Society - Saigoneer

Đuông Dừa, the Mekong Delta's Unique Squishy Snack and Enemy of Coconut Trees

2025-03-12T11:00:00+07:00

Towards the deep end of our home, several coconut trees’ fronds started browning and falling off, straight from the bud. For the last few weeks, tiny holes have gradually appeared on the coconut trunk and shoot, from a few to numerous, giving off an unpleasant funk of rotten sap. My dad says that these trees are infested with đuông, and we must chop them all down lest we lose the entire grove.

The toppled trees all have nearly vacuous trunks, housing a ghastly sight reminiscent of horror movies: myriads of nests crawling with white worms, each inching in and out of holes like those of aged cheese. According to my dad, the worms might look fat and full, but they won’t be satiated until they destroy the interior of the shoot.

Đuông dừa’s life cycle is intimately linked to coconut. Photo via Tinh Tế.

Đuông dừa (Rhynchophorus ferrugineus) is not a real worm, but the juvenile form of the red palm weevil — an insect originating from tropical Asia that has spread across the globe. It grows into a winged and snouted beetle; males have shorter snouts, and clumps of tiny hair in a yellow or ochre at the top of their snouts.

Đuông dừa is a prolific procreator and is particularly fond of palm trees like coconut, date, and oil palm, making it a formidable enemy of nations where these species are cash crops. Adult females use their snouts to pierce inside palm trunks at existing scars and scratches, laying from hundreds to thousands of eggs. These rice grain-sized eggs eventually hatch into tiny larvae and embark on an unrelenting quest to feast with reckless abandon, wiping out the tree flesh and coconut heart (củ hũ dừa). They drain off nutrients, slow the tree’s growth to a crawl, so the fronds slowly wither and drop off. If they’re left untouched, tree death is inevitable.

The life cycle of coconut worms.

Củ hũ dừa, the spongy and subtly sweet core inside coconut trees, is a beloved snack of both humans and đuông. So larvae that grow up on coconut are considered richer and tastier than those parasitizing other palms. According to folk legends, đuông dừa used to be the choice delicacy that Bến Tre residents sent as a royal offering for Emperor Minh Mạng. Delighted by the rare and quixotic treat, the king ordered his carvers to add the worms onto the Cửu Đỉnh (The Nine Dynastic Urns) in Thế Miếu Shrine in the Imperial City, Huế.

A royal depiction of đuông dừa on bronzeware. Image via the Hue Monuments Conservation Centre.

In the art of đuông dừa cuisine, the most famous application is perhaps fish sauce-marinated đuông dừa. The image is rather… haunting: a handful of live worms wiggle inside a bowl of sweet-and-sour nước mắm. Diners pick whole worms and chew the entire thing in one go as it’s believed this way retains the cleanest worm taste.

A more palatable preparation is grilled đuông dừa, where the lightly crispy exterior makes for an easier, less rich mouthfeel. Live worms are clamped between bamboo sticks and gently roasted on charcoal until a uniform golden hue is achieved. My personal favorite is đuông porridge with coconut milk, a distinctly Mekong combination. Apart from those, there are also pan-fried đuông, đuông salad, or deep-fried đuông, etc.

In nhậu feasts in the Southwest Region, đuông liquor is a rare treat, especially rice wine steeped with đuông. It’s often said that đuông is best enjoyed slowly because chewing slowly allows one to fully take in the richness of the worm. Chew and have a sense of the movement — a thrilling, nerve-wracking, ultimately exhilarating feeling.

Đuông dừa is great fodder for southern cooks to exercise their creativity.

Elsewhere in the world, especially among our Southeast Asian neighbors, đuông dừa is equally famous. Indonesians call them “Sago worms” and they are particularly famous on Bali Island, where locals often deep-fry them or use them in stews. Meanwhile, in Thailand, these worms are reared on an industrial scale to cater to both local and tourism demand. Scientists are looking into turning them into nutrition-rich rations for astronauts, as they contain high concentrations of fat and protein while sustaining good growth rates in air-tight conditions.

Canned coconut worms in Thailand. Photo via Thailand Unique.

Culinary celebration is only wholesome when we can ensure that the balances of nature are respected, and a dish, no matter how popular, can’t be a delicacy if it threatens the livelihood of the people who create it.

Before, đuông dừa was an anomaly that comes every once in a while, so its notoriety was blown out of proportion. But the boost in demand has compelled many to put aside precautions to grow worms for profits. The result is devastating: adult beetles escape into the environment, thrive, and obliterate coconut trees. The entire harvest season is destroyed, something that even the revenue from selling worms can’t compensate for.

Culinary celebration is only wholesome when we can ensure that the balances of nature are respected, and a dish, no matter how popular, can’t be a delicacy if it threatens the livelihood of the people who create it.

Today, several chemicals are available out there, helping farmers ward off đuông. Authorities in Bến Tre also prohibited growing đuông dừa. According to a decree issued in 2022, breeding, distributing, and trading đuông dừa can result in fines of VND3–12 million. Alas, this ban is only in effect in Bến Tre, the locality with the largest scale of commercial coconut cultivation; the rest of Vietnam hasn’t followed suit. Naturally, đuông breeders just move their operations elsewhere and even expand their business thanks to entrepreneurial schemes that encourage đuông rearing due to its lucrative financial potential.

Đuông rearing in the Red River Delta. Image via Sức Khỏe & Đời Sống.

Growing đuông is not too complicated, only calling for simple tools like plastic buckets. They’re happy with a mixture of coconut husk, rice bran, banana and cornmeal as their feed. Within one month, đuông will eat their way through the “kibble” and be ship-shape. After the worms have drained the husks of nutrients, they could be recycled as organic fertilizer for other crops. Therefore, some people believe that rearing đuông can be a beneficial process as it’s more cyclical, can be tightly controlled and is less environmentally taxing than other forms of animal husbandry.

Still, one needs to question whether the financial gains are enough to cover for the inherent risks. Without proper monitoring and smooth collaboration between localities, đuông dừa can easily take a joyride in the environment, which will be devastating not only for coconut groves but also palm groves and wild palms, posing a major threat to the delicate balance of our ecosystem.

The first time I ever had đuông was after my grandfather fell a coconut tree in his yard. He plucked off the worms that crawled out of the trunk and grilled them with the fire from the dried-up coconut fronds. I still remember that fear when I tasted the roast worms, and the surprise delight I felt after.

“It’s really tasty, but it’s also super harmful,” he told me. My friends from outside also ask me often about the unique taste of đuông, but I personally hope that it will eventually cease to exist, so that the farmers from my hometown will never have worry again when they see a lush, green coconut tree one day wither in a hollowed-out fashion, its dead trunk pierces the sky.

Chạm Vào Xanh, the Social Enterprise Normalizing Joy for People With Disabilities

2025-03-03T10:00:00+07:00

Hồng’s parents took her out of school in Grade 5. They weren’t facing financial issues, her grades weren’t bad and she had no behavioral setbacks. It was just because she has cerebral palsy.

Hồng: Leaving the nest

Cerebral palsy — a physical disability that affects movement and posture — does not affect learning abilities. However, as is often the case for people with disabilities in Vietnam, Hồng’s parents believed she would be safer at home with them. But Hồng was not content with a quiet life at her home in Bắc Kạn Province. As she got older, she felt increasingly restless. More and more, she imagined the sights she might see, the people she might meet, and the things she might be able to achieve, if she could somehow break out on her own.

Hồng (left) with her partner (right). They met during a Chạm Vào Xanh trip to the countryside.

Hồng began researching opportunities for people with disabilities online. When she found the chance to work in Hanoi, selling small items on the street — cotton swabs, nail clippers, pens — she left the safety of her home behind and traveled to the city. Despite the long, grueling days spent walking the streets, Hồng found the experience thrilling. She was finally out on her own, earning her own money and meeting people outside her family, which was why she was so crushed when, in 2023, the organization supporting her ran into financial difficulties and had to let her go.

Hồng moved back to her hometown. Still, having had a brief taste of independent life, she was not going to let it go. Searching online, she found an organization called Chạm Vào Xanh, a social enterprise that supports people with disabilities, especially those with cerebral palsy. It just so happened that Chạm Vào Xanh was looking for someone with cerebral palsy to work in their shop, Maru Amigurumi. Shortly after Hồng applied for the position, she received a response from Chạm Vào Xanh co-founder, Hiếu Lưu.

Hiếu: Transcending barriers

Lưu Thị Hiếu detests clichés about the shortness of life. She believes that existence is rich and diverse, and that, if we live openly and honestly, we have plenty of time to see and experience the world — and change it. She has worked for Blue Dragon Children’s Foundation and the United Nations; she has lived in Việt Nam, Japan and Malaysia; she speaks three languages, has a master's degree, has traveled to multiple countries, and has amassed millions of views on TikTok.

Lưu Thị Hiếu (left) and her friend Nguyễn Thùy Chi (right), the cofounders of Chạm Vào Xanh.

Hiếu also has cerebral palsy, and is doing whatever she can to make the world a better place for others with the same condition. One way she is doing that is through Chạm Vào Xanh, a social enterprise that she co-founded with the goal of bridging the gap between people with disabilities and society. Something Hiếu has seen time and again, both in her own journey and in those of the people she supports at Chạm Vào Xanh, is that one seemingly trivial thing — a hobby, an experience or a relationship — can be the catalyst that a person with disabilities needs to break through societal barriers and thrive.

With that in mind, Chạm Vào Xanh approaches its mission by introducing people with disabilities to new experiences. They organize trips to the countryside, host art exhibitions, and help people to find jobs, internships and academic courses. And through this, many of the people they help find friends, lovers, joy and independence — they find that life can be just as rich for them as for anyone else.

A lifeline

Hiếu’s own story shows how complicated it can be to normalize joy and encourage independence for people living with disabilities, particularly those with cerebral palsy. While the initial brain injury that causes cerebral palsy remains unchanged throughout life, the physical side effects have a tendency to spread and multiply over time.

At an event to mark the official collaboration of Chạm Vào Xanh and Adults Living with Cerebral Palsy (ACPV) Bắc Giang.

A few years ago, Hiếu’s disability changed, forcing her to re-evaluate her role in the world and find new ways to continue enjoying life. When Hiếu began to suffer from back pains, she convinced herself that it was nothing — that she had just been sleeping strangely, or that it was a side effect of other temporary injuries she had suffered — but deep down she knew that there was something deeply wrong with her body.

When she could no longer ignore it, she visited a doctor who gave her the news she had been dreading. Her pain was the result of a spinal injury caused by walking in the wrong posture since childhood, and because there was no way to correct her posture, all she could do was live with the pain as it continued to migrate and intensify. The doctor then warned her that the injury would soon affect her arms, and he was right.

Art is an important way to enrich the life of anybody, but especially those living with disabilities.

Shortly after that visit to the doctor, Hiếu reached into her pocket but couldn’t feel the object she was grasping for. She thought her hand was numb because she’d slept on it awkwardly, but the numbness persisted for days, weeks, and months until it spread throughout her body. The decline of Hiếu’s physical abilities coincided with the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, compounding her sense of fear and isolation. But, in her darkest hour, she found a lifeline: photography.

“If it weren’t for my camera during the COVID-19 period, I don’t know how I would have gotten through it. I couldn’t meet anyone, couldn’t cook anymore, got tired from holding a book, and wasn’t skilled at writing or drawing, so photography accompanied me through the beginning of the secondary complications of my cerebral palsy, helping me get used to the pain, helplessness, and sadness. I’m very thankful for photography.”

A beacon of hope

Amid the pain and the sadness, photography gave Hiếu the strength to keep living and searching for the beauty in life and, finally, to set up an organization focused on giving similar lifelines to other people with disabilities. In October 2022, Hiếu and her friend, Nguyễn Thùy Chi — who also has cerebral palsy and is the head of an organization called Adults Living with Cerebral Palsy — set up Chạm Vào Xanh. Together, they are using all their personal and professional experience to act as a voice, a “beacon of hope” and a source of empowerment for people with disabilities.

Chạm Vào Xanh members try out a friendly match of boccia, a Paralympic precision ball sport, with Japanese volunteers.

Chạm Vào Xanh approaches their work from two main angles. On the one hand, they work to break down restrictive societal perceptions of people with disabilities. They do this by giving talks at school, companies and events, telling the stories of people with disabilities and educating people on how to remove barriers for them. On the flipside, by serving as a safe and nurturing space where individuals can find training and employment, experience the thrills of self-expression, and look for joy in life, Chạm Vào Xanh enables people with disabilities to break through societal barriers and become integral contributors to their communities.

Some of the main ways that Chạm Vào Xanh does this include art therapy sessions, networking events, vocational training, and employment opportunities in their shop, Maru Amigurumi. Located in Cầu Giấy District of Hà Nội, Maru Amigurumi is run by people with disabilities, selling crocheted dolls made by people with disabilities.

Maru Amigurumi is a store where one can purchase crochet, and other, arts.

New experiences lead to new experiences

One day, in 2023, Hiếu was looking for a new member of staff for Maru Amigurumi when she received an application from a woman named Hồng. While Hồng wasn’t the most compelling candidate on paper, she had enough experience to warrant a chance, so Hiếu quickly reached out to arrange an interview.

During her interview, Hồng’s passion eclipsed any doubts Hiếu may have held about her candidacy for the role. Hồng proved to be clever, eloquent and determined, promising to give her all to the opportunities at Chạm Vào Xanh while improving Maru Amigurumi’s sales and driving the store in new and exciting directions. She didn’t disappoint.

A cultural exchange event with participants from Japan, Cambodia, Nepal, Pakistan, and Mongolia discussing efforts to promote independent living amongst people with disabilities.

At first, Hồng had no place to stay, so she slept at the store after work. It wasn’t ideal, but she was out in the world again, earning her own money and living on her own terms. And, unlike the first time that she moved to Hà Nội, she now had a community of people supporting her. At Chạm Vào Xanh, she joined trips and social activities, made friends and learned new skills through training courses.

Then, early last year, she went on a date with a man that she met on a trip to the countryside with Chạm Vào Xanh. They soon became a couple and decided to move in together. Since neither had rented a place before, Chạm Vào Xanh helped them find an apartment, negotiate with their new landlord, and raise money for everything they’d need to begin their new life together.

Through it all, Hồng has stayed true to her promise, working hard and significantly improving Maru Amigurumi’s sales. Soon, Hồng not only had a job, a partner and an apartment, but her first-ever salary raise.

“Everything Is Beautiful”

Hiếu and Hồng are now close friends. From her interview onwards, Hồng has proven herself to be a valuable contributor to society, to her new friends, her family and to Chạm Vào Xanh. Her new dream is to expand Maru Amigurumi to her hometown, helping others with cerebral palsy to thrive just like she is, and just like Hiếu did before her.

As for Hiếu, she continues to dedicate her time and energy to improving the lives of people with disabilities, showing both them and society-at -arge that they have the power to be meaningful contributors to their communities, and are capable of enjoying rich, full lives.

The spreading numbness means Hiếu finds it more and more difficult to express herself through photography — such a lifeline during her darkest moments. “Sometimes I feel like there’s a disconnect between my hands and my heart,” shares Hiếu. But she knows that there is always something to keep fighting for. Witnessing the journeys of people like Hồng, going for New Year's Eve drinks with friends from all around the world, and plans to travel to Pakistan next year, remind her that it’s all worth it.

“To be honest, there’s still a sense of helplessness in me,” says Hiếu. “Sometimes I’m scared, and there are only two choices: stop everything or keep living. And then, there are moments when everything looks beautiful — everything is beautiful — and that’s when I want to keep living.”

Photos courtesy of Chạm Vào Xanh.

WWF Works to Preserve the Elements of the Mekong Delta through Sustainable Products

2025-02-24T05:13:00+07:00

Over the past few months, WWF has been running a multi-faceted campaign to spotlight the importance of sustainable ingredients from the Mekong Delta.

The collaboration kicked off last year with the Elements of the Mekong Delta networking dinner. Chef Trụ Lang and his team at Mùa Craft Saké worked with Nguyễn Thị Phương Uyên, head chef of Nam Mê Kitchen & Bar, to design a menu highlighting products from the WWF’s nature-based solutions (NbS) projects. Centered around floating rice, shrimps, crabs, lotus seeds, and freshwater prawns, the six-dish “Ăn Cơm” concept gave guests a taste of how Saigon foodies can support and benefit sustainable practices. By amplifying the visibility of the delta’s responsibly produced agriculture and aquaculture alongside the voices of farmers and communities embracing the projects, WWF hopes more consumers will consider the items for their homes and restaurants.

Elements of the Mekong Delta dinner.

One dinner alone isn’t enough to introduce these delicious, sustainably sourced ingredients to the many people who would appreciate their impact on both communities and the environment. That’s why WWF created Elements of the Mekong Delta, a four-part video series showcasing these products through the lens of culinary creativity. Each episode features a talented Saigon chef creating a dish with different NbS project ingredients, highlighting their unique flavors and versatility.

Filming day for Elements of the Mekong Delta video series.

In episode one, Chef Trụ Lang kicked things off with ốc bươu cơm tấm made with floating rice. Chef Anaïs Ca Dao van Manen followed up in episode two with tôm sú kakiage, pairing crispy black tiger prawns with delicate floating rice noodles. Episode three brought Chef Nghiêm Minh Đức’s refined cua Cà Mau consommé, and for the grand finale, Chef Peter Cường Franklin served up fried floating rice with dried cá chốt—a bold and flavorful tribute to Vietnam’s rich culinary heritage.

Each of the four dishes made for the Elements of the Mekong Delta series.

But Elements of the Mekong isn’t just about incredible dishes—it’s about the people and places behind them. While the chefs shared their love for these ingredients and the realities of sustainable cooking, we wanted to go further. Together with WWF, Saigoneer ventured into the heart of the Mekong Delta, traveling to Long An, Cà Mau, and Kiên Giang to meet the farmers themselves. We watched as they carefully harvested black apple snails, black tiger prawns, and mud crabs—ingredients that have been part of local traditions for generations. Seeing their deep connection to the land and the patience required for their work made every dish feel even more meaningful.

Farmers in the Mekong Delta invited Saigoneer into their home to learn about the NbS projects.

Now, these same ingredients are making their way into markets and kitchens across Saigon, ready for anyone to explore their flavors. Watch all four episodes of Elements of the Mekong and dive into the stories behind each dish here each dish here.

