By Geraldine Campbell, Glamour

The intimate story of how a struggling waitress named Michelle Phan nabbed 4.5 million YouTube followers and a major makeup deal. As told to Geraldine Campbell.

Phan, 26, with her new makeup line, Em. Sweater, Sandro; skirt, Rachel Zoe.

At the time, I was keeping a personal blog in which I depicted myself as the girl I wanted to be, with money and a great family. But it was all a veneer. In reality my life was hard, and I was struggling with insecurities I’d had for years.

You wouldn’t exactly call my childhood stable. When I was growing up, my father constantly gambled away our rent money. Every few months we’d get evicted and move. My brother and I never had the same beds for long, or even the same tree outside to swing on. Then one night after a big loss, my father just disappeared. It was more than 10 years before I saw him again.

My dad and I had been close—he called me Tuyet Bang, Vietnamese for avalanche, because of my nonstop energy. I took a lot from him, like being a risk taker, and I know how much he loved my mother. Their families were like the Montagues and the Capulets—he was from northern Vietnam, she was from the central countryside, yet they ran off together.

After he left, my mother was heartbroken. But she remarried, and our relationship with my stepdad was good… at first. They had a daughter, my little half-sister, Christine. But bit by bit he became very controlling of my mother. Eventually, the four of us moved out, and at age 17, I started working as a hostess to supplement my mom’s income as a nail technician in a salon. We could barely pay rent, and we had no furniture; I slept on the floor, my clothes in a basket beside me. We couldn’t afford dressers.

Her family: Michelle, center, with Christine, left, and mom Jennifer.

Art was my escape, so when I was accepted at Ringling College of Art and Design in Florida, I prayed we’d find the $12,000 for tuition. My aunts and uncles had pooled together money to buy us furniture, but my mom used it to pay for my first semester instead. I promised her I would find a way to take care of the family. I just never imagined it would be through YouTube.

The makeup tutorials were a fun hobby at first. I’d play different characters or try new emotions—a bold lip or dark brows to look strong, or sweet pink hues for church. And I was resourceful: I stocked up on lipsticks and liners from drugstore 75-cent sale bins.

As my YouTube following grew, I was soon earning as much from advertising revenue as from waiting tables, so I quit my job. My boss thought I was crazy, which just made me more determined. In 2012, four years and 200 videos later, my channel was so successful that Google offered me $1 million to create 20 hours of content. It was an incredible opportunity: Out of all the online beauty experts, they had picked me, the person who filmed in her bedroom!

But my real Cinderella moment came when L’Oréal gave me my own makeup line to launch this year. I was already making videos for Lancôme, another L’Oréal brand, so when they first called, I thought I was being fired. As soon as I registered what was really happening, I called my mom, who was giving someone a pedicure. “Today is the last day you’re doing that,” I said. “I don’t want you to go to work tomorrow.” As I told her about the project, we sobbed together uncontrollably.

Her makeup line: Em Michelle Phan Makeup Mood Enhancer in The Golden Hour ($25), Lip Gallery Classic Lipstick in Daredevil ($28), and Pillow Plush Lip Balm SPF 20 in Lollipop ($15, all emcosmetics.com). Photos by Josephine Schiele.

I don’t know what the future holds, but I love working in the digital world. I never get bored; I went swimming in a mermaid tail for one of my last videos, which got 1.475 million views. Whatever happens, I’ll just keep moving forward. Like an avalanche.

From Thanh Nien News

 
Many foreign firms plan to pull out or scale down business in Vietnam and go to other countries with better business environments, the Foreign Business Association said.

 The head of the Foreign Investment Agency, Do Nhat Hoang (first R) speaks with some foreign investors at the conference.

News website Thoi Bao Kinh Te Saigon (Saigon Economic Times) reported the association and investors as telling Ho Chi Minh City leaders at an investment conference on August 30 that too many changes in regulations cause difficulties for them.

Paik In Ki, CEO of Korean company Woojin Vina and head of business support department at the Korean Chamber of Commerce in Vietnam, said businesses were hit this year when the minimum wage was suddenly raised and labor laws were amended.

New environmental regulations have forced many to call off new projects or scale back operations, he said.

Deputy chairwoman of the European Chamber of Commerce in Vietnam (EuroCham), Nicola Connolly, said 20 percent of European firms have considered shifting to other Southeast Asian countries while 45 said other Southeast Asian markets are better business destinations than Vietnam.

They are disappointed with the business environment and are aware of the growing competitiveness of other markets in the region, she said.

Two regulations limiting overtime working hours and increasing the minimum wage in the amendments to the Labor Code are causing the biggest worry for foreign companies.

Employees can no longer work more than 200 hours overtime per year, and, in exceptional circumstances, no more than 300 hours.

Connolly said this rule is inappropriate for firms in sectors like textile and footwear that carry out work on customers’ orders.

They need workers to work extra to execute orders.

Other countries in the region like Thailand, Singapore, and Malaysia allow 900 hours a year or even more, and Vietnam should reconsider the rule, she said.

Mark Gillin, chairman of the American Chamber of Commerce in Vietnam (AmCham(, said investors hope they are allowed to discuss or at least prepare for the new laws before they take effect.

Kimio Yamaguchi, chairman of the Japanese Business Association in HCMC and CEO of Sojitz Vietnam Ltd., Co., said Vietnam’s investment climate does not meet the expectation of Japanese firms.

Many of them still complain about the difficulties they have to face when doing business in Vietnam such as the poor logistics and transport facilities, lack of traffic safety, and tortuous customs and tax procedures, he said.

