Madeleine Thien’s Do Not Say We Have Nothing won basically every Canadian prize going in 2016 and made the Booker shortlist. It’s about three generations of Chinese musicians getting ground up by land reform, the Cultural Revolution and Tiananmen. It’s fine. I think the reasons it’s only fine are more interesting than the book itself.

Olio, the food waste company, is all positive vibe. But after several years of volunteering for them, I have various misgivings.

Snowplow is a highly customisable behavioural data platform, and blessed be that company since their code is open-source (amen).

It’s wild that Vietnam doesn’t have a functioning student loan system. For a country that prizes credentials so much, it’s strange that the government give out such meager amount of loan to students. The maximum amount that you can borrow from the government, after loads of paperwork to prove that you’re poor, is 4 million VND/month. The tuition fee is around 20 million VND/year. The Vietnamese government ran out of money after COVID, so they are mulling “university financial independence”, which is a polite way of saying “fuck you universities, take care of your own expenses”.

• Marry a smart 3^rd world citizen if you’re a 1^st world citizen: Get a prenup, organise a sham marriage, get the 3^rd worlder their citizenship, divorce them amicably (via no-fault divorce, without personal losses to yourself), rinse and repeat. You would change multiple lives, and multiply the income of many people.
• Income-sharing scholarship for smart 3rd world citizens: Get like the top chemistry major in Indochina who is also fluent in English, fund their place at some cheap US college. They should be smart enough to get into Google/Cornell after their Bachelor’s degree, and you’d recoup your investment from their income.

A strange thing in Vietnam (and I presume in all Communist countries) is that there’s a lot of prestige attached to being a literary critic, even more than being an actual writer. Even children are taught to be more of a critic than to be a writer. All Vietnamese literature exams are to criticise and evaluate the works of dead writers.

“As if we were never apart” is the clunky name of an extremely sentimental Vietnamese TV show. I believe this is a show that can only be made in post-war countries. Korea has a similar show. The entire premise of the show is to find the missing relative of some poor soul; thanks to the prodigious war-making ability of the Americans, the Vietnamese franchise of this show ran for 151 episodes. It’s hard to watch any of these episodes without shedding tears.

So the usual claim is that “if you don’t like your country, you should leave”. As if that’s so easy to do.

The frontier of politics is different in every country, but the starkest difference lies between rich ones and poor ones. Considering most people in the world live in “poor” countries, we have to keep in mind that they don’t really give a damn about what people in rich countries care about, e.g., Twitter bans, de-platforming, etc. And only the elite care about the aforementioned topics anyway.

Vietnamese literature is a minefield for any beginners as it’s choked full of propaganda for obvious historical reasons. There is also no trustworthy book-recommendation system in Vietnam, unlike the overly muscular Book Review Ecosystem in the West. To save myself (and others) time sifting the wheat from the chaff, below are authors I find to be interesting and less propagandistic (if their work sounds propagandistic, try to see if they’re hiding something in plain sight):

• Nguyễn Minh Châu: Deceptively simple prose blended with esoteric references to regional culture; this guy turns his Nghệ An childhood (one of poorest provinces) and his time in the military into tear-jerking passages
• Bảo Ninh: His one-hit-wonder remains a touchstone of Vietnam War literature
• Phùng Quán: His prose seems very cheeky, so don’t be fooled by his seemingly pro-Communist tone
• Trần Đăng Khoa: A clever guy who has been trying to escape people’s perception of him as a child prodigy for decades
• Viet Thanh Nguyen: An idealistic-second-generation-American-immigrant. Man doesn’t know much about what’s happening in Vietnam, though he offers a nice (albeit ultra liberal) outsider’s view on things
• Vũ Trọng Phụng: Cheeky satirist, probably the first edgelord in Vietnamese history

The best way to move money out of Vietnam’s strict capital control is via MB Bank. MB Bank allows you to transfer up to $100,000 out of the country each year.

Since the death of those Vietnamese folks (originally mistaken for being Chinese; how original), bleeding heart liberals have been drip fed the narrative of poor Vietnamese slaves being trafficked to the U.K. to work for evil folks, forced to grow the pernicious ganja. I think that’s a bit too simplistic, and would like to offer the following story of a real lorry Vietnamese that I’ve met.