I met the American Dreamer

Today was one of those days the unexpected manifests. It had already appeared in the shape of the Mesquite Sand dunes and the Badlands of the Death Valley, CA. Something that we thought would be a shortcut from Las Vegas to the Sequoia National Park and turned out to be one of the most shocking experiences of my life (including Vegas). We arrived into Death Valley at dusk, the time we like to arrive at places and saw the sunset in Zabriskie Point. Continued along the road listening to the Blade Runner sound track in the car under a purple sky and the vastness of the desert surrounding us…

Coming back to the story of today… It happened in Lake Isabella, arguably one of the ugliest and poorest towns in America, with a huge rate of unemployment and hard drugs addiction where the Sunday flee market is run by a bunch of cowboys who sell knives and swastika flags. We stopped there because we had driven 6 hours from Death Valley and I needed a point where I could plug the computer and translate. We did the motel experience and it didn’t disappoint, we went to a cheap one. We slept well.

We woke up in the morning and went for a run along the dirty lake. The shore was full of RVs with angry dogs and the atmosphere was generally unwelcoming, it reminded me of Snatch.

But all this was before we went into town to look for a place where I could have internet connection and proofread the work that I had done over night. We went to a cafe called My Place. There I met Huang:

Huang is a born-Vietnamese American man who just turned 55 and arrived in the US in 1974. He’s been working as a network engineer for 31 years and is married to Angela, an American woman who runs the Café. Huang is one of those people who is touched by the gift of devotion and hard work. This is so to such an extreme that he can come across either as a genius or a complete mad person.

In the restaurant Huang is seating at the back either working with his huge computer or playing guitar, he’s very small and skinny and wears dirty clothes from painting or simply sweating. Huang runs Guitar Elements, rated number 1 guitar learning website in the world for 3 years consecutive in 2009, 2010 and 2011, which has received a recognition from the American business association and the White House. Guitar Elements is a non profit website where anyone can learn to play guitar for free as a beginner or an advance student. It has hundreds of videos and thousands of lessons explained and uploaded by Huang and recorded in the little café.

This website is the work of a self taught guitar player and teacher who came out of Vietnam, thanks to the American army who saved his life and that of his family –according to his own words.

Huang believes that music can make people better and hopes this can help children play guitar and learn music even before they can own a guitar. He never had a guitar lesson, he learned everything on his own and for this reason he believes he ought to give this gift back to the world. He also doesn’t have patience to teach people who he generally perceive as lazy so he does it on the internet where people can come in or out of the website.

Some numbers about the company: Huang and his Guitar Elements are number 54 today in people with more friends in Facebook, nearly 600.000 thousand; number 70 in companies with more than 200.000 connections, his banner has been for 3 weeks in MTV’s website completely for free.

The website and the method is a very complex structure that he’s accomplished with the help of a programmer from San Francisco to whom he’s paid around 100.000 dollars for two years to develop the program. He’s paid the programmer who didn’t have a clue about guitar or music every hour of learning about the program..

He’s now writing a letter to raise funds. He hopes he can collect 1 cent a day from his friends in Fb and develop his program, Become a millioner and create schools and programs for children to learn music and make a better world. This and a guitar that would incorporate the whole software. A kind of a Guitar Hero but where you could learn to play guitar for real. Crazy man, a visionary? Both?

The fact that he’s a computer engineer means that he believes in creating a tool for today’s world but also he believes in creating a tool that won’t go outdated, a tool that can be updated. He hopes his son, guitar player and computer engineer will continue his mission

Huang doesn’t believe in helping his own community which he thinks is rotten and wasted with people being caught on drugs and problems. He believes in reaching the global community and teach them not only music but also the values of persistence, being constant, devote oneself to an activity and the rewards of dedication. This work has cost him 10 years of work in front of the computer, often for up to 16 hours a day, much pain and many crises.

He might reach his dream and get that money and then make a difference. He might not and the whole dream of changing the world will look like a mad utopia by a man who had too big dreams or ambitions. It makes me sad that he doesn't put all that effort to change his community but I guess he also hosts a couple of events a year in the cafe where he feeds the hunger and the war veterans.

Anyway what fascinates me is to see a man who’s given his life to a purpose and who -in his own words- has learned 'to translate frustration into work'. Someone who has had to resist many people laughing at him for working on a non profit project for so long time and who only gained the respect of people after he received the official recognition. Someone who believes in doing good just for the sake of it.

I dedicate this entry to him and to all the people who work on their dreams however big or small, and who are willing to devote their lives to that with such passion so as to look mad to the rest of the world.

Check him out on www.guitarelements.com and be amazed at what one single individual in a remote city of deep down America is capable of.