Herb Cochran, AmCham’s executive director, said Vietnam should improve its investment environment and authorities should not cause trouble for foreign investors but instead help them pay taxes and complete licensing formalities more easily.

Le Net, a local lawyer, agreed that the country’s investment procedures cause many difficulties for companies.

An official from the city Department of Planning and Investment said to get a license a project has to go through different levels of authorities, which results in contrasting opinions and causes difficulties for investors.

Deputy chairman of the HCMC People’s Committee, Le Manh Ha, and head of the Foreign Investment Agency, Do Nhat Hoang, promised to apprise the government about all the difficulties mentioned at the meeting.

From Tuoi Tre News

A hailstorm took place in Ho Chi Minh City on Tuesday afternoon, to the surprise of locals who said they have never seen anything like it. Meanwhile, torrential rains are forecast to hit northern provinces today.

By Kevin Baron, Defense One

Why has Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., clamored for air strikes on Syria for years, while Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel, until now, has urged caution against using military forces? One likely reason: Vietnam.

Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz. prior to discussing the crisis in Syria on national television // J. Scott Applewhite/AP

Hagel and McCain were two of several combat veterans on stage during Tuesday’s Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing about whether to authorize military strikes on Syria in retaliation for its chemical weapons use. And where politics meets global security, combat experience quickly became a qualifying credit several times during the debate.

It showed after Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., had his spotlight moment to lecture Secretary of State John Kerry about the war powers given to the Congress by the constitution, and his limited view of the executive branch. Kerry waited patiently, and then the baritone former senator and anti-war protestor gave an erupting rebuttal, making his case for military strikes into the heart of the Syrian war. Pointing to himself, Hagel, McCain and Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Martin Dempsey, who fought in Iraq, Kerry said, “There’s not one of us that doesn’t understand what going to war means.”

No one ever wants to go to war, Kerry said, in trying to argue that the Obama administration wants Congress’s support only for a limited strike inside Syria, with no ground troops, specifically targeting chemical weapons capabilities.

McCain and Hagel often are lumped together as Vietnam combat veterans, as Kerry did. But they have two strikingly different views of when the use of force is warranted that reflect their experiences of that war. One difference is obvious: McCain spent six years as a prisoner of war in the Hanoi Hilton prison and knows the suffering of war in his way. Hagel spent two years as soldier seeing his share of combat while walking point with his brother Tom. But another distinction has greater relevance today: McCain was a Navy combat pilot. Hagel was an infantryman, who saw close hand the effects of aerial bombing and the rest of warfare.

Neither man is a dove. Hagel staunchly backs a strike against Syria most of America opposes. But Hagel has written about his personal Vietnam battlefield declaration to never permit warfare again, if ever he were in power to prevent it. McCain, on the other hand, has never been accused of being a peacenik. For two years, he has clamored for American military intervention in Syria. Not a ground invasion, clearly, but some combination of airborne strikes and other forceful ways to get the U.S. military involved.

Here is McCain’s view of the Vietnam War. In 1973, he wrote: “The date was Oct. 26, 1967. I was on my 23rd mission, flying right over the heart of Hanoi in a dive at about 4,500 feet, when a Russian missile the size of a telephone pole came up — the sky was full of them — and blew the right wing off my Skyhawk dive bomber. It went into an inverted, almost straight-down spin.”

McCain wrote of hating the guards who tortured him and held him in solitary for two years. He directs his hate at the Vietnamese leaders. Hagel, on the other hand, turns towards U.S. leaders.

Hagel, in his 2008 book, America: Our Next Chapter, after surviving his wounds while in Vietnam wrote: “I remember a strong resolve coming over me, as our chopper climbed over the glistening green canopy of the jungle and I watched the steam rise above it in the morning light. I made myself a promise that if I ever got out of that place and was ever in a position to do something about war — so horrible, so filled with suffering — I would do whatever I could to stop it. I have never forgotten that promise.”

It’s a promise Hagel repeats to this day. He called himself changed forever, from being “a foot soldier in an ill-conceived, poorly prosecuted, and unsuccessful war.”

“It is the responsibility of every elected official, especially those who have seen combat, to assure that any policy that sends men and women into war is worthy of the sacrifices that we ask of them and their families,” he wrote. It’s a mantra he’s repeated several times since taking office in February.

In questioning the automatic flag-waving of Americans for the troops, Hagel wrote, “I wonder how many of us here at home actually picture the grunt in the mud and grime with the cold stench of death hanging over him…”

Get the picture? One man prosecuted military strikes from above. The other smelled their effects on the ground.

“Obviously the perspective from 30,000 feet is entirely differently from that on the ground,” said former Sen. Chuck Robb, D-Va. Robb served in Vietnam also, before the Senate, and knew McCain’s father before he knew the senator. Though a distant memory now, Robb described the feeling of walking among dead Americans and their enemies, searching dead North Vietnamese Army soldiers’ bodies for weapons or intelligence only to find their family pictures. Robb was careful to say he would not wade into the Syria debate and was reluctant to speak on the record. But ultimately, he insisted that years of being a policymaker have as much weight on both McCain and Hagel as their combat years.

“Once you’ve been on the policy side, you tend to develop a broader understanding and complete picture of what they’re trying to conduct at any given time,” he said.

McCain, back in ’73, wrote what he’d like to be later in life. “If I have to leave the Navy, I hope to serve the government in some capacity, preferably in Foreign Service for the State Department.”

Just like Kerry.

 A tasty Vietnamese restaurant has moved into a corner restaurant in Denmark and upped the ante for Asian fare in the community.

Read the review of Nha Trang by Lucy Murray of The Copenhagen Post.

Nha Trang