The Power of Sustainable Ingredients

Elements of the Mekong Delta’s mission to raise awareness for the availability of local, sustainably produced ingredients is of great importance. Compared to conventionally-produced fruits, vegetables, grains, meats, and seafood, they help protect ecosystems, promote biodiversity, and sustain the livelihoods of local farmers. By introducing fewer chemicals and pesticides into soil and waterways, allowing natural cycles to restore and replenish nutrients, and allowing native flora and fauna to thrive, sustainably produced products can ensure priceless nature continues while human communities can exist comfortably.

Farmers in Long An amongst the floating rice. Photo courtesy of WWF.

These efforts are particularly important in the Mekong Delta, which is facing numerous challenges that threaten the environment and jeopardize the livelihoods of those who depend on the region’s agricultural output. By improving the socio-economy and resilience of local communities through the bolstering of sustainable livelihoods, it becomes easier to protect and restore critical ecosystems, and vice versa.

Working with Nature to Restore the Mekong Delta

Restoring the Mekong Delta requires a multi-faceted approach, with NbS such as those featured in Elements of the Mekong emerging as one of the most promising strategies. WWF’s vision for addressing the region’s challenges spans the entire delta including the headwaters, central floodplains, and coastal regions. The strategically selected project sites are located near protected areas, national parks, and other ecologically significant landscapes to enhance biodiversity conservation and sustainable development.

Scaling up sustainable food production is at the heart of the WWF’s work and requires close collaboration with farmers, government agencies, and funding partners to promote food production systems that align with the delta’s natural flood cycles.

Ca Mau communities and farmers benefit from the NbS projects. Photos courtesy of WWF.

The projects include the CRxN Mekong Expansion – Vietnam Country project which is supported by WWF-Australia and DFAT to restore the floodplain in Láng Sen Wetland Reserve by transforming traditional to flood-based agricultural models that contribute to climate resilience.

U Minh Thượng National Park. Photo courtesy of WWF.

WWF is also working to preserve U Minh Thượng National Park, one of Vietnam’s last remaining peatlands by improving the lives of poor communities through the Conservation-Friendly Alternative Livelihoods project, supported by the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation (SDC). Meanwhile, in Cà Mau, a shrimp and rice rotation model is being deployed in mangrove canopies to ensure environmental and economic resilience.

What You Can Do

While WWF’s initiatives and similar efforts have made significant strides, restoring the Mekong Delta remains an ongoing challenge—one that requires continuous and collective support.

Photo courtesy of WWF.

By choosing sustainably sourced products, you play a vital role in empowering farmers to maintain eco-friendly practices, protect their livelihoods, and preserve this precious ecosystem for future generations.

Đàng Trong Cafe Marries Gò Công's Nhà 3 Gian Design With Modern Cafe

2025-02-19T12:00:00+07:00

Major metropolises like Saigon and Hanoi might boast the most concentrated distributions of coffee shops in Vietnam, but a new crop of fresh faces in other up-and-coming towns have emerged in the scene, offering sterling brews, spacious seats, and, in some cases, delightful interior design that blends modern cafe conventions with uniquely local flairs.

Designed by Saigon-based KSOUL Studio, Đàng Trong Cafe is a newcomer to the Vietnamese coffee scene, having opened its doors only in 2024, but the Gò Công cafe is already making a name for itself as a must-visit stop on the Mekong Delta trek. A town in Tiền Giang, Gò Công is just 60 kilometers from Hồ Chí Minh City and was once the capital of Gò Công Province under the French administration until 1975.

Like many other Mekong Delta townships such as Châu Đốc and Mỹ Tho, the urban landscape of Gò Công is characterized by spacious nhà ba gian architecture. Multi-generational households used to live on the same spacious lot in expansive three-compartment homesteads connected by two wings, surrounding a courtyard filled with trees and flowers.

Classical nhà ba gian decorative elements — a confluence of French and Chinese influences — were what inspired the interior design of Đàng Trong Cafe, which is based inside a corner house facing three streets. These include the use of ornate balustrades, abacus-inspired decor, wooden rafters and woven bamboo on the ceiling, patterned cement tiles, and natural terracotta tiles, amongst others.

Those who have been to the Traditional Medicine Museum in Saigon would also find some wall decorations familiar: they are botany illustrations done in the vintage style showcasing local medicinal plant species. The use of natural textures like wood and bamboo in contrast with a bright turquoise creates a familiar but modern ambiance for anyone seeking a refreshing drink to combat the intense Mekong Delta heat.

Have a close look at Đàng Trong Cafe below:

[Photos by Phu Dao via ArchDaily]

A Folk Symbol and Cash Animal, King Cobras Just Really Want to Be Left Alone

2025-02-14T13:00:00+07:00

The king cobra, or rắn hổ mang chúa in Vietnamese, has great personal branding. For proof, one need look no further than the recent flower display on Nguyễn Huệ celebrating the Year of the Snake: the largest, most impressive statue bore the telltale hood of a cobra.

Photo via Travellive.

Endemic across tropical Asia, including much of Vietnam, the king cobra (Ophiophagus hannah) occupies a large range but is not particularly numerous. Because it is not considered aggressive and avoids people, human interactions are relatively rare. Despite the infrequency of people encountering king cobras, they maintain a prominent role in everything from illustrations accompanying myths to tourism efforts in Vietnam.

In the zodiac animal race, the slow snake took sixth place by wrapping itself around the leg of the galloping horse. Such fairy tale behavior supports contemporary stereotypes of snakes as sneaky, cunning, crafty creatures. The king cobra, however, needed no such chicanery to achieve archetypal status in modern society. The reason for its popularity is obvious. Humans are designed, literally, to fear snakes. Coiling across the rungs of our DNA is a revulsion to creatures that hiss, slither, strike and exist without limbs or concepts of play. King cobras are the world’s longest venomous snake and one of the heaviest. Moreover, the hood formed by the flexing of special muscles to spread its ribs, is impressively imposing, particularly when the cobra employs its unique ability to rear up, its fangs hovering at a child’s eye level. These traits, unique to most cobra species, elevate the snake from just a glorified worm or slug into an embodiment of the cold-blooded instinct to kill. Additional characteristics, such as its preference to eat snakes, particularly other cobra, make the king cobra the most extreme version of an animal that stirs an instinctive panic in humans.

Photo via Mongabay.

Myths never include scientific names. Few of the many Vietnamese legends and folktales involving snakes include enough information to discern which type of snake is involved. Sometimes, details and context clues can rule out varieties, but when presenting apocryphal stories constructed with threads of fantasy, memory, and morality-making, it’s up to the (re)teller to add whatever details he or she would like. It therefore makes sense to go with the most visually impressive and menacing example. Thus, the king cobra is often featured in story illustrations and photographs. For example, an article exploring various folk wisdoms about snakes including the popular “rắn trả thù” (snake’s revenge), uses a king cobra as the top image, despite the sayings not mentioning any specific species. Because king cobras can be found throughout Vietnam, one can insert them into just about any legend that features a snake, from the Tranh Temple god to the story of Dã Tràng and the Lệ Chi Viên cases’ curse. Associations with these narratives further contribute to the gut-dropping, pulse-racing terror fear people have when they think of king cobra.

The legend of Dã Tràng. Graphic by Dương Trương.

The exaggerated image of king cobra as diabolical serpent has led it to exploitation on a global scale. Tourism offerings in Hanoi, particularly those catering to western backpackers, can include visits to Lệ Mật, a village about 7 kilometers outside the city center that traces its snake-taming ways to an ancient legend of a hero saving a princess from a snake monster. There, guests enjoy a spectacular experience. Waiters remove snakes from cages, slit them open, and pour their blood into rice wine while the still-beating heart is offered on a separate plate. A full spread of dishes including mì xào with snake, fried snake skin and grilled snake ribs follows. The rowdy tourists slam the blood shots and mug for selfies that will present Vietnam as a barbaric, backwater that is equal parts exotic and dangerous.

Photos via Life Part 2 & Beyond.

One should not trust everything they read on blogs or see on social media, of course. Performed dozens of times a night, the meals are about as routine as those in a restaurant serving snails. And the snakes are not always cobras. Cheaper species are included on the menus, and because of the imprecision of naming conventions, it’s rarely clarified if one is being served the body of a king cobra or one of the other 38 species of cobra — of which the king cobra is technically not one, though that’s a tangle of taxonomy we aren’t going to get into. Tourists can indeed seek out a king cobra specifically though, as seen in Anthony Bourdain’s 2002 trip to the country where he ordered it from the menu at a Saigon restaurant. For him, like the tourists to Lệ Mật today, the experience is not about the taste of the meat or blood, which are quite bland and overwhelmed by the accompanying rice wine or fried noodles. Rather, the entire point is to consume something terrifying and deadly. In doing so, they attempt to show they are wild and fearless in a barbaric foreign land.

Video via Go Traveler YouTube page.

This desire to boast of travels to strange, savage lands explains why in tourist shops you’ll find a few bottles of rice wine containing coiled cobra. Sometimes, it's all a lie. Sneaky vendors can stretch the neck bones of common, non-venomous sneaks so they look like cobras. Moreover, the alcohol in rice wine denatures venom proteins, completely neutralizing its effect, which really has no effect on a product likely destined for display rather than consumption.

Photo via South China Morning Post.

While cobra rice wine is largely a tourist item that locals claim is not an important part of their culture, it wasn’t invented for the sake of foreign visitors. Rather, certain Vietnamese consumers — particularly those older and living in rural localities — believe the cobra contains medicinal qualities owing to its “hot” nature. It is thus suggested to treat a long list of ailments including rheumatism, arthritis, back pain, leprosy, excessive sweating, hair loss, dry skin, far-sightedness, exhaustion, flu, fever, and migraines. And like just about every animal product used in traditional medicine, some men think it will make their dick hard.

Even though most of the products associated with the endangered species trade can be waved off as hokum, snake venom, including cobras, can have true medical value. Scientific research into its use as an anti-inflammatory and cancer treatment is underway. A recent visitor to the Saigoneer office claimed that the tube of snake venom cream we purchased at the Đồng Tâm Snake Farm in Tiền Giang helped remedy his stiff neck.

Superstitious medicine and tourism efforts detrimental to the national image do at least help support local livelihoods. Vĩnh Sơn Village in Vĩnh Phúc Province, for example, is the nation’s largest hub of cobra raising. Farmers in the once jungle-filled area transitioned to breeding the snakes when the wild populations diminished. Thanks to traditional medicine and rice wine products, the village pulled in VND100 billion (US$3.95 million) from snakes and eggs for breeding purposes in 2024. While capturing them in the wild is illegal, according to Vietnamese and international law, farming them is allowed and in 1983, Prime Minister Phạm Văn Đồng even encouraged the villagers to pursue the industry as a viable income source to alleviate poverty.

Snake hunters in the Mekong Delta. Photo via Roads and Kingdoms.

Unfortunately, illegal king cobra hunting exists in Vietnam as well. Poachers across the country, some belonging to lineages of northern snake farmers, undertake the dangerous, uncomfortable and poorly paid work. The snakes they catch are used for rice wine, medicine and to supply local restaurants, as well as to illegally supplement captive farm stocks. As with many instances of poaching, poverty ultimately impacts wild species, incentivizing individuals who would likely prefer other sources of income were they available.

But perhaps, in honor of the Year of the Snake, we should strip the king cobra of all its associations with humans, removing every artificial layer of myth we’ve draped upon it. Free of the legends and marketing, the fears and fables, it’s a sleek creature that muscle-ribbons through the undergrowth, its Triassic brain pulsing with simple instincts. A crunch of leaves, swish of dirt and crack of a twig, and it's out of sight. It prefers we don’t watch it, anyhow, especially if it has eggs nearby, because king cobras are incredible mothers.

Most snakes will abandon their eggs after laying them, but a few species, including cobras and pythons, will protect and incubate them. King cobra mothers take their parental duties even further by first constructing elaborate nests up to four-foot tall in areas that are carefully selected after assessing sunlight, temperature and water drainage. Female cobras will lay 20 to 40 eggs in the waterproof nests and guard them dutifully for up to four months until they are ready to hatch. Such warm displays of motherly love is not what we first associate with these cold blooded animals, but perhaps we should.

How You Can Think and Live Sustainably

2025-02-11T15:27:00+07:00

Frequently touted as environmentally friendly options that help preserve the planet, cotton tote bags require so much energy and freshwater to produce that you must use one at least 7,000 times to make it an effective alternative to plastic bags. Finding out that purchases, habits, and initiatives you thought were good for the planet, such as using tote bags, are in fact not likely to help our current climate crisis can be disheartening. Recognizing how the sustainability movement is rife with performative acts, corporate greenwashing and good intentions thwarted by misinformation threatens to discourage people from the entire concept.

You should push back against this sustainability burnout, however. By approaching sustainability not as an all-or-nothing, extreme concept, but rather a mindset supported by a clear philosophy, firm knowledge, and realistic practices, you can confidently identify and proceed with behaviors that can help save the planet.

Vietnam is home to countless scenes that exemplify Earth's natural splendors.

Before considering how one can act sustainability, one must articulate why it's important. At its most basic level, for humans to continue as a species, our Earth must have clean water, soil, and air. But even before conditions that would eradicate the entire human race develop, pollution, rising sea levels, chaotic storms, and a myriad of other human-caused scenarios will significantly endanger people’s health, safety, and quality of life. It’s already happening. This is in addition to the impacts on flora and fauna that face extinction through no actions of their own. The science is settled on the cause of these issues and the only question one must ask oneself is if humanity is worth survival.

Evidence of human impact on the environment and the behaviors that cause them is everywhere.

Admitting we want to save the planet is easy, but identifying what must be done is more difficult. There is no magic bullet that will solve the many compounding issues, and even if there were, we need as much time as possible to discover it. Reducing just one aspect of climate change will require the ideas and actions of many people working together. Large corporations will need to change how they operate, including transitioning from fossil fuels and adopting new technologies such as sand batteries. But we cannot rely on ginormous businesses and governments alone to make all the changes. Individuals must act in small ways that add up when done collectively. For example, scientists can research ways to more efficiently grow and store crops, but households must still work to reduce food waste via simple decisions such as not throwing away uneaten items and purchasing local, seasonal produce.

Most industries, such as coffee (left) require massive amounts of heat, which can benefit from employing a sand battery, such as those produced by Alternō (right).

At this individual level of acting sustainability, every decision is an opportunity. Recognizing that a good action is not the enemy of a perfect action allows one to compare the impact of all options and take sustainability into account alongside other factors such as ease and cost. For example, it’s not realistic to never travel in a motorized vehicle even if that were the best way to limit your personal carbon emissions. Still, you can often opt for public transportation or an electric vehicle as opposed to a private, internal-combustion car. Thankfully, such decisions are becoming easier with innovators across sectors providing everything from electric vehicle chargers to bodhi leaf tea bags.

Electric vehicle chargers are becoming increasingly common across the world, including in Vietnam.

Part of adopting a balanced, rational approach to sustainability involves admitting you will make choices based on other criteria. Price and convenience realistically influence our actions. But even if sustainability is not the primary determinant of any choice, it can still play a part. For example, we often eat what is tastiest, but knowing a dish is sustainably produced may motivate us to order it as opposed to an equally delicious one that isn’t. Similarly, solar panels may be better for the environment than connecting one’s home to the power grid, but the fact that they reduce monthly electricity bills may prove to be the necessary motivator for homes and factories to install them.

Solar panels can help the financial bottom line for industrial and residential buildings, including countryside homes such as those pictured here.

Education is crucial for taking actions that make a tangible difference. You must have a strong foundational knowledge about what choices are available and the facts behind them. Media literacy and staying informed via trustworthy publications, websites, and speakers, as opposed to TikTok influencers and corporate marketing doublespeak is essential. Research and vetting companies and activities can take time, but it's worth it when the health of the planet is involved.

Representatives from Vietnamese companies focused on sustainability explaining their visions during the Powering a Sustainable Future event.

Educating oneself about sustainability is difficult to do alone and it's therefore important to seek out events, organizations, and institutions that can help bridge knowledge gaps. In Vietnam, the Empowering Sustainability Unitour, for example, is a university-based series of events that connects students with experts and innovators via panel discussions, mini-exhibitions, and career opportunities ranging from alternative energy solutions and green transportation to sustainable entrepreneurship, emphasizing practical applications and innovation. The event is particularly helpful for young adults entering full adult independence who must decide where to work and how to live. With this great range of decisions comes opportunities and responsibilities to act with a sustainability mindset which the Unitour can help develop.

With collected, concerted efforts, we can maintain the planet's natural beauty.

Thinking about our planet’s demise and its impact on humanity can be terrifying. Because sustainability has been so thoroughly co-opted by the agents of consumerism, the concept offers little solace. However, if you can consider a sustainability mindset from a holistic perspective, taking into account its philosophical and practical elements alongside a willingness to act boldly in the world, you can do your part.

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Adding Billiards to Saigon's Pantheon of Pastimes

2025-02-03T11:00:00+07:00

The clink of cue sticks on eight-ball muffling the clank of whisky glass ice cubes and the slap of cards as boozehounds hide their addictions in the shadows of sport and hobby? Dense plumes of Bastos smoke obscuring illicit activities and immoral affairs? Are Saigon's pool halls the seedy dens of patriarchal indulgence their reputation and pop culture representations suggest?

I’m no big-J journalist, so I visited a pool hall during the Tết holiday not for any scoop, but simply because I need more hobbies. Everyone should have a pastime they cannot monetize and will never be particularly good at, an activity whose sole purpose is to provide non-destructive joy. It's worth noting that while many, myself included, use the terms pool and billiards interchangeably, particularly because most venues have tables to accommodate both, they are distinct games.

The youthful vibes present in many Saigon pool halls. Photo via Saigon Billiards.

As a relatively young walker of the straight-and-narrow, I was not alone at the three-level District 3 pool hall. Even in the waning days of the holiday, it was filled with groups of youths sipping soft drinks and joking around without a single criminal act in sight. It was the complete opposite of what this article's top image suggests. This shouldn’t really come as a surprise. Saigon residents hunger for third-space offerings away from screens. Air-conditioned, spacious, convenient, clean, and relatively cheap, pool halls meet these needs. Recent reports in local media support my first-hand observations for Saigon and beyond. It’s not so difficult to understand why, as the egalitarian spaces offer a welcome change-up from routines saturated by coffee shops, bars, and restaurants. The game itself is at worst a nice diversion, and maybe a chance to flex that high school physics class knowledge.

