everyday on the trip, but apparently the busy schedule (we had meetings/tours/volunteer everyday from 9am-8pm) did not allow me to achieve that intention. We traveled to several different cities, from Fort Myers, Lehigh Acres, to Miami city, city of Miami Beach, Overtown city, Liberty city, etc. At each place, we had chance to do various things, including touring the foreclosed and abandoned houses, talking with different NGOs, meeting with government officials (in fact we had a meeting with the Mayor of city of Miami Beach), canvassing (knocking on door to door to offer helps to people who are forced to leave their home),... Considering the huge amount of things we did, and that I don't have enough time to elaborate everything, I will write this post in the "stories format"; i.e., I will briefly retell the most profound stories that I took back from the trip.

Story #1: The chalkboard

Marc Joseph is a realtor, a person who facilitates house transaction. He is a bit different from other realtors: After 2008, he bought a bus for his 40th birthday (or so he says) and used it to give free tours around the foreclosed houses in the area. He seemed very knowledgeable, and surprisingly ethical. My stereotype of realtors has been that they just do everything they can to sell houses and make money; so I was very ambiguous about this guy. Anyways, he is not the main character of this story. He took us on a bus, drove us from house to house to introduce to us the foreclosed houses.

Marc Joseph

Marc Joseph took us to another house. This one looked particularly nicer than the previous four, which made me think that the ex-owner of this house probably used to be a bit more wealth-off. Anyways, it doesn't matter any more, for now,3 years after the Housing crash, they all lost their houses. The story was probably the same for all of them: acquiring a house using a huge (and easy) mortgage, fulfilling the American dream (that everyone possesses a home), some of them tried to sell off the house later with higher price to make easy money, then housing price decreases, the market crashes and they all lost their houses. 


The group dispersed around the house to look at what used to be the living place of a family. The house hasdthree bedrooms and two baths, the size for a typical American family. Just like the previous houses, every room was refurnished, so I could hardly tell what kind of family used to live here. However, as I entered a room at the right corner, the black object on the wall caught my attention. It was a chalkboard, with drawings and writings by the previous owner. Somehow the board was left untouched; it was not removed from the wall, and neither was the drawings on it. I looked at the wall, smiling and thinking about how cute this family was. My smile was put off when my eyes moved to the bottom-right corner, where inscribed the words 

"I love you son, Mom :).

The last writing on the wall

10/2001-11/2011
It's been a wonderful life. :)"

From then, I can't stop feeling emotional about that chalkboard, and wondering what happened to this family after they moved out in November 2011. There are people who deserve the housing crash- because they tried to make money out of the housing bubble. This family is definitely not one of that kind. I am confident they just wanted to live a life and own a home - not just a house, but "home". This family I've never met, but I admire them for their love to each other.

Hugo should have won the Oscar for Best Motion Picture

My tea doesn't taste right. It tastes, how do I put this, bitterness. The Artist was awarded the Oscar award tonight for Best Motion Picture, and I think it actually deserves it. Michel Hazanavicius has done a great job in recreating a black-and-white silent movie that unexpectedly accomplished such high reception from the audience and critics. The cast was awesome; both Jean Dujardin and Berenice Bejo were able to express their "muted" characters successfully, and I admit acting a silent role requires much more from the actor, from facial expressions to gestures, than acting a normal role. Yet, Hugo, the movie I had expected and hoped for, did not get the Oscar for Best Picture (even though it won the most Oscars this time, for Best Cinematography, Art Direction, Sound Editing, Sound Mixing, and Visual Effect).

Hugo has its charm. The movie is the adaption from an original of Brian Selznick "The invention of Hugo Cabret", which portrays an orphan boy who lives in a railway station after losing his father due to a museum fire. He often steals toys from a toy store in the station to extract the gear motives and other mechanical parts of the toys that would help him fix an automaton that was left by his father, hoping to retrieve a message from his late father.

Personally, I think the most creative part of the story is the shift of focus of the movie from a boy looking for a message from his dead father to the lives of the characters around him. An old man, owner of the toy shop, who lives in agony trying to forget his great past of being a film-maker; a little girl who also lost her parents but loves wonderful adventures; a writer who so believes that his childhood great idol has been killed during war,... all contribute to fill Hugo the wonderful stories of extraordinary lives, those that without Hugo's adventure would have never been known of. Without the young boy's journey, the toy shop owner would still just make toy, the little girl would still live her lives unchallenged, and the writer would still think that his childhood admired man was dead.

