ON DEFINE did not begin with a plan. It began with a conversation—on a flight, between two strangers—and a feeling I still cannot quite name.

In March 2023, on a journey from Da Nang to Bali, I sat next to Jorge, an Australian doctor who had come to Vietnam twice to work on reforestation and ecological restoration projects. He spoke about Da Nang with a level of attention I had never given to the place I call home. Streets I had walked a thousand times, dishes I ordered without a second thought, layers of history resting quietly beneath familiar corners—through his voice, they all appeared as if for the first time. Not because they had changed, but because someone was truly seeing them. It was a small feeling, but it reached deeper than I expected.

After that encounter, I began to look again—not in search of something new, but to recognize what had always been there. Landscapes so familiar they had become invisible. Layers of cultural memory quietly embedded beneath everyday life, revealing themselves only when one truly pauses. Nothing shifted suddenly; it felt more like a curtain being drawn back—not from the world, but from the way I had been seeing it. And from that, I came to understand something simple: a place does not become meaningful when it changes. It becomes meaningful when we learn how to see it.

In September 2024, I began to write. A novel centered on Da Nang, interwoven with the history of the Champa Kingdom, with memory and time. To date, the manuscript has reached eleven chapters, over 55,000 words, and it continues to grow. For me, it has never been just a book, but a way of thinking—a way of staying with questions long enough for them to become deeper, more honest.

Everything comes at a cost. Late nights after my family had gone to sleep, the glow of a screen lighting a corner of the room. A quiet tension began to form as I devoted what little time I had to writing. My wife initially opposed it—and she had every reason to. But one evening, I asked her to read the first five chapters. She did not ask me to stop. She asked something else: if these stories have value, why keep them to yourself?

That question stayed. And over time, it became ON DEFINE—embodied in the letter D. That letter carries more than one meaning.

For me, D begins with "The Dao that can be spoken is not the eternal Dao," from Laozi—a reminder that the moment something is named, it begins to drift away from its original essence. Yet humans continue to name the world, because it is through that effort that understanding takes shape.

D is also "define," in the spirit of René Descartes—the rational side of me, shaped by a career in technology, that believes clarity is what allows an idea to be built, to function, to exist in a practical sense. In many ways, something only fully exists in our world when it can be defined.

D is Dharma—not as a religious concept, but as a lived experience. Growing up in Central Vietnam, where Buddhism quietly permeates daily life, I came to understand Dharma not as something taught, but as something realized—through attention, through lived experience.

And finally, D is Da Nang. Not merely a destination, but the place where my thoughts become something real—where philosophy is no longer abstract, but tied to memory, to people, to life itself.

The letter "D" does not close into a single definition. It holds a question I believe is worth living with: how do we define something without losing its essence?