DOCTORATE AND FAME AND ACHIEVEMENT (NOTE FOR A NOVEL)

Doctorate (Ph.D.) and Fame and Achievements (note for a novel) 

In October 1971,  I went to New Zealand as a graduate student in Political Science under the aegis of the Colombo Plan. I had a brutal year before I left for New Zealand. I finished my last year at Teacher’s College (called Faculty of Pedagogy then). I graduated 2nd out of 14. I gave a wrong answer in the Linguistics exam about the pronunciation of “wolf”. 

I wasn’t that pissed for coming out Second. Everybody in the class knew I should have been First for I was the best student and I didn’t study that hard. I was also taking the courses for the first year at Law School, preparing for the entrance exam to the master’s program at the Institute of Public Administration, and applying for the Colombo Plan Scholarships using the B.A. I had earned the year before at the Faculty of Letters, while carrying a torrid love affair with a French-speaking graduate student. I was spreading myself very thin. 

I succeeded in all my endeavors except for the love affair with Laura, the French-speaking graduate student. She soon dumped me shortly after my arrival in New Zealand for a guy doing Computer Science at University of Chicago. I was devastated. I loved her. She wasn’t the first girl that went through my life, but was the first one I really loved and with whom I had some carnal explorations. It took me over 30 years after multiple marriages and dozens (yes, plural) of girlfriends for me to cease having dreams about her in my sleep. I know, I was weak and stupid and sentimental. 

We will revisit her later on in the book. Anyway, on April 30, 1975, Saigon fell to the Vietcong and with that vanished my dreams of finishing my Ph.D. and becoming a professor in Vietnam. In October 1975, I had an opportunity to migrate to America. After 3 sleepless nights pondering about the opportunity, I took the plunge. I thought I could finish my Ph.D. in America, but I ran into money problems and had to find a job, any job, to support myself. To make a long story short, I earned an MBA at Roosevelt University in Chicago, with a tuition scholarship, but I didn’t resume working on my Ph.D. in Political Science. My excuse was that I needed to make money to live. 

To this day, my sisters and brother and close relatives continue expressing their disappointment in me for being a quitter. They want me to have the designation Ph.D. after my name, making the Ngo family proud. There are many members in my paternal extended Ngo family who have advanced degrees in Medicine, Law, and Humanities. 

So I had a nagging sense of shame for disappointing my kinsfolk. To compensate for the disappointment, I unconsciously tried to educate myself by reading quite widely in the humanities and popular science. Then I began to write about my struggle to battle the demons that were ravaging my soul and threatening my existence. I meant I had recurring thoughts and nighttime dreams  of inflicting extreme physical violence to several assholes that crossed the line. 

One day I realized the pieces that I had written over the years were very good and few, if any, of my peers, including though those that went on and got their doctorates, could write as well as I did. It also occurred to me that I knew far more about bookish matters than they did. I knew that in my exchanges of ideas and arguments with them in an Internet forum called Mitchong during a five-year period. I finally quit the forum in disgust and contempt of the stupid power-hungry attitude of the ignorant, stupid, and vain moderators of the forum. Most members of the forum didn’t impress me at all with their pathetic English, ideas, and arguments. They were like babes in the woods, outside their area of expertise, whereas I was and still am a mini-Renaissance man who wrote cogently on all matters. At least that has been how I have viewed myself during the last 20 years. 

A thought came to me the other day. People go to school mostly to gain sufficient skills so they can land a job. After landing the job, they try to last in their employment until they reach retirement. Meanwhile they mostly fail to develop their minds further, apart from the skills associated with their employment. They are smug and complacent with their academic degrees. 

I have reached a stage in my life where I am financially self-sufficient. I have pensions on top of my social security payments for my retirement. Now I work for nobody. I work for myself whenever I want while continuing reading, writing, and learning languages (I can navigate in 4 and have a reading knowledge of 6 others). 

I now rightly or wrongly view myself as superior, not way superior but superior nonetheless, in terms of book knowledge and the facility with the English language, to all the guys and gals I personally know that have a Ph.D. designation. I am walking tall and don’t hesitate to put all my interlocutors in their rightful place if they stupidly act uppity with me. Of course none of them has two literary books in English written in a kind of prose that elicits awe and admiration from folks in the know, as I have done with mine. I also have a lingering feeling that my name might live on in posterity, thanks to my books, whereas those doctorate holders that I personally know will die in obscurity and remain so in the posterity for they are nobody special. They have not done a damn thing that would distinguish themselves from the masses of humanity. All they have is an empty vanity and pride of having a designation of Ph. D. next to their names. 

Call me obnoxious. Call me a guy fraught and freighted with an inferiority complex. Call me whatever the fuck you want. But I dare you to get into a written debate with me in English. I have driven several Ph.D. holders to run, not walk, away from me in shame and humiliation, with their tails between their legs like dogs that they are. And it’s very likely I will do the same with/to you. 

Wissai 

July 29, 2019