Blogger Prospero from The Economist has commented on the structure of Hugo: "Hugo has its structural problem. Like so many movies, Hugo has too many endings." However, that is actually what makes Hugo special. The story is not very much about how the boy ends up in the railway station, how his father dies or what the message his father left. In fact, if it had gone that way, Hugo would have been a non-original, non-creative plot. Some people cannot "digest" Hugo for its free-floating story line, with focus shifting from one life to another. However, it is simply because we are so conditioned to stick to the traditional way of movie making, which consists of a main centerpiece, the building up of the tension and the climax occurs on that centerpiece. For Hugo, it's rather a pleasure to just sit back and peacefully enjoy the adventure of a boy through many people's lives.


The movie also contains a message. In Hugo's own words: "Sometimes I imagine this whole world as a giant machine. Any part of a machine has its own function and purpose, and everyone in the world must also have their own purpose. No part is extra, and no one is extra" (sorry for any imprecision). I also think the movie is beautiful, because, unlike in other movies, this message is not said as a propaganda. A lot of time, in movies, there are inspirational slogans that are repeated throughout without being proven. In Hugo, the message goes deeper than that. It doesn't just say "everyone in the world has his own purpose" to convince audience of a perfect world, a utopia where everyone is assured to have a good function. On contrary, the movie tries to focus on the fact that sometimes, this purpose is lost, or not yet found; and Hugo, described in the movie as "a boy whose purpose is to fix things", selflessly walks through his journey to fix, to look for, to regain, to transform the purposes of other people around him so their parts are no longer extra.

Besides excellent cinematography (which the movie has won the Oscar for), Hugo also has very expressive and unique soundtracks. Simple uses of piano, blended with the sound of accordion which brings in the French feeling and elegant strings section (mostly violin, sometimes there are guitars). The music of Hugo surely makes the movie a time machine that brings the audience back to the real Paris in the 1930s. Songs are often written with a main melody with wide-range, disjunct (and sometimes dissonant) sound, accompanied by soft, repetitive, floating chords in the background. Overall, the melody line tends to stay simple, with little polyphony. The music seems to decorate the movie with a layer of fog, of mystery, of adventure that is slowly explored throughout the movie. I think the music fits perfectly well with the steamy train station in Paris at the time, describing the "magical" world of the young boy Hugo.

Asa Butterfield, playing the role Hugo.

Last but not least, the best decision of Hugo's director would be to cast Asa Butterfield into playing the role Hugo. In fact, this is not my first time watching a movie with Asa Butterfield playing the main actor. The previous movie was one that I especially liked - "The boy in striped pyjamas", in which Asa played a German boy whose father works for the Nazi. Compared to last time, Asa obviously has grown a lot, both physically and emotionally. His ability to convey emotions is, without exaggeration, unlimited. Even though, sometimes I feel like Hugo cries too much in the movie (which is pretty understandable for a 12-year-old orphan who has to live on his own), I admit that Asa did those scenes so perfectly that the crying of the character Hugo just does not seem fake.


Approaching the audience with a fresh and new approach, Hugo deserves all the awards it's got. Even though it didn't get the Oscar for the Best Motion Picture this year, for sure it has won my heart. It will be a while longer, probably decades, until my passion for this movie fades away. Until then, I will keep treasuring it.

The Fed's Job under Political Hands.

This blog post is a response to the article "Sympathy for Ben Bernanke" (can be found at http://www.economist.com/blogs/freeexchange/2012/02/monetary-policy-2).

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When the Federal Reserves (Fed) of the United States was created in 1913, it was structured so that it could maintain independence from the Government and Congress; the idea was that, in the Fed's own terms, "the people who control the country's money supply should be independent of the people who frame the government's spending decisions" (i.e. Congress). Now the situation is rather bizarre: the Republicans in the Congress try their best to make sure Ben Bernanke stop injecting money into the economy - or to be very honest, they actually would want Ben Bernanke to be gone. 

Ron Paul debating with Ben Bernanke during a Congress meeting
Photo: CNN

The Republicans are concerned by the very basis knowledge that any first-time learner in Introduction to Macroeconomics must know: when you implement expansionary monetary policy, inflationary expectation and, hence, actual inflation tend to move up together. However, I would argue that they had ignored two things:

1) When consumer confidence is low and aggregate demand is weak, inflation can't pick up that fast, which still leaves the government capacity to stimulate the weak economy further more. In fact, inflation rate in 2011 was well-below 4%. People look at inflation as the first derivative of price (how fast price changes), I would like to look at the second derivative (how the rate of inflation changes). In fact, after inflation picked up at the beginning of 2011, the rate of increase of inflation has started to slowed down. By January 2012, inflation has dropped. That doesn't look to me like a booming economy at all - rather a weak economy fluctuating up and down. Hence, now is not the time to worry about inflation.

