When I told my parents I was moving to Ho Chi Minh City, they looked at me like I had lost my mind.

My mother’s hands tightened around her tea cup. My father stared at the floor.

“You have a good life already,” my mother said finally, the words brittle in her mouth.

They weren’t wrong. I had a steady job in Sydney, a sunlit apartment, a path they had dreamed about while crouching in refugee camps in Malaysia, clutching my future in their thin hands.

But somewhere deep inside me, there was a restlessness they couldn’t quite understand—a need to reclaim something they had been forced to abandon.

I arrived in Saigon (nobody here calls it Ho Chi Minh City) in the wet season. The air was thick and alive, the streets seething with motorbikes, food carts, and laughter that felt heavier and sweeter than anything I had known.

It didn’t feel like coming home. It felt like falling through a portal into a life that might have been mine if history had not intervened.

I wasn’t alone. Among the neon-lit cafes and co-working spaces, I met others like me—children of the diaspora, returning not as tourists but as builders. Architects, designers, startup founders, documentary filmmakers. We were chasing dreams in the very places our parents had been forced to leave behind.

And with every small success—a freelance contract signed, an exhibition opened, a rooftop party thrown—we tasted a strange, complicated pride.

But pride was only half the story. Guilt clung to us too.

How could I celebrate my life here when my parents had lost so much to give me a different one?

How could I walk these streets freely, build careers and dreams atop the rubble of the lives they had no choice but to leave behind?

Some nights, sitting in a third-wave coffee shop, laptop open, I would catch the strains of a bolero song from a nearby shop and feel a hollow ache in my chest. As if I was borrowing a life that wasn’t fully mine to claim.

And yet, piece by piece, it feels like a kind of healing.

Not erasure—not pretending the past didn’t happen—but acknowledgment.

Our parents’ broken dreams weren’t wasted. They became the soil from which we could grow something new, something stubborn and beautiful.

Every time I navigate a deal in clumsy Vietnamese, every time I wander the alleys my father once ran through barefoot as a boy, every time I call my mother and tell her about the project I’m working on, I stitch a thread between the life they lost and the one I am still building.

It’s not a perfect reconciliation. Maybe it never will be.

But it’s a beginning.

By Minh Tran | The Asian Diaries | Ho Chi Minh City

Minh Tran is a Vietnamese-Australian writer and editor based in Ho Chi Minh City. Born in Sydney to refugee parents who fled postwar Vietnam, he spent his early career in corporate law before pivoting to storytelling. His work explores identity, migration, intergenerational memory, and the search for belonging across two worlds.