Fwd: New York Times -- Lessons for America From Asia
Kien Pham
<kienpham@neverchange.com>Dear anh Kien,Please find below the article published on New York Times on February 7th, 2026, title: Lessons for America From Asia. Best Regards, QL./.BEGIN:When I began to cover Taiwan in the 1980s for The New York Times, it was a dictatorship under martial law, banning opposition parties and imprisoning dissidents. Per capita income was just $4,000, and the government once tried to bribe me to provide more friendly coverage.
Now the world has turned upside down. Taiwan today is more democratic than the United States, according to the democracy index published by the Economist Intelligence Unit. Similarly, Freedom House lists Taiwan as more free than the United States.
What’s more, Taiwan is a wealthy technological marvel: Robots assist at restaurants, and its citizens enjoy a higher per capita income than the Japanese do. Because Taiwan produces more than 90 percent of the world’s most advanced computer chips, it may be the single most indispensable hub in the global economy.
Likewise, on my first visit to Vietnam in 1989, its per capita income was about $100, and in one hotel my wife and I stayed at (one of the best in the city of Hue), rats fell like rain from the ceiling of our room.
Last month at my Sheraton hotel in Vietnam, where per capita income is now about $5,000, there was no rat precipitation. Skyscrapers line city streets, reflecting an 8 percent economic growth rate, among the highest in the world, and a stock market that soared 37 percent last year in dollar terms. Life expectancy in Ho Chi Minh City is 77 years, longer than in some American states.
So it goes across so much of Asia, transformed at a staggering pace. Some Asian countries have managed to double their economies in less than a decade. The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development says that emerging Asian economies (including China, India, Indonesia, Vietnam and others) contributed more last year to global economic growth than the rest of the world combined, and will do so again in 2026.
I have been able to spend much of my career as an Asia watcher precisely because it was so unimportant in the 1980s that The Times didn’t mind sending a young reporter there as a correspondent. The region has been changing so quickly in recent years that, to borrow from Heraclitus, you can never step into the same Asia twice. (Actually, that’s not fully true: Sadly, you can repeatedly step into the same Myanmar and the same North Korea.)
Asia is not a monolith, but the gains that were first visible in Japan and the small “tiger” economies (Hong Kong, South Korea, Taiwan and Singapore) then spread to China and much of Southeast Asia, and more recently to Bangladesh and India. One factor was investments in human capital, coupled with prudent economic policies.
As America’s democracy and society have struggled in recent years, caught in an authoritarian riptide and mired in inequality and discontent, I’ve wondered about the lessons that we Americans can learn from some of the successes of Asia.The one I focus on is the transformative power of education. It’s not a new thought, of course, and it’s one I’ve puzzled over since my wife and I began visiting schools in Asia in the 1980s and sending our kids to school in Japan in the 1990s. Every time I visit, I feel a pang of envy for societies that seem to value education more than America does.
The passion reflects a tradition in the Confucian belt of East Asia that the path to glory is to study. Even today in Chinese villages, you occasionally come across an ancient “paifang” monument to some local man who centuries ago earned a “jinshi” degree with top honors in the imperial exams. (When was the last time you saw an American village commemorating a local Ph.D.?)
In a modern echo, in some East Asian schools I’ve visited, students and teachers alike have explained that the “hot” girls and boys are the valedictorians. It’s nerd heaven, and this set of values leads many students to work extraordinarily hard.
Consider Tran Ha Hoang Chau, whom I met in Ho Chi Minh City. She didn’t have money for college but was determined to get a degree anyway. So she decided to work full time and study full time. After studying all day at university, she would then work all night at a coffee shop, seven days a week.
When did she sleep?“My only chance to sleep was at the coffee shop, between 3 a.m. and 5 a.m. if there weren’t many customers,” she explained to me. She also caught up on weekends, she said.
She didn’t have enough money for food and often went hungry. But her grit paid off, and she began to win academic recognition for her science research, including one prize for her work on Covid and another for an investigation into cervical vertebrae. The prizes included cash payments that allowed her to eat more food.
That reverence for education is a reason Singapore’s schools may be the best in the world, with those of South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Japan also in the mix.We Americans eagerly invest in our own children’s education, but we’re less enthusiastic about paying to educate other people’s kids. In Taiwan, by contrast, the constitution stipulated for decades that education, culture and science must account for at least 15 percent of the national budget; a law that updated it mandates that at least 22.5 percent of combined net budget revenues for government at all levels go to education. (In the United States, education has accounted for a bit more than 2 percent of federal budgets and about one-third of state and local spending.)
