Author Description

Born into a poor family in a poor village in one of the poorest districts in the country (Vinh Linh, Quang Tri), where he grew up during the hardest stage of the modern era: from French colonialism to Japanese colonialism, with millions of deathsfrom famine, and then the prolonged and violent Franco-Vietnamese war, Nguyen Xuan Thu was evidently not a lucky man. Even worse, becoming an orphan early, for his father died when he was 5 and then his mother when he was 13, andwithout any relatives, having to leave home to survive through numerous lowly jobs since the age of 14, Nguyen Xuan Thu clearly was the least lucky of all the unlucky. And yet, with his efforts and no other means, Thu achieved highly in his academic journey: finishing a high school certificate, continuing to higher education and gaining an Ed.D in the US before becoming the Director of the Documentation and Research Department in the Ministry of Education in South Vietnam and then being one of the few Vietnamese to be conferred with a professorship at a renowned university inAustralia.