Vietnam Idol - Bill from Saigon

"Bill" (real name Tran Son Hung) has become a bit of a celebrity in his home country of Vietnam. The original video that I made of him and posted on YouTube has been viewed over 70,000 times on that site, plus at least that many more times on all the sites where it has been reposted by Vietnamese bloggers.


I went back to talk with Bill again in early October while in Saigon with the AACC recruiting tour. I also met Chau, a wonderful young lady from Vietnam who is studying mass communications in Singapore. She was home from college for a few weeks and we met to talk about Bill and about her interest in interviewing him as a journalism project for her program at the university. It looked like we weren't going to be able to see Bill since he had gone home to his home province for a few days. We talked a while and I shot this video of Chau.

We got lucky when Bill answered a phone call from Chau and decided to come back to Saigon earlier than originally planned. The next day we met him at Ben Thanh market in his normal spot and talked with him some more. I shot a lot of video and have posted two responses ( number one, and number two) and am just tonight posting the third video response (embedded below) to the original video interview with Bill. There will be one more video posted from the last part of our conversation together.

For Chau's part, she successfully got an article published about Bill in both the Vietnamese version and the English version of the Saigon newspaper Thanh Nien Daily. (Here is my cached copy in case that link rots.)