Obviously, not every child in Asia is a paragon, and there is plenty of poverty, inequality and injustice. Education isn’t a cure-all; North Korea appears to have decent schools yet is both impoverished and totalitarian. But especially in the countries with Confucian influences, respect for education is so deep that it can even overwhelm youthful hormones.
“Dating or having a boyfriend is not necessary,” Phan Thi My Duyen, 20, a technology student at a university in Ho Chi Minh City told me primly. “My priority is schoolwork.”
It keeps her busy. Duyen built a device to measure soil parameters so that farmers can understand how to add fertilizer to improve crops. Then she built an S-RAM device that I would tell you about if I understood it.
Duyen, who grew up in a rural area, is a beneficiary of a nonprofit called U-Go, started by a former Microsoft executive named John Wood. I admire U-Go, which provides scholarships of about $800 each so that brilliant low-income women in Asia and Africa can attend university.
Can we build this kind of education-obsessed culture in America?In any case, many in East Asia complain that their systems work children too hard, robbing them of fun, and focus too much on memorization and not enough on creativity. Yes, that’s all true.But couldn’t we Americans edge a little in Asia’s direction? We don’t need to build a commemorative arch outside the home of each Ph.D., but maybe we could manage a bit less complacency about educational mediocrity? Maybe we could acknowledge the inequity of local school finance that results in sending rich kids to good schools and poor kids to weak schools? Perhaps politicians could stop demonizing universities and taxing their endowments? What if we respected human capital as much as financial capital?END.Lam Nguyen (Ms.)
Special Assistant
Mobile: +84-814-364-472151 Ton Dat Tien, SB02 Garden Court 1, Tan Hung Ward, Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam
Alan Colner
<colner.alan@gmail.com>On Feb 8, 2026, at 4:45 PM, Kien Pham <kien...@neverchange.com> wrote:
--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "GSB Vietnam 3" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to gsbvietnam3...@googlegroups.com.
To view this discussion visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/gsbvietnam3/b6dbc8dd-d95b-4235-a483-e925d607daea%40neverchange.com.
Dan Scherlis
<danscherlis@gmail.com>--
Chris Cramer
<Chris.Cramer@karlstrauss.com>Thought you all might enjoy this review by Daniel Fienberg of the Hollywood Reporter as much as I did…
Critic’s Notebook: Bad Bunny Shrugs Off Trumped-Up Controversies for an Exhilarating, Vital Super Bowl Halftime Performance
Lady Gaga, Ricky Martin and a few celebrity guests were part of one of the biggest parties to ever hit the field at a Super Bowl.
Plus Icon
Chief Television Critic
More Stories by Daniel
- ‘The Muppet Show’ Review: Sabrina Carpenter Is the Ideal Host for a Promising Special That Reminds Us What the Muppets Do Best
- Critic’s Notebook: Trevor Noah’s Final Grammys Hosting Gig Is a Dud, but Big Performances and Passionate Speeches Carry the Telecast
- THR Film Critics Pick the Best of Sundance 2026
February 8, 2026 7:53pm
Patrick T. Fallon / AFP via Getty Images
There’s a reason Bob Dylan has never played the Super Bowl halftime show.
OK, there are several dozen reasons Bob Dylan has never played the Super Bowl halftime show. But one of the reasons is simple: Nobody watches the Super Bowl halftime show for the lyrics.
People watch the Super Bowl halftime show for the spectacle. For the energy. The sonic component is not an afterthought, but it’s a delivery system. Even if the halftime act is an act you love, I’m gonna posit that nobody’s favorite version of anybody’s favorite song is the version as it was performed at the Super Bowl. Don’t be a weirdo and attempt to give me counter-examples.
Related Stories
Think back on the Super Bowl halftime memories you have and unless they relate to that really special 12-layer dip that your ex once made — the extra layer was “granola” — they’re probably 95 percent related to imagery. I’m talking Prince’s ginormous shadow/silhouette or Michael Jackson’s magical teleportation act or Rihanna’s pregnancy reveal. (Or Nipplegate or Left Shark, because memorable halftime images don’t have to be positive.)