US Consumer Price Index from 2009-2011
Photo: Tradingeconomics.com

2) The increase of inflation isn't necessarily bad, especially when the economy is not at full employment. Normal Keynesian stabilization policies require that we must endure a bit of inflation during expansionary time. Yet, Republicans - as mostly the haters of Keynesian economics - tend to favor the self-correcting mechanism. That is, they would rather wait for unemployed people to beg for lower wages, which would in turn increase aggregate supply, fixing the economy without the cost of inflation. Let me tell you how this won't work (and I'm not reusing the Keynesian usual reason "stickiness of wages"): The minimum wage is already too low. Even though the nominal wage seems to have continuously increased, the real wage actually has mostly decreased since 1970. Any attempt to lower people's real wage further is simply inhumane. In the end, the price won't rise as much, yet that doesn't even matter because people don't have money to buy the goods anyways.

The movement of federal minimum wage
(Pink line indicates real wage)

Personally, I consider the Republicans' concerns over inflation is in fact partisanship, i.e. they feel the need to oppose the Democrats. Or, if there should be other reasons, I think they are acting just to fit into their general stereotypes that "Republicans are conservative, Republicans are classical economists, Republicans oppose stabilization policies, and inflation must be the very first target". This is what I consider the failure of democracy: the opposing parties are so busy fighting each other that they forget or ignore what the country actually needs. Just to be fair to the Democrats, back when Republican Ronald Reagan was in office in the 1980s, the actual person that put aside the employment goal of the Fed and engineered the way out of double-digit inflation at the time was actually a Democrat: Paul Volcker (a Princeton professor who served as the Chairman of the Fed from 1979 to 1987). That said, I wonder why Republicans can't be as compromising and act according to the economy's need like what the Democrats did?

This post is another reason why one should really think twice when voting for a Republican - be it Mitt Romney, Newt Gingrich or Ron Paul or whoever else - to be President. Any of them is so ready to get rid of Ben Bernanke, and trust me, it's hard to find another intellectual and creative Fed Chairman like him.

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Vu T. Chau

Princeton, Feb 7th, 2012

--I don't own or make any photos in this blog post.--

New plan: 200 words of the day

So this is my new plan to keep up with my blog more frequently. I read a lot of articles everyday, so starting today I will try to keep up a daily journal of my opinions on the most concerned article of the day. My personal response, however, will be limited under 100-200 words so that I can (1) make sure I won't spend too much time on my blog and (2) short posts are easier to be kept updated. To ensure flexibility, I will give myself 2 "free days" per week that I can skip, just to make sure I can sustain the plan even at busy times.

I will name this plan Daily Opinion. I would really appreciate it if you also contribute your thoughts to the conversation in the comment box :)

SO HERE IT GOES:

DAILY OPINION #1

(Saturday, January 14th, 2012)

Topic of the day: Please view this article:

http://www.baomoi.com/Nhieu-nguoi-bat-binh-clip-teen-tung-ho-Le-Van-Luyen/104/7710108.epi

For summary, the article talks about a murderer who intruded a gold merchant store, killed three people of a family and cut off an arm of an 8-year-old girl. He was sentenced for 18 years in prison. However, when he was escorted off the court, there were a number of young teenagers who publicly praised his name and supported him like an idol. 

My concern is: How can those young people idolize such a gruesome murderer?

Response:

Many people blame this strange phenomenon for bad education, lack of family concern, the degraded behaviors of the young generation, etc. They are all true. However, such blames are already old-fashioned, the kind of blames that I started to hear in middle-school about 8 years ago. Is there then any newer explanation for this new phenomenon?

That was what I wondered at first, but later on, I wondered a different question: Is this phenomenon new at all? Or is it just a long hidden social issue that we just start to observe and be surprised?

The kind of murderer in the article is not rare, and there have been tons of murder cases committed by under-aged teens. We are so used to reading that kind of news that we are more “immune” towards reading about murders. In short, will you still be surprised if another teen commits another murder? No, not that much.

