Part 3 of my personal journey series. Read Part 2 here.

My days in the highlands had a dual structure that I came to accept as simply normal: school, and the plantation. One fed my mind, the other fed the household. Both demanded something from me every day.

Primary School

Primary school in a highland town is not the same as primary school in Hanoi or Ho Chi Minh City. The resources were fewer, the classes larger, the teachers sometimes undertrained. But there were teachers who cared, and when you find one of those — anywhere, in any circumstance — it changes things.

I was a curious student. Not necessarily the most disciplined, but genuinely interested in understanding things. Mathematics made sense to me in a way that felt almost physical — there was a satisfaction in following a problem through to its solution that I didn’t get from rote memorisation. That preference for reasoning over recitation stayed with me.

After school I would come home to the plantation. Homework first, if I was disciplined. Then work. The coffee plants don’t care about school schedules.

Secondary School

By secondary school the academic stakes felt more real. The Vietnamese education system is competitive in a way that concentrates pressure on examinations — your results determine your options, and your options determine your future. In a place like Tây Nguyên, where families had sacrificed a great deal to be there, that pressure was palpable.

I studied seriously. Not because I had a clear vision of what I wanted to become — I didn’t, not yet — but because I understood, in a visceral way, that education was the only path I had. The plantation was a life, but it was not the life I wanted. I had seen what that life cost in labour and uncertainty, and I respected it too much to do it badly. The only alternative was to be good enough at school to go somewhere else.

Science subjects clicked for me — mathematics, physics, the logic-heavy parts of the curriculum. There was something in the structure of those subjects that appealed to the way I thought. Problems had answers. Methods could be learned and applied. Effort had a more direct relationship to outcome than it did in the unpredictable world of harvests and commodity prices.

What Coffee Taught Me

I spent years around coffee — planting, pruning, harvesting, drying. I never loved the work the way some people love the land. But I learned from it.

Patience. A coffee plant takes three years from planting before it produces its first harvest. You invest years before you see any return. There is no shortcut.

Consistency. The plants that were tended carefully, year after year, were the ones that produced reliably. Neglect compounds just as surely as care does.

Dependence on things outside your control. Rainfall, frost, global commodity prices — you could do everything right and still have a bad year. This teaches a specific kind of resilience: you separate what you can control from what you cannot, and you focus only on the former.

I’ve thought about these lessons many times since leaving the highlands. They apply to software, to machine learning, to careers, to most things worth doing. Patient, consistent effort. Separate what you can control. Think in years, not weeks.

The Person I Was Becoming

By the end of secondary school I was someone who had been independent for most of my life, who worked hard without being told to, and who had a quiet but firm conviction that things could be different. Not better by chance — but better by design, by study, by choosing the harder path when the easier one led nowhere interesting.

I missed my parents. I had learned not to say so.

Next: Returning to my parents — and leaving again.

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