this post was submitted on 06 Jul 2023
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It's... not an option. I live in a slum in Vietnam. This is actually quite nice in many ways, it is overall quiet and safe! However, flooding, weird plumbing, humidity, and general low-level chaos make it impossible to keep particularly clean.
It would be like being afraid of air.
Like, I used to be afraid of spiders. Then I immigrated here and spiders were just common enough that after a period of discomfort I just had to give up and accept them.
Thanks for sharing! How come you moved to Vietnam? Where were you living before?
Canada. I finished my MSc. at the exact moment a government restructure eliminated essentially all the jobs in my field.
So there was a big temptation to just sell all my worldly possessions, move to a growth market, start a company, and just work really hard. I checked out China, but ended up choosing Vietnam because it was in an earlier stage of development, the language used Latin characters (so I didn't become functionally illiterate), and there was a clearer framework for properly sorting out my immigration paperwork.
A lot of other foreigners I knew early on laughed at me for sorting out that last item. About four fifths of them have been booted out, the rest died. I am left.
I'm not great at running a business, I made many mistakes. Heck, I lost every dime to my name at the worst of it (and nearly died of cholera besides). It worked out in the end, I'm happily married, have achieved reasonable cultural integration, I'll own a home and probably retire into volunteer work in my mid 40s. However I'd classify the journey as acutely distressing. Some of the things I've experienced haunt me, but I think I can live with that.
It's true, although some of those things make me rather sad. Climate change is one -- I'm moving to a coastal city in a few years and as I'm designing a home, I'm realizing that everyone that didn't have the money to build with climate change in mind is going to live a hard life. Just south in Quảng Nam it's already getting quite bad.
In the slum where I live now (in HCMC), life is easy and most people do not work full time (I think 3-4 people on my street have what you would recognize as a 'job'). However, they will be priced out of their homes within a generation, there are no words I can say to help them, and the cause is company owners like me seizing the lion's share of the country's growth (although admittedly I work a lot more than they do).
At least for the moment they lead rich and full lives with family and friends, a brief moment in the sun -- but they've sold their children's future for the present without realizing it.