There’s something about that first whiff of salty sea air that gets me all giddy. Then come the maddening slivers of blue and green that you can barely make out through the trees, like a harbinger of pleasure. Just being near the beach, I can practically feel...
I love my parents. Despite growing up in a lower-middle class family when we immigrated from Vietnam in the 70’s, they indulged my every extracurricular whim. I remember walking to the nearby strip mall in my shiny new black tap shoes, hearing the clickety-clack of the taps...
I’ve always been somewhat cold-hearted. I’m not sure whether it’s a byproduct of my “Field Marshal” personality where there’s “not much room for error” and where “feelings are a weakness”. Or perhaps it’s simply been honed (or blunted?) by 11 years of seeing daily poverty in Asia....
Failure is not an option for me. I hate to fail. At anything. Anytime. I blame it on my massively type A personality. Or my ENTJ Myers-Briggs type, affectionately known as “The Field Marshal”, the Bringer of Order to chaos, the need to control everything and everyone....
I have a confession. I’m a bit fancy. There. I said it. I just spent $100 on a water cooler just so that I don’t have to drink water from a jug in the fridge like a plebe. People who come over always remark on how many...
“Work” is a such a strange thing. We all dream of the day when we don’t have to do it. And yet, it defines us for most of our adult lives. When I moved to Vietnam about a year ago, I was anticipating a full year off...
Brigitte Bardot in St. Tropez. Beyonce in St. Barth’s. George Clooney on Lake Como. There’s a reason celebrities flock to these destinations. They’re exclusive. They’re gorgeous. They’re either hard or expensive to get to or sometimes even both. They’re an unreal slice of the luxe life where...
The past has a way of catching up to us. No matter how fast you run, no matter where you try to hide, it inevitably finds you, for better or worse. I was born in Vietnam, a child of the war. Here, it’s referred to as the...
Money spoils everything. It’s at once an evil that changes everyone it touches and yet we all need it in order to travel to these far flung magical places, so beautifully illustrated in glossy magazines. I’m always a little sad to visit “minority villages”. They’re inevitably a...
Declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1995, Luang Prabang is the Brangelina of scenic towns. A gorgeous marriage between traditional Lao architecture, on display in its many wats, unchanged wooden houses and a smattering of royal residences, and the gentility of French colonial buildings and their...