Three Generations of Vietnamese LifeA Family Story from the Countryside

Written by Dzung’s mother. Dzung is the founder of Mekong ZigZag. He asked her to write this down so that guests who come to Ben Tre might understand something about where Vietnamese people come from — and why they are the way they are.

I. My Parents’ Generation — Born around 1924

My parents married when my father was 7 years old and my mother was 9. Almost no one in the village knew how to read. My father attended school for two or three years before dropping out. My mother never went to school at all, but taught herself to read printed text.

They farmed rice and wove cloth. To buy thread, my father would walk over 100 kilometres to Thanh Hoa on foot, sleeping at the homes of strangers along the road.

When the cooperative system began, it was the hungriest period of all. People worked hard but received only 200 grams of rice per working day. At first, everyone was hopeful — they believed in a better tomorrow, and liked the idea of eating together and sharing according to need. In the end, the cooperatives collapsed.

Almost every house was built from thatch and mud walls. The village paths turned to mud in the rain. Only our lane, unusually, was paved with brick.

II. My Generation

Childhood to the end of high school (1956–1968)

We were used to being poor. We didn’t feel it as suffering — it was simply life.

Food

The family was large and everything was divided. Usually we ate one meal of rice per day, sometimes two bowls of porridge, or whatever roots and grains were available. Some days we ate sugarcane instead of rice — four joints per person per meal. Seeing a big bowl filled with rice or porridge was a moment of real happiness.

Every year we counted down to the fifth day of the fifth lunar month and the three days of Tết — the only times we could eat until full. We looked forward to those days with deep longing, and felt a sharp sadness when they passed.

We ate whatever had a sweet, sour, bitter, or astringent taste — any plant stem or wild fruit we could find.

Clothing

Each person owned two shirts and two pairs of trousers all year round. In winter we layered them on top of each other for warmth. Because there was nothing to change into, clothes were rarely washed and nearly everyone had lice. No one had gloves, socks, or scarves. We all went barefoot, and felt the cold deeply.

Sleep

In summer, five people shared a bamboo bed 1.8 metres wide and 1.6 metres long — one person had to sleep at the foot end, on the floor below the others. There were no mosquito nets, so we burned chinaberry leaves to drive away mosquitoes. Everyone was bitten throughout the night.

In winter we covered ourselves with a single thin sheet, or later a thin cotton blanket whose stuffing had bunched into lumps. Sleeping on a bed of spread straw on the floor felt like luxury.

Cultural life

We almost never left the village. There was no media of any kind, and life was entirely cut off from the outside world. When a loudspeaker was installed in the village for the first time, people walked to the communal yard in the evenings just to listen — the excitement was extraordinary. Before that, someone had assembled a crystal radio receiver. The sound was faint and difficult to hear, but it felt like magic.

Village roads were dirt. The national highway was unpaved gravel, full of potholes.

Work

Everyone thought only of how to find enough to eat. Having enough food and warm clothes felt impossibly far away.

From early childhood I was responsible for gathering fuel: rice straw stumps, fallen leaves, grass cut from hills more than 10 kilometres away, carried home on a shoulder pole.

From the age of ten, we did day labour to earn money: carrying bricks, digging peanuts, stripping sugarcane leaves, gleaning leftover rice from harvested fields, digging for roots. The work was exhausting, and we did it hungry — but we didn’t mind.

School

Most children in the village left school after second or fourth grade. Most adults were illiterate. In our entire neighbourhood, only one boy and I completed secondary school, because I was completely devoted to learning. My parents discouraged it — especially for girls.

Asking for money to buy paper and a pen felt frightening.

Once during a school work period, I dropped my fountain pen into a pond. The whole class tried to find it — no one could. I couldn’t bear to go home. I just stood there crying until the teacher had to walk me back.

The pens had iron nibs. When a nib broke, I filed it down myself to keep writing.

We had almost no books. I dreamed many times of owning a book of my own.

