CAN THO, Vietnam (AP) — Dao Bao Tran and her brother Do Hoang Trung, 11-year-old twins growing up on a rickety houseboat in the Mekong Delta, have dreams. Tran likes K-pop, watches videos at night to learn Korean and would like to visit Seoul. Trung wants to become a singer.
But their hopes are “unrealistic,” Trung said: “I know I will end up going to the city to try to make a living.”
Such dreams could disappear in the Mekong in southern Vietnam, one of the most climate-sensitive regions in the world.
The future is especially uncertain for the poor. A 2022 UN climate report warned that there will be more flooding in the wet season and more drought in the dry season. Unsustainable extraction of groundwater and sand for construction has further aggravated the situation. And with rising seas gnawing at the southern edge and dams enclosing the Mekong upstream, farming in the fertile delta is becoming increasingly difficult. According to a 2020 report by the Vietnam Chamber of Commerce and Industry, the country’s contribution to Vietnam’s GDP fell from 27% in 1990 to less than 18% in 2019.
The call of the city, where factory jobs promise better salaries, is often too hard to resist for the region’s 17 million residents.
The twins’ single mother, Do Thi Son Ca, left shortly after her children were born to look for work in Ho Chi Minh City. She left them with her mother, 59-year-old Nguyen Thi Thuy. The small family cannot afford the rent for land and has been living on a small houseboat ever since.
Thuy rents a smaller boat to sell meat and bean rolls at the Cai Rang floating market, the largest of its kind in the Mekong Delta. She rises well before dawn to steam the buns in a metal urn over glowing coals in the center of the boat, while she stands in the bow to pull a huge pair of oars to make her way to the market.
On good days she earns 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 also couldn’t help their mother, who was struggling in the city. Now their houseboat on the Hau River, their only refuge, is in dire need of expensive repairs and Thuy wonders how she will find $170 before the rainy season.
“The storms are getting more intense,” Thuy said. In the rainy season, heavy rainfall can mean that water has to be pumped up with great effort so that her houseboat does not sink. Floods force Thuy to move the boat to a larger canal to avoid a stampede if she were to remain anchored on shore, but the larger canal brings its own risks in the form of larger waves.
Moving from the Mekong to bigger cities or even abroad for better prospects is not new. But net out-migration – the difference between people leaving the delta and those moving in – has more than tripled after 1999. Experts warn that the reasons why people move are complex, and it is difficult to estimate how big a role climate change plays.
“Climate change is both a catalyst and an accelerator for migration,” said Mimi Vu, a human trafficking and migration specialist based in Ho Chi Minh City. It has damaged livelihoods and widened inequality in a region that remains less developed than other parts of Vietnam, she said. The region lacks solid development foundations, such as high rates of high school completion, consistent access to clean water, and adequate health care.
“Every generation is still struggling,” she said.
And moving to the city guarantees nothing.
The twins’ mother experienced new beginnings when she moved to Ho Chi Minh City, found a job in a garment factory, got married and had a baby. But both she and her husband were eventually laid off – one of thousands of workers in Vietnam who lost their jobs because of low overseas assignments. They have since returned to his home village. Ca, 34, never finished school and is looking for work, but doesn’t know what to do next.
“My family is poor. So I don’t think too far ahead. I just hope my children can get a full education,” she said.
For now, she cannot help her family with school fees or boat repairs and has not seen the children for Tet, Vietnam’s Lunar New Year festival.
Vu, the migration specialist, said older workers who return to their villages after being laid off often don’t want to return to a city where the daily struggles made them “take off their rose-colored glasses.”
That includes 50-year-old Pham Van Sang, who left his native Bac Lieu for Ho Chi Minh City in his twenties after unpredictable weather conditions made rice and shrimp farming no longer viable.
Today, he and his wife, Luong Thi Ut, 51, live in a room measuring about 9.2 meters, stocked with everything they need to run a food stall for factory workers in the city. Their main offering is an intense Mekong-style fish noodle dish that, he says, gives homesick factory workers “comfort” with a taste of their old lives.
Sang said he is haunted by memories of home, of growing up in the countryside, of growing shrimp with his family. “I feel sad for the generation of children and grandchildren who have no future,” he said.
The Vietnamese 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 crucial to feeding other countries such as Indonesia and the Philippines. The plan includes trying new technologies to reduce rice emissions while increasing yields and profits, creating more fisheries and fruit orchards, and building airports and highways to attract foreign investment.
But the lure of Ho Chi Minh City – a bustling metropolis of 9.3 million inhabitants and the financial engine of Vietnam – is difficult to resist for many, especially the young. Even those in rural areas see moving to the city, or better yet, moving abroad, as the fastest way out of poverty, says 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 at a factory that makes pharmaceutical parts, followed by hours of riding motorcycles for a Vietnamese taxi company. He enjoyed school and wanted to become a literature teacher, but his family’s agricultural income in the Mekong’s Dong Thap province had been decimated 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 home. “My sister is doing well at school, I am very happy,” he said.
Hieu initially found the city bewildering and homesick, but the city slowly grew on him. “You adapt gradually, you survive,” he said. He learns how to thrive in the city: work hard, but also network and communicate.
Still, he hopes to one day go to university and realize his dream: becoming a teacher and working at a school in the delta, like the school where he and his sister studied. He said it would make him feel closer to home.
“Everyone wants to go back to where they were born and raised,” he said.
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