Now, if there are many people similar to that murderer, it is just completely normal that the murderer had supporters during his hearing at the court. Those “supporters” are eventually potential criminals that have yet to commit an official murder.

In the end, we have long been alarmed; and instead of fixing the problem, we slept in that alarm. Now the alarm changes its ringtone, the problem reappears, not new, but just in another form, and that’s why we are alarmed again. Hopefully this time we will act.

Thinking of politics

Recently, I got caught up with Politics. Not that I was not interested before: I checked a Vietnamese newspaper ten times a day during the peak of the 2008 US election just for the curiosity of whether Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton will win the Democratic Party nomination. It's funny though I never paid attention to any election in Vietnam; or maybe, just like one of my friends had said, we have no real election in Vietnam. But I do remember people excited to go cast a vote on election day - or at least many of my friends were so eager to turn 18 just to get to put a little paper into a sealed box. That sounded fun, but after the paper went inside the box, no body really cared who would be elected. Probably they thought it would not make any difference anyways.

Now that I thought again, my attention for the US election that year was just as pathetic as the Vietnamese people's attention for their country's election. I loved to read statistics, loved to see who was winning, waited to see Hillary Clinton be nominated. But I never knew why I wanted her in office - nor was I aware of how she was different from Obama. This has a little bit to do with my childhood: I was born when Clinton won the office, and during most of my childhood, the US economy got such a boom and budget surplus that my parents, admiring Bill Clinton so much, decided to give me the nickname Bill Clinton. So I was their little "president" for a few years. (Sadly the next president Bush was hated and henceforth my brother didn't get to have a presidential nickname) Back to the point, probably because of my childhood's affiliation with the name "Clinton", I wanted Hillary to be in office, that's all. Never knew what she was good at.

So my friend was both right and wrong in saying that Vietnam had no real election. First, just to be sure, I'm not talking anything about the single-party rule of Communism, since I do believe that one party is enough for a country. But here I'm not trying to argue for/against that. The real problem in Vietnam election is that within many Vietnamese Communist party candidates, it's usually hard to pick the right one. This is, I believe, mostly due to the lack of campaigning process; no one really goes out there and speaks his policies to the crowds. It's rather ironic to be able to vote, but when looking at the candidates list one cannot decide who's better than whom, and this case is not rare. I remember a kid in my middle school class used to tell other kids in the class: "Tell your mom and dad to vote for my dad to become the provincial congressman." Some days after other kids so proudly replied "My parents voted for your dad. They didn't recognize any other name."

That goes to the second problem: The Communist leaders aren't really close to the people, and the party's presence is more and more unpopular each day. That wasn't the case some years ago. When I started to go to school some ten years ago, most teachers recognized me by my last name, for my grandpa had been the provincial governor some years before. I was so proud, though, for the public's compliments about his good works. Now no one really cares who the leader is. That explains why the potential candidates for the government positions are so unfamiliar. That also explains why I was never interested in Vietnamese election before; simply because no adult bothered to talk about it, and we kids tended to pick up most information from them.

Today I sat in a lunch table at Princeton, and the kids started talking about the Republican primary in New Hampshire. That was so my topic! I didn't know why I spent so much time watching Republican debates, observing voting results, reading news, etc. or even went back to see a fight in the US Senate there years ago (Now I feel guilty for not studying for my final exams right now). But I love it here that so many people care about their nation's future, and consequently, their future too. Now thinking back, I can't think of many friends in Vietnam (who are already better than a standard Vietnamese young generation kid) that care that much about politics.

That's not to say the situation is very gloomy right now. The government, the congress and the party are doing a better job now than what they were doing five years ago. A southern economist became Prime Minister, a Speaker of the Congress that is more fierce in questioning the Cabinet and a new Party general leader that recently (and finally) admits the fact that the party is losing its popularity,... all are going in the right direction. It seems like better and more responsible people somehow managed to assume power now and they are leading the country in the right direction. I watched a Vietnamese Congress meeting last month, and for the first time I could spend an hour just listening to their debate. That's a good sign.

Even so, there is still much more to be done. Congress meetings are still far from being effective, many congressmen still lack both responsibility (they don't speak at all during the meeting) and sufficient knowledge to contribute. Some ministers still don't know their jobs, and the prime minister still hasn't been able to fulfill every of his promise. The party recognized the problem but still hasn't proposed any practical solution. I will wait to see what they will do to maneuver the country in a hard time like this. And watch out for 2022, I may be running.