At first, I signed up to stay in the dormitory. Few different universities which are under the same government system share the same areas. Male and female buildings are separated but within the same enclosed structure. Each building may be 100-200 m distance from each other. Food court, community services are usually holding on the ground floor. These areas aren’t restricted.

So you can imagine, there were a lot of love stories and gossip stories circling in the campus and in the dorm. That year, it was the World Cup year, around 2, 3 am in the morning, even we were in our own dorm rooms upstairs, we can still hear the cheering sound of soccer fans through the walls. I never a big fan of soccer or any sports, so I rarely joined in. If anything, just for fun and curiosity.

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There were curfew and it was strict. If we came back after closing time, we can’t come in. For university students, this is not a big problem. Spending a night out, asking to share a room with classmates. Honestly, in my memories, those were more fun. Breaking rules and late-night snacks, stories sharing with unusual roommates, those are the cherry on top.

My aims were to go overseas, so I wasn’t staying in the dorm for long. I rented a room outside, near campus still, so that I can come back late, convenient to get to classes and have the English courses as excuse to stay out late.

I joined a group of friends included few from the same department, some from the neighbor departments. The group had a great diversity, boys, girls, different geographical areas, backgrounds and interests. It were fun with the ‘new’ narratives, but I till didn’t know how to get in. I just kept arriving.

New environment. New circle. New hope of maybe this time I can become a different version of myself. I could read the room. I could read the people in it. But I still couldn’t get in. The distance was already there, waiting.

#TimeCharm is a memoir series drawn from a Vietnamese childhood shaped by post-war life and the double lives it required.

Dr Ha Nguyen is a materials scientist and systems analyst writing on geopolitics, policy, and the long aftermath of power. She publishes ImpactLine (cross-scale systems analysis), ShardSediment (historical accountability), and TimeCharm (memoir drawn from a Vietnamese childhood shaped by post-war life).

After a few good years running our family’s food stall, the construction workers who filled our tables finished their jobs and moved on. Business slowed to a trickle. Around that time, a new wave swept through our countryside, chicken farms.

It was a clever model for those with little to start with: companies provided chicks, feed, equipment, even loans. Farmers raised the chickens and handed them back. Profits came after deductions, small, but steady. A lot of our neighbours joined in, it was like a wave, making headlines and we could see small elevated structures everywhere in the countryside. So my mother joined too.

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For the first year or two, she followed the system. When there are a lot of supplies without sufficient demand, the values go down. The company started to reward less and less money to the farmers, eventhough the chicken cost in the market just keep increasing. At that point, she already had few years experiences under her sleeves.

And one day, she quit. She ran those farms herself, sourcing chicks, food, vet, and outlets, all by herself, with some family help. By the time I started secondary school, she had found her rhythm.

My mother wasn’t someone you could measure by her body or her past. She went through the war with one and a half legs and only a fourth-grade education. But she had an extraordinary mind for timing, precision, and nerve. While others stayed tied to contracts, she grew her farms to hold sixty or seventy thousand chickens at once. In a few short years, the woman who once juggled pots and pans at a food stall became one of the largest independent farmers in our province.

People called her “Bà Ba Gà”, the Chicken Lady.

By that time, no one would call us poor anymore. What she truly built though wasn’t just wealth, it was self-worth forged from defiance, endurance, and quiet logic. For the little girl me, what I learnt was that strength doesn’t always roar. Sometimes it limps, learns, and builds its own way out of limits.

#TimeCharm is a memoir series drawn from a Vietnamese childhood shaped by post-war life and the double lives it required.

Dr Ha Nguyen is a materials scientist and systems analyst writing on geopolitics, policy, and the long aftermath of power. She publishes ImpactLine (cross-scale systems analysis), ShardSediment (historical accountability), and TimeCharm (memoir drawn from a Vietnamese childhood shaped by post-war life).

I joined a university that was supposed to open doors for overseas exchange. I kept my original field, biotechnology. The idea of being a lab person, white coat, safety glasses, doing something that mattered, never quite left me.

First year subjects were light. English, Physics, Philosophy, foundation Biology, Chemistry, Mathematics. The first three were shared with other departments, which is usually where you made friends outside your own field. I did.