The one surprise came when I looked into the history of the sport in Vietnam. While I rightfully assumed it was imported from the west, where it evolved centuries ago amongst European aristocracy, I didn’t expect it to have such a robust and enduring niche popularity. Several Vietnamese have earned accolades on the global professional circuit in recent years, as well as gotten involved in a convoluted scandal involving tournaments and overlapping governing bodies.

Photo by Adrien Jean.

Perhaps pool halls will become part of my regular routine. Inspired by a recent Saigoneer writer’s pursuit of skateboarding, maybe I’ll delve deeper into the sport, meeting friendly, interesting people and gaining valuable life-long lessons along the way and write a Parks and Rec spotlight. Or maybe months will pass without me playing again. Regardless, I am happy to know there is a very viable option for having good, clean fun any time, day or night, waiting.

[Top image by Adrian Jean]

Solar Power: Where Economics and Environmentalism Meet

2025-01-31T09:17:00+07:00

When seeing a reflective row of solar panels situated on a roof in Vietnam, it’s easy to assume that the home, office, or factory belonged to someone who had decided to pay a little more for the sake of the common good. One might think that while solar energy has become more affordable and convenient as technologies continue to improve, it still requires consumers to make a conscious decision to spend extra for electricity because it is better for the environment. This, however, is wrong.

An increasing number of solar panels can be seen throughout cities and the countryside in Vietnam.

The Virtues and Surprising Value of Solar Power

We all know that energy derived from the sun is cleaner and better for the environment than energy obtained from burning fossil fuels such as coal and oil. It creates no carbon emissions or other heat-trapping gases that contribute to global warming and climate change. Additionally, it comes without the environmental destruction required for mining or drilling fossil fuels or the massive amounts of water needed for power plants. While it's not without impact, as solar panels rely on precious metals and materials, it's vastly cleaner than conventional alternatives.

Capturing sunlight to transform into energy results in no harmful emissions.

Moreover, Vietnam is particularly well-suited for an increase in solar power adoption. According to a recent study published by The International Journal of Management and Technology for Research Studies, energy demand is rising rapidly as the economy develops, but traditional, dirty sources such as coal and crude oil constitute the largest sources. Meanwhile, large land areas receive significant amounts of sunlight per year with Vietnam amongst the leading nations for sunlight as observed on the solar radiation map.

For these reasons, we were confident that environmental concerns are the primary driver of solar power adoption in Vietnam, however, a conversation with Stride, a cleantech company involved in Vietnam’s solar energy industry, changed our perspective.

Financial considerations motivate the installation of solar panels on large factories and farms.

“I want to reduce my electricity bill, so solar becomes a way to help solve that problem.” Andrew Fairthorne, Stride’s Chief Executive Officer shared when explaining the motivations of many of his customers. "They are less motivated by environmental concerns, and are looking for ways to reduce operating costs for their business to make it more profitable."

The specific economics behind solar energy adoption can be complex, particularly when considering the tariffs, rebates, grants, and taxes that different governments offer to individuals to incentivize adoption. One constant, however, is that energy derived from fossil fuels will continue to rise with increased demand and finite supply, and solar energy will continue to become cheaper to own, install and operate thanks to new technologies. While limiting one’s reliance on fossil fuels is a positive motivator that many consider to be a matter of ethical obligations, the financial bottom line is currently the most convincing reason why people in Vietnam are purchasing solar systems.

Solar panels are particularly effective in rural areas on large buildings.

The Need for Financial Expertise

Solar panels reduce a building’s monthly energy bills from the moment they are installed, and given enough time, these savings pay for the cost of the required equipment. This equipment, however, requires upfront costs that can be overwhelming. The panels “might cost, say, 4,000 US dollars for a typical household, and most people do not have that money readily available,” Andrew said. Large, local banks aren’t eager to maneuver the difficult process for single households or small businesses loans, and individual credit cards aren’t designed for such purposes, he explained. Unless a customer has the full, upfront cost in cash, there aren’t a lot of options. “That's where the financing comes in, allowing for repayments to be made in small installments using the savings generated from the solar energy system.”

Vietnam has many experienced, professional operations for solar panel installation

With more than four decades of combined experience in financial services and technology, Andrew and Stride co-founders, Leo Polojac and Tra Le, have the expertise needed to facilitate private purchases of solar systems which are paid off in small increments. An intuitive mobile app that provides for on-the-spot approval allows customers to make payments and calculate how long it will be until the solar system is paid off using the savings from each month’s energy bills. Moreover, Stride provides comprehensive insurance for protection against natural disasters such as the recent Typhoon Yagi and an independent quality assurance check to ensure the solar system is installed to an international standard.

The specifics of how Stride provides the financing is complicated and not particularly interesting for the average consumer. But this is where Stride excels. Successfully navigating international transfers, cross-border regulations, and lending via currency exchanges is only part of the equation. Stride must have a firm grasp of the underlying technology and market.

Fortuitously, through a mutual acquaintance, the founders got to know Huy Le, who has a background in solar technologies. Not long after they began brainstorming about the potential of solar power in Vietnam after witnessing its proliferation in their native Australia, Andrew and Leo invited Huy to join Stride as Chief Commercial Officer. Huy was able to explain in greater detail how the technology works and also the specific uses, needs, and challenges for Vietnamese customers. He also ensures that Stride only works with experienced, reputable installation companies that offer fully certified and trustworthy equipment.

The Stride team at the Powering a Sustainable Future event speaking with potential clients.

Amongst these challenges for local Vietnamese is a lack of familiarity or comfort with debt and financing options. We all know individuals here who don’t like to use banks and prefer to keep their money in cash, gold, or land. Convincing these individuals to take advantage of Stride’s system often requires clear explanations and positive reputations based on word of mouth and community connections. Huy’s time in the industry has proven instrumental in this. Meanwhile, Leo and Andrew’s roles with global banks working in Vietnam have allowed them to overcome obstacles inherent to explaining to overseas investors and institutions what to expect in terms of timelines, processes, and requirements for the local market.

Since their founding in 2021, Stride is succeeding as evidenced by their support of over 400 solar installations across 48 provinces in Vietnam. This has resulted in over 6,100 MWh's of solar energy produced with a reduction of 2,300 Tonnes of CO2 carbon avoided.

An Impact Beyond Bank Accounts

Saving money may be the main motivation for solar system adoption in Vietnam, and Stride was undoubtedly founded as a means to generate profits, but Andrew admits there is more to life than making money. He shared with pride how a Stride solar system is reducing electricity costs for a kindergarten in the Mekong Delta while providing children with an opportunity to learn about the earth and sustainable stewardship, for example. Meeting large and small customers like the teachers and students at the school and hearing about the positive impact Stride is having is extremely gratifying. “Previously, while in banking, it was mainly looking at reports and numbers”, he said, emphasizing the value of witnessing a difference being made. Reflecting on the experience with the school he said: “By using Stride, they didn't have to put up a lot of capital up front. So they're like, ‘Well, this is a pretty good deal. The solar system pays for itself.’ And then they shared what they were able to do with the savings: buy more toys and upgrade their learning supplies.”

Members of a kindergarten in the Mekong Delta with a Stride representative who helped them fund solar panels for their school.

Stride’s success reveals that the differences being made with solar energy, and environmental progress in general, will require economic incentive. Our society is ultimately driven by money and few decisions are made without it as a primary consideration. For the sake of the planet, we must therefore look to maximize the situations where sustainability makes economic sense. We must be prepared to recognize and foster situations where it’s cheapest to act responsibly towards the Earth. Doing so requires businesses like Stride that have financial and technological expertise along with cultural knowledge and trust.

In Vietnam, ‘Golden Babies’ Are Choking Public Services, Parents and One Another

2025-01-26T20:00:00+07:00

The year is 2013. Linh lies awake in the attic bedroom of her cozy childhood home in Saigon. Tomorrow is her first day at primary school, and sleep doesn’t come easily with the all butterflies fluttering in her stomach. She’s worried, but mom assured her that she would be okay, because she is special.

The reality is, Linh is just as “special” as the other 110,708 friends in her Saigon cohort, who were born in 2007, the uber-auspicious Year of the Golden Pig. Every 60 years, it’s once again time for the “golden pig” to grace the Earth, supposedly bringing with its bedazzled snout and sparkling body an abundance of prosperity, success and familial glory. For ease of explanation, in this article I’ll assume that Gregorian years overlap with their lunar counterparts; though in most cases, the lunar system runs one or two months behind the solar calendar.

Vietnamese Astrology 101

After a millennium under Chinese occupation, Vietnam has inevitably adopted a significant portion of Chinese cultural traits into its local life. This could manifest in many forms, at many levels and occasions, from festive Lunar New Year shenanigans to more somber realities like sexism and an overwhelming emphasis on academic achievement. Of all these vestiges of Chinese culture in Vietnam, the adaptation of the Chinese zodiac is probably among the most benign and whimsical.

Any pop astrologer could recite the twelve animal signs of the Chinese zodiac with great ease: rat, ox, tiger, rabbit, dragon, snake, horse, goat, monkey, rooster, dog and pig. Many Asian cultures also adopt this system, albeit with some contextual changes to fit with their own beliefs and natural biodiversity. Vietnam replaces the ox and rabbit with water buffalo and cat, respectively, thanks to the latters' abundance in the Southeast Asian country. Koreans opt for sheep instead of goat while Kazakhs, bewilderingly, prefer snail to dragon.

Much like western astrological star signs or Myers-Briggs personality types, it’s completely healthy to indulge in the implications behind one’s zodiac animal every once in a while, as long as they’re taken with a grain of salt. Of course, a population of Vietnamese parents will do the opposite and lunge deep into the astrological intricacies of their children’s birth year, month, date and even hour in order to secure the most auspicious offspring.

Chinese culture also prefers “dragon babies” to the rest. Image via The Economist.

There are several levels to Vietnam’s layers of childbirth superstition. The first layer of auspiciousness lies in the animals themselves, as George Orwell aptly puts: “All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.” Years of the dragon consistently experience baby booms across 12-year cycles due to the majestic reptile’s meaning in Asian culture; dragon is usually associated with power, fierceness and royalty. This explains the baby booms of 2000 and 2012, both dragon years.

After dragon, parents also have a fondness for farm animals such as water buffalo, goat, chicken and pig as they believe babies born during these years will adopt their patron animals’ docile nature, loyalty and fortitude. The bottom positions of the list fall to the rabbit, snake and tiger: rabbit and cat are thought to be skittish and easily discouraged while snake is the symbol for slyness and is thus frowned upon. The case of tiger, however, only applies to baby girls, as parents believe baby tigresses will grow up struggling to find a match that could handle her “temper.”

The mystery of the golden pig

To unravel the mystery behind the elusive “golden pig,” just skimming the meaning behind the animals is not enough, as years like 2007 only come once every 60 years, in accordance with the sexagenary cycle. Known in Chinese as ganzhi and Vietnamese as can chi, the sexagenary cycle is an ancient Chinese method of time-keeping that originated from the middle of the 3^rd century CE. The word ganzhi, meaning stems and branches, refers to the two interwoven systems that determine the order of the years.

According to ganzhi, the order of the years in the cycle is determined by 12 earthly branches, which correspond with the 12 animals; and 10 heavenly stems represent the five classical elements — metal, wood, water, fire and earth — and whether their property is yin or yang. This creates 60 combinations of names for the years, in which each zodiac animal could take any of the five elemental forms and a yin or yang attribute. For example, 2018 is called Mau Tuat in Vietnamese, meaning it’s a year of the yang earth dog.

Among the elements, metal captures the heart of parents due to its association with gold and prosperity. In Vietnam, the word for metal as an element is “kim,” which also means money, boosting metal years’ desirability in astrological family planning. Therefore, years that begin with the two heavenly stems associated with metal — Canh (yang metal) and Tan (yin metal) — almost always make “golden” years. In recent history, 2000 (Canh Thìn) encompassed two levels of luck as it was both a metal year and a dragon year. A golden year for superstitious parents but a logistical calamity for hospital administrators.

A summary of how the order of zodiac came to be and the sexagenary cycle.

The immense depth of ganzhi is impossible to go into within the constraints of one article, but in short, it represents the harmony between yin and yang, heaven and earth, the 12 animals and the five classical Chinese elements. Now, with the knowledge of the sexagenary cycle, we can determine that 2007 (Đinh Hợi) was the year of the yin fire pig, which — contrary to common beliefs — doesn’t have the usual quasi-prosperous ring that drives prospective mothers to immediate ovulation. Why?

Perhaps Linh is indeed special, because the meaning her birth year, Đinh Hợi, has legitimate historical significance instead of just being a numerical derivation. Since the beginning of time, Đinh Hợi has always been known as the year of the fire pig, until 627 CE. Ancient China had entered the early days of the Tang Dynasty after the short-lived Sui Dynasty. Wrecked by heavy taxation, ambitious wars and taxation projects, post-Sui China was in the midst of a dark era.

Emperor Tang Gaozu, who was credited with founding the Tang Dynasty, carried out a number of reforms during his reign, including lowering taxes, distributing land equally and abolishing the harsh existing system of law, among others. These policies worked, paving the way for his son Tang Taizong’s rule, which was widely considered to be China’s golden age when the country flourished economically and militarily. Because of this momentous prosperity, ancient Chinese started referring to the start of Taizong’s reign, 627 CE, as the year of the “golden pig” instead of the usual fire pig. This moniker stuck, and since then, Đinh Hợi years have been widely considered ultra-lucky years.

A chart showing the 10 heavenly stems (third row) and the 12 earthly branches

Translation

3. Giáp, Ất, Bính, Đinh, Mậu, Kỷ, Canh, Tân, Nhâm, Quý.

4. Tý, Sửu, Dần, Mẹo, Thìn, Tỵ, Ngọ, Mùi, Thân, Dậu, Tuất, Hợi.

The golden plague

While it’s fascinating to delve deeper into the thought process that prompts Vietnamese parents to go gaga over family planning, there is little — if any— scientific research to support the golden years’ positive effects on children. Most parents, beyond some arbitrary knowledge of perceived auspiciousness, can’t exactly pinpoint how birth years can benefit their children’s lives in tangible ways, such as improving school performance, intelligence, social connections or job prospects.

According to Nguyễn Bá Minh, a researcher from the Vietnam Centre of Human Potential Research, in 40 years of researching and consulting eastern philosophy for couples, around 50% of parents with boys born in 2000, a “golden” dragon year, are either divorced or separated. Regarding the fate of those born in 1952, another dragon year, he shared: “Among my friends who were born during this year, many encounter a lot of hardships in life, few have achieved considerable success.”

Minh believes that the best years to conceive a child are not based on some celestial rules, but the household’s conditions: if parents are happy, healthy and financially stable, then their children will have a higher chance of being happy, healthy and successful in life. This notion might seem intuitive and commonsensical enough to take to heart; but, to churn out a “golden” baby, many parents are taking a gamble on everything, from wealth, time to even their own health.

It might take decades to gauge whether the parents’ family planning decisions actually bring about wealth and success: the children would have to graduate, get a job, invest in crypto-currencies, buy lottery tickets or establish a startup — you know, life events that are supposedly governed by luck. On the other hand, the detrimental effects of superstitious family planning can already be felt right from the moment the “golden” babies are born.

In 2003, year of the “golden” goat, Hanoi’s National Hospital of Obstetrics and Gynecology delivered a total of 14,000 babies in the first nine months, a staggering 3,000 more than in an average year. For the remaining three months, another 5,000 future mothers had already registered for the wait-list while the hospital only had 380 beds. This baby boom resulted in a bottleneck of resources, meaning two mothers had to share the same bed and a handful of doctors had to spread themselves thin to cater to hundreds of recuperating moms.

Dr. Nguyễn Thị Thanh from the Hanoi Obstetrics & Gynecology Hospital observed that her patients came from a diverse range of backgrounds; however, they all shared a burning goal: pushing out a baby “goat” in 2003.

“Some families already have both genders, but they still wanted to get more. Another patient didn’t have good health, but she had to obey her family’s wishes,” Thanh elucidated. “Especially, there was a couple who were not ready to marry, but because they wanted a golden goat, they had a ‘shotgun’ wedding in the start of the year to prepare for a baby later. I don’t know if the kids will actually be successful when they grow up, but now everybody is miserable, from the moms to us.”

The more the wearier

For children born in 2007 like Linh, the weight of the special once-every-60-year “golden” pig might already be crushing her chances at having a quality education. In 2013, Saigon’s public primary schools welcomed some 110,709 new first graders, most of whom were the products of the “auspicious pig” craze. That was an increase of 40,804 students compared to 2012, while the number of schools and classrooms remained relatively unchanged. District 9’s Office of Education and Training had to make use of facilities from local middle schools and high schools to accommodate the surge in first graders. In Gò Vấp District, school officials resorted to squeezing more students into classes with each fitting from 45 to 50 schoolchildren.

A typical first grade class in Vietnam.

Because the zodiac is cyclical in nature, these overcrowding problems don’t go away but tend to rear their obnoxious golden heads every time the child moves up a grade, until graduation. The only difference is that this time, middle school and high school administrations have to deal with them. A typical Vietnamese student has to spend 12 years in public schools: Grade 1 to 5 in primary school; Grade 6 to 9 in middle school; and Grade 10 to 12 in high school.

In 2018, high school admission officers have to bear the brunt of the “golden goats” of 2003, 109,000 of whom are starting Grade 10 in Hanoi, an increase of 24,000 students compared to last year. Similarly, the capital’s middle schools take in some 125,000 “golden pigs” (born in 2007), 11,000 more than last year’s Grade 6 cohort.

It might be uncomfortable to share school facilities with an overcrowded cohort, but the painful ramifications of superstitious family planning are most pronounced in the case of this year’s graduating class, the “golden dragons” of 2000.

Across levels of Vietnam’s public school system, the majority of students are divided based on household location, meaning as long as there’s a nearby school, they are likely to be able to secure a spot. This, however, culminates in a notoriously cutthroat university entrance examination when candidates across the country are allowed to pick and choose colleges according to their interest, regardless of location. This June, approximately 925,000 candidates sat for the exam, compared to 865,000 in 2017. In total, the “golden dragons” of 2000 had to fend off 60,000 more competitors than their immediate predecessors.

There’s always a possibility that Linh has been thriving with her 49 classmates. Where statisticians see overcrowded classes, she might see a host of new friends with whom to spend her wonderful five years of primary school. Where admission officers see a highly competitive entrance exam, she might have learned to love a chance to challenge herself. Much like how it’s difficult to tell for sure if the children’s fate is positively impacted by their birth year, supporting the other extreme of the argument is also a herculean task with just a macro perspective.