There was no time to study at home. I did most of my learning on the road — it was a long walk, and I memorised lessons or worked through problems as I walked.

Once I burned the rice while absorbed in a maths problem. I was terrified.

For secondary school I walked 12 kilometres to school on an empty stomach, and still arrived eager. Once we left so early that we fell asleep on the road waiting for dawn — we had no clock and didn’t know what time it was. Many days I ate only once. I didn’t feel it was hardship.

During the war, we walked to school with our straw helmets — helmets woven from rice straw to protect against bomb shrapnel. We kept going.

Carrying straw helmets along the long road to school — that is the miracle of our people.

Looking back on those school years, I never once felt I was suffering. I only remember joy.

University (1968–1972)

The state covered everything.

There were periods when we ate two meals a day, each one a bread roll. Other times we had rice mixed with maize or noodles. I didn’t mind — there was occasionally a little meat or fish, which was already better than home.

Two people shared one narrow single bed. In summer we used paper fans. The dormitory was crowded and water was always scarce.

Travelling to Hanoi meant taking the train. Once I missed a train and waited three days and nights at Hang Co station. On another journey, I stood for over 100 kilometres in the gap between two carriages, with only enough room to put down one foot. One time I travelled in a coal wagon. When we arrived, no one recognised anyone — we were all black from head to foot. Even so, I look back on it with warmth.

Hanoi’s streets were narrow. Almost everyone travelled by bicycle or on foot. Motorbikes were rare, cars very few. Petrol was sold in cans. Those with a little money rode the tram. We walked.

Clothing was rationed with coupons — four metres of fabric per person per year. As a student, I still wore patched clothes to lectures.

I remember that time as one of the happiest of my life.

Teaching (1972–2005)

Food

The rationing system was still in place. We received rice coupons, but the rice was mixed with cassava, sweet potato, or wheat.

We often went hungry ourselves, saving the rice ration for our young children. I survived mostly on roots and wheat grains. Many times I became ill from eating green-skinned potatoes — they contain toxins — but I accepted it as a normal part of life and felt no self-pity.

Clothing and daily life

I wore patched trousers to teach class. I was cold. A single ordinary outfit, if bought outside the ration system, cost half a month’s salary.

A bicycle required a full year of savings. A washing basin or cooking pot cost half a month’s wages.

Because everything was so difficult, I practised extreme economy. In over thirty years of teaching, I bought only two school bags. I sometimes wore broken sandals to work. When travelling, even if hungry and thirsty, I never bought food or drink along the road. At home, we almost never ate shrimp, meat, or fish.

Despite all of this, I was diligent, warm, and careful in my teaching. In the early years, I taught private tutoring sessions and never charged a fee.

Outside of teaching, I did whatever work was available to earn money: milling rice (buying paddy, milling and polishing it into white rice to sell), breaking new ground to grow crops, raising animals, farming, trading small goods.

Retirement — and now

This has been the era of opening up, of great change, of the country moving forward.

With a pension and a little savings, I can now live and work as I choose. I read. I travel. I look at the world.

III. The Generation of Children and Grandchildren

My children grew up with shortages — in food, clothes, and schooling. But as they grew older, things slowly became more complete. They had the right to choose their own work and their own paths.

As for my grandchildren — their lives, in my mind, are like a dream. More than I ever imagined possible.

Written by Dzung's mother, who lives in Northern Vietnam and has never visited the Mekong Delta where Mekong ZigZag operates. Dzung is the one who moved south and built something here. But the story of how people lived — the hunger, the resilience, the quiet joy in difficult circumstances — that story belongs to this whole generation of Vietnamese people, North and South alike.

If you came to Ben Tre on a Mekong ZigZag tour, you met people whose families lived through some version of this. The woman cooking your lunch, the man steering the boat, the guide riding ahead on a scooter — their parents and grandparents walked barefoot on dirt roads, counted the days until Tết, and found ways to keep going.

That is still living memory here. Not distant history.