Vietnam made me
I grew up there, and it never really left. The warm rain, the early markets, the aimless motorbike rides through the city. Breakfast was never the same thing twice — whatever my parents happened to buy on the way, whatever I grabbed running late for school. Nothing planned, and somehow it always worked out.
Nobody in my family talked much about how they felt. It didn't need saying — you just understood it from how much they did without asking for anything back. I think that's where I get it: showing up matters more than announcing it, and effort is just something you do quietly, not something you talk about.
I left in 2023 and don't know when I'll be back for good. But on a worldwide spectrum, I'm still very much a product of one small province in central Vietnam — Bình Định, not Hà Nội, not Sài Gòn. Meaning:
- resilient by necessity, not by choice — the kind of place where storms and drought taught you to expect little and make do
- thrifty, almost stubbornly so, even now that I don't have to be
- quiet about effort, loud about nothing
- community first — if a neighbor's roof came off in a storm, the street showed up, nobody had to ask
- proud of a home most people outside Vietnam have never heard of
- suspicious of loud confidence — if you're actually good at something, it shows without you saying so
- warm to guests, slower to trust strangers