The only time in my life that I’ve seen anyone related by blood to Ngô Đình Diệm – Ngo Dinh Diem for readers that are used to the English spelling – occurred exactly thirty-three years ago this month. The town was Carthage, Missouri, best known as the American headquarters of a large Catholic order of Vietnamese American priests and brothers. The person was Ngô Đình Thục, Diệm’s older brother and the former archbishop of Huế. Along with tens of thousands of Vietnamese Catholics, I was attending the annual Marian Days weekend with my family and people from southern Minnesota. Unfortunately I don’t remember much about the Archbishop except that he presided over one of the masses with a visiting bishop from Vietnam.
I was on campus today for my first meeting of the new school year. It was the first time back since late May, meaning that yesterday was the unofficial last day of my summer. Like last summer, I worked at home and it gave me more downtime and a chance to catch up with popular culture.
Continue reading “I know what you watched last summer #2: my dancing portfolio”
My pre-tenure review was completed last month, and the ratings from the tenure committee were “very good” on all three categories of teaching, research, and service. Apparently the highest rating is “outstanding,” which means for my case that there is room for improvement but I am on the right track. Now comes the hard part: keeping them there for the next two years. Wish me luck because I’ll need it.
Vào đầu thế kỷ thứ 17, thế lực của Anh Quốc không so sánh bằng đế quốc Tây Ban Nha và Bồ Đào Nha. Nhất là Tây Ban Nha, được mệnh danh là “Đế Quốc không thấy mặt trời lặn.” Mãi đến thế kỷ 19, mệnh danh này mới chuyển qua đế quốc Anh.
Continue reading “Lịch sử nước Mỹ #10: Tại sao Anh Quốc muốn thuộc địa hóa?”
Continue reading “Buổi nói chuyện về người Việt tị nạn với dân biểu Stephanie Murphy”
Having entered academia in my thirties, I sometimes wondered what it would have been like had I begun graduate school not long after college. It was, after all, the pattern for the majority of my academic friends, peers, and colleagues. I couldn’t help wondering where I’d be on the academic ladder as people of my age now. Yet each time that I thought about it, I always concluded that, most likely, it’d have been a disaster.
With under four million people, Connecticut ranks in the lower half of the list of population by state (at 29th). It is also the third smallest state in geography; only Delaware and Rhode Island are smaller. If measured, however, by the proportion of academic historians of Vietnam to the population or geographical size, it’d probably rank first among fifty US states and ten Canadian provinces. Continue reading “Interviewing historians: C. Michele Thompson on Vietnamese traditional medicine”
Continue reading “Interviewing academics: Jamie Gillen on tourism in Vietnam”
