Le Giang Lam, an economics graduate from University of Cambridge, UK, argues that the Central Highland ethnic minorities' concept of poverty might be fundamentally different from ours.
Sir Walter Raleigh, the much celebrated English adventurer, poet and navigator, "discovered" both tobacco and potatoes in Americas in the late 1580s and brought them back to England. Raleigh helped to make smoking popular. It is even said that he persuaded Queen Elizabeth I to take her first puff, although it’s not clear whether she inhaled.
The fact that many Vietnamese students decide to stay in foreign countries where they have studied rather than return home has aroused controversy among Vietnamese people.
"I can’t say what made me fall in love with Vietnam - that a woman’s voice can drug you; that everything is so intense. The colours, the taste, even the rain. Nothing like the filthy rain in London. They say whatever you’re looking for, you will find here. They say you come to Vietnam and you understand a lot in a few minutes, but the rest has got to be lived." - Graham Greene, The Quiet American.
Reading Luong Hoai Nam’s “My haunted mind on greed and corruption, even when life improves” in VN Express International (18 March 2016) brought my mind to neighboring countries in Southeast Asia.
Due to the ambiguity and complexity of the Vietnamese language, I had to use the word 'authentic' to describe what would otherwise be referred to as a high quality education.
A scene in which I saw scores of people in Hanoi looting household goods from a truck 30 years ago made me doubt the honesty and kindness that I thought existed.
2015 witnessed a surge in media coverage of single and serial homicide offences throughout Vietnam. Whether this is reflective of increasing crime rates and a less stable society needs to be answered by actual data rather than speculation.