University was different from everything before it. I did not have to find an excuse to not go home. I simply didn’t have to go. That freedom, the kind I had been constructing in my head for years, was suddenly just the ordinary shape of a day. I did well enough in my studies. But it was the student life that made that period feel like youth. Meals out, new voices, nights that didn’t require explanation.

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There was a regular hot pot tent near campus, a local karaoke shop we returned to after almost every class. Nothing remarkable about either of them. But even years later, when I had the chance to come back to Vietnam, I would find myself looking for the tent. Looking for that specific flavour of a student evening.

It was never there. I think the flavour was never what I was looking for. The memories were.

Underneath all of it, I believed I was starting over. No one here knew about the fake confidence or the lame excuses. The geographical distance from home gave me something that felt like a new version of myself or I deluded myself into believing so.

The pattern I carried never really left. It followed me everywhere

.

I didn’t understand why I had to be there. There were just me and my mom, supposedly went it to catch my dad and her, then my dad left. Before leaving, he said sorry. I heard it, but I knew it wasn’t for me

.

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I spoke with her before. I had resented her for a long time. But when I saw her that night, all I saw was a single mother who using shortcuts to survive. I couldn’t bully her.

We spent a few hours with her and let her leave intact. Later, my mom blamed me. “We should have at least kept the motorbike,” she said.

Much later, neighbours knew about the incident and asked why my mom took me there. I wanted to ask the same.

On weekends, I returned home from the city and acted as the adult, calming my mom and questioning my dad. He disowned me several more times. I didn’t see any of this as significant.

Something cracked permanently for me.

The university exam centre was in Ho Chi Minh City, about 20 kilometres from home. Motorbike in morning traffic on an important day felt like too much risk, so I rented a small room nearby the night before.

My dad came early on exam morning with food. Rode me to the centre himself. I found out later he used that morning as a reason to go somewhere else. I was the excuse that got him out of the house.

At the time I only knew he showed up. And things had cooled off at home or at least felt like it.

After the exam I thought I’d done alright. Walking out I already knew where I’d slipped. A few small things here and there. My dad was upset. Started predicting how fail I would be. Accused how such a waste of resource I am.

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In the end, I didn’t do badly. But I missed the university I aimed for. And I never submitted for a second alternative, so options were limited.

I chose a university that advertised a bridging pathway to overseas study. Specifically Nottingham, in the UK. I didn’t name it to anyone then. But at that point I was already thinking about that pathway as a way to escape our household situation.

Meanwhile, my mother discovered my father was still in contact with the woman. I was tasked to confront him.

It was ugly.

He disowned me in front of relatives. I didn’t feel much. It wasn’t the first time. It wouldn’t be the last. He demanded divorce and a settlement of 3 billion VND, not half. Not the full amount, and more. Tiny compared to what my mother had.
I pressured her either agree to divorce or I would drop out. She refused.

Everyone around us said divorce was unnecessary. That divorcing is giving money away for free. I felt like I was the only unreasonable one, so I stayed quiet.

Part of the “Roots & Fruits | Childhood” series - reflections on how early environments shape who we become, often quietly. Roots: a generation who mistook fear for discipline, believing obedience built character. Fruits: a child who learned truth over comfort, resilience over recognition.

The National Competition System

Every year, there were national academic competitions, one for each subject. Schools ran their own selection first, picked the top 8–10 students, and trained them on weekends.

Year level didn’t matter. A Year 10 student could compete against Year 12. It sounds unfair until you understand the point. The school was identifying high-potential students early and pushing them before they were ready to be pushed.

For biology students, placing in the top three nationally meant direct entry into medical school. To understand why that mattered, you need to understand what we were all walking into.

After Grade 12, there were two separate exams: high school graduation and university entrance. The graduation exam covered your main subjects, Maths, Vietnamese, and English, plus three randomly selected subjects from the remaining pool. Nobody knew which three until it was decided. Those three could save you or sink you depending on what they were.

That year, the remaining three subjects for us was Physics, Chemistry and History. For me, English was the sinking one. I didn’t fail, but it was the lowest score in my book.