In fact, one of the very rare lyric-based halftime memories I have relates to last year’s show, with Kendrick Lamar leading an entire stadium to shout “A minor!” So if you want to make an argument that only acts that publicly humiliate Drake should play the Super Bowl, I find your point to be very compelling.
But if you are making, or have attempted to make, the argument that Bad Bunny was a bad selection as halftime performer because the Puerto Rican superstar’s songs are primarily in Spanish? Nah. Even you don’t sincerely care. We live in a country that is now largely bilingual (or trying to be), and it isn’t my fault you took French in school. Serge Gainsbourg’s Ghost can perform next year.
And who did you want playing this year’s halftime show instead of Bad Bunny? Lee Greenwood? Don’t be a clown. Metallica for vague regional connections? Sure, I’d have been happy with that, but don’t pretend Metallica is a magical elixir binding every demographic together. Plenty of reasonable and respectable people hate Metallica. You just don’t care about them. Taylor Swift? If booking Taylor Swift were that easy, everybody would do it.
So here we are. Trumped-up controversies aside, Super Bowl LX — gotta love Roman numeric simplicity — featured Bad Bunny, and his only mandate was to deliver 10 to 12 minutes of diversion between concussions and commercials — period. Diversion. Distraction. Even “entertainment” is a bonus. To expect anything more from an event that used to employ Up with People is folly.
ADVERTISEMENT
(Common Sense Disclaimer: This is, of course, all disingenuous. Bad Bunny represents, and is beloved by, a huge portion of AMERICAN music fans, many of whom have never seen or heard their culture or language represented like this on a stage like this. The words and how they’re delivered are hugely representatively potent. But that’s nuance, and any argument that Bad Bunny, a music superstar with a vast film and television footprint and recent top-tier Grammys wins, didn’t belong on this stage is inherently devoid of nuance. Words matter. Representation matters. Diversion in a difficult moment matters.)
So did Bad Bunny succeed?
(Yes. By being there, Bad Bunny succeeded.)
More than two hours after Green Day energized the pre-show with the rather pointed “American Idiot” — clearly everything I said about lyrics not being Super Bowl-ian was a lie — Bad Bunny brought Super Bowl LX to life.
And good gracious this Super Bowl needed an injection of whatever it was that Bad Bunny brought to the game.
Coming after one of the worst halves of football in Super Bowl history and a slate of commercials that represent the largest waste of money since Melania, there was an astonishing lowering of entertainment expectations leading into halftime.
ADVERTISEMENT
But I don’t think “lowered standards” had much to do with my reaction. Put simply: This was the most impressively conceived and executed Super Bowl halftime production I’ve ever seen. That’s not the same as “best straightforward, concert-style Super Bowl performance I’ve ever seen”; sometimes you really DO just want a familiar artist to stand on a stage and play five of their hits with a group of dancers on the field in front of them while everybody at home sings along. Plenty of people were singing along to Bad Bunny, too, but there was also a whole narrative, one that celebrated Puerto Rico and the Americas, capturing every aspect of life, from hard everyday work — in the cane fields, on power lines — to family to a relationship that went from proposal to marriage ceremony to joyful party. I’m just going to keep saying “joy”/”joyful,” because that’s what it was.
Did I understand every detail of it? No.
Am I sure there were nuances to the cultural specificity being articulated that there’s no way a 40-something white guy could possibly get? Absolutely.
Do I hope some publications have Puerto Rican writers exploring and decoding those nuances? I surely do.
But here’s the thing I know with certainty: When I don’t understand something, I can either attempt to do a little research and follow a few links and learn about the things I couldn’t process in the moment, or I can complain. And, honestly, why would anybody in their right mind complain? Because I understood that the halftime show was about life and humanity and telling a story in a way that’s nearly without Super Bowl precedent. It was vital in every imaginable definition of the word. It was necessary and it was alive and it was musical, well beyond a simple set list.
ADVERTISEMENT
There was a string symphony and a brass band and Lady Gaga popped up and even sang in English, just in case that was a thing you thought was necessary. Oh and Ricky Martin! Bad Bunny knew that some people might not know who he was, but he made sure he brought a few friends whom everybody knows. Jessica Alba, Cardi B, Pedro Pascal and some people I don’t recognize were at this party as well.
