Vietnam’s Climate Voices

She came to the garden every day, not to earn money, but to keep her body moving. Life indoors had grown dangerously quiet. If she stayed home, she believed, she would have stopped moving altogether. Out here, the air was lighter. The work gave her a reason to stand, to bend, to breathe. She grew vegetables she trusted: clean food she could eat without fear. These days, she wouldn’t dare buy vegetables from the market. If she couldn’t grow it herself, she would rather go with

Hanh lives in a small rented flat tucked inside a market area. It isn’t a solidly built house - just something pieced together, renovated enough to be livable. The one advantage is that it’s airy, with wind coming in from all four sides. But that very openness turns into a source of anxiety whenever a storm arrives. Her room sits on the top floor. The roof is temporarily patched, and one glance is enough to tell it isn’t secure. During the big storm that year, the wind scream

I grew up in a family where my parents still had the “feet” of farmers, but their “heads” had already turned toward factory life. Technically, I wasn’t a farmer. But by the time I was four years old, I was already following my father out into the garden, helping him plant peach blossom trees. That’s when I fell in love with the farmer’s craft, especially the art of growing peach blossoms. From the age of four, I followed my father into the gardens every Tet season. He didn’t