University entrance was a separate exam entirely, grouped by faculty. Medical school required Group B: Physics, Chemistry, Biology. To get into a public national medical university, you needed near-perfect scores across all three. The difficulty was calibrated to match national competition level.

The biology competition wasn’t just a school activity. It was a door and for some students, the only one that opened quietly, before the harder gates appeared.

The One-Week Competition Gamble

I registered for the school biology competition, Grade 11 or 12, I can’t remember which. Just putting my name down felt like something.

I lost interest almost immediately. The biggest part of the biology competition ran on memorisation, and I’d already worked out that I wouldn’t be able to hold knowledge efficiently without a logical pattern underneath. History, literature, geography had the same problem. I didn’t dislike the subjects. I disliked that they required me to store every fact individually, without anything to hang it on.

I stopped preparing, and I was going to withdraw. About a week before, a classmate mentioned how competitive the younger students were that year.

I don’t know why that landed the way it did. I had never thought of myself as competitive. Something changed, not toward the competition, but toward the idea that I might be displaced before I’d even decided whether I wanted to be there.

I studied for one week. Not everything, there wasn’t time. I went back through papers from previous years and mapped which topics kept appearing. I worked from pattern, not coverage. I stayed up until 4am the night before.

I made the school team for the local round, but didn’t make nationals. I wasn’t disappointed. I’d gone further than I’d planned to go, from a starting point of not going at all. That pattern would repeat itself more times than I knew then.

Not Actually Impressive

The high school chapters are nearly done. What comes after is university and then Australia. If childhood trained me to sense the state of systems around me, Australia is where I learned to name what I was sensing. But that’s next. For now, I’m still here, still that sixteen year old girl.

If someone didn’t know me, they would see an active, smart, diverse high school girl. She played for the school basketball team and joined the biology team. Someone expected to have both the brain and the look. That sounded impressive, probably.

But I wasn’t great at biology. The lab work I could do including the cutting open of things, the careful looking came naturally. The theory didn’t stick the way it should have. I was too busy watching and sensing everything else.

And basketball. I wasn’t the cool kind of basketball player. Not the one who moved like they owned the court. I was the kind who showed up, who stayed after, whose attention was always on the room rather than the game.

Both of these things were true at the same time: I was genuinely there, and I was not what I appeared to be. I was just an unpopular girl trying to be seen. The teams were a place to belong.

Martial Arts & Losing Properly

By grade 11, I had spent four to five years doing martial arts. Apart from pretending to be tough, I was actually tough. I entered a provincial free-style fighting competition. Opponents were grouped by weight, not skill level. I was chosen because there weren’t many girls who stayed that long in training.

My opponent was bigger and more experienced. Of course I lost. With a few bruises, luckily not on my face. No one from the family showed up.

My coach teased me afterward, saying he expected more bruises. I didn’t know if that was praise or criticism. I felt good, just by participating in something I knew I would lose from the beginning.

There were real advantages from martial arts. It saved me once from a bus collision. The only thing damaged was my bicycle, so I don’t complain about the training. The bus didn’t leave a mark. The training did. I think about that sometimes, the things that hurt you less than they should have, because of what you quietly built.

Where to Stand

I had an ankle injury one year and missed training for weeks. My coach came to check on me in front of the school. I didn’t say anything about it at the time, but I held onto it.

I was always in the main team for competitions. That sounds like someone naturally good at sport. I wasn’t. I barely passed the standard running exams. I was sunburned, slightly chubby, and short. My husband still looks surprised when I mention I played for the school team.

I wasn’t picked for my fitness. I was picked because I knew where to stand and where to run to create space for someone else. I read the game. I worked for it.

We never won the championship. Second place in our final year was the closest we got. I still think about those game days, not with sadness exactly, but with the particular feeling of something that mattered and then simply ended.

A Certificate of Worth

Some of my classmates wrote in my farewell diary that I was tough, and rough. I think I covered myself pretty well. But a few wrote that I was pretentious. And that I seemed fake.

