by CAN THO, Vietnam (AP) – Dao Bao Tran and her brother Do Hoang Trung, a couple growing up on a rickety houseboat in the Mekong Delta, have dreams. Tran loves K-pop, watches videos at night to learn Korean and would love to visit Seoul. Trung wants to be a singer.
But their hope is “unrealistic,” Trung said: “I know I will eventually go to the city to make a living.”
Such dreams have a way of spreading in southern Vietnam’s Mekong, one of the world’s most fragile regions.
For the poor, the future is particularly uncertain. A UN report on climate change in 2022 warned that there will be more floods in the wet season and drought in the dry season. Unsustainable extraction of groundwater and sand for construction has made matters worse. With seas rising at its southern edge and dams impinging on the Mekong River upstream, farming in the fertile delta is becoming increasingly difficult. Its contribution to Vietnam’s GDP fell from 27% in 1990 to less than 18% in 2019, according to a 2020 report by the Vietnam Chamber of Commerce and Industry.
The call of the city, where factory jobs demand better salaries, is often too hard to resist for the region’s 17 million inhabitants.
The twins’ single mother, Do Thi Son Ca, left to look for work in Ho Chi Minh City soon after her children were born. She left them with her mother, 59-year-old Nguyen Thi Thuy. They were unable to pay rent on land, the small family has been living on a small houseboat ever since.
Thuy rents a smaller boat to sell meat buns and beans at the Cai Rang floating market, the largest of its kind in the Mekong Delta. She gets up long before dawn to steam the buns in a metal urn over glowing coals placed in the middle of the boat, standing in the bow to pull a pair of oars on her way to the market.
On good days she makes about $4 – barely enough to put food on the table. The twins have already missed two years of school when their grandmother couldn’t pay the fees and their mother, who is struggling in the city, couldn’t help either. Now their houseboat on the Hau River, their only refuge, is in desperate need of expensive repairs and Thuy is wondering how she will get $170 before the rainy season.
“The storms are getting more violent,” Thuy said. In the rainy season, heavy rain can mean the water is pumped furiously so that her houseboat doesn’t go in. Flooding forces Thuy to move the boat to a larger canal to avoid battering if she remains anchored on the shore, but the grand canal comes with its own risks in the form of large waves.
Moving from the Mekong to big cities or even abroad for better prospects is nothing new. But net emigration — the difference between people moving out of the delta and those moving in — tripled after 1999.
“Climate change is a catalyst and an accelerator for migration,” said Mimi Vu, a trafficking and migration specialist based in Ho Chi Minh City. It hurts livelihoods and exacerbates inequality in a region that remains less developed than other parts of Vietnam, she said. The region lacks a strong foundation of development, such as high rates of students completing high school, consistent access to clean water and adequate health care.
“Every generation still struggles,” she said.
And moving to the city doesn’t guarantee anything.
The twins’ mother had a new beginning when she moved to Ho Chi Minh City, finding a job in a clothing factory, getting married and raising a family. But she and her husband were eventually fired – among thousands of workers in Vietnam who lost their jobs because of lower orders overseas. They have since moved back to their native village. Ca, 34, didn’t finish school and is looking for work but doesn’t know what to do next.
“My family is poor. So I don’t think it’s too far ahead. I hope my children can get a full education,” she said.
Right now she won’t be able to help her family with school fees or boat repairs and she hasn’t seen the kids for Tet, the moon festival in Vietnam.
Vu, the migration specialist, said older workers who return to their villages after layoffs often don’t want to go back to a city where “their rose-colored glasses have been pulled out” by the daily struggle.
That includes Pham Van Sang, 50, who left his native Bac Lieu province for Ho Chi Minh City in his 20s after unpredictable weather made rice and shrimp no longer viable.
Today, he and his wife, Luong Thi Ut, 51, live in a room of about 100 square feet (9.2 meters), full of the things they need to operate a food stall for workers factory in the city. Their main offering is an intense Mekong-style fish noodle dish that, he says, gives nostalgic factory workers “comfort” with a taste of their old lives.
Sang said he has the memories of the town, of being young in the countryside, of raising shrimp with his family. “I feel sorry for the generation of children and grandchildren who have no future,” he said.
Vietnam’s government has approved a plan to strengthen the agricultural economy of the Mekong region, which produces about half of the country’s rice and is also vital for feeding other countries, such as Indonesia and the Philippines. The plan includes testing new technologies to reduce emissions from rice while increasing yields and profits, creating more fisheries and fruit orchards, and building airports and highways to attract foreign investment.
But the allure of Ho Chi Minh City — a bustling metropolis of 9.3 million people, the financial engine of Vietnam — is hard for many to resist, especially young people. Even those in the countryside see moving to the city, or better yet moving abroad, as the fastest way out of poverty, said Trung Hieu, 23.
Hieu lives in a dormitory that he shares with another young man from the delta. He works two jobs – a 12-hour shift in a factory that makes pharmaceutical parts and hours spent riding his motorcycle for a Vietnamese riding company. He enjoyed school and wanted to be a literature teacher, but his family’s farm income in Dong Thap province in the Mekong had dwindled over the years. When he finished school, his family had to choose whether to send him to college or let his younger sister finish school.
He chose to move to the city so he could send money back home. “My sister is doing well at school, I’m very happy,” he said.
At first Hieu found the city awkward and he felt homesick, but slowly the city grew on him. “You gradually adapt, you survive,” he said. He is learning how to be successful in the city: hard work, but also networking and communication.
However, he hopes to go to college one day and realize his dream of becoming a teacher, and work in a school in the delta like the ones he and his sister studied in. He said it would feel closer to home for him.
“Everybody wants to go back to where they were born and raised,” he said.
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