Bag the name
The moment they refer you to the school you go to. You’re screwed.
Dear friends,
An editor once asked me to write a profile of a Vietnamese-American student who got into Harvard.
I said no.
He called me flaky.
Another editor, after I submitted an interview with a (female) professor who worked for Deakin University on the disruption of international education amidst COVID-19, requested to “switch” it to a piece anchoring to the professor herself for the March 8th edition.
I let her dump the original version without giving the order a second thought.
While the obsession with prestige is understandable, the intention of profiling anyone with a tiny hint of prestige on Vietnamese media is laughable, at least for me.
It’s not that their personal achievements are not impressive but it’s the zero tolerance towards imperfection and misalignments that make this kind of coverage’s synopsis tough to chew. .
Instead of showing who the subject is with textures and mismatches, those profiles veneer them under names of schools or employers, exposing nothingness instead of personalities, hence, reducing the person close to none.
In the first case, I refused, not because I knew the person was a daughter of the editor’s friend – it was part of the reason. Her story, in which the biggest plot was getting into the crimson college, didn’t interest me.
It’s an outdated motif to perceive Ivy League schools as the ultimate success. And I’m caught off guard and it’s still in use.
For the past couple weeks, my (clone) Facebook newsfeed has been flooded with profiles of Vietnamese students who just got into American and European universities.
I shared my frustration with a friend, hoping to grant this feeling at least a meaning.
“Ultimately, I think people buy into a well-written story (rag-to-rich, boy-meets-girl, học sinh giỏi (gifted students), học sinh nghèo vượt khó (students overcoming hardship to shine)),” he said.
“In the case of college application, "Ivy League schools" is an unwavering manufactured branding of "success" – what lies towards the end of the story these media companies are writing
I wonder who can be a target reader of a story about a graduate of Hanoi-Amsterdam – unarguably Vietnam’s most famous high school – who received a job offer from Google, except for himself and his parents.
Is it too late to wait for an innovation before being portrayed as a source of inspiration? People say let us enjoy every moment of our life. I guess it should only be a domestic affair.
The competition fetish is a problem for Vietnamese media. By romanticizing the race to the top, we’re blind ourselves to privileges and social injustices that fuel the race itself.
What do these pieces try to say, even?
The friend gave me some options to choose from: “to inflate ego? to deliver a message? to educate? to set a model for people who read those pieces?”
As a Janet Malcolm’s reader, David Salle’s reflection on her writings hit me hard. In an Art Forum piece, he wrote:
“One of Janet’s themes as a writer was self-delusion in all its guises – the propensity we all share for telling ourselves stories that, at the very least, reconfigure events to cast ourselves in a more favorable light.
I don’t hope that Vietnam will have such a profound profiler like Malcolm. What I wish for is an editor who easily gets bored of unhinged flashy brand names and dares to take a look deep into the cores of those stories to find a rumble of nothingness.
Till next time,
T.
P/S: Thank you so much for your kind words, and for friends who know me in real life, thank you for recalling our memories. My thoughts are with you always. Let me know yours is with me.
This week’s top picks
My favorite person on earth asked whether I’d talked about my mental issues to anyone except for my therapist lately. I told her yes, SZA and Travis Scott.
This story on Chuck Searcy made me wonder what’s wrong with America. Reported from Đông Hà – my hometown.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/15/world/asia/vietnam-demining-chuck-searcy.html
Have you ever tried watching traveling vlogs? I bumped into this couple recently and really like their styles (and the way they enjoy food). This ep is about my beloved city – Manila.
Food for thought from the said friend. On college admissions.