Perhaps, things would be much easier if parents just take heed of researcher Đỗ Bá Minh’s advice: if parents are happy, healthy and financially stable, then their children will have a higher chance of being happy, healthy and successful in life.

This article was originally published in 2018.

The Role of Sand Batteries in Responding to the Climate Change Crisis

2025-01-24T06:12:00+07:00

How does a sand battery work?

You’d be forgiven for not even knowing sand batteries exist. When we hear the word battery we picture the electricity-storing devices used to power smartphones, computers, cars and air conditioning remote controls. But batteries can be understood as any device that stores energy.

The batteries we typically think of store chemical energy that can be converted into electricity for use as a power source. But heat is also a form of energy that can be stored and used. The value of this thermal energy is particularly profound when one learns that more than 52% of all energy used worldwide is for heating and cooling. In addition to creating comfortable indoor climates, warming showers, and cooking food, heat is essential for nearly every industrial process, from applying color to plastic trinkets to processing agricultural goods. Regardless of where the energy comes from, the end goal is often pure and basic heat, with electricity often just an intermediary.

Imagine the heat on the bottom of your feet when walking across a sandy beach at midday.

What is a Sand Battery?

What does sand have to do with thermal energy? Think about walking across a beach at midday and you’ll realize how sand is an incredibly efficient material for retaining thermal energy and once warmed, and with proper insulation, it can remain hot for six months. A sand battery is essentially a large encased, insulated mound of sand with internal physical and chemical components that support heating and heat conduction. Energy is transferred into the sand battery from conventional sources including solar panels, generators or a fossil fuel-reliant electricity grid to heat the sand. The battery then retains that thermal energy until it is needed as direct heat or transformed to other forms such as kinetic energy via steam.

Alternō sand battery (far left) with accompanying equipment.

There are numerous uses and advantages of sand batteries. Consider, for example, Vietnam’s large coffee farms. Before roasting the beans, farmers often rely on sunlight to dry them, which puts the entire process at at the mercy of capricious weather patterns. Otherwise, the farmers can dry them with the assistance of carbon-spewing combustin engines. Sand batteries attached to solar panels, however, can provide the coffee farmers with consistent and regular heat that doesn’t release greenhouse gases. Sand batteries can be easily adopted by most industries that employ massive amounts of unseen heat. Textile factories, for example, require heat to iron fabrics while car manufacturers dry paint with hot air. Sand batteries in these situations don’t reduce the quality of the work but drastically cut down on harmful emissions and overall environmental impacts.

Vietnamese farmers typically dry their coffee beans before roasting in the open air or in large greenhouses.

Sandbatteries Developed in Vietnam

Hải Ho has long been aware of the dangers of climate change that result from environmentally destructive behavior. “I watched the Inconvenient Truth in 2008 and since then I’ve been a bit of a doomsday prepper,” he shared with Saigoneer during our visit to his Thủ Đức factory. “My house is right on the beach in Đà Nẵng, so I saw with my own eyes the storms getting bigger and bigger and then I looked at the data.”

Hải’s concern for the future of the planet’s environmental health and the particularly poignant impact on Vietnam led him to establish a sustainable travel company in 2011. Everything was going well until Covid and the business understandably hit a standstill. During the lull, and motivated by a desire to be the change he hoped to see in the world, he moved to remote Bảo Lộc and built a fully off-the-grid home. This is where he saw the applications for sand batteries in Asia setting

After moving into his self-sufficient home, Hai quickly discovered the limits of powering it via solar panels connected to a lithium battery that stored energy to use at night. “You can use an aircon, you can turn on the fan, you can turn the computer; easy peasy. But the moment you press a button to heat up a water heater or the water kettle, it crashes,” he explained. It takes five times as much energy to heat water as it does to run an air conditioner, and this is simply more than a lithium battery can manage. Moreover, in addition to their limited capacity, lithium batteries lose their full storage potential quickly and are always at risk for dangerous malfunctions when exposed to the elements.

Alternō sand battery operated by the Alternō team in their factory.

Hải shared his frustrations about lithium batteries' inability to satisfy routine, daily heating needs on his social media. Friends quickly shared details about sand batteries and by 2021 Hải and his co-founders Nguyễn Quốc Nam launched Alternō. After successful participation in an accelerator program, by 2024 they were working with large corporations including global food conglomerates to install sand batteries as part of holistic technology integration to meet heating needs while reducing emissions.

Alternō battery installed for a client.

Alternō provides businesses with sand batteries designed and constructed in-house as well as supports their clients in selecting and installing appropriate energy source systems. For example, Alternō can provide guidance for choosing the most suitable solar panels for use in coordination with their sand battery. Or, as is sometimes the case, the upfront costs of a clean energy source are not realistic and the Alternō team will help connect the battery to a traditional fossil fuel-burning source. Sand batteries do not produce energy in and of themselves, and will thus always be a piece in the larger puzzle of how to meet energy demands in the most feasible, sustainable way. There is always room for compromise when working on this puzzle.

In addition to a lack of awareness, the biggest challenge for sand battery adoption is their cost. Hải admits that even though his off-the-grid home revealed to him the potential of sand batteries, he can’t actually afford one himself. At approximately 20,000 USD they are not realistic for individual or small business use. And anyway, Hải’s ultimate goal is to have as much of an impact on global emissions as possible, which necessitates working with multinational corporations and huge factories, particularly because they spend half of their fuel costs on heating.

Many small scale business operations in Vietnam still rely on burning wood or fossil fuels to generate heat.

Just because big conglomerates have the cash needed for sand batteries doesn’t mean they are eager to spend it. Thus Hải has learned that he must offer financing options when approaching large companies. Their curiosity about sand batteries gets them in the door, but it’s Alternō’s ability to connect clients to sustainable energy solutions while offering financing options that get contracts signed. To date, their success can be understood as the world most affordable thermal energy storage solution.

Sand Batteries are Not a Silver Bullet … and That is Okay

It was surprising at first to hear that Hải sometimes connects Alternō sand batteries to fossil fuel burning sources as those produce the carbon emissions he is working so hard to reduce. But the more Hải explained his approach to combatting global climate change the more it made sense. While he is an ardent believer who prioritizes the mission of saving the planet from the monster of climate change, he is realistic. “Why are we waiting for a silver bullet? To kill the monster. But in the meantime we have to fire every single kind of bullet we have to slow it down; to buy time for someone to invent the silver bullet,” he explains. “What we do is small, it’s not magic, but maybe it will slow things down so instead of a category 5 storm we experience a category 4 storm. Or maybe it extends disaster from happening in 2030 to happening in 2032 and during that time someone invents something that saves us.”

Alternō presented at the Powering a Sustainable Future event.

Hải became animated when speaking about the other ideas he’s learned about at events while promoting Alternō. From paper batteries to wind turbines on the sides of buildings to tabletop nuclear fusion, many people are crafting “bullets” to slow down climate change like Alternō. Such a situation reveals an important reality about sustainable actions: no singular solution or action will solve everything. Even the most passionate individuals like Hải can only hope to contribute to the larger set of solutions. Hải serves as a great example of how the size of the problem doesn’t have to discourage one from working on those small contributions.

The Alternō headquarters complete with sand batteries in the open space.

With the HCMC Metro Here, It's Time to Cultivate Saigon's Very Own Metro Culture

2025-01-23T11:00:00+07:00

One of my least favorite genres of comments on Saigoneer’s social media posts is jokes involving the laggard opening of the HCMC Metro and some random, outrageous year far into the next decades, or even centuries.

They were funny a decade ago when the first rounds of construction delay were announced, but over the years, with every postponement and every joke posted, the mockery gradually grew less funny and more tiresome. Every time we published any metro-related news, they would rear their bitter heads, pushing the blade just a bit deeper into Saigon’s chronic ulcer.

The HCMC Metro has been through numerous delays due to problems with fund reimbursement, structural faults, and the pandemic.

While tired of the jokes, I can somewhat sympathize with them, as they are more than just garden-variety shitpostings — they were the festering symptoms of a sense of public nervousness plaguing Saigoneers. When will it be done? Saigon’s population keeps ballooning and even I was beginning to fear I might kick the bucket before ever riding the metro. While the HCMC Metro was inching excruciatingly slowly towards the finished line, Hanoi already unveiled two lines, Jakarta got its debut line, and Singapore probably built a spaghetti bowl’s worth of MRT routes. I’ve resorted to treating the metro launch like a lottery prize; it will come when it comes, there’s no use in hoping, because the more one hopes, the bigger the disappointment will be.

A view from Thảo Điền Station, one of the most popular stops for those exploring Saigon.

For a while now, it seemed that there would be no end to these overwrought jokes, especially when the metro, even after construction had finished, went into endless rounds of pilot runs. It goes without saying that when the HCMC Metro officially started welcoming members of the public last December, I couldn’t be more relieved, both to finally experience my favorite mode of transport right in my backyard and to be freed of the delay jokes for good. During the weeks after the metro launch, it felt like the city was also collectively heaving a sigh of relief, before the mood shifted to giddy anticipation as everyone and their mothers (literally) headed to take a maiden ride.

Bến Thành Station, slated to be a major interchange in the future, is the most crowded stop.

On a weekday afternoon, I decided to commit truancy at work to take a midday train to anywhere. The “anywhere” in this case is the Suối Tiên Terminal Station, based deep in the outskirts of Bình Dương Province and adjacent to the Eastern Bus Station. Boarding the train at Bến Thành Station was a breeze during the free-ride period, requiring only a QR code scan, though the crowd was significant enough to require the presence of several station staff members to direct passenger flow.

While the train runs relatively smoothly, getting to it has been the most irksome process so far.

With every stop, the full passenger car was whittled down to a small handful and there were enough seats for everyone by the end of the line. When the train made an extended stop at the end, I wandered around the platform, taking into the vastness of the sparsely populated land at the border of Saigon and Bình Dương. This horizon will not stay open for long, because in the next few years, residential complexes, shophouses and condotels will pop up like mushrooms empowered by the connectivity that the stations offer. The metro launch is just the prologue of a long chronicle of Saigon’s future.

The presence of the metro has massively boosted real estate prices along the line.

The train is my favorite mode of transportation, and a metropolitan metro network is just like a theme park ride that you can experience every day. The majority of Saigoneers certainly see Metro Line 1 that way: my time on the line was filled with folks who stayed in place even from one end to the other and back. Families with strollers and cherubic toddlers who can barely walk. Gaggles of ladies wearing iconic floral pajamas and nón lá. Elderly couples who were content to be able to board the metro before senility could catch up with them.

Only spanning a short 20-kilometer stretch from downtown to the northeastern border of the city, the metro in its current state is helpful in improving the daily commute of just some Saigoneers. For the rest of us, me included, we’ll have to settle for the theme park novelty it provides, but at least for now, we can marvel at the mostly grayed-out full map installed at every station, dreaming of a day when every city resident can leave their house, walk a few steps, and be seated on a train zipping across town to any location they desire.

I am sappy and really enjoy the look on older Saigoneers when they get to experience the train.

This is certainly the case in Singapore. When I left the island nation in 2013 after four years there, the local MRT network had four full metro lines; in 2025, two more have been added, with numerous new stations and extensions of existing lines. The North-South Line, coded in red, was Singapore’s first-ever metro route, whose first five stations became operational in 1987 — so Singaporeans have had nearly four decades of enjoying their urban railway infrastructure and forming a well-established public transport culture.

In Singapore, riders stand on the left on escalators, leaving the right side for those who are in a hurry and wish to walk. Seats closest to the door are reserved for the elderly, pregnant and disabled. It’s courteous to let people inside get out first before getting in yourself. Train rides are often so quiet you can hear nothing but automatic announcements and the gush of wuthering wind pressing against the tunnel. None of these behaviors exists yet when it comes to the HCMC Metro, but compared to their almost four decades of reinforced cultural norms, Saigoneers’ mere one month with our new train set seems like child’s play.

Metro culture is still something Saigon needs to work on.

Practicing basic courtesy and following rules are the crucial first steps toward growing a healthy metro environment. Metro culture, however, is not limited to just public etiquette: the introduction of train rides will potentially free up hours of our days for other enriching activities instead of being stuck in congested, polluted, stress-inducing commutes. The two half-hour blocks you spend on the metro every day are now a new garden of freshly tilled soil to cultivate your mind. Daydream, write poetry, look at trees, listen to a whole album uninterrupted, catch up on a podcast, read a book, do homework, sketch strangers, watch your crush’s Instagram stories, text your mom, make up mnemonics to memorize station names, or even catch up on some sleep — anything but ride a motorbike in shitty traffic.

So far I've listened to music and read a chapter of a book on the metro, things that would be impossible on a bike.

As the Saigon Metro is still so fresh, I haven’t noticed any whimsical activity but sheer enthusiastic glee and a palpable sense of disbelief from other passengers. A middle-aged lady next to me took a picture every time the train stopped at a station. A young man behind me came all the way from Vũng Tàu to ride the train and was video-calling his girlfriend the entire time, pointing out every recognizable building he spotted. Everybody was too busy just existing in this incredulous nowness to think of what book to read or forming a routine — it’s almost too cute. One thing that stands out about Singaporeans’ attitude about their MRT system is that nothing stands out. The train is as normal as a utility pole, a park bench or a telephone booth. They’ve been living with it for so long that the train network is just infrastructure, not a frustratingly delayed dream project decades in the making.

Looking forward to a day when Line 1 is complete with all the planned stops.

Operating and adjusting to a metro line is still a constant effort for Saigon. Service has been halted twice due to heavy rain, and some ugly behaviors from passengers have been reported, but once the novelty wears off and ridership has had time to stabilize, I for one am looking forward to observing and contributing to the formation of a metro culture that’s uniquely Saigon’s.

Typing Vietnamese, Part 2: The Vietnamese Diaspora, Unicode and the Ubiquity of Unikey

2025-01-17T10:00:00+07:00

This is part 2 of our two-part series on the history of Vietnamese-centric typing technologies. Part 1 can be accessed here.

Voices from the diasporas: Early virtual communities and the emergence of VIQR

After 1975, there was a significant wave of Vietnamese migration to North America, Europe, Hong Kong, China and Australia. In the United States, the Vietnamese immigrant population, which was once only several thousand, increased to 245,025 in 1980. By 1990, the number doubled to 593,213 and, by 2000, it reached 1,122,528. Displaced from their home country and otherized within their new nations, they faced an increasing need to reconnect to aspects of their native identity and culture. The Vietnamese language was a very concrete way to achieve this, as exemplified by Anh Tran's observation in Vietnamese Language Education in the United States that, several years after 1975, there was a surge in Vietnamese language schools in the US.

Efforts to maintain connections to Vietnam through language was playing out during a time of major technological advances. The computer industry underwent a change from mainframe computers to personal microcomputers. IBM released its first home computer model in 1977 named Altair 8800, and in 1981 it introduced the mass-produced IBM-PC which resembled a modern day PC. The computer gradually became a more personal and individualized device.

The Vietnamese diaspora gained fairly early access to these computer advances in the United States in the 1990s, thanks to a large number of Vietnamese immigrants, especially women, working as low-level technicians in Silicon Valley and later, engineers working in the Information Technology industry. Vietnamese were IT pioneers in Australia as well. For example, students at Australia National University worked on a project that eventually brought internet connectivity to Vietnam.

In the book Transnationalizing Vietnam: Community, Culture, and Politics in the Diaspora, Kieu Linh Caroline Valverde introduces computer programmer Tin Le, a member of a group of Vietnamese American computer scientists that worked on establishing links via wide area networks. In 1986, they created an email list called Vietnet, with the purpose of connecting members of Vietnamese diasporas via electronic communication. In an interview with Valverde, Tin Le said: “It was pretty hard to connect, especially in regions where few Vietnamese resided. We wanted to talk to each other and reach out to one another.”

The administrators of Vietnet later moved the mailing list to a Usenet newsgroup, a type of discussion forum, called soc.culture.vietnamese (SCV). Both the Vietnet mailing list and SCV predated the internet as both relied on smaller network precursors to the world wide web. The Google archive of the newsgroup discussion suggests that soc.culture.vietnamese was created as early as April 1991. One can find literally everything Vietnam-related on soc.cultural.vietnamese — Vietnamese poems, lyrics, recipes, advertisements, searches for relatives, academic project announcements, as well as discussions of larger issues.

Computers at that time period only supported the ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange) character encoding standard. The set of codes could only represent English alphabets on computers, which didn't include diacritics. In order to communicate with each other in the newsgroup, Vietnet and SCV members used a set of rules that allowed members to write Vietnamese using the characters available in ASCII to connote Vietnamese diacritical marks. The set included ( .+ ^ ? and ' ). The rules were often collectively called quy ước Vietnet (Vietnet convention) or quy ước SCV (SCV convention) or quy ước VIQR (VIQR convention, in which VIQR was short for Vietnamese Quoted-Readable). VIQR conventions became the de facto standard for many Vietnamese online citizens during the heyday of newsgroups and forums and is still used by a modest proportion of the population today.

A Usenet post listing some Vietnamese names that sound derogatory in English for parents to avoid when naming their child in order to prevent being mocked by Americans. Screenshot via Google Group.

The flux of technological solutions

The handy VIQR conventions were only a temporary solution, however, as the Vietnamese texts displayed were unrecognizable to the uninitiated. There remained a need to establish standard Vietnamese character encoding for web pages and fonts, which is why during the late 1980s and the early 1990s, a plethora of software packages, character encodings and Vietnamese fonts entered the cybersphere. While some of these solutions worked well, the large number of them created yet another problem. As Kim An Lieberman explains in Asian America.Net: Ethnicity, Nationalism, and Cyberspace, “The problem has not become how to put Vietnamese on the internet, but which Vietnamese to use.”

One popular encoding standard and input method produced during this time was the VNI standard, developed by a Vietnamese software engineer Ho Thanh Viet who was living in Westminster at the time. In 1987, Viet proposed using numerical keys to represent diacritical marks. The input method was popularized and commercialized by Viet and his company VNI Software via a package that included a font and word processor designed for the MS-DOS operating system. The method took off and became the standard for dot matrix printing which improved the landscape of Vietnamese-language newspapers in the US. VNI was even adopted by Microsoft in their Windows 95 operating system in the 1990s. However, VNI Software sued Microsoft over unauthorized use, forcing the tech giant to remove it. Today, VNI is taught in computer textbooks and used by many Vietnamese in Vietnam.

