Part 7 of my personal journey series. Read Part 6 here.

I arrived in Singapore alone.

My wife stayed behind in Vietnam while I got settled — found a place to live, understood the city, worked out what life here actually looked like before asking her to come. It was a familiar feeling, that particular kind of aloneness at the beginning of something new. I had felt it before: arriving in Tây Nguyên as a child, arriving in Ho Chi Minh City as a student. Each time, the city was indifferent, the work was real, and you either made something of it or you didn’t.

Singapore was different in scale and texture from anything I’d known, but the essential task was the same. After a few months, my wife arrived, and what had been a solo effort became a shared one. That changed things in ways I hadn’t anticipated — having someone to come home to, to talk through the strangeness of a new country with, to build alongside.

Refinitiv — Growing Into Finance and AI

I joined Refinitiv (then part of the London Stock Exchange Group) as a Senior NLP Data Scientist, working with Salman on AI and natural language processing applied to financial data. It was the most technically demanding environment I’d been in — the problems were hard, the data was vast, and the standards were high.

It was also my first deep exposure to finance as a domain. Not just fintech — the plumbing of financial technology — but the actual substance of financial markets: how information moves, how it’s processed, how it translates into signals that traders and analysts act on. I found it genuinely fascinating. Finance, properly understood, is an information problem. And information problems are what I had been trained to solve.

Over nearly three years at Refinitiv I built production NLP systems, led a regional data science team, and developed a much clearer understanding of how AI actually gets deployed at scale in a regulated, high-stakes industry. The gap between a model that works in a notebook and a model that runs reliably in production, on live financial data, with real consequences if it fails — that gap is where most of the real work lives.

A Short Detour — DHL

I moved briefly to DHL Express as a Senior System Analyst and Machine Learning Engineer. The role was different — logistics rather than finance, a larger corporate environment — and I learned from it. In nine months I delivered machine learning projects into production and built frameworks that the wider team adopted.

But finance had gotten into my thinking. The domain, the rigour, the combination of technology and consequential decisions — I wanted to go back.

Standard Chartered Bank

The opportunity came through Standard Chartered Bank. The role was as a Lead Developer on the financial market terminal platform — building systems that trading desks across the globe depended on, computing risk metrics in real time, working at the intersection of finance and engineering at a level of depth I hadn’t reached before.

The salary was better. In Singapore, where healthcare costs are real and housing is expensive, that mattered.

I took the role and haven’t looked back.

2020 — My Daughter, and COVID

My first child, a daughter, was born in 2020.

The timing was what it was. COVID had arrived, and Singapore — like everywhere — was under enormous pressure. My wife was pregnant, and the decision was made for her to return to Vietnam for the birth, where her parents could support her. It was the right call, practically speaking. It was also brutal.

I stayed in Singapore. They were in Vietnam. For months, what should have been the most connected time of my life — the arrival of our first child — was mediated through a phone screen. I watched my daughter grow in videos and photographs. I was working, alone in an apartment, in a city in lockdown, separated from my family by closed borders.

That period tested me in ways I hadn’t expected.

Panic Attacks, and What Came After

During the worst of that isolation, I started experiencing panic attacks.

If you haven’t had one, it is difficult to describe. The physiological reality of it — the racing heart, the inability to breathe properly, the overwhelming sense that something is catastrophically wrong — is completely convincing in the moment. The rational mind knows it is an anxiety response. The body does not care.

I didn’t want to talk about it. I wasn’t sure I fully understood what was happening. I dealt with it the way I had dealt with most difficult things in my life: I started reading.

Self-help books — not as a genre I had ever taken seriously, but as an urgent practical need. Books on anxiety, on the nervous system, on cognitive patterns that produce suffering. Books on stoicism, on acceptance, on the relationship between thought and feeling. I read widely and seriously, treating it the way I’d treated every other problem I’d cared about: find the best sources, extract the principles, apply them.

It worked. Not overnight. But gradually, the panic became manageable, then infrequent, then something I understood well enough to not be afraid of. The process of going through that — of confronting something genuinely frightening about my own mind and coming out the other side with better tools — made me more resilient than I had been before.

The cliché is that difficult experiences make you stronger. In this case, it was simply true.

Reunion

Eventually the borders opened. My wife came back. My daughter — who had grown from a newborn into a toddler without me there in person — came with her.

The reunion was one of the better moments of my life.

Growing at the Bank

Back with my family, settled in Singapore, I focused on the work. At Standard Chartered the opportunities were real — the platform was complex, the technical problems were interesting, and the organisation was large enough that doing good work was noticed.

People started to rely on me. Not just for execution, but for judgment — for architecture decisions, for mentoring junior developers, for leading the integration of machine learning into the trading platform. The promotion came. Then more responsibility. Then more trust.

I had spent years learning from people better than me. Now I was, in some rooms, the person others were learning from. That transition — from the one catching up to the one setting the pace — happened gradually, and then suddenly, and it still occasionally surprises me.

Eight Years In — Two Kids, a Son, and PR

In the years since, life in Singapore has deepened and settled. My son was born — a second child, a different kind of joy, the particular chaos and fullness of a home with two small people in it.

And finally, after eight years: Permanent Residency.

PR is not just administrative. For someone who arrived here alone, with a suitcase and a job offer and a tentative sense that this city might be the place to build something — PR is a kind of answer. It says: you belong here, formally, with the rights and the stability that come with that.

I am, by any reasonable measure, far from the village in Ha Tinh where this story started. Two children who are growing up in one of Asia’s most open and connected cities. A career that has taken me from coffee plantations to financial market terminals. A country I have chosen as my own.

I think about the boy who left Tây Nguyên for a city he’d never seen, not knowing if he was good enough. I think about my parents, and what they sacrificed so I could have options they never did.

I think I’ve tried to deserve it.

The journey continues. This is not the end of the story — just where I am in it.

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