Dear Brothers and Sisters,

Love is a feeling and love demands action to satisfy that feeling.

Everyone who has fallen in love once knows exactly what I am talking about.

Now, let’s talk about loving your country. I am very sure that if you ask every Vietnamese: “Do you love Viet Nam?” you will hear an automatic answer: “Of course, I do. Why do you have to ask?”

We all have been trained to say, “I love my country.” That is very good. But that “slogan” may just be that – slogan, said out loud with no feeling and meaning. Đầu môi cửa miệng (the tip of the lips, the opening of the mouth).

Brothers and sisters, I am seriously concerned about our love for our country. Do you really love Viet Nam with true feeling and true action?

I knew I loved our motherland when I was 8 or 9. We lived in Thành (now, Thành cổ Diên Khánh), in Diên Khánh, Khánh Hòa. That is the citadel Võ Tánh built for Nguyễn Ánh in their war against the Tây Sơn’s. Almost every weekend, my dad would take me and my younger brother Sơn on his 50cc scooter for a ride from Thành to Tân Bình (now I know, is a Catholic Parish), on National Highway 1, probably 30km away from Thành.

The road went through the countryside, with gardens and fields and groups of little houses now and then. And sometimes we would pass by a very dry and cracked field under the burning sun, with 3, 4 very dark and skinny little boys riding on their very skinny cows. The cows were so skinny that you could see clearly all their bones – ribs, pelvic bones, and all.

Every time I saw that scene, I felt like crying inside, thinking: “How poor is our country, how miserable is our people!” And my heart hurt.

Only many years later I understood that such a feeling meant I loved my country.

And of course, I have had such feeling often throughout my life in many different situations and settings. And that feeling has guided my decisions and actions in those occasions, so that I have always decided and acted in the ways that I believed were right and good for our country.

What I am trying to say is: Loving our country is real experiences in feeling and in action.

Not just an empty slogan.

If you don’t have a strong feeling for your country, you are not really loving your country.

This is important, because loving our country is the cement to build our foundation of unity, positivity, and proactivity, to work together in developing our country strongly and quickly.

And when our country develops strongly and quickly, your career and your pocket grow strongly and quickly too, because you would just “ride the waves.”

Without real love, nothing happens, folks. Imagine you don’t have real love for your girl/boy friend, what will happen?

We need to develop real love for our country, if you haven’t got real love.

With compassion,

Hoành

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