This is the first in a series of posts about my life — from a small village in central Vietnam to Singapore. I’m writing it partly to remember, partly to make sense of the distance travelled.

Ha Tinh is not a province that gets much attention. It sits in the narrow waist of central Vietnam, where the country pinches between the Annamite mountains to the west and the East Sea to the east. It is not famous for food, or tourism, or industry. It is known, mostly, for being poor — and for producing people who leave.

I was born into a village in that province. The kind of place where the roads turn to red dirt after rain, where electricity was unreliable, and where most families grew rice and vegetables not because they chose farming but because there was no other choice.

My earliest memories are textured with that life. The smell of wood smoke in the morning. The sound of rain on a tin roof. The way the whole village felt like an extended family because, in many ways, it was — everyone knew everyone, and everyone’s business was everyone else’s business too.

We were not the poorest family. But we were poor enough that the future felt narrow. My parents worked hard in the way that people work when hard work is the only lever you have, and it still might not be enough.

I don’t write this for sympathy. I write it because it is the beginning of the story, and you cannot understand where someone is going without knowing where they started.

What the Village Gave Me

Poverty has a way of clarifying things. You don’t take for granted what you never had. I grew up knowing that comfort was not guaranteed, that security had to be built, and that the path out of a difficult situation usually required moving.

The village also gave me something harder to name — a sense of groundedness, of knowing where I come from. Even now, working in Singapore on financial systems and AI, there is a part of me that is still that child in Ha Tinh, watching adults make hard choices with limited options.

That perspective has never left me. I don’t think it should.

Next: Following my uncle west — to the highlands, the coffee, and a different kind of life.

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