Born in Vietnam, my siblings of six including myself, lived in a Chinese town called “Cholon”. Cantonese was the business dialect that even the native Vietnamese learned to speak. Many of the Vietnamese natives sent their children to Chinese schools.
On July 27th, the U.N. Secretary General Antonio Guterres issued a dire warning: “The era of global warming has ended, the era of global boiling has arrived.” According to World Weather Attribution (WWA) which analyzed worldwide weather patterns and statistics, the month of July was possibly the hottest period in Planet Earth’s 120,000 years of history.
On June 18, 2023 at 8 am EST, a state-of-the-art submersible led by OceanGate Expeditions’ founder and CEO Stockton Rush, made its descent in Canada’s Newfoundland province approximately 375 miles east of the coastal town of St. Johns. Its objective was to explore the unsinkable Titanic’s wreckage, which sank 111 years ago, its mysteries and at a depth of nearly 13,000 feet below sea.
When the communists took over Vietnam in 1975, my second eldest brother (David), I and my younger brother (Kevin) were studying in the “Same Heart” middle-and-elementary school in Cholon, Vietnam. Originally a private school, it was changed to a public school under the communist government.
Man is an adventurous creature. In the pre-pandemic year of 2019 the US travel and tourism industry generated 1.9 trillion dollars in economic output. That was a startling 9% of the nation’s corresponding GDP of 21.38 trillion dollars in 2019.
My parents ran a textile and clothes retail shop from our home. Under the new communist government after the Vietnamese civil war, every home was eager to sew the new national flag. Therefore, all of a sudden our home business was thriving beyond our wildest imaginations.
Pollen allergy is more commonly known as hay fever. Medically speaking, it is called seasonal allergic rhinitis —- a provocation of the immune system to overreact to pollen from trees, grasses, and weeds. Hay fever occurs mainly in the spring and fall when pollen from trees, grasses, and weeds are in the air.
On the evening of June 2nd, three trains derailed in India, causing almost 288 deaths and more than 1,000 injuries. According to a BBC report, this was the most devastating train collision in this century.
Hong Kong’s population had increased roughly five hundred times since China’s defeat in the Opium War in 1842. For me, it is an ambivalent emotion when I think about the British rule over Hong Kong for over a hundred fifty years between 1842 and 1997.
In the May issue we mentioned the civil war between North and South Vietnam. It finally ended on the so-called “Liberation Date” on April 30, 1975. The North united the country into a communist country.
