Articles

"A realistic look at life as an activist in Vietnam's civil society space: "Surely though, there needed to be some middle ground between the ‘white picket fence, nuclear family’ facade and being stranded and unemployed on one’s first day in a foreign country. This move to Bangkok was not my first foray into Vietnam’s civil society sphere. My first NGO supervisor and I argued about the sudden decision to discontinue my work with them.""

"It is hard to be happy unless we can break the confinement that imprisoned us, especially at old age when habits formed solid. A great failure confines us for a long time, but every day we confine ourselves to smaller, shorter-term cuckoo nests with our anger, jealousy, illness,... A broken glass could take away happiness for a few minutes, an argument could take a few days of our lives. Those long- or short-term prisons are built by our thoughts around an event that happened which we are not satisfied with. Those prisons forbid us to go out and seek happiness for ourselves and for our loved ones. They can only be broken when we can forgive the cause of it, or forgive ourselves, or if we are able to stop thinking about it."

"She did not attend a French schools but she was a good student at Van Hoa High School in Nha Trang. She did not know how to play a musical instrument, but she knew how to enjoy great music. She confided to him that she loved the piano music from the villa of Khoi Nguyen and liked to see the purple flowers near by the fence that her friends often called Purple Flowers. Khoi Nguyen said Purple Flowers were wild flowers that covered La San hill, therefore nobody wanted to plant them in their garden. His mother planted them in the garden because they were officially named Angelonia (Ngoc Han), her own name."