Dear Brothers and Sisters,

Vietnam has always been poor because our culture has been teaching us to hate the rich.

Have you read a lot of Vietnamese fairytales? Almost in every Vietnamese fairytale, when a rich person is mentioned, s/he has to be a bad person – greedy, stingy, oppressing and cheating. Business people are always described as cheaters. Teachers are always poor and their poverty is a medal of honour.

Well, if all your teachers are glorified for being poor (thầy đồ nghèo, thanh liêm), then all the students in the country want to be glorified for being poor. You know for sure how the entire country would end up to be, right?

If your culture teaches you to hate the rich and glorify the poor, your culture must be poor moneywise. (The Communist comrades didn’t have to propagandize rich v. poor class struggle; it had already existed in the traditional culture for thousands of years. Marx and Lenin are newbies of the modern time).

I think that is the problem with our culture. But, look at the current scenes of our time, with all kinds of business VIPs and big government officials lining up to take vacation in jail, you probably would agree with the traditional culture that business folks and their governmental accomplices are truly bad people and only the poor are good. It seems we are forever stuck in the trap of bad riches and poverty.

But, richness by itself is NOT bad and being rich itself is NOT bad. Getting rich by immoral methods is bad. The methods you use to get rich are the problem, richness itself is NOT the problem.

The issue with the culture is that it always says the rich get rich by cheating and oppressing. And that is the biggest myth in our culture that has to be demystified and exorcized.

“Good people, working honestly and diligently, will be rich and their wealth will be longer lasting, bigger and more sustainable than the wealth that comes from dirty money or blood money.”

If you have lived long enough, you will see the Truth.

Using the Protestant work ethics to explain this Truth is probably the best way to convey the message: God gives us everything we need – the mind, the body, the heart, the beauty, the health, the job, the reputation, the money – to manage righteously and make them increase in value for God. If we do well, God will give us more capital to manage. The better a job we do, the more capital God gives us to manage. We will become very wealthy, but that wealth is not ours – it belongs to God; we only keep it and manage it for God. We are only the manager, not the owner.

That is the Truth of working for God – making money righteously and ethically, to help the poor, the oppressed, the downtrodden… for God.

And that is the sustainable wealth.

Wish we all be rich. And our country be rich.

With compassion,

Hoành

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