I recently read the 6th version of the BANYAN TREE project book. This book is very atypical compared to most of the books I've read in the past. It takes abstract ideas and requires deliberate effort to slow down and really imagine what the text is trying to convey. It took about 6 hours to read due to its complexity. Most of the pragmatic content is in the 1st chapter. The later chapters could use figures or tables to visually lay out the concepts using memorable imagery.
Chapter 1 breaks down well-known concepts like culture into their Vietnamese subdefinitions. The English word "culture" doesn't immediately account for different expressions of culture, such as tradition, useful culture, and harmful culture. The book draws parallels of these ideas with scientific theory (though some figures can highlight these parallels).
The latter chapters introduce a lot of Vietnamese cultural ideas and may not directly tackle the objective of building a family legacy, but they may be important topics to prime our brains into the East Asian worldview.