The set design was remarkable, from the sugar fields to an urban neighborhood, from night clubs to barber shops to a domestic living room where the family gathered to watch last week’s Grammys speech from Bad Bunny. There’s some precedent for using the Super Bowl field as more than just a stage. It was only four years ago that the turf at SoFi was turned into a recreation of South Central for performances from Dr. Dre, Snoop Dogg and more, but that was tiny and intimate compared to this.
The integration of technology and performance was like nothing I’ve seen in this venue. The camerawork, following Bad Bunny through these tableaus of everyday life, was surely Emmy-worthy. Parts of it called to mind the movie version of In the Heights, in which Jon Chu brought a neighborhood to life for two-plus hours, but the idea of doing it live makes one marvel at what director Hamish Hamilton was able to execute. There were dozens (hundreds?) of dancers and performers, and the choreography was exceptional and — this goes without saying — universal. It wasn’t just the sexy troupe of dancers in khaki shorts and white tank tops. There was a married couple slow-dancing, and grandpas dancing in ways that probably embarrassed their kids, and grandkids grooving with total, youthful (but fully choreographed) abandon.
ADVERTISEMENT
There were moments when Bad Bunny played a role that was less showcase performer and more like the Stage Manager in Our Town, with an entire island — with the entirety of the Americas, Central and North and South, inclusive of the United States, but not exclusively the United States — as his Grover’s Corners. He was our guide, showing us around his world and, in many cases for the audience, introducing and curating his music.
More than that, the show was fully immersive. If some “pundits” claimed that they felt excluded by the selection of Bad Bunny, the entire conception of the show was to bring everybody in. I’m not sure the camera was ever positioned away from the field. There were no long or wide shots, no sense that this was being contained to 30 yards at a football stadium. Occasionally a drone or crane brought the camera 15 or 20 yards aloft, but that was just so you didn’t miss the scope of what was happening, not so that you ever lost your presence as part of it.
And, again, I’ll admit: I didn’t recognize all the songs. There were snippets from at least a dozen, I think, and had to look up what they were and I still don’t know where one ended and the next one began, but that was by intent. It was a 15-minute tableau that expressed the continuity of life, the flow. I just watched with jaw-dropped appreciation for how every level of the performance came together within the confines. At no point did Bad Bunny and the show’s producers take the easy way out, and if you can’t appreciate that, I hope you found something that brought you similar happiness.
And maybe next year, they can get Bob Dylan. Or Metallica. Not Lee Greenwood, though. Don’t be ridiculous.
Cheers!
Chris
Chris Cramer
CEO & Co-Founder
Karl Strauss Brewing Company
5985 Santa Fe Street
San Diego, CA 92109
(858) 408-3991 Fax
About Karl Strauss Brewing Company…
Karl Strauss Brewing Company has pioneered the San Diego beer scene since 1989 with innovative beer releases like Aurora Hoppyalis San Diego-Style IPA, Boat Shoes Hazy IPA, Mosaic IPA, Wreck Alley Imperial Stout, and our new Tower X West Coast IPA. The brewery has won more than 120 medals in major competitions since 2009 and its Red Trolley Ale is one of the most award-winning beers in the world. For more information visit www.karlstrauss.com or call the brewery at (858) 273-2739. Share it. Cheers!
This electronic message contains information from Karl Strauss Brewing Company. The contents may be privileged and confidential and are intended for the use of the intended addressee(s) only. If you are not an intended addressee, note that any disclosure, copying, distribution, or use of the contents of this message is prohibited. If you have received this e-mail in error, please contact me at ch...@karlstrauss.com.
From: gsbvi...@googlegroups.com <gsbvi...@googlegroups.com>
On Behalf Of Dan Scherlis
Sent: Monday, February 9, 2026 3:13 PM
To: Kien Pham <kien...@neverchange.com>
Cc: GSB Vietnam 3 <gsbvi...@googlegroups.com>; KP Support Team <kpsupp...@vnfoundation.org>
Subject: Re: New York Times -- Lessons for America From Asia
CAUTION: External Sender. Please do not click on links or open attachments from senders you do not trust.
To view this discussion visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/gsbvietnam3/CABCGb5KpXC-A1MXmW5X6GjpEJXkao3R_uLiGF4L4i1gHp2BP7A%40mail.gmail.com.