It was also during this time that The Unicode Consortium was created. Established in 1987 in Silicon Valley with members belonging to many technology companies such as Apple, Xerox, Sun Microsystems, IBM and Microsoft, the consortium aimed to create a universal standard for encoding and displaying every language including Vietnamese. It enlarged the 8-bit standard often found in character encoding at the time to a 16-bit character set in order to increase the number of characters it could hold.

For Vietnamese, the consortium's original plan was to assign a code to each diacritical mark instead of assigning a code to a precomposed combination. The reason for this decision was that Unicode wanted to save space and avoid encoding anything that could be created through a combination of two or more characters that was already assigned a code. However, doing this would prove to be problematic. According to a memo written by the non-profit Viet-Std Group whose aim was to standardize Vietnamese for computers: “The heavy use of diacritical marks in Vietnamese text calls for a keyboard input scheme that does not require extra keystrokes such as a special ‘compose’ key to generate accented letters.” Dr. Ngo Dinh Hoc, one of the Viet-Std members, noted that the practice was unfair as French and German enjoyed the privilege of having every precomposed character encoded in the Unicode set.

Viet-Std Group sent a complaint to the Unicode committee for reconsideration, which the Unicode Consortium rejected on the grounds that the language didn't have a nation-wide character encoding, and therefore there was no need to ensure compatibility like other Latin-based languages. Not accepting Unicode's argument, Viet-Std Group developed its own character encoding standard VISCII (Vietnam's Standard Code for Information Interchange) in 1992. VISCII was a modified ASCII character set, in which the least problematic characters in the original ASCII were replaced with Vietnamese diacritical marks.

In 1993, Unicode finally agreed to encode every character in Vietnamese. From that year onwards, more typing conventions entered the cybersphere. Non-profit organization Vietnam Professionals Society (VPS) released its own input method software, VPSKey, in 1993 designed for Windows 3.1. In the same year, Vietnam's Ministry of Science, Technology and Environment (now Ministry of Science and Technology) issued TCVN 5712 — an 8-bit national standard character encoding for Vietnamese. The TCVN 5712 character encoding was called VSCII (Vietnam's Standard Code for Information Interchange) and included three versions: VN1, VN2, and VN3. The first was a modified ASCII set and the other two utilized the extended ASCII. TCVN 5712 was widely-used in northern Vietnam.

TCVN 5712 code charts: VN1 (left); VN2 (middle); VN3 (right). Images via Van Ban Phap Luat.

Web pages could finally properly display Vietnamese and users could write Vietnamese on the web if the output and the input were compatible with each other. However, typing and reading Vietnamese on computers remained a headache because the plethora of solutions allowed different web pages to use different encodings and fonts that were incompatible with one another. Therefore, users not equipped with the right tools were unable to neatly read and write Vietnamese.

Moving toward a unified standard: the story of Vietkey, WinVNKey and Unikey

Software and word processors continued to use 7-bit and 8-bit Vietnamese character encoding before Microsoft Windows included the Unicode encoding for Vietnamese in its 2000 version. WinVNkey was the first computer program to allow users to type Vietnamese on Windows 3.0 — the first version of the Windows operating system after MS-DOS. WinVNKey was designed and offered for free by TriChlor — a non-profit group that promoted the use of VISCII as a unified standard. WinVNkey started to support Unicode in 2000 after recognizing its potential. The project was taken over by Ngo Dinh Hoc, who was working with Unicode and designing a Vietnamese keyboard driver for Macintosh at the time. The program then became a multilingual input method software which facilitated more than 30 international languages that don't usually translate well into a computerized environment. Nom characters and Vietnamese ethnic minorities languages were also included.

A notable WinVNKey equivalent is Vietkey. It was developed in 1991 and released in 1997 by Vietkey Group, a company based in Vietnam and founded by Đặng Minh Tuấn, who was a young engineer at the Ministry of Defence at the time. The program was first offered as freeware and later commercialized in conjunction with the company's other products. Vietkey supported Vietnamese, English, French, German and Russian. There was a version compatible with the Linux operating system as well. Just like the team behind WinVNKey, Tuấn was an advocate for a universal character encoding for typing Vietnamese. Tuấn and Vietkey offered the Unicode support in 1997 and fine-tuned it into more efficient software in 2000. However, the fact the Vietkey was not freely accessible was a drawback for many.

Seeing the need for a widely accessible software that supported Unicode other than Vietkey, Phạm Kim Long — a graduate student in Prague at the time — had the idea to develop his own input method software, which resulted in Unikey, released in 2000. The compact freeware is now ubiquitous among Vietnamese computer users. Long had been toying with the idea since 1991, when he and his classmates at the Hanoi University of Science and Technology challenged each other to write the most lightweight Vietnamese typing program using the Assembly language. Long won the challenge with a program that only weighed 2 kilobytes called LittleVNKey. However, LittleVNKey" did not support Unicode.

In 2000, Long decided to work on a Vietnamese input program with Unicode support after seeing online conversations about Windows 2000's multilingual support which included Vietnamese. He spent two days writing the program and released the first version of Unikey online. He then spent the next four months receiving feedback and fine-tuning the software. In 2006, through a Việt Kiều friend, Phạm Kim Long gave Apple the rights to integrate the software in its operating system. Unikey remains a free and accessible software now.

Although Long and Tuấn are the two most credited with making Vietnamese compatible with modern computers, the development of typing technologies is much more multi-faceted, and reflects the sociocultural and historical needs of a population yearning for connection with the world and with itself.

This article was originally published in 2018.

How a Startup's Drive to Expand Charging Stations May Shape the Future of EV's in Vietnam

2025-01-16T17:00:00+07:00

A thick haze often hangs above Saigon, obscuring the skyline. Some people can feel a heaviness in their lungs while their eyes and throats throb. After a day spent atop a motorbike idling in traffic, you may notice your facemask has gathered a layer of dark grime. Statistics likely aren’t needed to convince you that the city suffers from poor air quality, though the science certainly exists to back it up. Saigon and Hanoi appear with increasing frequency on the air quality index (AQI) list of most polluted cities. In addition to issues regarding climate change caused by rising carbon levels, living in such conditions carries with it a range of short-term and long-term health risks including breathing difficulties, respiratory infections, and the exacerbation of pre-existing conditions such as asthma as well as stroke, heart disease, lung cancer, and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease.

Streets in Vietnam's large cities are frequently clogged with traffic.

While a variety of economic and industrial conditions contribute to poor air quality, gasoline vehicles contribute up to 70% of urban environmental pollution emissions including dangerous levels of CO and NOx (NO, NO2, N2O3, N2O5), according to the 2019 paper “Urban Transport in Vietnam: A Perspective from Environmental Pollution” published by the European Journal of Engineering and Technology Research. Traffic jams, as are frequently experienced in large cities, exacerbate the situation as gasoline vehicles contribute 4-5 times the level of pollution vapors amidst congestion. In Vietnam, the vast majority of cars run on gasoline and nearly all of Saigon’s more than seven million motorbikes do.

Electric Vehicles Offer Optimism

Combustion engine vehicles release significant pollutants into the city air.

Sitting in traffic, overwhelmed by the noxious fumes and depressed by the visible pollution on the horizon, you, like many, have probably reflected on alternatives including better public transportation and more electric vehicles (EVs). While EVs sound attractive because they emit no toxic pollutants as direct exhaust and are more energy efficient than internal combustion engines, which reduces their total carbon output, adoption remains low. Many reasons exist for why more people have not made the change to EVs, including concerns with the cost, performance and style of the vehicles, as well as access to charging stations and battery safety.

There is cause for optimism, however, as many of the barriers to EV adoption are being removed and technologies are improving to address the concerns. A recent study by KPMG reports that 70% of participant responders in Vietnam expressed interest in buying a hybrid or fully electric vehicle with particular support coming from younger consumers. This desire coincides with the increased availability of EVs from trusted global brands including Hyundai; newer players such as BYD; and local upstarts such as Vinfast and Dat Bike that are offering new designs that boast longer ranges, greater durability, more comfort and higher overall performance. Meanwhile, the government is considering ways to promote e-vehicle ownership via regulations and industry support.

What EBOOST Reveals About the Industry’s Path to Sustainability

Several years ago, before the EV climate in Vietnam appeared so positive, Stefan Kaufmann found himself trapped in Saigon’s claustrophobic traffic during his daily commute and pondered the market potential: “Wow, there are 70 million motorbikes in this country; it’s huge!” he remembers thinking.

Stefan Kaufmann atop the motorbike he built at an EBOOST charging station.

The Swiss national with a background in microengineering was working in operational management for a global materials corporation but nurtured an entrepreneurial spirit and romantic notions of becoming a startup founder. Driven by a desire to overcome the challenges of starting his own business, he launched a company assembling and selling electric vehicles in tandem with charging ports. While building the bikes on the ground floor of his apartment and working his corporate day job, he learned difficult but necessary lessons regarding establishing networks and partnerships. As he progressed and continued to analyze the market and its development he realized it would be better to focus fully on another aspect of electric vehicles he had been concurrently developing thanks to a fortuitous realization.

“Don't call me stupid; you can think about many things as an entrepreneur, but sometimes you miss the most essential things,” Stefan explained during his visit to the Saigoneer offices earlier this year. “Where do I go to charge? There is nothing to use to charge and there could be thousands of electric bikes coming,” he says of his building’s parking lot. Stefan quickly realized that when more people adopt electric vehicles there will be an overwhelming need for charging stations that up to that point didn’t exist. Thankfully

EBOOST charging station for residential building with standard outlet.

“There must be thousands of buildings where they have shared parking areas: offices, commercial malls, residential apartments. This means thousands of bikes, right? And cars. They need to have a certified, safe, smart solution” for charging, he realized. “Hey, I'm going to do that because I saw nobody's doing it much.” Thus about four years ago, EBOOST pivoted to focusing 100% on providing certified, convenient, and trustworthy public charging stations for electric vehicles. It was a prescient calibration as access to a large and reliable charging network is currently among consumer’s greatest concerns when it comes to EV adoption.

EBOOST charging stations can accommodate all makes and models of electric vehicles.

Equipped with a problem-solving engineer’s mindset, Stefan identified the electric vehicle market’s needs and quickly shaped his business to meet them. EBOOST employs an app so that users can easily pay for and track their energy use as well as locate stations that have been installed in cooperation with commercial and residential locations that see the economic and brand value of providing them to tenants and the public at large. Predicting the future landscape, Stefan knew he had to make his chargers accessible for all vehicles so that customers could use them regardless of their vehicles’ brand or model. EBOOST also provides around-the-clock support so individuals can receive assistance if they encounter any problems.

EBOOST charging station installed for public use.

EBOOST’s business model posits a win-win situation for all stakeholders. By witnessing the proliferation of charging stations, individuals will be more aware of progress being made in the electric vehicle industry and more able to take part. Incentivized by direct and indirect value received, residential buildings, offices, schools and public spaces will assist in expanding the charging coverage. Meanwhile, EV manufacturers will be able to better satisfy and attract more customers thanks to the more complete charging solutions provided by EBOOST. And of course, the impact on the air pollution positively impacts everyone in the city.

One of the greatest concerns revolves around safety. A number of high-profile tragedies involving building fires sparked by charging electric bikes in Vietnam have led to public fears. Stefan understands that these concerns are not unique to electric vehicles and have surrounded the adoption of many new technologies from microwaves to air travel. It’s always a matter of perception as impacted by information. Therefore, one challenge is to communicate to customers that EBOOST’s stations are safe as exemplified by third-party certification according to international standards along with a variety of safety features that protect against current surges and overheating. Ultimately, EBOOST can only do so much as the most consequential element is that e-vehicle manufacturers should use and deploy high-quality batteries according to required standards to avoid risks. Furthermore, while users are protected if the chargers malfunction, they have a responsibility to correctly use and maintain their batteries. As time passes and more people have positive experiences with e-vehicles, the consensus of the industry’s safety should mature.

EBOOST representatives explaining the technology during the Powering a Sustainable Future event.

How the EV Landscape May Look in the Future

A true entrepreneur, Stefan has quantifiable goals and benchmarks as well as an endgame for his company. To date, EBOOST has expanded to over 200 charging locations across the country with more on the way. These efforts are not only helping foster the transition to green mobility in Vietnam but also contribute to avoiding a projected metric ton of carbon per year. And while he remains passionate about EBOOST’s day-to-day growth and praises his team, he fantasizes about “one day in the future, a large partner or corporate institution joining to establish the EBOOST brand for many years to come and help Vietnam in reaching its green journey goals,” he shared.

The EBOOST team.

For the electric vehicle industry to take hold in meaningful ways that will significantly impact air pollution, for example, implementation must come on a massive scale that is simply not possible for small, independent companies alone to foster. This reality holds true for the industry’s smaller components, such as charging stations. Thus, it will be a positive sign if a government entity or large corporation such as a vehicle manufacturer joins EBOOST and nurtures its further growth.

We had assumed our conversation with Stefan would involve how matters of environmental stewardship and sustainability are compelling people to switch to EV vehicles while these ethical issues are major motivators for business founders. But after more than an hour of speaking about EBOOST, from inception to exit goals, we had barely mentioned the topics. When we brought them up to Stefan he quickly remarked “That should be in the DNA of everything we do … I think that's obvious, right? We don't need to talk about climate change, waste, garbage, health … that’s proven.” Stefan is not a wide-eyed dreamer picturing scrawny polar bears on melting ice floes. Rather, the thrill of succeeding as a founder allows him to continue with what he repeatedly described as a marathon.

Cleaner skies are achievable.

Improving Saigon’s air quality will require the work of many people like Stefan toiling away as small business owners, corporate cogs, and government functionaries to address mundane logistics and infrastructure needs as well as individuals changing their travel habits by selecting EV, public transportation and bicycles. The challenges ahead may seem daunting. But from improving battery recycling methods to designing sleeker electric bikes on par with the flashiest combustion models, it's only a matter of time. And if Saigon drivers one day take deep lungfuls of fresh, clean air, it will be thanks in part to passionate innovators and dogged tinkerers thrilled by a challenge.

Typing Vietnamese, Part 1: Language, Identity and Technology at a Crossroad

2025-01-10T12:00:00+07:00

My first exposure to the computer traces back to my primary school years when computer classes were conducted once a week. In order to study computers, students had to migrate from their usual classrooms to a multimedia lab — an air-conditioned room filled with computers. Computer classes were generally more popular among us than most subjects thanks to that satisfying cool breeze and the delight of operating something one wasn't privileged with at home.

Beginner computer lessons often involved practicing mouse and keyboard skills. While the mouse was easy to handle, the keyboard involved greater challenges. The first year of computer class includes learning to type using ten fingers, sometimes with the aid of entertaining typing games. By the time one finds themselves on the brink of secondary school, Vietnamese typing was introduced.

Vietnamese characters, albeit rooted in the Latin alphabet, have an additional seven characters thanks to diacritics (Â, Ă, Đ, Ê, Ô, Ơ, Ư), and five tonal marks including acute (á ó í), grave (à, ò, ù), hooked (ả, ỏ, ỉ), tilde (ã, ẽ, ĩ), and underdot (ụ, ọ, ị) strung together. My fellow secondary school students learned from the start that the facile QWERTY keyboard can't understand the nuance and complexities of their mother tongue.

Chữ Quốc Ngữ

Vietnam underwent a change from a logographic writing system that places Chinese, character-based chữ Nôm, and chữ Hán at its forefront to another system that relies on the Latin alphabet with added diacritical marks. This writing system, called chữ quốc ngữ, is now the de facto writing standard for most Kinh Vietnamese today. Popularized by Portuguese missionaries during the 17^th century as a tool for their evangelical mission, chữ quốc ngữ is the romanization of the Vietnamese spoken language.

Despite its original use, during French colonialism, many Vietnamese scholars saw a different opportunity in chữ quốc ngữ — a tool for liberation from Chinese imperialism and the feudalistic system of thought that could lead the country to modernism. Despite opposition by rigid Confucian scholars and nationalists as a reaction against French and Western culture, several anti-colonial movements by the intellectual class in the early 19^th century such as the Duy Tân movement, Đông Du movement and Tonkin Free School (Đông Kinh Nghĩa Thục in Vietnamese) promoted learning chữ quốc ngữ and using it as the official language of Vietnam.

Quốc ngữ was legalized as the official language of Vietnam as the result of the Decree 81 issued on April 6 in 1878.

Quốc ngữ found itself in an odd position. It was supported by both French colonizers and some of their Vietnamese opponents. For the French, due to its Latin tradition, chữ quốc ngữ was integral to their cultural homogenization efforts and a convenient compromise between chữ Hán (Chinese script) and French. For several anti-colonial movements and scholars, because chữ quốc ngữ reflected the complexities of Vietnamese tonation, it was both a manifestation of a national identity and the nation's road to modernism. In a country that was trying to claim its own voice at the intersection of two imperialist regimes — China and France — chữ quốc ngữ was an inevitable option.

Colonial technologies, local ownership: the birth of Telex

As a result of France's economic exploitation and efforts in gaining systematic control and a monopoly over public services and goods, a wide variety of new technologies were brought into Vietnam. The typewriter is an example of an everyday technology advertised to Vietnamese. It's unclear when the typewriter first appeared in Vietnam; however, a look through several newspaper advertisements suggests that the typewriter was available in Vietnam as early as 1929.

While the QWERTY keyboard is the most well-known layout for the Western world, the first typewriters in Vietnam followed the Franco-centric AZERTY layout.

The AZERTY keyboard layout. Screenshot via Larousse mensuel illustré (top).

The Hermes Baby. Photo via Retro Tech Geneva (bottom).

In “Cycles of Empowerment? The Bicycle and Everyday Technology in Colonial India and Vietnam” and “Everyday Technology in South and Southeast Asia: An Introduction,” David Arnold and Erich DeWald make the case for considering colonial technology changes from local perspectives rather than viewing them as one-way transfers from European and American countries. This shift from seeing technology as wholly Euro-centric gives more credit to the bargaining power indigenous people can have against colonial control. The modified AĐERTY aligns well with this angle.

When and how the curious typewriter layout emerged is an arbitrary matter. According to Arnold and DeWald, quốc ngữ keyboard has been around since the late 1920s and early 1930s. A 1960 proposal written by Daniel Loren Carmicheal from the Michigan State University Vietnam Advisory Group suggests that it has been around since 1947. An article penned by journalist and translator Nguyễn Văn Vĩnh suggests that since 1922, typewriters from brands such as Underwood and Royal had been altering the traditional keyboard layout to fit chữ quốc ngữ. Vietnamese typewriters existed through the American War — when it was used by the national liberation front of South — until the late 1980s, when being a typist was still a viable career option in many newsrooms and offices.