It hurt. I reached for my defences immediately, they don’t know me well enough. But honestly, they were probably the ones who saw me most clearly. Both things were probably true. I was performing strength I genuinely had. The performance was real, and so was the insecurity underneath it. That’s not contradiction. That’s just being sixteen.

Final year was intense everywhere. I developed a strong interest in Chemistry over Biology that year. Maybe it was something about the rules, the balancing, that appealed to me. I chose Group B for university, Mathematics, Chemistry and Biology. The university I wanted had a biotechnology program. My crush, one year ahead, had already gone there.

We passed farewell diaries around. Notebooks circulated through the class, each person leaving a message. A lasting record of how we saw each other, or how we wanted to be seen. I probably still have the diary somewhere at home.

High school final year looked the same everywhere. The rush, the worry, the atmosphere that followed you into every corner. Some knew exactly where they wanted to go. Others were still searching. For our generation, university wasn’t really about a dream. It was the ticket into adulthood, into independence, into something that felt like a future. A certificate of worth.

Looking back now, I think it was something smaller than even that, for us, and for our parents. Not a ticket to the future. Just proof that we had somewhere to go. I showed up for all of it. Not because I was impressive. Because I didn’t know yet that showing up was the thing.

#TimeCharm

Around graduation time, we discovered another of my dad’s affairs. The woman lived near one of our chicken farms, a single mom with a small grocery store. Before anything came out, I went there to get snacks all the time when I visited the farm. I sensed something wasn’t right.

I pressured the workers until they confirmed it. My mom questioned my dad. He weakly denied it and left home, but we knew he was lying.

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By that point, everything clicked. A lot of sudden reasons to go to the farm late at night. She was a single mom, and in a short period of time she got a new motorbike, upgraded her petrol station equipment, expanded the grocery store. I felt bitter. I don’t remember if I slept that night, because I have no memory of it. I just know when the morning arrived, I was exhausted.

We later found out she was also involved with other men. My dad was upset. The house became heavy and dark. Have you ever felt that, the number of lights, the brightness, the television, everything the same, but everything just seem darker?

Not long after, one farm caught fire. Lucky that it was between chicken cycles, so there was no loss. I came to see it once. The elevated structure was still there, just everything covered in black. That farm was no longer used after that, for many different reasons. No one confirmed anything, but we suspected it was connected.

It was also my final year of high school. Mock classes, monthly exams, graduation exam, university entrance. I juggled all of it alongside the heaviness at home that I had no way to fix. If I could, I found excuses to stay in town instead of going home. I poured myself into study, into activities, into anything that kept the hours full. I hated after-school time. I knew what I would have to face when I got home.

#TimeCharm

TimeCharm is a memoir series drawn from a Vietnamese childhood shaped by post-war life and the double lives it required

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TimeCharm is a memoir series drawn from a Vietnamese childhood shaped by post-war life and the double lives it required. This is entry 32. Earlier entries are on Medium and my Linkedin I’m bringing the series here from this point forward.

Some of my classmates wrote in my farewell diary that I was tough, and rough. I think I covered myself pretty well.

But a few wrote that I was pretentious. And that I seemed fake.

It hurt. I reached for my defences immediately, ‘they don’t know me well enough’. But honestly, they were probably the ones who saw me most clearly.

Final year was intense everywhere. I developed a strong interest in Chemistry over Biology that year. May be it was something about the rules, the balancing, appealed to me. I chose Group B for University, Mathematic, Chemistry and Biology. The university I wanted had a biotechnology program. My crush, one year ahead, had already gone there.

We passed farewell diaries around. It was notebooks circulated through the class, each person leaving a message. A lasting record of how we saw each other, or how we wanted to be seen. It was trendy, I probably still have the diary somewhere at home.

High school final year looked the same everywhere. The rush, the worry, the atmosphere that followed you in every corner. Some knew exactly where they wanted to go. Others were still searching.

For our generation, university wasn’t really about a dream. It was the ticket into adulthood, into independence, into something that felt like a future. A certificate of worth.

Looking back now, I think it was something smaller than even that, for us, and for our parents. Not a ticket to the future. Just proof that we had somewhere to go.

#TimeCharm