Ripples of a Best-Selling Vietnamese Book :)

Phong Nguyen wrote his first novel, "Many Lives, Many Times" in 2020. In the US, he is better known as John Vu, an engineering professor. After his first volume, he wrote a second volume. It has already sold a million copies! (FYI, you can have NYT best-seller with 5 thousand copies sold.) Now, he's just publish the last volume of his trilogy, and all of them are being translated to English. 

The thing is that a few months ago, we started seeing a massive uptick (ie. in the hundreds!) in new members from Vietnam -- and 90% of them mentioned John's book! So I checked out the English translation and didn't see any mention of ServiceSpace. But I recognized a friend's name mentioned in the book -- so I dropped him a note. He then connected me to John, who solved the mystery. :)

"I know about your work through Dr. Yeh, and I've been following ServiceSpace since your pandemic talk on 'Uncertainty as a Bridge to Compassion.' In the second volume of my book, which is not yet translated in English, I write about your organization and approach. In the novel,  the main characters are philanthropic billionaires -- they have lunch at Karma Kitchen, discussing today’s problems and asking themselves why so many current approaches aren't effective even with billion dollars spent on them? They conclude that most people are not looking inward and changing themselves -- instead they let ego, greed, ambition get in the way. One of the proposed solutions is supporting the approach of changing themselves before changing the world, as advocated by ServiceSpace.org."

Go figure! :)  (BTW, we recently pulled up a list of books we've been featured in -- turns out to 32 that we know of!)