This past weekend, I drove home to Orange County and witness an event that identifies the heart of Little Saigon: hard-core, extreme protests based on sheer ignorance and lack of communication. What started out as a community forum to vote on a meaningful day to commemorate the Vietnamese refugee experience, ended up in a rather verbally violent protest—and we were the center of the attention. As the forum went on inside, many protesters gathered outside yelling in, disrupting our meeting, calling us communist for reasons that I find logically unsound. They were holding signs and banners and calling us rather unfavorable names. We were “chu.p mu?” and verbally abused.
It would have been easy to simply ignore the protest and move on with our meeting, but there were some of us who said that we need to go out there and attempt to communicate with these protesters and so we did. A small group of maybe 5-7 young people went out there and approached the elders and tried to understand their reasoning. Being accused of not having the experience living under communist rule, or being accused of being naive is one thing, but what bothers me more is that the group we tried to talk to simply refused to communicate with us. "We don't want to talk to you communist-followers" is what we hear.
It's so easy to go home and quit it all, to say that we have enough. People are constantly encouraging me to stay away from the Vietnamese community for that reason. Why do we even attempt to change the community we live in? People who are not involved in the community continuously criticize and challenge me and ridicule my efforts as futile and hopeless, but I beg to differ.
After my tonight’s piano lesson, my piano teacher and I discussed a little bit about my goals and aspirations, and he encouraged me to join ASCAP (The American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers) even though I am very much a novice, but I replied "Oh no, I don't think I'll do music as a full profession", thinking that my passion to be a computer science teacher or a reformist for Vietnam has more broader significance than my personal passion for film music, but he interrupted me right there and requested that I should never ever utter that sentence again, for I will never know what the future will bring and how powerful my mind can be. He reminded me of a motto that I have lived by since childhood. Ever since I grew up in the computer revolution, I have always wanted to work for Microsoft, and after many years of hard work (and one prior rejection), I am finally here, currently working on some very cool stuff on Microsoft IPTV and Vista's WPF. During my college years, I made it a goal to go to Berkeley and/or Stanford, and I've finished the first part of that goal and aiming at finishing the second part later this year. Several years ago, I decided to write a book for personal development, and during one particular lunch break, I took out my laptop under the San Diego sun and simply started writing the introduction, and now you can buy the book on amazon.com.
Where do I go with this? Well, as I drove home from my piano lesson, listening to Kitaro's inspirational music to "Heaven and Earth", I asked myself if I have successfully applied this code to my career life, then I can apply it to my emotional world as well. I've gone through a rather difficult year in my life in 2005, but I realize that the power of the mind can control so much. It’s not only your physical limits that your mind can control but also your emotions, and this has been put to test very much this past year. In the end, you choose to be happy, and you choose to live your life with the emotions that you can control. After DH4, I've taken a small chill pill and am in the process of reorienting myself for 2006, and I am happy to see that the optimist and Minh-goes-around-to-change-the-world-mentality slowly returns in me.
Then I thought that, if I can apply this to my emotions, my life, why can’t I apply this to the community as well? If there is a small group of enough people applying the same principle on a community-scale, why can't we change the community we live in? There is absolutely no reason why we can't change the Vietnamese community (or the world for that matter). "Be the change you want to see in the world", Gandhi says, and that's the reason why we went out there last weekend, even though we know that it might be futile.
The bottom line is that people will always continue to stand outside, pointing their fingers at us, laughing at us for trying to make a change, but what matters is that we believe in what we do. There are so many bad things within the Vietnamese community that I am not particularly proud of, but I see this as an opportunity for change and to make it better. I believe in the work I do, and I strongly believe that we have already ignited some change within the Vietnamese community here in the States as well as inside Vietnam. There will always be opposition regardless of what you do, but what matters is that you stand up and pick the battle you want to fight, because you believe that it's the right thing to do.