Vietnam
Home. Ninety-six million people and the reference point for everywhere else on this site.
~96.2M people
Source: 2019 Vietnam Population and Housing Census
- Cities
- 12
- Members
- 334.6K
- Restaurants
- 5
- Discussions
- 3
01How the community formed
Everything else here begins in Vietnam. The country runs seventeen hundred kilometers from the Chinese border to the Cà Mau peninsula, and the differences along that line — accent, seasoning, what you call your parents — are the same differences that turn up in Little Saigon and Cabramatta forty years later. Two thirds of the population was born after 1975, and the country most Việt kiều return to is not the one their parents left.
The migrations that built it
- 01 Northerners moving south in 1954, after partition
- 02 Reunification in 1975 and the movements that followed it
- 03 Đổi Mới from 1986, and the cities that grew out of it
- 04 Return migration, from the 1990s onward
02Reading
View all03Cities
View all04Feed
To everyone abroad asking why their cà phê sữa đá never tastes right: it is the robusta, not the technique. Buy Vietnamese beans. Use a phin. Wait the four minutes. That is the whole secret and I am tired of pretending otherwise.
Cái Răng at 5am. The market is finished trading by the time the tour boats arrive at seven, which is the part nobody photographs.
Question for parents raising kids abroad: would you want your children taught the Huế accent, or whatever the textbook says? I get asked this by families overseas every year and I never know the right answer.
Half of Đà Nẵng seems to be Việt kiều back for the summer. Good. Bring your cousins, we have room, and the mì Quảng has never been better.
05Food
View all06Marketplace
View allHonda Wave 110, one owner, papers in order
Hồ Chí Minh City · 4h ago
Vietnamese lessons over video call, from Huế
Huế · 11h ago
Room in a Tây Hồ house, foreigners and Việt kiều welcome
Hà Nội · 2d ago
Wanted: someone flying Sài Gòn to Houston in March
Hồ Chí Minh City · 4d ago
07Discussions
View allSending money home: what are you actually paying in fees?
Comparing notes across countries, because the spread is worse than the advertised fee and nobody says so. Post your corridor, the service, and what actually arrived. I will keep a table at the top.
by Trang Nguyễnin Hồ Chí Minh CityActive 6h ago
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Moving back: what actually catches people out?
Not the visa threads, those exist already. I mean daily life. Banking without a local credit history. Being read as a foreigner in your own language. Family expecting you at every meal. If you grew up abroad and moved back, what do you wish someone had told you?
by Hiếu Đinhin Hà NộiActive 2h ago
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Which accent should kids abroad learn?
Families overseas ask me this constantly. Textbooks teach Northern. Most of the diaspora speaks Southern. Central speakers get told they are hard to understand by everybody. I teach whichever accent the grandparents speak, but I want to hear how other people decide.
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- 74 replies
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