Writing Resumes with Fascinating New Stories!

Hello Everyone,

Some people have asked what has been going on over the last few months. Today, I want to fill-in everyone about what I have been doing and what I have planned for the blog going forward.

A few months ago I needed to take a rather abrupt break. It wasn’t due to burnout or lack of topics. The break came about as personal responsibilities started creeping into my life. Family responsibilities called me back to the US and I knew I would need to leave Vietnam in December for a long time. I wanted to enjoy my last few months in Vietnam before moving back to the US. I can’t say yet whether this is a permanent move or just a several year sojourn from my Vietnamese home, but as of today, there are no plans to return to Vietnam.

By mid-December, I gave away most of my possessions in Vietnam. Personal items and books were packed into several massive boxes that were sent back to the US. I decided to delay writing here to reserve my first few weeks back in the US with my family during the holiday season since I have not been able to return to the US for a couple of years. I am settling into my new life in the US. My body seems to have adjusted to the cold and next month I will be returning to the snow in the Northeast US for at least a couple weeks in mid-January.

Going forward, this blog will be limited because I don’t have as much free time as I did last year. Posts will probably go up in spurts as I read a topic of interest and write the next series of articles relating to that subject. This spurt of writing will be followed by a break as I read about the next topic. The plan is to write a series of three or four articles every week followed by a month or two break as I read the next series of books.

Right now, I am interested in the dynamic of ethnic groups in Vietnam and the differences between the people of the mountains and the plains. I recently learned Vietnam has 54 ethnic groups and almost 50 of them live in the mountains of the central highlands or the northern mountains that border China and Laos. This led me down a rabbit hole that touched upon a domino cascade of new writing topics.

• Who are the ethnic groups of Vietnam and where did they come from?

• Where did the early Neolithic tribes that make up these ethnic groups evolve?

• How does Linguistic Anthropology help us better understand how these tribes split and migrated around the region?

These studies led to a controversial historian who has some very interesting ideas about the origins of the Vietnamese people. I will discuss this historian along with all of these topics over the next few weeks as the next blog series returns.

Stay Tuned!