Part 4 of my personal journey series. Read Part 3 here.

Returning to my parents for high school should have felt like coming home. In some ways it did. After years of growing up in someone else’s household, there was something profoundly settling about being with my own family again — my mother’s cooking, the particular ease of being somewhere you fully belong.

But the reunion was also strange, in the way that long separations always are. Years had passed. I had changed. The relationship we might have had — built on daily proximity, on shared small moments — had to be rebuilt from a distance. We loved each other in the way that family does, but we were also, in some ways, catching up.

A Different Kind of Leaving

High school for me meant another separation — not back to the highlands, but to a town with a better school, away from home again. In Vietnam, families who want the best educational opportunities for their children often have to send them elsewhere. The best schools are concentrated in towns and cities. If you live in a rural area and you are serious about your future, you go where the school is.

So I went. Different boarding arrangements, different circumstances from the highlands, but the essential condition was the same: studying far from the people I loved, making my own way in unfamiliar surroundings.

I had grown up enough that this was easier than it had been. Independence, by then, was not a condition imposed on me — it was simply how I operated. I knew how to manage a household, how to budget time, how to motivate myself without external pressure. Those years in Tây Nguyên had built something in me that I didn’t fully appreciate until I needed it.

The Exam That Changed Everything

In Vietnam, the university entrance examination — the thi đại học — is one of the most consequential moments in a young person’s life. It is the filter through which futures are sorted. Study well enough and you earn a place in a university in a major city. Fall short and the options narrow considerably.

I studied for those exams the way you study for something that matters beyond just grades. I had a clear picture, by then, of what I wanted: to study computer science, in Ho Chi Minh City, at one of the country’s best technical universities. It was specific and ambitious for someone from my background. That specificity helped.

The result came back. I had made it.

What My Parents Had Given Me

In the period before I left for university, I thought more consciously than I had before about what my parents had done — the choice to send me to my uncle’s, the years of distance, the quiet sacrifice of presence for opportunity.

They had not given me money, or connections, or a comfortable start. What they had given me was harder to measure and more durable: the understanding that difficulty is not a reason to stop, that the path that requires more of you often leads somewhere better, and that education is the one investment that no one can take away from you.

My father said something before I left for Ho Chi Minh City that I still think about. He said: “We couldn’t give you much. So make use of what we gave you.”

I took that seriously.

Next: Ho Chi Minh City — university, Computer Science, and the beginning of a career.

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