The Olympia Splendid 33 with an AĐERTY layout used in the 1960s currently displayed at the Ho Chi Minh Museum. Photo via WikiCommons.

The typewriter is not an exclusive example of technological appropriation that made Western technologies compatible with Vietnam. Many printing technologies such as linotypes and the letterpress were adapted to be able to print chữ quốc ngữ. French type foundry Deberney & Peignot created 127 typefaces for chữ quốc ngữ, some of which were printed and recorded in book three of its typeface catalog series Caractères Étranger (loosely translated to "foreign characters" in English) in 1930.

Screenshots via Caractères ètrangers.

Technology appropriation that involves typing served important logistical functions. In the early 1860s, the French built telegraph networks throughout Vietnam and Indochina to establish a coherent communication connection between different colonial authorities. The first post office was built by the French in 1862 in Saigon. In his memoir L'Indochine Francaise, former Governor of the colony Paul Doumer states that at the end of 1901, the French's telegraph network had covered 18,000 kilometers of Indochina. Local Vietnamese called French telegraph posts nhà dây thép, which translates to “house of steel wires,” referring to the method of sending messages using wires with steel conduits. Sending a telegram was commonly known as đánh dây thép, which literally translates to "hitting the steel wire."

The telegraph's clientele in the early days was exclusively French officers and elites. However, as the number of Vietnamese staff in French postal offices increased and telegraph service got cheaper, there was a need to communicate quốc ngữ via Morse code, the common telegraph language. Vietnamese used a system called Telex, which is a set of rules that can convey Vietnamese diacritical marks that are not available in Morse code. The person commonly credited with coming up with Telex is Nguyễn Văn Vĩnh.

One of quốc ngữ biggest advocates, Vinh was a nationalist and anti-Confucian modernizer who believed that the future of Vietnam rested on quốc ngữ. A narrative account suggests that after witnessing a local Vietnamese receive a telegram sent from Nam Dinh that only read “vo de” — which could either be interpreted as vỡ đê (“the embankment broke” in English) or vợ đẻ (“wife is in labor” in English) due to the lack of accented marks — Vĩnh came up with a set of rules to include diacritical marks using the Franco-centric keyboard.

In 1929, Vĩnh published his ideas in an article in Trung Bắc Tân Văn, a paper of which he served as editor. The gist of his argument was the value of replacing diacritics with alphabetical characters that either didn't exist in Vietnamese or would never be placed together. Vỉnh even went to the extent of proposing that in traditional writing, these alphabetical characters should replace diacritical and tone marks altogether, in order to make the language even more compatible with Western telecommunication standards. However, his idea was rejected as many wanted to reserve Vietnamese tonal marks.

An article in Khoa Học Tạp Chí about changing quốc ngữ. Screenshots via National Library of Vietnam.

Nguyễn Văn Vĩnh was not the first person to think of replacing Vietnamese tonal marks with alphabet letters. According to a 1933 article in Khoa Hoc Tap Chi, in 1919 a scholar named Phó Đức Thanh wrote an article in Trung Bac Tan Van proposing that the characters B, D, K, L, Q could be used to convey quốc ngữ tonal marks. A response published on the same page argued that using the five letters B, D, K, L, Q would only be effective in some cases and could not be applied as a general rule that works every time. The response also suggests that there were some similar systems that were already proposed by the managing editor, F. H. Sneichder.

These attempts to come up with a rule set for communicating Vietnamese in Morse codes were later adapted to the Anglo-centric and Franco-centric keyboards. The postal industry shaped the Telex rule many Vietnamese are using to type Vietnamese on a computer today. The current Telex rule can be seen in the images below:

Screenshots via Wikipedia entry of Telex.

The computerized war

The early development of computer science and information technology in Vietnam happened when the country was partitioned after the Geneva Conference in 1954. While the north was building a socialist society, with help from Soviet Union countries, the south was backed by France and the United States. The partition put the status of early computers in Vietnam during the 1960s and the 1970s on two different trajectories: one influenced by the computing tradition in the Soviet sphere and another influenced by the Americans.

The first computer to ever arrive in northern Vietnam was the Minsk-22, produced by the Byelorussian SSR — a federal unit of the USSR whose territory is now shared between Belarus, Lithuania, Poland and Russia — in 1965 and imported to Vietnam in 1968. The Minsk-22 was a model of the famous Minsk family of macro computers that were employed in planning and economic calculations. Like most early computers at the time, the Minsk was mostly used for research and calculation purposes. Vietnamese system engineers during this time had to learn to operate the Minsk-22 and later computers such as Minsk-32 or the Polish-made ODRA 1304 using Russian.

A scene in a 1979 movie Con Chim Biết Chọn Hát showing a computer scientist operating a mainframe computer produced in the Soviet sphere.

In southern Vietnam, the role of computers and computing possesses was important for the US military as tools to computerize the war and to collect and process data on northern Vietnamese troops. In a journal article titled “Computers, Electronic Data, and the Vietnam War,” historian Donald Fisher Harrison argues that the American war was the first war in history to be aided by full-scale electronic data. The US military built many computer centers and stations throughout Vietnam where data processing of the war was conducted. In After Pinkville, Noam Chomsky described the American War as the country's intention to “to turn the land of Vietnam into an automated murder machine.”

The computerization project of the American troops was supported by International Business Machines Corporation (IBM), the leading computer manufacturer that was producing America's most advanced computer technology at the time. Some of these advanced IBM mainframes and smaller computers that were imported to South Vietnam included the IBM 1400 series and various models of the IBM System/360.

An article published in The Misc in 1970 about IBM's involvement in the Vietnam War (left) and a photo showing Nguyen Thi Nhin fetching information from the computer's memory bank (right). Image via Vassar Archive (left). Photo by Douglas Pike via Vietnam Center and Archive (right).

According to a New York Times article from October 1, 1969, on the Combined Intelligence Center in Saigon (where most of the IBM mainframes were based), the facility was rather complex: “Day and night in its antiseptic interior, a family of blinking, whirring computers devours, digests, spews out a Gargantuan diet of information about the enemy.”

The amount of data that the American troops were collecting on its opponent was astounding, as the Times articulated: “The landscape of Vietnam and the border regions are studded with electronic sensors that beep information into the banks of computers. Radar, cameras, infrared detectors and a growing array of more exotic devices contribute to the mass of information. Not long ago reconnaissance planes began carrying television cameras.”

During this turbulent period, one of the first attempts to make the Vietnamese language compatible with early computers started to take shape. In When Big Blue Went To War and White Shirts and Ties, a former IBM expert who used to work in Saigon, Dan Feltham, recalls that from 1965 to 1973, there were 250 IBM computer experts working in the city. These experts' jobs often included writing software applications, building computer centers and training data-processing and programming skills for Vietnamese professionals. Some of the computer languages taught included FORTRAN, COBOL and PL/1.

A group of Vietnamese keypunch operators, most of which were top students. Photo by Douglas Pike via Vietnam Center and Archive.

On March 26, 1970, the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) supported a project which called for printing in Vietnamese. Because the machine was incompatible with Vietnamese diacritics, technicians working on the project had to print the unaccented Vietnamese writing first using the IBM 1403 — a computer equipped with a line printer and a keyboard — then add the diacritical marks by hand later. However, the IBM system engineers figured out a solution that would allow typing Vietnamese documents with Vietnamese diacritics right from the machine. It was called the 1403 Vietnamese print chain.

The 1403 print chain at work. Screenshot via When Big Blue Went To War.

Keypunch operator Tran Thi Minh Huong transfers data onto punch cards. Photo by Douglas Pike via Vietnam Center and Archive.

The 1403 print chain required translation, a unique program and a special type slug. The engineers would encode the English into Vietnamese with diacritical marks and punch that encoded data into punch cards. Each letter with Vietnamese diacritical marks would need two spaces representing two bytes on a punch card as opposed to one for the English alphabet due to the added marks. This caused the computer to read the letter as two characters, so a program in Assembly was written to manipulate the process by instructing the computer to read the accented letter as one character. A special type slug manufactured for the Vietnamese language was then needed to print out these accented letters.

This is the end of part 1 of our two-part series on the history of Vietnamese-centric typing technologies. Read part 2 of the series here.

This article was originally published in 2018.

Hoa Sữa, Poetic Icon of Autumn in Hanoi or Nasal Health Enemy No. 1?

2025-01-09T12:00:00+07:00

It was early in the day. I opened my window to let in the very first rays of the morning sun, just to catch a waft of that distinctive floral aroma lingering in the cold air. This year, autumn came early, and hoa sữa has started blooming where I live.

People often refer to hoa sữa as the “muse” of the Hanoian autumn, coating city streets in a layer of pristine white blossoms. Its fragrance is the most pungent element capital residents' collective memory. Every autumn, there are two ways Hanoians would talk about hoa sữa: one shrouded in eager anticipation and dreamy romanticism, and the other is pretty much “I can’t stand it, it’s so annoying.”

Hoa sữa appears frequently in evocations of autumn, in between romanticisms and laments about its concurrently sweet and dizzying smell. No matter how one feels about that, it’s impossible to deny that the flower has become a unique harbinger of the season — an aroma that reminds locals of nostalgia, something that many hold dear.

Hoa sữa, the unofficial muse of the Hanoian autumn. Photo via Tiền Phong.

A familiar flower

Milkwood’s scientific name is Alstonia scholaris, known in some regions as mò cua, but it’s perhaps nationally famous by the name hoa sữa. The name arose because the plant emits an abundant white sap just like milk. It possesses a distinctively powerful fragrance that fills the air every time the northern autumn arrives.

Hoa sữa is an evergreen tropical tree belonging to the dogbane family, with a lifespan averaging a few hundred years old. The tree has a sizable trunk growing upright, reaching a height of 10–20 meters, though a few have grown to 50 meters. Trees produce wide canopies so the species is often planted along streets, in parks and residential enclaves to provide shade. Milkwood likes tropical climates and ample sunlight, and grows fast, so it has been widely planted across Vietnam, especially in Nha Trang, Quy Nhơn and Hà Nội, where hoa sữa is the most densely distributed.

Milkwood has wide canopies, fan-shaped leaf arrangements, and a strong smell. Photo via Wikimedia.

Hoa sữa bloom in clusters with each tube-shaped flower consisting of five petals and five sepals. Flowers are arranged in circular formations that, from afar, look like bouquets standing out on the green bed of leathery leaves. The sight of these white bouquets swaying in the soft sunlight of an autumn morning is something especially poetic to me. Just one look and I can immediately feel the tender embrace of a new season that’s weaving itself in between the pulses of the city.

Maybe it is that unique, unmistakable scent that has entered the collective memory of the people. It’s formidably strong, reminiscent of lily, but also quite different as it spreads in the cold air of autumn. It can be pleasant to occasionally detect when one’s not paying attention but is suffocating when living right next to it, especially at night.

Hoa sữa bloom in clusters in the Hanoian autumn. Photo via Dân Trí.

Those who grew up in Hanoi and even those who’ve fallen in love with the capital have probably experienced periods of yearning for a moment of relaxing quietude when you sit on the sidewalk sipping milk coffee, munching on green cốm, and sniffing hoa sữa in the atmosphere. Because of this yearning, everytime I hear ‘Nhớ mùa thu Hà Nội’ (On missing Hanoi’s autumns), an unnamed emotion swells within me:

Hà Nội mùa thu / Autumn in Hanoi
Cây cơm nguội vàng, cây bàng lá đỏ / Awash in yellow cơm nguội trees and red bàng leaves
Nằm kề bên nhau, phố xưa nhà cổ, mái ngói thơm nâu / Tree by tree, old streets and ancient houses, ochre roofs scented in brown
Hà Nội mùa thu, mùa thu Hà Nội / Autumnal Hanoi, autumn in Hanoi
Mùa hoa sữa về thơm từng ngọn gió / The season of hoa sữa, perfuming every zephyr
Mùa cốm xanh về thơm bàn tay nhỏ… / The season of green cốm, lingering on tiny hands

Since when has hoa sữa taken root in Vietnam?

This question was answered by journalist and writer Nguyễn Ngọc Tiến in an essay: “The French planted the first milkwood tree on Quán Thánh Street. They noticed its tall trunk and luxuriant canopies, great to help shade local streets from the searing sun of northern Vietnam. The following years, more hoa sữa were planted along streets like Nguyễn Du. As the trunks often spawn tough protrusions, people used to call it vú trâu [buffalo boob] tree. In the beginning of the 20^th century, hoa sữa were planted sparingly with a gap of 10–15 meters between trees, so when the flowers bloomed at the end of September to October, the fragrance was only gentle, not pungent.”

Since then, hoa sữa has spread across Hanoi’s major streets; Nguyễn Du Street became the unofficial “hoa sữa street,” to the point that many believe that only by being on Nguyễn Du can one grasp how breathtaking (literally) the flowers are. In recent years, the municipal government has cultivated hoa sữa all over town and Nguyễn Du is no longer the sole owner of that title. On Thụy Khuê, Quán Thanh, Cửa Bắc or Đào Tấn streets, one can easily recognize that scent every fall. For a crop of young Hanoians, taking a stroll on the bank of Hoàn Kiếm Lake to catch a touch of monsoon wind mixed with hoa sữa aroma is a yearly ritual.

Rows of milkwood trees in Thái Bình City. Photo via Sài Gòn Tiếp Thị.

Departing from Hanoi, hoa sữa embarked on a cross-country trail to pepper alongside streets in the south. Around October, a stretch of Nguyễn Lương Bằng Street in District 7 of Saigon where it cuts Trần Văn Trà Street is perfumed with the sweet smell of hoa sữa. There are around 20 milkwood trees here, all planted in 1997. Hoa sữa might not be as prevalent in the city as in Hanoi, but if you know where to look, there are spots to relish its distinctive scent. There are a few hoa sữa trees on Hoàng Sa and Trường Sa streets, one in Vĩnh Lộc Industrial Park, and some individual trees in residential areas across town.

Outside of Vietnam’s colder regions or metropolises, I also bumped into hoa sữa during my trips to the Mekong Delta in autumn, like in An Giang. A friend once told me that to get from Ngã Ba Lộ Tẻ in Châu Thành District to Ngã Tư Đèn 4 Ngọn in Long Xuyên City, there are six hoa sữa “checkpoints.” The aroma is most intense around the area of Hoàng Diệu Bridge and Nguyễn Trãi Street. Though the tree and blossoms still look the same, somehow in my mind, it doesn’t have the same grace like those people often rave about in Hanoi. Perhaps it’s because you can take an icon out of its homeland, but you can’t separate the land from the icon.

Hoa sữa and an indictment: guilty or not?

Hoa sữa only does what it evolved to do in nature, but its existence has become victim to much censure by the public.

Fascinatingly, there were quite a number of legal suits involving hoa sữa in history, as those living near flowering trees cannot stand its head-splittingly intense scent. In 2004, locals in Tam Kỳ City, Quảng Nam filed a complaint against the flower, alleging that its pungent smell caused constant bouts of allergy, asthma, and migraine. Residents of Trà Vinh City in the Mekong Delta also once threatened to sue the local people’s committee as the city’s illogical hoa sữa density caused much inconvenience to their livelihood.

Following the uproars in many cities across Vietnam, localities started removing milkwood trees and replacing the plots with other non-flowering trees to reduce the concentration of hoa sữa. Via these incidences, I learned that this is not just a problem unique to Vietnam, but also in a number of other Asian countries where the plant is endemic.

As an evergreen tropical species, hoa sữa shows up in other Southeast Asian nations as well. The newspaper Bangkok Post once wrote a piece suggesting the use of hoa sữa to combat unpleasant smells in the neighborhood. In Indian, local opinions about the tree are also just as polarizing: some think that it’s so aromatic that “no matter how busy one is, they must stop to enjoy it,” but others believe that its intense smell causes a lot of troubles in their daily lives.

Hoa sữa lining local streets. Photo via ivivu.

A government directive from Noida, a city in northern India, reads: “If asthma sufferers stand under a milkwood tree for too long, they can have respiratory problems.” The city has since replaced hoa sữa with purple jarul trees. In Taiwan, over two-thirds of milkwood trees at Chihcheng Secondary School were axed as their scent negatively affected students.

Preserving the fragrance of the Hanoian autumn

Above all, whether they love, hate, or threaten to chop all the trees down, I know that deep inside their hearts, Hanoians still value their role in the city landscape and the memories they’ve built with hoa sữa. In the collective subconscious, there’s always a sense of anticipation before the first blossoms show up, signaling an impending autumn.

To conserve that elegance and ease the people’s discomfort, I think there needs to be deliberate efforts to space out hoa sữa trees to a manageable distance like 50 meters. In reality, some localities went too hard on the planting with just 2–3 meters between trees. By relocating or removing some trees in central areas, the city can still protect one of Hanoi’s most iconic autumn features while ensuring the health of its people.

Plastic Waste Is Choking the Mekong River and Every Nation on Its Path

2025-01-05T11:00:00+07:00

On Son Island in Vietnam’s Mekong Delta, Le Trung Tin scatters fish feed into his ponds, where dozens of snakehead fish leap through the surface in synchronised bursts. “I taught them how to do that,” he says proudly, tossing another handful of feed at his fish.

The scene looks idyllic, but Tin’s fish farm is a reluctant response to an escalating crisis. For decades, he made his living fishing the Hau River, a distributary of the Mekong. But in recent years, plastic waste clogged his nets and strangled the fish. “I had no choice but to stop,” he says. “Everything was tangled — trash, nets, even the fish themselves. It was hopeless.”

Now, Le relies on enclosed ponds using filtered water to keep his fish alive. “I built this ecological environment free of plastic waste, chemical spills and [protected it from] extreme weather,” he says.

Video by Anton L. Delgado via Dialogue Earth.

Le’s experience reflects the wider challenges facing the Mekong. Stretching over 4,300 kilometers from the Tibetan Plateau to the East Sea, the river supports nearly 70 million people and some of the world’s most biodiverse ecosystems. Yet, it is one of the most plastic-polluted rivers in the world and among the 10 rivers in Asia that carry the vast majority of plastic to the sea. The Mekong dumps — by some estimates — tens of thousands of tonnes each year into the ocean, with plastic waste accumulating along its banks, tributaries and lakes.

Plastic enters the Mekong in myriad ways — agricultural runoff, unregulated dumping and a flood of single-use packaging from upstream countries like China and Myanmar. It accumulates in hot spots like Tonle Sap Lake in Cambodia and the wetlands of Vietnam’s Mekong Delta, where this plastic waste threatens biodiversity, food security and human health.

