Vũ Thiện Đạm sent me a message asking whether Vinh had heard this news yet: “Ngô Thế Vinh passed away around April 2024 (at the age of 83, according to some sources from the overseas literary community; the family followed his wishes and did not hold a funeral.” (Grok xAI, March 12, 2026)
Just recently, on a Thursday afternoon in the first week of March 2026, Vũ Thiện Đạm sent me a message with a note: “Vinh, remember to read the last part.” It was only a short conversation between Đạm and Grok — an xAI (x Artificial Intelligence) program created by Elon Musk, which many people praise as far superior to ChatGPT by OpenAI’s Sam Altman or Google’s Gemini by Sundar Pichai. Grok is considered powerful because it is directly connected to X (formerly the social network Twitter).
Before 1975, Vũ Thiện Đạm was my classmate at Saigon Medical School and also served as the treasurer of the Tình Thương Medical Students Magazine from its very first issue until its final one, when it was shut down by the government of General Nguyễn Cao Kỳ. Although Đạm held the title of treasurer, he never really knew anything about the accounting books or the editorial office’s expenses! Intelligent and academically gifted, with a somewhat heavy build, he was given a lifelong nickname by Nguyễn Thanh Bình — famous under the pen name Bát Sách — who humorously exaggerated his physique and called him “Đạm H.”
Đạm was very close to his friends in the Tình Thương editorial team, including Nguyễn Vĩnh Đức (RIP), the first editor-in-chief; Trần Xuân Dũng (RIP), the secretary general; as well as Trần Mộng Lâm, Nguyễn Thanh Bình, Đỗ Hữu Tước, and others. For Vũ Thiện Đạm, working on the magazine was mainly for fun, yet there was a time when he suffered an unexpected mishap simply while walking from his house to the editorial office.
Đạm’s house, at number 99, was just one townhouse away from the Tình Thương office on Nguyễn Bỉnh Khiêm Street, near the Saigon Radio Station. Reflecting on that period more than 40 years later, Vũ Thiện Đạm wrote an article in the Vietnamese Physicians Association Bulletin in Canada, issue 184 (January 2010), titled “Some Memories of the Tình Thương Monthly.” Perhaps that was both the first and the last article ever written by the student journalist Vũ Thiện Đạm.
I—Vũ Thiện Đạm—negotiated to rent the ground floor of a four-story building near my home, at 103 Nguyễn Bỉnh Khiêm Street, Saigon, to serve as the headquarters for the Tình Thương monthly magazine. Besides being a meeting place for producing the paper, this headquarters was also a gathering spot where everyone could socialize and chat.”
His choice could serve as a model for many people to accept the cycle of birth and death as part of the natural order. It may also help save a healthcare system that is on the brink of collapse simply because everyone wants to prolong a vegetative existence—living on as “the living dead.”
On September 20, 2015, news came that Mặc Đỗ had passed away at the age of 98. He remained lucid until the end, like an ancient tree quietly withering away. From a medical perspective, his passing was considered a natural death. According to his wishes, the funeral was held simply within the family, without visits or formal condolences.
…
Professor of Medicine Trần Ngọc Ninh, as he approached the age of 90, emotionally reflecting: “Now that I am old (at that time I was only 89, in 2012), I increasingly feel that my understanding, my knowledge, and even my perception only touch the shallow surface of phenomena (including history and science). That is the ‘biological destiny’ of human beings on this earth.”
Professor Ninh passed away on July 16, 2025, at the age of 103. In accordance with his wishes, his family did not hold a funeral or deliver eulogies. He was laid to rest at Loma Vista Memorial Park Cemetery in Fullerton, about 20 km from Little Saigon, beside the grave of his wife, who passed away in 2020 during the COVID-19 pandemic. His gravestone is very simple—bearing only his name and the dharma name “Orgyen Karma,” symbolizing enlightened activity.
…
And below is the section written by Grok xAI for Vũ Thiện Đạm about his Tình Thương friend who has passed away:
… “Writer Ngô Thế Vinh (born in 1941 in Thanh Hóa, originally from Hà Nội) is a prominent author, physician, and former military officer in Vietnamese literature, especially associated with the Southern literary generation before 1975 and the overseas Vietnamese literature that followed.
Main biography
- Born on April 1, 1941, in Thanh Hóa (his father was a professor of French).
- Graduated from Saigon Medical University in 1968.
- Before 1975: He served as editor-in-chief of the student journal Tình Thương (Saigon Medical School, 1963–1967), and as chief medical officer of the 81st Airborne Ranger Group in the Army of the Republic of Vietnam.
