Once in a while, I stumble upon a new piece of information, a new concept or a new voice, and my head spins and my heart beats faster; it's like falling in love! And it doesn't take much either. For example, look at what I just found at http://www.diacritic.org/blog/:
The poster has this comment, which I find amazing: «Of the top ten spoken languages, it is split evenly between European and non-European. Factoring in colonialization, at least half of the world's largest nations have been colonial subjects at some point in their history and very few on the list have been major colonizers (although some on the list have been both colonizers and colonized, China for example). Of the major European colonizers: Great Britain, Spain, Netherlands, Portugal, Belgium, France, none make the largest nations list. In fact, surpassing Germany in the last several years, Vietnam is now larger than every European nation.» The mind she boggles.The same blog also directed me to this definition of «Vietnamese» at the Urban Dictionary site: http://www.urbandictionary.com/
Vietnamese:
1. n. Used to identify people who are from Vietnam. They often are quiet and hardworking individuals. Most common last names are Nguyen, Tran, and Le.
Ex: I live in a Vietnamese neighborhood.
2. A special breed of beings who are patient, hard working, smart, courageous, determined, respectful, and all that forged in their blood. They have survived and won many, many wars in the past thousand years. They have overcome numerous obstacles other people would fail attempting to pass it. The bigger the obstacle the tougher they get. Almost the perfect warrior.
Ex: In the game of life it's the survival of the fittest. The Vietnamese are born survivors.
3. A noble and intelligent race.
Ex: Just by the way that he presents himself, he must be Vietnamese!
4. A person from Viet Nam. Mostly F.O.B's but we crazy.
Ex: Damn that Vietnamese foo can fight.
For some reasons, they forgot to mention that the Vietnamese are also a modest and humble race. Shameless!!!!
2 comments:
Yes, I agree with you. We are modest and humble. Case in point, after every Chinese-Vietnamese war that we won, our kings still treated China with respect. We sent messengers with gifts to make peace. That just the way we are. But we are also arrogant and discriminated. Just look at the way we treat or feel about our ethnic minorities (Chinese-Vietnamese, Cambodian-Vietnamese…). We call the ethnics who live on the central highland region “moi”. We are acting as if we are somehow more superior to them. I am not criticizing at all. I am just as guilty. But I think we should be more objective in our judgment. We should learn our history and move on. Taking the good as well as the bad into considerations. Cheers.
Thank you ducster for your very gracious and instructive comment. You are a wise duck indeed. Sorry I didn't realize that you posted a comment until I went back in my archives.
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