Part 2 of my personal journey series. Read Part 1 here.

In the early 1990s and 2000s, the Central Highlands of Vietnam — Tây Nguyên — were drawing people like a quiet magnet. The government was encouraging migration into the region. Land was available. The red basalt soil of the highlands was extraordinarily fertile. And coffee — robusta coffee — was growing into one of Vietnam’s most important exports.

My uncle was one of the people who went. He had the vision, or perhaps just the restlessness, to leave Ha Tinh and build something new on the other side of the country. When he came back to visit, he seemed like someone from a different world — not rich, but purposeful, moving forward. In Ha Tinh, that stood out.

When he offered to take me with him, my parents said yes. I was young enough that I didn’t fully understand what that meant. I understood it later.

The Road South

The journey to the highlands felt enormous. Vietnam is a long country, and Tây Nguyên sits in the interior, elevated above the coast, connected by roads that wound through mountains and forest. For a child from a flat, coastal province, everything about it felt different — the altitude, the cooler air, the red earth, the scale of the trees.

We settled in a community of people much like us — migrants from other provinces, building lives on plots of land that had been cleared from the forest. Everyone was in the early stages of something. Houses were simple. The work was constant.

And everywhere, coffee.

Life on the Plantation

Coffee cultivation has a rhythm that organises your year. The plants need pruning, fertilising, and careful management through the dry season. Then, from around November to January, comes the harvest — weeks of picking the red cherries by hand, processing them, drying them in the sun.

I grew up inside that rhythm. From the time I was old enough to be useful, I was part of the work. Before school, after school, on weekends, during harvest season — the plantation was always there, always needing something.

It was hard work. Physical, repetitive, dependent on weather and prices you couldn’t control. A bad harvest or a drop in global coffee prices could erase a year’s effort. I watched my uncle and the people around him absorb those losses and keep going.

But there was also something about that life that I’ve come to appreciate more with time. It was honest work, with a clear connection between effort and outcome. You planted, you tended, you harvested. The land responded to care. That lesson — that patient, consistent effort compounds — is one I carried out of the highlands and into everything I’ve done since.

Growing Up Without My Parents

My uncle and his family were good to me. I was not mistreated, not neglected. But I was also not with my parents — and that is a particular kind of absence that a child feels in ways they cannot always articulate at the time.

Birthdays passed quietly. The moments when you want your mother — when you are sick, or frightened, or have done something you’re proud of — she was not there. My father was not there. I learned to be self-sufficient earlier than most children do, because I had to be.

I don’t say this to cast my parents in a difficult light. They made a choice under constraint — to give me access to a life and an education that Ha Tinh couldn’t offer. It was an act of love, even if it didn’t always feel like one.

Growing up in someone else’s household, you develop a particular attentiveness. You learn to read rooms, to be useful, to not be a burden. You learn independence, because dependence on people who are not obligated to you feels different from dependence on parents. These traits shaped me more than I realised at the time.

The New Economy

Tây Nguyên in those years was a place of genuine opportunity — rough and unfinished, but alive with the energy of people building something. The “new economy” my uncle had followed was real: Vietnam’s coffee industry was growing, incomes in the highlands were rising, and the region was developing infrastructure, schools, roads.

For my uncle’s generation, the bet paid off. They had left the certainty of poverty for the uncertainty of the frontier, and the frontier rewarded them — not with wealth, exactly, but with stability, land, and a future for their children.

For me, the highlands were the place where I grew up — where I went to school, made friends, learned what work meant, and began, dimly, to understand that education was the other frontier, the one available to me.

Next: Primary school, secondary school, and what coffee and books have in common.

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