- After 1975: He was held in re-education camps for more than three years, then worked at the National Institute of Rehabilitation. In 1983, he resettled in the United States (through family reunification), retrained in medicine, and became an internist. He also served as a Clinical Assistant Professor at the University of California, Irvine (UCI), and worked at a U.S. veterans hospital in Long Beach, California.
- He is an intellectual and writer deeply engaged with issues concerning his homeland, the environment, and Vietnamese history.
Some notable works include:
- The Green Belt (novel, written in the 1960s, related to the FULRO movement in the Central Highlands).
- The Nine Dragons Drained Dry, The East Sea in Turmoil (2000, a widely influential work).
- Mekong – The Occluding River (2007, continuing the Mekong theme after a 4,800 km field journey along the river).
- Other works on environment, history, and literary portraits (such as Creative World of South Vietnam and Overseas 1954–1975 to the Present, published more recently).
He received the Văn Việt Prize in 2017 and is regarded as a writer “of a turbulent era,” a soldier-intellectual always oriented toward his homeland, warning about environmental and political crises.
…
Then, perhaps worried I might miss it, Vũ Thiện Đạm reminded me to read the last lines:
… “Ngô Thế Vinh passed away around April 2024 (at the age of 83), according to some sources from the overseas literary community; his family, following his wishes, did not hold a funeral.” [end quote]
Thus, Elon Musk’s Grok had “pronounced dead” Đạm’s friend two years ago. And the one who sent me that information—the messenger—was none other than my old Tình Thương acquaintance, Vũ Thiện Đạm.”
Grok, the artificial intelligence system developed by Elon Musk, was recently characterized by The Economist as a “Disrupter-in-chief.” This characterization is hardly surprising. Yet, with a momentary pause, I responded to a close friend of over sixty years by invoking a remark attributed to Mark Twain—with the addition of a single word, premature:
“The report of my death is premature and greatly exaggerated.”
Positioned between “reality” and “illusion” within what is now described as “AI hallucination,” I find myself compelled to question the boundary between the real and the imagined. This epistemological uncertainty recalls the well-known parable from the Nam Hoa Kinh by Zhuangzi:
“Zhuang Zhou dreamed he was a butterfly; upon awakening, he could not determine whether he was Zhuang Zhou who had dreamt of being a butterfly, or a butterfly dreaming it was Zhuang Zhou.”
Between Two Infinities
In Buddhist philosophical language, the human body is understood as a composite of four fundamental elements: earth, water, air, and fire. However, from the perspective of modern scientific discourse, the human organism—depending on its scale—consists of approximately 30 to 40 trillion cells (i.e., 3–4 × 10¹³), all of which are engaged in continuous cycles of generation and decay. This dynamic equilibrium persists alongside tens of trillions of symbiotic microorganisms inhabiting the body.
At the cellular level, it is estimated that billions of chemical reactions occur each second (on the order of 10⁶ to 10⁹ reactions per cell per second). Extrapolated across the entire organism, the total number of chemical reactions taking place within the human body ranges approximately from 10¹⁹ to 10²² per second.
This perspective resonates with the concept of “double infinity” (les deux infinis), articulated by the 17th-century French mathematician and philosopher Blaise Pascal in his work Pensées. Pascal’s insight situates human existence between two extremes: the immeasurable vastness of the cosmos and the infinitely divisible microscopic realm. Notably, this conceptual framework has gained renewed clarity in light of contemporary scientific understanding.
…
Returning to the notion of “birth and death within each second,” one may ask: what, precisely, occurs within that temporal instant? This question was raised by a younger colleague, Dr. Phạm Hạnh, a professor of neuroradiology at the University of California, Irvine, who is also trained as a yoga master. A preliminary response might be: “We breathe.” Yet a single second is insufficient to complete even one full respiratory cycle; it corresponds more closely to a single heartbeat in a physiologically normal individual.
Within that fleeting second, human existence remains suspended in a delicate balance between life and death. Death, in this sense, may be understood as the disruption of this unstable equilibrium—an inherent condition of impermanence manifesting at every moment.
Dr. Phạm Hạnh subsequently reframed the inquiry:
“What can you do for your cell in one second?”
The response emerges in the form of a brief AI-generated musical composition created using Suno, expressing its meaning through a highly condensed poetic structure:
In one second,
a single breath,
a single softening,
a single kind thought
can change the river
to which your cells swim
–
A cell does not ask for miracle
Only for a moment of ease,
a whisper of oxygen
a hint of safety
And you can offer that
Any time you choose
…
Ngô Thế Vinh
Long Beach 01.04.2026
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