Ba ơi Con xin lỗi Ba và con thương Ba lắm Nếu con biết con sẽ trở thành người hôm nay thì con đã không phải cẩn chạy xa Bà khi mình còn ở trại. Hôm nay con đã hiểu Ba hơn vì con ďá tiến hóa và không còn sợ nữa. Con đã trở thành một người con muốn và con sẽ theo những giấc mơ của Ba Con trai út của Bà My Son (and Daughter) will not suffer the same fate as me as the cycle of pain and suffering will now be broken. Thầy is right that through sharing both the sharer and the listen

Over dinner last night Isabelle shared with me a piece of her writing on the nature of time for her AP English class. It was funny hopeful and forward looking. My immediate reaction was typical of a father in an AI-induced time, Isabelle pls tell me that Chat GPT did not write that. No daddy. She showed me her other writings and vigorously explained the class writing process to ensure no computer would be involved. I breathed the sound of relief and happy that my daughte

My American Mother used to remind me that when I first came to live w her I had said all trees were the same. There were not many trees in Saigon. What I first saw at 334 Warwick were the majestic trees. They were so tall reaching toward the open sky and so expansive that hid any hint of suburban living. Later, I cried a little when PSE&G had to chop one of them down because a branch had fallen on the electrical lines between neighbors on a very severe frozen night. It wa

My mother passed away when COVID was starting to spread quickly thru NJ. The night before the nurse was kind enough to leave the phone on speaker so we could tell her not to be afraid. Not sure if she could hear us. She had been in her own world since my father's death 5 years ago. The nurse said she did smile at some point. Her children, her grandchildren and great grandchildren did their best to speak in Vietnamese and English to tell her how much we loved her and that w

In the movie The Fabelmans, Stephen Spielberg recounted how he first met John Ford who told him to make film he had to understand art and pictorial composition. Frank gave me a lesson on pictorial tension on my first day at the Arts Student League. Before Frank walking into class that night, I was ready w how to book on oil painting. But Frank explained the difference between a curtain and a painting and the respect for the four corners of the pictorial frame which is making

I visited my American family before returning to finish my Amherst college senior year. They were moving to Boston and asked me if I wanted their car. I said sure. We went to the garage to pick it up and I said "Wait a minute I don’t know how to drive with the stick shift". They said don’t worry, proceeded to show me via driving around the garage area twice and then said goodbye. I came back to where I parked the car and couldn’t find it. Looking around further and found it i