Plastics and other waste accumulate along the riverbank near the city of Can Tho in Vietnam’s Mekong Delta region. Photo by Anton L. Delgado via Dialogue Earth.

The unchecked proliferation of single-use plastics, combined with a lack of waste management infrastructure across the region, has resulted in widespread mismanagement of plastic waste — much of which is neither recycled, incinerated nor properly disposed in landfills. Vietnam, often ranked as the world’s fourth-largest contributor of mismanaged plastic waste, also accounts for a significant share of marine plastic debris, highlighting the country’s struggle to address the crisis effectively.

Addressing the Mekong’s plastic pollution crisis will require coordinated efforts from regional governments and transboundary organizations, however experts say a lasting solution requires a bold global agreement limiting plastic use and production, combined with enforceable regional policies.

A global crisis: Will the plastics treaty deliver?

Hopes were high as national negotiators gathered in Busan, South Korea, to finalise the Global Plastics Treaty — an ambitious UN effort aimed at tackling the global plastic pollution crisis. However, the talks were adjourned earlier this month without agreement, leaving campaigners frustrated in their push for the treaty to address both ends of the crisis: limiting plastic production and improving global waste-management systems.

On Sunday, December 1, the final day of the summit, Eirik Lindebjerg, global plastics policy lead for WWF, said governments were “no closer to agreeing on a solution to the worsening plastic crisis.”

“For too long, a small minority of states have held the negotiation process hostage. It is abundantly clear that these countries have no intention of finding a meaningful solution to this crisis,” he continued in a press release. “It is unjust that those who bear the greatest burden of plastic pollution are being denied the opportunity to forge a solution among themselves by those profiteering off the unregulated production and consumption of plastic.”

Critics also point out that previous global agreements to resolve environmental crises, such as climate change and biodiversity loss, have fallen short of their goals due to weak enforcement mechanisms and the influence of powerful industry lobbying groups.

A plastic bag full of waste floats down the Ruak River, a tributary of the Mekong on the border of Myanmar and Thailand. Nearby, a rescued elephant plays in the water. The United Nations Environment Programme warns plastic pollution could triple by 2040, threatening the biodiversity of this rich ecosystem. Photo by Anton L. Delgado via Dialogue Earth.

Plastic production has doubled over the past 20 years, with over 400 million tons produced annually. Single-use plastics, which make up half of this total, are particularly problematic, accounting for a significant portion of the waste clogging rivers like the Mekong. While technological solutions like recycling and waste-to-energy plants are often advocated by industry, their impact pales in comparison to the scale of production.

The United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) has warned that plastic pollution could triple by 2040 without drastic action.

“The price for inaction is far greater than wasted time, it puts both planetary and human health on the line and sets us up for a scenario where ambition could diminish over time,” says Erin Simon, vice president and head of plastic waste and business with WWF. “We can’t back down on delivering a legally binding text that finally puts us on a course to eliminate plastic pollution,” he added.

Local fisher Boonrat Chaikeaw catches a net full of trash as he plies the Mekong’s waters by Chiang Khong on the border of Thailand and Laos. Photo by Anton L. Delgado via Dialogue Earth.

Every day after fishing, Boonrat has to carefully untangle plastic waste from his nets before he can return to the river. Photo by Anton L. Delgado via Dialogue Earth.

We visited four plastic-waste hot spots along the lower reaches of the Mekong — Chiang Saen in Thailand, Phnom Penh and Tonle Sap Lake in Cambodia and Vietnam’s Mekong Delta. These sites showcase the problems the plastics treaty needs to address: waste from newly produced plastic, the damaging impact of plastic waste on local people and the transnational nature of the problem.

Chiang Saen, Thailand: Where the Mekong’s plastic problem peaks

In northern Thailand, the Mekong flows past Chiang Saen near the Golden Triangle, where Thailand, Myanmar and Laos converge. Here, plastic waste collects in growing heaps along the riverbanks. The debris — food wrappers, plastic bottles and fishing nets — has floated downstream from upstream countries like China and Myanmar, clogging tributaries like the Ruak River.

“Sometimes it feels like the waste never ends,” says Poonyawee Srisantear, who manages a local elephant camp. Mahouts (elephant keepers) at the camp regularly collect rubbish from the riverbanks to protect their elephants. “The smell of food clings to the plastic and elephants often mistake it for something to eat,” she explains. “When they swallow it, it can be life-threatening to them.”

Video by Anton L. Delgado via Dialogue Earth.

Although plastic waste is visible along the Mekong’s banks, quantitative information remains scarce. In recent years, international organizations have tried to quantify the scale of the problem.

Thailand, like many Mekong countries, also struggles with inadequate waste management systems, which exacerbate the problem. Over 150 plastic-waste hot spots have been identified across the country. A 2023 study detected close to 1,000 official and unofficial waste sites across Southeast Asia, nearly a fifth of which were located within 200m of a waterway. Almost half of these were in the five Mekong nations of Myanmar, Cambodia, Laos, Thailand and Vietnam.

A volunteer douses a burning pile of rubbish at an unofficial dump site next to the Tonle Sap River in Cambodia. The lack of proper waste management exacerbates the problem of plastic pollution in most Mekong countries. Photo by Anton L. Delgado via Dialogue Earth.

Chiang Saen is also the site of one of the Mekong River Commission’s (MRC) upcoming video monitoring stations, part of a broader initiative to track plastic flows across the basin. The MRC serves as an intergovernmental advisory body and the video monitoring system dovetails with its new protocols for riverine microplastic monitoring; the first guidelines standardizing water health monitoring across the lower Mekong basin.

“We need more [and better] data to drive policy change,” says Phan Nam Long, a water quality officer with the MRC. “Without information on the scale of the problem, we cannot create effective solutions.”

Critics, however, argue that such monitoring efforts fall short of addressing the underlying problem, in part due to the MRC’s limited advisory role to the region’s governments.

“It is fine for the MRC to monitor. Yes, the more information, the better. But that can’t be the only thing the MRC or the Mekong nations do,” says Niwat Roykaew, also known as Kru Thi [teacher in Thai], an environmental activist, who founded the Mekong School. “We can see how the garbage impacts the river. We can see how the garbage impacts those dependent on the river. That is enough information for us to begin to act.”

Thai environmentalist Niwat Roykaew, also known as Kru Thi (teacher in Thai), sits in front of a banner at the entrance to the Mekong School, an educational and knowledge-sharing initiative, which monitors development in the Mekong River Basin. The sign reads: “The Mekong is our life” in English and Thai. Photo by Anton L. Delgado via Dialogue Earth.

Niwat wants to see a basin-wide accountability framework to tackle plastic pollution. But with no agreement from the UN in Busan, he questions whether the Mekong region will be able to overcome its own divisions to establish a unified approach.

“All the countries that share the Mekong River must share the responsibility,” he says. “Plastic is choking the river and the consequences affect us all — from the fish we eat to the water we drink.”

Recent studies conducted along the riverside near Niwat’s school underline his point.

“We’re addicted to plastics, now more than ever,” says Panate Manomaivibool, an assistant professor at Thailand’s Burapha University. Over the course of a year, ending in July 2022, his team collected 2,650 large waste samples from the waters around the Golden Triangle. He adds: “Compared to the scale of the problem, attempts to fix it are tiny.”

Panate’s research determined that 91% of the waste was plastic, with labels indicating around 30% originated in Myanmar and nearly 20% in China, underscoring the transboundary nature of the challenge. “Plastic pollution has already contaminated our food chain and all life in the Mekong,” he warns.

Panate says he tries “to be optimistic that we are not yet at the irreversible turning point”, but fears the region’s addiction to plastic will be hard to break.

“We are the first generation facing this problem on this scale. Our ancestors, even our parents, were never exposed to this level of plastic pollution,” he says. “Without an alternative, our countries will always choose to use the cheapest, easiest option. For now, that remains plastic.”

The confluence of the Ruak and Mekong rivers marks the point where Myanmar, Laos and Thailand meet, an area known as the Golden Triangle. Over 4,300 km in length, the Mekong passes through or marks the borders of six countries. Photo by Anton L. Delgado via Dialogue Earth.

Thai academic Panate Manomaivibool’s research has shown that over 90% of the waste samples his team collected from the Golden Triangle is plastic. Labels indicate 30% originated from Myanmar and 20% from as far away as China. Photo by Anton L. Delgado via Dialogue Earth.

The Thai government has taken action by announcing a ban on plastic waste imports from 2025, a move inspired by China’s 2018 restrictions, which redirected foreign waste to countries such as Vietnam, Malaysia and Thailand itself. Yet domestic plastic consumption continues to rise.

“The more people there are, the more the city develops, the economy grows and the use of plastic increases,” says Saksan Chuamuangpan, director of Chiang Saen’s Public Health Department.

Waste production in the district has skyrocketed from two tons per day two decades ago to 15 tons today, he says, and warns a joint effort is needed.

Tonle Sap Lake: Cambodia’s beating heart

In Cambodia, Tonle Sap Lake — a vital freshwater fishery for Southeast Asia — is increasingly choked by plastic waste. Each monsoon season, the Tonle Sap River reverses flow, carrying waste upstream into the lake. This cycle has made the survival of the lake’s ecosystems ever more uncertain.

Cambodia’s minister of environment Eang Sophalleth talks to the press about his anti-plastics campaign at a conference earlier this year. Photo by Anton L. Delgado via Dialogue Earth.

Since assuming the role of Cambodia’s environment minister last year, Eang Sophalleth has made addressing plastic pollution a priority. As part of a national anti-plastics campaign he has called on half of Cambodia’s 17 million inhabitants to reduce their use of plastics.

“Plastic is our number one enemy,” he said at the September launch of the campaign.

Cambodia also joined the Global Plastic Action Partnership last year and signed an agreement with Laos to tackle cross-border plastic pollution. But the focus has been on changing public perception and plastic habits, with little mention of plastic manufacturers or waste management improvements. Eang says only when plastic reduction targets are met, will a major clean-up of Tonle Sap Lake, the nation’s main source of protein, take place. “There’s no point in cleaning if we’re throwing away more than we clean up,” he said.

As it stands, though, much of the plastic continues to accumulate in fishing nets and along the shorelines, with little evidence of progress on waste reduction.

The fishing village of Kampong Phluk on the banks of Tonle Sap Lake, a vital source of protein for Cambodia. Every monsoon season, the Tonle Sap River reverses its flow, bringing waste from the Mekong upstream and dumping it in the lake. Photo by Anton L. Delgado via Dialogue Earth.

The propeller of a fishing boat on Tonle Sap Lake, jammed by a plastic bag. Fishers on the lake, and elsewhere along the Mekong, face a daily struggle with plastic waste, which breaks their motors and clogs up their nets. Photo by Anton L. Delgado via Dialogue Earth.

In Kampong Phluk, a fishing village on Tonle Sap Lake, plastic waste disrupts daily life for local communities. Sophal Sea, director of the NGO Bambooshoot, says the debris is damaging livelihoods. “The nets get tangled, motors break down and fish stocks are declining,” he says.

Welcoming the government’s apparent focus on plastic, he adds: “This is the first time I’ve heard government leaders promise that kind of support.” However, he stressed the need for political support and regulations to address the systemic issues fuelling the crisis and to wean Cambodia off what he described as its “trash culture”.

Plastic disposal options are scarce in villages surrounding the lake, leading residents to dump waste directly into the water.

“Most people don’t know how to dispose of their waste properly. They just throw it everywhere,” says Srey Toch, a litter picker with River Ocean Cleanup who has joined Sophal and a group of volunteers to collect rubbish at the confluence of the Tonle Sap and Mekong rivers.

Video by Anton L. Delgado via Dialogue Earth.

Srey Toch’s observations are corroborated by Sovann Nou, River Ocean Cleanup’s executive director, who attributes the problem to inadequate household and industrial waste management, combined with limited awareness amongst the public regarding the impact plastic waste has.

Walking along the riverbank, he stops to hold up some of the debris: plastic tarps, bottles and tires. At one point he pauses to pick up a dead turtle lying among the waste — its death a stark reminder of the toll plastic pollution takes on wildlife.

As the Mekong flows south past Phnom Penh toward Vietnam, Eang expressed hope that other upstream nations will follow Cambodia’s lead in beginning to take steps to tackle plastic pollution. “If we clean up plastics, downstream communities like Vietnam will be grateful. We’ll all benefit,” he said.

Sovann Nou, River Ocean Cleanup’s founder, holds up a turtle discovered among the plastic waste during their litter pick. Photo by Anton L. Delgado via Dialogue Earth.

Can Tho: Where the Mekong meets the sea

In Vietnam’s Mekong Delta, the river fans out into a vast network of tributaries and wetlands supporting millions of people through farming and fishing. Known as Vietnam’s “rice bowl,” this fertile region is also heavily impacted by plastic pollution, with much of the waste from upstream deposited in its waterways and rice fields.

By the time the Mekong reaches Vietnam’s Delta, the river carries the accumulated waste of its 4,300km journey.

“Most inland waste reaches the river through canals, especially during annual flooding,” says Nguyen Xuan Hoang, a researcher from Can Tho University’s College of Environment and Natural Resources. “Most of this plastic isn’t from Vietnam, but as the basin’s lowest point, we suffer the most.”

Aquaculture farmer Le Trung Tin’s snakehead fish jump into the air to catch feed. Le gave up fishing on the Mekong Delta’s Hau River several years ago due to increasing levels of pollution. Photo by Anton L. Delgado via Dialogue Earth.

Back on Son Island, on the Hau River, Le has experienced this suffering firsthand, but switching to fish farming in enclosed ponds appears to have paid off. He notes a reduction in fish deaths, combined with an increase in profits compared to his previous ventures in the plastic-choked waters of the river.

“Living in harmony with nature is essential for fish farming, but it’s becoming harder in the delta,” he adds, acknowledging the additional effort required to shield his livelihood from the worsening environmental challenges.

For farmers like Trung Tin, in nearby Thoi Lai District, the pollution is impossible to ignore. Due to a lack of plastic waste disposal options, farmers often leave fertilizer and pesticide bottles in fields, fearing the release of toxins if they burn them. Rain washes these bottles and residues into the canals, polluting the delta’s waterways.

Rice farmer Trung Tin picks up plastic waste from his paddy field in Vietnam’s Mekong Delta. Lacking waste disposal infrastructure, he says farmers often have no choice but to leave used fertilizer and pesticide bottles — like the one he is carrying — in their fields. Photo by Anton L. Delgado via Dialogue Earth.

According to Trung, who has farmed rice for over 20 years, “the climate now is not easy.” “The soil has less nutrition, and we must protect crops, even if it means using more chemicals.” Seeing discarded bottles in the river, he adds: “It’s scary to think about what’s in the fish we eat.”

Cong Thuan Nguyen, another researcher at Can Tho University, confirmed that agricultural waste from rice farms is a significant source of pollution. “We’re still trying to understand the full scale. The more we learn, the more the problem grows,” he shares.

Can Tho University’s Cong Thuan Nguyen and Nguyen Xuan Hoang say they’re still trying to understand the full scale of the plastics problem in the Mekong Delta. “The more we learn, the more the problem grows,” says Cong. Photo by Anton L. Delgado via Dialogue Earth.

In 2019, the Vietnamese government appeared to take steps to combat the plastic crisis, by announcing a ban on plastic waste imports starting in 2025. In 2022, it implemented the Extended Producer Responsibility policy, requiring companies to manage the recycling of their products and packaging to reduce waste and promote sustainability.

Despite these commitments, the country was the world’s fourth largest importer of plastic waste in 2022, adding to its waste management struggles. A significant proportion — up to 30% — of this imported plastic leaks into rivers and waterways, including the Mekong Delta, often carried by runoff or untreated wastewater.

As the 2025 deadline for plastic waste imports approaches, Vietnam’s ability to enforce the ban and transition to alternative recycling or disposal systems will be critical to reducing the plastic burden on the Mekong Delta and safeguarding the livelihoods it sustains. Among these challenges is the need for greater clarity from Vietnam, whose stance on INC-5 appears to straddle both national economic interests, particularly in the plastics industry, and broader commitments to addressing global plastic pollution. Moving forward, Vietnam will need to prioritise one over the other to demonstrate its commitment to tangible action.

Thailand, meanwhile, has expressed support for a legally binding international agreement to reduce plastic waste and mitigate its environmental and health impacts. However, its heavy reliance on single-use plastics and limited progress in addressing domestic waste management challenges raise questions about how effectively these commitments will be implemented. Similarly, while Cambodia has emphasized the importance of effective implementation mechanisms, including the establishment of national committees under Article 8 of the treaty, its capacity to deliver on these objectives remains uncertain. The country’s reliance on international collaboration, capacity-building and technical assistance underscores gaps in its existing infrastructure to tackle plastic pollution independently.

A piece of polystyrene stamped with the word “Mekong” caught in water hyacinth along the banks of a stream in Vietnam’s delta region. Photo by Anton L. Delgado via Dialogue Earth.

Meanwhile, grassroots efforts are working to clean the Mekong Delta despite overwhelming odds. Waste-collecting boats regularly navigate canals to remove debris and NGOs run educational campaigns to reduce dependency on single-use plastic.

The Mekong’s plastic crisis is not just a regional issue; it is emblematic of a global failure to manage waste sustainably. As the river carries tens of thousands of tonnes of plastic waste into the East Sea each year, its plight underscores the urgency of solutions at every level — local, regional and global.

“We have not yet reached the summit of our efforts,” INC chair Luis Vayas said on Sunday, at the end of seven days of negotiation that concluded without consensus. The meeting was adjourned, with plans to reconvene next year, leaving questions about how soon tangible actions might address pressing issues like plastic pollution in the Mekong Delta.

Without intervention, the Mekong will continue offloading plastic into the East Sea. From the first signs of plastic pollution in the Golden Triangle to the plastic-clogged canals of the delta, the river’s journey highlights the urgent need for coordinated, cross-border action to protect both the river and the millions who depend on it.

Additional reporting by Ladawan Sondak in Thailand and Nguyen Hao Thanh Thao in Vietnam.

This article was originally published on Dialogue Earth and was republished with permission. Visit the original article here.

The Childhood of Côn Đảo's Baby Turtles Caught on Film

2024-12-20T13:00:00+07:00

In July, I visited Côn Đảo National Park as part of a group of International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) sea turtle volunteers to see first-hand conservation efforts aimed at the local sea turtle population.

In the top photo, a sea turtle heads back to the sea after completing her mission. There are five types of sea turtles in Vietnam, including the green turtle, hawksbill, olive ridley, loggerhead, and leatherback turtle. Green turtles are the most common species in Côn Đảo National Park. Côn Đảo includes the main island of Côn Sơn, and numerous small islets. Bảy Cạnh Islet has the most breeding turtles in Vietnam due to its long, beautiful beach.

Anywhere sea turtles live, the underwater habitat must be very clean. It takes nearly 30 years for a sea turtle to reach reproductive age, and they face acute threats from climate change, pollution and hunting while to 42,000 sea turtles are killed every year for commercial purposes.

Breeding can take sea turtles up to four hours. It's an exhausting process for them to come on shore and dig a half-meter-deep hole to lay eggs. During our visit, we could even hear the hard breathing of the females. During the breeding season, which runs from June to September, thousands of turtle eggs are laid on Bảy Cạnh.

Only one out of 1,000 baby turtles survive to adulthood. Besides ocean pollution and the low natural survival rate, human activity is a huge threat to turtles. For example, turtle meat and eggs are sometimes served as a specialty to tourists.

Thịnh, 24, is the youngest ranger at Côn Đảo National Park. In the above photo, he is laying turtle eggs in the incubation area after being brought from the beach. The global sea turtle population has plunged dramatically over the last 60 years due to hunting, and they need to be preserved before they go extinct. In addition, increasing global temperatures are directly affecting the turtle sex ratio, which means in the future there will be more female turtles than males. Turtle reproduction follows temperature-dependent sex determination, with lower temperatures during incubation yielding males while higher ones resulting in females.

Due to climate change, the incubation is divided into two areas. One part is kept under the shade, as lower temperatures produce more males, while the other section sits under natural light. Maintaining this arrangement will help to balance the gender ratio.

Rangers and volunteers check turtle nests in the incubation area. Each bamboo stick marks a turtle nest with a sequence number, the date they were laid, the number of eggs in the nest, and name of the ranger who brought the turtle eggs into the incubator. They must be extremely careful to not step on a turtle nest, and this is why tourists are not allowed to enter this space.

Turtle eggs take 45–60 days to hatch. Turtle nests are covered with baskets about one-two weeks before hatching. After hatching, the turtles dig out of the sand at the same time. The baskets help the rangers to collect the baby turtles in order to release them safely into the ocean.

New-born baby turtles can fast for one week. Once they reach reproductive age in 30 years, they will return to where they were born; a phenomenon that remains a mystery. Despite the low survival rates, we hope to see some of these baby turtles again on Bảy Cạnh.

This article was originally published in 2019.

WWF-Viet Nam’s “Elements of the Mekong Delta” Networking Dinner Shines a Light on Climate-Resilient Products

2024-12-13T12:45:00+07:00

As part of a project aimed at empowering communities in the Mekong Delta that are facing serious threats from climate change, WWF-Viet Nam assists local households in raising plants that are more resilient than typical monoculture crops and animals in ways that are less detrimental to the environment. To help amplify the voices of farmers and communities embracing sustainable farming practices and create awareness about the nature-based solutions (NbS) products such as rice, shrimps, crabs, lotus seeds, and freshwater prawns that they raise and grow, WWF-Viet Nam recently held a networking dinner at Mùa Craft Saké.

In the Mekong Delta, mangroves, freshwater swamps, rivers, and a range of tropical and subtropical forests teem with unique birds, fish, insects, reptiles, and amphibians. Vast rice fields, lush gardens, and fertile waters for raising plants and animals allow it to support culturally diverse communities known for their laid-back hospitality.

Covering over 40,000 sq. km in southwestern Vietnam, the Mekong Delta is an essential environmental and agricultural region. Unfortunately, it is facing serious threats from climate change, water extraction, habitat conversion and degradation, and sand mining combined with rising seawater and salt intrusion are among the many issues expected to get worse in the coming decades.

To support the country’s response to this urgent and massive challenge, WWF-Viet Nam has piloted several NbS projects in the Mekong Delta, which have improved the socio-economic situation and resilience of local communities through sustainable livelihoods while protecting and restoring critical ecosystems. Pilot models include raising floating rice with fish; mangrove with shrimp; lotus with fish; and rice with shrimp. Each supports farmers to raise, grow, and process agriculture and aquaculture products in ways that are less detrimental to the environment and also more sustainable in uncertain climatic conditions.

The event, Elements of the Mekong Delta, took place on 23 November 2024, to help showcase the diverse range of NbS products through culinary creativity from Mùa Craft Saké’s head chef Trụ Lang, in partnership with Nguyễn Thị Phương Uyên, head chef of Nam Mê Kitchen & Bar, both of whom specialize in utilizing local ingredients in their menus.

For the networking dinner, the chefs designed a menu based on the concept “Ăn Cơm” (eating together) with six dishes and drinks highlighting NbS ingredients.

Starting off with the Mekong nipa palm salad made with nipa palm, and vegetables centered around black tiger shrimp from the project in Cà Mau Province (gỏi dừa nước nam bộ - dừa nước, rau củ, tôm sú).

This was served alongside crab and lotus spring rolls using crab meat also sourced from Cà Mau, lotus seed, pork (chả giò cua hạt sen - thịt cua, hạt sen, thịt heo).

The menu not only represented a traditional Mekong Delta meal, but also one of WWF-Viet Nam’s mixed rice-shrimp aquaculture models in Cà Mau, Bạc Liêu, and Kiên Giang, where the ponds produce rice and freshwater prawns in rainy seasons and raise brackish-water shrimps and crabs in dry seasons and periods of saltwater intrusion.

Products from this model also appeared in the following offerings of stir-fried lotus root, wild crab paste, salted egg sauce, and herbs (ngó sen xào tỏi - ngó sen, sốt riêu cua, sốt trứng muối gạch cua, rau thơm) and braised giant freshwater prawn, fresh coconut juice (tôm càng xanh rim nước dừa - tôm càng xanh, nước dừa tươi).

One ingredient was particularly prominent due to its importance as one of the central products in the NbS portfolio - floating rice (gạo lúa mùa nổi) from the CRxN Mekong project in Long An Province, which can be made into milk or eaten regularly. Cultivated without pesticides or chemicals, this strain of rice was reintroduced into the province in 2020 after having mostly disappeared in the 1970s. Unlike other strains, floating rice can grow in deep water thanks to a stem that lengthens to follow rising water upwards. While submerged, it's protected from pests. This means it can be grown in sync with natural water cycles and without damaging chemicals or destructive flooding control. Critically, this also translates to benefits for farmers who reduce their input costs by not having to use fertilizer and have potential increased income generation opportunities from more sustainable practices.

The dinner attracted representatives from prestigious organizations, including the Australian Government in Bangkok and Hồ Chí Minh City, the Australian Chamber of Commerce in Vietnam, global companies as well as local enterprises. By fostering connections between communities, businesses, consumers and investors, WWF-Viet Nam hopes to build awareness about the potential of sustainable produce and demonstrate the business case for nature-based solutions and products. This can further help incentivize communities to adopt practices that support floodplain restoration that reap benefits for people and nature. It also provides a powerful example of how sustainable change is possible and delicious.

Climate Resilient by Nature (CRxN) is an Australian Government initiative in collaboration with WWF-Australia, designed to promote high-integrity and equitable nature-based solutions to address climate change in the Indo-Pacific. The CRxN Mekong - Viet Nam project is supported through funding from the Mekong Australia Partnership – Water, Energy, and Climate.

Learn more at climateresilientbynature.com.

Ward off Your Monday Blues by Joining Me on Beginners' Skateboard Night

2024-12-12T15:54:28+07:00

Usually in life, niche topics are commonly associated with unpleasant stigmas and misunderstandings — skateboarding in Vietnam is no exception. Once, I admittedly was influenced by such one-sided assumptions.

I used to believe that skateboarding is a street hobby reserved for hip-hop revelers, and for shirtless sweaty dudes who always swear on Nguyễn Huệ Walking Street. Much like the prejudiced characters we often see in the movies, I met my “comeuppance” after accompanying my friend one summer to a beginner’s skateboarding class. Even though I’m not a dude, not very street, and don’t know anything about hip-hop, I was completely enthralled by the dopamine hit the mystical sport provided me.

One of the goals I set for 2024 is to join a new sport. I envisioned playing more mainstream ones, like badminton or running, and I didn’t expect to fall in love with skateboarding. It came as a total surprise to me that even in a city as lively as Saigon, this isn’t a commonplace pastime. My friend even thought that I took up surfing (lướt ván) instead of skateboarding (trượt ván), no matter how many times I tried to clarify.

Badminton, running, or swimming? I picked skateboarding.

Digging deeper into the history of skateboarding, I discovered that, even though both were introduced to Vietnam in the 2000s, skateboarding is much lesser-known than its inline sibling, rollerblading, which has a more robust scene and many more skating venues. Despite this lack of facilities, Saigon skaters keep their passion going by gathering at public places like Gia Định Park, Khánh Hội Bridge, under the Ba Son Bridge and in front of Bến Thành Market. Nonetheless, none of these places were designed for skateboarding, exposing players to incoming traffic and pedestrians. I hesitated a lot before joining due to these risks, and started hanging out at Saigon Skatepark, an indoor skatepark in District 7, every Monday at 6pm.

The only indoor skatepark

Saigon Skatepark the only indoor skateboarding venue in Vietnam, established by a duo of skaters after running their Saigon Skateshop for 10 years. Today, the District 7 park is a well-known address for the community of skaters in the city, and even from overseas. I choose the 6pm slot on Mondays as my regular visiting time, not because I’m particularly free then, but because this period is specifically reserved for newcomers, especially female skaters.

The spacious interior of Saigon Skatepark

On your first time at Saigon Skatepark, you’ll probably need a moment to get used to the dynamic atmosphere here, filled with skaters flying and sliding in every pose on the park’s range of slopes, rails, steps and ramps. During my first visit, I thought everyone was really flying on their boards like Aladdin on his carpet, though the skaters were more stressed-looking and sweatier. Even if you’re not observing them closely, you can probably feel their efforts through the clamoring of wooden boards against concrete or metal, depending on the trick they’re trying to master.

Skaters can express their personalities via the designs and patterns of the griptape on their boards.

Thông, the co-founder and manager of Saigon Skatepark, shared with me that the idea behind the park’s Beginner’s Monday wasn’t something they started out with, as the founders were all long-time skaters, who have befriended the boards for over two decades ever since the action sport first entered Vietnam.

“Had we kept operating from the perspective of veteran players, we would not have noticed and realized the common feeling of new skaters. They’re often quite shy and reluctant when they skate in front of more experienced participants. Moreover, skating with pro skateboarders can be dangerous as each side is used to a different speed and intensity,” he told me in Vietnamese.

A good board can be determined by the quality of each component: decks, trucks, wheels, etc.

After a few Mondays at the skatepark, I could qualify as a skateboarding newbie and realize that this is a conducive environment for anyone new to the sport.

Regarding safety, the indoor space is designed to be quite friendly to amateurs. You can rent any gear you’re missing like helmets, braces for your knees, elbows and wrists. Staff members are always present to deal with urgent situations if any. Cost-wise, with just VND50,000, equal to a plate of cơm tấm, you can skate for as long as you want for the day;until you’ve burned off all the calories from that cơm tấm plate. Finally, and this is probably my most significant factor: there is no need to feel shy. During these sessions, everyone is just like you — all are starting out, so there’s no need to hesitate.

A set of safety gear includes a helmet and braces for knees, elbows and wrists.

Every skater was once a newcomer

One thing that I learned too late about skateboarding is that it’s an officially recognized sport. It’s currently a highly sought-after event as part of the Summer Olympics and even appeared in SEA Games 30, though just that once. Like most other sports, skateboarding is much more fun when there’s a community behind you. I would have given up much easier had I not had my group of friends and a welcoming place like Saigon Skatepark to practice.

Skaters at Saigon Skatepark stretch before a session.

Nguyễn Phương Thảo, one of my skate-mates told me: “Here, you only need to be brave enough to ask, no matter how silly the questions might seem, other skaters, especially the female skaters of @chiemskateclub, will wholeheartedly help out and even coach you.”

Another thing that has endeared me to my community of skaters is that the moment you pull off a trick that you’ve painstakingly trained for a long time, every person in the park, friend or stranger, will genuinely cheer you on, and clap for you, even if they didn’t actually see it.

As long as you ask, someone will help out.

I’ve accomplished another personal goal for 2024 thanks to my new connection with skateboarding: befriending more people. This is of course not reserved for skateboarding, as any sport has the potential to foster bonds between participants without much effort or commitment, as long as you keep to a consistent schedule to sustain the passion and the relationship. One of my skate-mates made it a personal goal to be able to do an ollie — leaping into the air on the board without using hands — before she gets married. And we promised her that we would practice hard so we could ollie during her wedding. Perhaps, finding motivation to exercise is simpler than I thought.

In skateboarding, falling down is a frequent event.

Skateboarding is like most other sports, as it requires time to hone the craft and to develop as an athlete. “Even though we’ve skateboarded for many years, in a badminton court, we will revert to shy newbies and will need a lot of time to train,” Thông explained. “To me, landing a new trick is just a matter of time. You’ll definitely be able to do it after 50, 100, or 1,000 tries.”

To me, the heart of any sport is always a sense of joy and community, so the act of reaching out to ask “hey, wanna skate today?” is more important than pressuring oneself to succeed at a challenging trick at all cost.

Saigon Skatepark has different opening times depending on the day. Check out the park’s official fanpage or Instagram account for more details.

Pure Passion Turns Dark: The Unexpected Dangers of the Wild Turtle Trade

2024-12-12T11:00:00+07:00

Seeking a companion during quarantine, Khánh*, a 25-year-old Hanoian, bought a baby turtle through a Facebook group.

Khánh spent more than VND1 million on a newborn red-eared slider turtle, alongside a "house" equipped with a swimming pool, heater, purifier, and floating island. He named the medium-sized shelled friend Bin Bin.

"It is not complicated to take care of turtles. They don’t need a vast area, nor are they as pricey as some other pets. My budget is low, so having a ‘ninja’ to keep me company throughout social distancing is really nice," Khánh explains.

Rare elongated tortoises advertised on a Facebook group.

Nowadays, many young people reach out to turtle trading groups on social networks for similar reasons. Thanks to Khánh's introduction, I joined a turtle-lovers community with about 5,200 members on Facebook. In two months, from July to the end of September, I saw many messages from new prospective owners asking to buy turtles, and sales offers targeting pandemic needs like "relieve stress, dispel pandemic boredom.” Pets for sale are mostly juvenile tortoises and freshwater turtles, varying from exotic to native.

Beside ordinary turtles with reasonable prices ranging from VND50,000 to 100,000, unique specimens with eye-catching appearances are commonly included in promotional posts. The “catalogue” includes numerous species that have been categorized as endangered or need to be highly protected, such as snail-eating turtles, elongated tortoises, Asian box turtles, and so on.

As Nguyễn Thu Thủy, a representative from the Asian Turtle Program (ATP) shared in the virtual seminar "When wild animals are pets," authorities have recorded about 1,912 individuals of 15 different species on sale on the internet in the last 12 months. All in all, the turtle was the most-trafficked wildlife creature in the country in 2020, with 377 individuals rescued out of 1,132 wild animals saved in Vietnam.

The wildlife trade behind seemingly innocent fun

Many of these forums claim to exist just to share pet-keeping experience and knowledge about ornamental turtles, but there are sadly no — or very few — posts concentrating on features, habitats, and requirements to take care of them. Finding information and images on these forums is not as simple as I thought it would be because posts related to buying and selling endangered animals use slang phrases and typographical tricks. Khánh says: "At first, I didn't know about these regulations, so my original posts were erased."

Members of these groups strictly avoid typing out words such as “mua” (buy), “bán” (sell), “giá” (price), “thanh lý” (sale), etc. Instead, users add a period in between letters in order to avoid Facebook's censorship algorithm. Other tricks include using the rice emoji to indicate price (“lúa” is a slang word for money) and translating species names into English, such as "3G" for snail-eating turtles (rùa Ba Gờ) and "núi gold" for elongated tortoises (rùa Núi Vàng).

A post advertising a snail-eating turtle, an endangered wild species. The post appeared in mid-July on a Facebook group of turtle enthusiasts.

To make their business less conspicuous, shop owners selling rare species only post a photo of their contact information instead of typing it out, share merchandise photos in the comment section, or limit the number of turtles appearing in each photo.

Harming pets, burdening owners, and destroying the ecosystem

Khánh admits that, despite having invested heavily in Bin Bin on the suggestion of the store owner, he has little understanding about Bin Bin’s species: "I didn't ask questions about his origin, partly because I wanted to get him home as soon as possible, and partly because of the cheap price." Khánh had no idea that Bin Bin is from an invasive species. Red-ear sliders are easy to keep since they are well-adapted to the hot and humid temperature of Vietnam, yet they pose several threats to the local ecosystem.

As explained by Thủy, from the ATP, red-eared turtles and other exotic turtles will compete with native species for food, and at the same time spread diseases from outside to the local ones if they manage to proliferate in the wild.

A rescued turtle being treated by medical professionals. Photo: Asian Turtle Program.

In spite of travel limitations due to the pandemic, the number of turtle rescues is still significant, according to Thủy. As many owners lack knowledge about the ideal habitat, care and medical needs of their pets, most rescued turtles are in serious danger: broken legs, broken tails, severe fungal infections, cracked and perforated shells, etc. “Turtles have a slow metabolism and, as a result, slow recovery. An individual turtle can take months or years to fully recover,” she explains.

Apart from the damage caused to the turtles themselves and the ecosystem, this trend may pose health risks to owners and handlers, such as salmonellosis due to bacteria common in reptiles. According to the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA), the bacteria can infect people via physical contact, leading to diarrhea, fever, stomach pains, typhoid, or even death.

A while into our video call, Khánh glanced at Bin Binh's terrarium and turned to me: “I’m suddenly a bit worried. I can’t return it to the wild because it’s a gluttonous invasive species. Rescue centers won’t take him either. I guess I’ll have to do a really good job taking care of Bin Bin.”

*This name has been changed upon request by the subject.

Cúc Phương Turtle Conservation Center is undertaking efforts to rescue, care for, and release tortoises and freshwater turtles saved from the illegal trade into the wild. Visit the center's Facebook page here to provide information or learn more about turtle conservation.

This article was originally published in 2021.